by Tom Reiss
The Black Pioneers folder was full of letters from demoted black officers. In the same period when Dumas was asking his comrade generals to help him attain some small measure of what he was due, unbeknownst to him, these officers—of much lower rank—were also writing, begging to resume their commands. They and Dumas were experiencing the same betrayal. Starting in 1802, just as Dumas was being released from prison, Napoleon attempted to impose a return to the pre-revolutionary standard of allowing only white officers to command. The folder also contained an order, signed by Napoleon and Berthier, creating segregated infirmaries so that “colored men who will be treated there will be placed in a separate room, so that they have no communications with the White patients.”
Talented men of color were so bereft that even membership in the segregated Black Pioneer companies became fiercely competitive. Looking through the voluminous correspondence in the archives, I read dozens of long and eloquent letters from black soldiers explaining why they should merit a spot in one of the units and how grateful they would be to be so blessed by the generous French state. Often the letters begin, “I find myself stranded in France in a difficult situation. I cannot return to my homeland and am no longer allowed to report to my job.”
The roughly one thousand soldiers who served in this battalion were eventually formed into the so-called Royal African Regiment, which greatly distinguished itself in service in 1805 and 1806. But having enjoyed prestige as “Americans” during the Revolution, black and mixed-race soldiers now found themselves denigrated as “Africans.” As France rejoined the wider world of slaveholding nations, the elevation of nonwhites to positions of power or respect became a dangerous anachronism. In the armies that General Dumas once led, suddenly the very concept of a black soldier commanding white troops was impossible—a black general of division or general-in-chief of an army, unimaginable.
ON July 24, 1802, Marie-Louise bore their third and last child. Alex Dumas would spend the last four years of his life inseparably attached to little Alexandre.
But even in the joy of his son’s birth, General Dumas was reminded of his new fallen status. In his memoir, his son recalls how “before the Egyptian campaign it had been settled that if my mother bore a son, the godparents of this said son were to be Bonaparte and Josephine. But things had changed greatly since then, and my father had no inclination to remind the first consul of the general-in-chief’s promise.”
Instead, two days after the birth, Dumas wrote to an old friend, General Brune:
LIBERTY, EQUALITY.
From the Headquarters of Villers-Cotterêts, 7 Thermidor Year X of the French Republic.
ALEXANDRE DUMAS, General of Division,
To his best friend General Brune,
I hasten to announce, my dear Brune, the happy delivery by my wife of a large baby boy who weighs 10½ pounds, and at 18 inches, you see I hope that if this child has no accidents he will not be a pygmy by age 25. This is not all, my friend, you have to prove yourself to me, to pass muster, my friend, by being the godfather, [along] with my daughter. The matter is not urgent, because the child carries himself well, and my daughter will not be here for a month, when she takes her vacation. I need a prompt response from you, my dear Brune, to know what to expect—farewell, my friend, you have no better one than
Alex Dumas
To this warm note, Brune replied that “a superstition prevents my complying with your request,” and he asked Dumas’s “indulgence” on his having to offer his “sincerest regrets to [Dumas’s daughter Aimée Alexandrine] and to your charming wife.”
Dumas couldn’t help wondering at his friend’s coolness and his refusal to attend. Dumas refused to accept his friend’s rejection. He tried for weeks to get him to come to Villers to be Alexandre’s godfather. But Brune only made excuses. Finally he agreed to be the godfather, but would not come to the ceremony, and so Claude Labouret, the baby’s grandfather, stood in for him.
DUMAS continued to write to Napoleon, offering his services in combat. Dumas’s final appeal asked for a chance—despite his impaired health—to fight England: “As soon as the current war started I have had the honor of twice writing you to offer you my services. Please accept that I once again offer you that service now.” In another letter he’d written, with a glimmer of his old swagger: “Whatever my sufferings and pains, I will always find enough moral force to fly to the rescue of my country at the first request the government sends me.”
The general loved playing with his precocious son, telling him stories of his childhood in Jérémie and pretending there were alligators in the moat of the small castle outside Villers-Cotterêts that the family managed to rent for a time. Though they were outcasts, they were happy together, especially big Alex and little Alexandre, who was described as “a kind of giant” from toddlerhood on, inheriting his father’s prodigious strength, size, and constitution. Even if never again restored to full health, Alex Dumas was capable of physical feats that made a lasting impression on his son. In the memoir, Alexandre recalls how he saw his father emerge after saving a servant from drowning: “It was my father’s naked form I saw, dripping with water; he smiled an almost unearthly smile, as a man may who has accomplished a godlike act, the saving of another man’s life.” As he watched, Alexandre was struck by “my father’s grand form (which looked as though it might have been made in the same mold as that which formed the statues of Hercules or Antinoüs) compared with [the servant’s] poor small limbs.”
“I adored my father. Perhaps, at so early an age, the feeling which today I call love was only a naïve astonishment at that Herculean stature and that gigantic strength I’d seen him display on so many occasions; perhaps it was nothing more than a childish pride and admiration for his braided coat, his tricolor cockade, and his great saber that I could barely lift. But, in spite of all that, even today the memory of my father, in every detail of his body, in every feature of his face, is as present to me as if I had lost him yesterday. No matter what the reasons, I love him today with a love as tender, as deep, and as real as if he had watched over my youth and I had had the happiness to go from childhood to manhood leaning on his powerful arm.”
