by Tom Reiss
GENERAL ALEXANDRE DUMAS
MAN OF COLOR
4 Germinal, Year V
It is without distinction as to individuals, status, or rank that the history of Republics consecrates the memory of great deeds to posterity. If, in the course of engraving the annals of a great people, its faithful chisel should cover a hero, a man of virtue, with immortal glory, it does not stop to consider whether he was born in Europe or under the blazing sky of Africa, whether his face is the color of bronze or something closer to ebony. A negro’s feats of courage are every bit as deserving of admiration as those of a native of the Old World. Indeed, who has a greater right to public respect than the man of color fighting for freedom after having experienced all the horrors of slavery? To equal the most celebrated warriors he need only keep in mind all the evils he has suffered.
This is the way Alexandre Dumas—citizen of color, but mulatto and mixed, born in Saint-Domingue in 1762—has always acted since the Revolution. This young man, who came to France to fight among the defenders of the Fatherland … displayed such intrepid bravery and such consummate intelligence that he soon distinguished himself even in the Army of Italy, and rose to the rank of Commander of the Second Cavalry Division. The General is six foot one or two inches tall, and one of the handsomest men you will ever meet; his interesting physiognomy is accompanied by a gentle and gracious manner. His frizzy hair recalls the curls of the Greeks and Romans.
Covered in glory during the conquest of Italy, Alexandre Dumas followed the immortal Bonaparte into the Tyrol. On 4 Germinal, Year V [March 24, 1797], he went forward to observe enemy movements with about twenty dragoons detached as scouts. Dumas ordered a brigadier general to take up a position behind a ravine, in order to cover Dumas’s flank. Seeing how few men stood in their way, the Austrian cavalry charged vigorously; Dumas’s escorting troops were defeated before Dumas could reach them. Arriving at the Clausel [sic] bridge, in the village before Brixen, without having been able to take the enemy line, [his troops] were all tightly squeezed into a narrow passage. Seeing the danger, General Dumas rushed alone to the bridgehead and held back a squadron of enemy cavalry for several minutes, forcing them to retreat. Surrounded by some twenty Austrians, he killed three and wounded eight; he took only three minor saber wounds. The enemy, shocked and terrified by his courageous resistance, turned on their heels and fled. Redoubling his blows, Dumas cried “Surrender! The French army is right behind me! A republican general never marches behind his soldiers.”
The next biographical sketch I found was published eleven years later, in 1808—after Dumas’s death and Napoleon’s assumption of imperial powers. This capsule biography was from a book simply titled Military Anecdotes (compiled by a Parisian publicist named Pierre Nougaret). As I read it I had a strange sense of déjà vu. “Alexandre Dumas, born in Saint-Domingue in 1762, went to France to fight with its defenders,” it began.
He distinguished himself so much in the Army of Italy that he rose to the rank of Commander of the Second Cavalry Division. He followed his immortal general-in-chief (Bonaparte) into the Tirol [sic]; on 4 Germinal, Year V (March 25 [sic: 24], 1797), he went forward to observe enemy movements with about twenty dragoons detached as scouts.… Seeing how few men stood in their way, the Austrian cavalry charged vigorously. Dumas’s escorting troops were defeated before Dumas could reach them. Arriving at the Clausel [sic] bridge, in the village before Brixen, without having been able to take the enemy line, [his troops] were all tightly squeezed into a narrow passage. Seeing the danger, General Dumas rushed alone to the bridgehead and held back a squadron of enemy cavalry for several minutes, forcing them to retreat. Surrounded by some twenty Austrians, he killed three and wounded eight; he took only three minor saber wounds. The enemy, shocked and terrified by his courageous resistance, turned on their heels and fled, fearing that Dumas had backup. Redoubling his blows, Dumas cried “Surrender! The French army is right behind me!”
I read this little article—scarcely more than a paragraph—many times before I realized what was so familiar: it was the 1797 biography! Except that all references to race, to slavery, and to republican values had been removed. The descriptions of Dumas’s military success and the defense of the Clausen Bridge were identical, down to the wording and syntax. But everything that distinguished Dumas as “a man of color fighting for freedom after having experienced all the horrors of slavery,” as the original text put it, had been expunged.
THERE was once a statue of General Dumas in Paris, done by a sculptor of the late-nineteenth century, Alfred de Moncel, who specialized in such monuments. It was located in the Place Malesherbes, soon to be known popularly as the Place des Trois Dumas, for the statues it featured of the general, his novelist son, and his grandson the playwright. The commission was conceived in the 1890s, in the midst of a wave of patriotic nostalgia in France for the revolutionary wars a century earlier. The funds for erecting a statue of General Dumas didn’t come from the state or any military organization. Rather, a small group of devotees of the legacy of his son—who had once tried in vain to get a statue of his father erected—raised the money by subscription. The fund-raising was spearheaded by two of the biggest celebrities in France at the time, the writer Anatole France and the actress Sarah Bernhardt. Bernhardt gave a special theater performance for the cause. It took more than a decade to have the statue created, and then, once it was actually installed in the Place de Malesherbes on the Right Bank in the fall of 1912, bureaucratic ineptitude resulted in its remaining covered, by official order, for the better part of a year.