“On his side, too, my father adored me,” Alexandre wrote. “I have said it, and I don’t know how to say it too often, especially if the dead can hear what is said of them; and though at the end of his life the suffering that he bore tormented him to the point where he could no longer stand any noise or movement in his bedroom, he made an exception for me.”
In 1805 General Dumas’s health took a sharp turn for the worse, and his stomach pains were diagnosed as cancer. He visited a famous doctor in Paris. Afterward, he held a lunch where little Alexandre met Generals Brune and Murat, and Alex asked his old comrades to take care of his family after he was gone. The boy would remember playing with Murat’s sword and Brune’s hat. At the end of the luncheon, “My father embraced Brune, shook Murat by the hand and left Paris the next day, with death in both his body and his heart.”
The novelist also remembered going with his father to pay a visit to Pauline Bonaparte, the most beautiful of Napoleon’s sisters and the young widow of General Leclerc. Father and son went to her château, just outside Villers-Cotterêts, and in the memoir there is the following description:
A woman reclined on a sofa, a young and beautiful woman, very young and very beautiful; so beautiful that even I, a young child, noticed it.… She did not rise when my father entered. She extended her hand and raised her head, that was all. My father wanted to sit by her in a chair; she made him sit at her feet, which she placed on his knees, the toes of her slippers toying with the buttons on his coat.
That foot, that hand, that delicious little woman, white and plump, near that mulatto Hercules, still handsome and powerful in spite of all his suffering, made the most charming picture you could hope to see.
I laughed as I looked at them, and the princess called me to her and gave me a tortoiseshell bonbon box, all inlaid with gold
.
I was shocked to see her empty out the bonbons that were inside before she gave me the box. My father made an observation to her. She bent toward his ear, said a few hushed words, and the two began to laugh.
As she bent down, the princess’s white and pink cheek brushed against my father’s brown one, making his skin look darker and hers, more white.
Inside the safe, I found a note inviting “Madame Dumas” to visit “her Imperial Highness the Princess Pauline” at her mansion in Paris. It gave the time, 2 p.m., and the address, but the date was obscured. I thought it was probably from 1807, following General Dumas’s death. Perhaps the princess tried to help the widow and her children. But it’s impossible to know. From the time of the visit to Pauline, Alexandre Dumas would write, “Soon after, my father grew weaker, went out less often, rarely mounted a horse, stayed more in his room, took me on his knees with greater sadness. Once again, all this has since come back to me in glimmers, like things seen in a flash of lightning on a dark night.”
The night of February 26, 1806, the final night of his father’s life, remained illuminated in his mind, surely as his mother described it to him:
“Oh!” he cried, “must a general who at thirty-five was at the head of three armies die at forty in his bed, like a coward? Oh my God! My God! What have I done that you should condemn me so young to leave my wife and children?” …
[The next day], at ten at night, feeling that death was approaching, he asked for [his priest].… It was not a confession that the dying man wanted to make. All his life, my father had never done a single bad thing, committed a single action that could be reproached; perhaps some hatred for Berthier and Napoleon remained at the bottom of his heart.… But all feelings of hatred were suspended in those hours before his death, which were spent in trying to comfort those he was to leave alone in the world, when he had departed from it.
Once, he asked to see me; then, as they were about to get me from my cousin’s, where I had been sent:
“No,” he said. “The poor child is sleeping; don’t wake him up.”
That night, after they’d heard the knock at the door and his cousin had put him to bed again, and before he’d gone back to sleep, the child felt “something like an exhaled breath” pass over his face, and it calmed him. Of that moment, Alexandre Dumas wrote, “It isn’t surprising that my father’s soul, before rising up to heaven, hovered for a second over his poor child, whom he was leaving so bereft of all hope on this earth.”
I found a detailed inventory of General Dumas’s household belongings made the day after his death by a notary, apparently with a view to the family’s outstanding debts, which are also listed in detail. In the middle of a list that included side tables, armchairs, “one pair of firedogs in glazed brass,” and “30 canvas shirts—360 francs,” I found the following entry:
one painting in its black wooden frame representing Horatius Cocles, Roman, estimate—10 francs.
Everything changed for Alexandre when his father died. The pension that was owed General Dumas was withheld and the family was plunged into a poverty that would stretch throughout his childhood.
Marie-Louise supported her children by working in a tobacconist’s shop. The impoverished boyhood Alexandre Dumas writes of pluckily in his memoir must, in fact, have been a depressing and humiliating time. Despite his brilliance, he missed a basic secondary education, for lack of scholarship funds. He believed that the rejection was due to Napoleon’s hatred for his father: “this hatred extended even to me, for in spite of the attempts made on my behalf by my father’s old comrades, I could never gain entrance to any military school or civilian college.”
Alexandre Dumas would continually meet up with men who wanted to pay their respects to his father. One of the first I found a record of had sent Marie-Louise a note, in September 1807, thanking her for her hospitality when he had come to town to call on the general, not realizing he had died. “What a shock to find only the ashes of our common friend. I left Paris in hope of seeing him. That hope was soon covered in tears and regrets. What subject is more dignified than General Dumas? Who … could cherish the beautiful qualities of his soul?” The letter writer, a Monsieur Doumet, reassures Marie-Louise that “his traits and his virtues are reborn in your lovable children.… Your son will resemble his father; he already has the sincerity and the kindness as much as his age permits it.”
Marie-Louise would spend the next decade petitioning the emperor through every possible channel for the minimum of support to which she and her children were entitled. But the first modern-world bureaucrats proved implacable. She paid calls on whichever of Dumas’s colleagues would see her. Her letters in the War Ministry archives are a sad testimony to an individual’s persistence in the face of obdurate officials directed from the very top to ignore her claims. She briefly had hope in 1814, when Napoleon was forced into exile on Elba and she could write the new war minister with candor:
The death of General Dumas left his family without fortune and without any resources or hopes for his widow to receive the pension normally allocated to the widows of generals, and which, by the most unjust exception, has been refused her.… The brave General Dumas, whom the fates of combat had spared, perished in misery and grief, without decoration or military compensation, and victim of Bonaparte’s implacable hatred and of his own tenderheartedness.
Widow Dumas
Villers-Cotterêts, October 2, 1814
Murat and Brune tried—“Brune zealously, Murat halfheartedly,” Dumas’s son wrote—to keep their promise to Dumas to try to help his family. “But it was quite useless.” When one of Napoleon’s generals once tried to bring up the question of General Dumas’s family, the emperor is said to have stamped his foot and said, “I forbid you ever to speak to me of that man.”
MARIE-LOUISE lived till the age of sixty-nine, long enough not only to pass on to Alexandre all her memories of his father but to watch her son achieve international fame and fortune. Ironically, in his novels the writer would capture—perhaps better than any other novelist—the particular mystique Napoleon held for all Frenchmen of the early nineteenth century and, indeed, continues to hold for young readers introduced to him through Dumas novels.
And of course Napoleon is ultimately the man behind Edmond Dantès’s suffering and imprisonment; if not for the innocent task he does on the emperor’s behalf, Edmond would have married his true love, avoided prison, and lived happily ever after. But then there would have been no story.
“Unhappiness cannot but draw tighter the bonds which hold us fast to one another,” General Dumas had written to Marie-Louise as he made his way home. His son has Edmond Dantès express the same sentiment in a letter to his friend at the close of The Count of Monte Cristo: “He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness.… Live then and never forget that until the day when God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these two words—‘Wait and hope.’ ”
Out of the deepest betrayal Alexandre Dumas would weave imagined worlds that resurrected his father’s dreams and the fantastical age of glory, honor, idealism, and emancipation he championed.
“You see, Father,” he writes in his memoir, as if for himself, “I haven’t forgotten any of the memories that you told me to keep. From the time I could think, your memory has lived in me like a sacred lamp, illuminating everything and everyone you ever touched, even though death has taken it away!”
* In another faux-democratic sleight of hand that would set a model for the future, Napoleon submitted his personalized constitution to a plebiscite to receive the stamp of popular approval. With his characteristic impatience, he did not wait for the plebiscite’s results to be tallied before declaring the new constitution in force; but he would return frequently to the plebiscite ruse whenever he wanted to justify some fundamental change in France’s government or law. Even if it was a rubber stamp, it gave him the best excuse for outrageous policy shifts: the peop
le’s will. Napoleon had also learned the value of the press during the Italian and Egyptian campaigns. In December 1799, there were seventy-three independent newspapers and journals publishing in Paris, offering a wide opportunity to broadcast critiques of the government. Within less than a month of proclaiming a constitution to “guarantee the rights of the citizens,” he had closed sixty of them. The Moniteur, the main newspaper of the Revolution since 1789, was allowed to remain as an official mouthpiece of the government.
† Though mandated by the 1794 law for all French territories, slavery had been effectively abolished in only three of them: in French Guyana on the northern edge of South America, on the island of Guadeloupe, and above all on Saint-Domingue, whose massive slave insurrection had precipitated French colonial emancipation to begin with. On many other islands—Martinique, Saint-Lucie, Réunion, Île-de-France, and others—the 1794 emancipation had been blocked, either because those places had been under British occupation, or because slaveholders themselves had successfully repulsed the attempt by the distant government in Paris to impose the new law, as happened in France’s Indian Ocean colonies.
EPILOGUE
THE FORGOTTEN STATUE
THE first biographical portrait of General Alex Dumas was published in 1797,* in the wake of French victory in northern Italy. It was one of the high moments of the French revolutionary decade, a time when Alex Dumas was being lauded by Napoleon himself, who compared Dumas to a Roman hero driving back the barbarians. The article’s breathless description of General Dumas’s heroism makes bittersweet reading when one knows what would befall him only two years later. But something else about the article shocked me: its candid description of Dumas’s racial identity.