After more than two years of searching, I discovered what may be the only set of photos of the statue in existence, snapped in 1913 by a municipal statue photographer. Dumas stands in a simple double-breasted greatcoat, chest out, gazing into the distance in the pose of a resolute patriot, grasping his long rifle like a walking stick. Along with five black-and-white prints of the statue from all angles, there was another one of the bronze General Dumas covered in a tattered white shroud, with just the arm and the rifle exposed; in the background is a horse-drawn delivery truck driven by a man with a handlebar mustache. Seen in these silvery images, the statue struck me as actually not bad; it captured a sense of Dumas’s heroic candor and can-do attitude. But what intrigued me was the one in the shroud. A clipping of the newspaper Le Matin, dated May 28, 1913, provided a hint, under the headline “The Forgotten Statue”:
The poor general! It looks as if they have abandoned him there, rifle in hand, in the middle of the lawn, as if to be through with him once and for all. The two other Dumas, the father [the novelist] and the son [the playwright] have stood on the green for so long already, their images in bronze. But he, the old soldier, the grandfather … has been forgotten. This injustice had to be repaired, and since the square is quite spacious and our generation is hardly miserly when it comes to statues, we put one of the old general up.… But it’s one thing to erect a statue, and quite another to inaugurate it.
The newspaper explained that the statue had been in place since the previous year with that shroud over it, thanks to the glacial pace of correspondence between a phalanx of bureaucracies—the Prefecture, the Municipal Council, the Interior Ministry, the Undersecretary of State for the Arts, the Administrative Commission for the Arts, the Bureau of Arts and Museums, the Bureau of Architecture, Walkways, and Landscaping—and finally the sculptor, whose annoyance is palpable in his scrawled complaints about the delay. Since the official inauguration seemed to have been postponed indefinitely, on May 27, a group of satirical wags led by a popular cartoonist, Poulbot, held a mock inauguration in which they pulled off “the sordid Moorish cloak serving as its veil.” Madame Poulbot recited a poem and “a little girl came to offer, in memory of the general, the homage of all French youth. Needless to say, the large crowd in attendance witnessed this curious inauguration in astonishment.”
An anonymous letter to the editor the next day added a little more to the story:
For months and months, the Place Malesherbes has featured a scarecrow: it is the statue of a certain General Dumas, cloaked in the frock of a monk … given such a fine cause, how is it that no minister has been found to inaugurate it? On Tuesday, a merry band of comedians decided to act on their own.… This morning, General Dumas was once more dressed like a Capuchin friar.
By early summer 1913, the president of the republic had signed a decree approving the statue, but there is no record of it ever receiving an official inauguration. A landscaping official complained in July that the now tattered shroud was hanging off of the old general in pieces; after that the paper trail ends.
I had to go to such trouble to find traces of the statue because it was destroyed by the Nazis in the winter of 1941–42.† The German occupiers melted down hundreds of French statues, paying more attention to the subjects than to the amounts of metal involved: to melt down the likeness of a mixed-race fighter for liberty, equality, and fraternity was an easy decision for them to make.
IN 2008, I sat with Monsieur Angot, the founder of the Association of the Three Dumas, in his small apartment across the street from the former palace of the Duke d’Orléans—once the scene of “Adam and Eve nights,” now a retirement home—watching a video on his TV. It was a documentary featuring a tall, light-skinned black man, dressed in full eighteenth-century military costume, riding on a white horse through Villers-Cotterêts; from the compact cars and DVD shops in the background, it was evidently not meant to be the eighteenth century. The rider makes his way through the modern town to the cemetery, where he ties up his horse and walks to the grave of General Dumas to pay his respects. The visitor, a French writer and political activist originally from Guadeloupe named Claude Ribbe, had arrived with a film crew to tape himself making this ride. Angot had watched some of the filming, and after the camera was shut off, Ribbe had broken out weeping, he said, proving his devotion to General Dumas.
I tracked down Claude Ribbe in Paris. He was lobbying the Sarkozy government to get General Dumas a posthumous Legion of Honor, he explained, and a big new statue in the center of the city. It turned out that Ribbe led one of those microscopic French political associations, and this one lobbied the French government on issues relating to the legacy of slavery in the Caribbean. It appeared to have only a handful of members, but Ribbe kept his opinions circulating in the press and in book-length polemics. On his website, he described himself as a “historian of diversity.” He was remarkably active. He showed me stacks of letters to the president and the mayor of Paris, along with books and articles he had published.
“Why did General Dumas not get the Legion of Honor?” he fumed. “Every revolutionary general got one! Why did they not rebuild his statue after the Nazis destroyed it? We have statues on every block here in Paris. Racism, racism, pure racism.”
Ribbe’s relentless campaign apparently produced results, for the next time I met him, it was with the mayor of Paris, who had endorsed his statue proposal. Then, some time later, I saw a French television clip of him standing with the mayor, both of them raising a little tricolor flag beneath an imposing bronze sculpture of slave shackles, each perhaps fifteen feet tall. In the race politics of twenty-first-century France, the statue of General Dumas had morphed into a symbolic monument to all the victims of French colonial slavery, in the form of these mega-shackles. A military marching band played the “Marseillaise” in Alex Dumas’s honor, followed by an Afro-Caribbean drumming group, then by the mayor and the activist, who both made impassioned speeches. Then everyone went home.
There is still no monument in France commemorating the life of General Alexandre Dumas.
* In the archives of the French National Library, I found the two printed pages in a battered folder of letters and other original documents by and about General Dumas from the 1790s, during the years of his military command. The library’s records show that the folder was part of a kind of scrapbook of papers on the Dumas family given to the library sometime between 1946 and 1956; unfortunately, no further information was kept about who made the donation, and there is no way to determine from what book the short biography was torn, though its chronology, which ends abruptly in March 1797, as well as its very distinctive tone—that of the high point of French republican and emancipatory zeal—make it nearly certain that it was published sometime around the summer of that remarkable year, likely while Dumas was serving as the military governor of Treviso.
† After the war, the writer and director Jean Cocteau wrote a book describing the Nazis’s selective destruction of France’s statues, with his friend Pierre Jahan, who had taken priceless and disturbing photos of them as the Nazis broke them apart and hauled them away. Jahan did not photograph the destruction of General Dumas’s statue.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Tracking down the life story of a man who died more than two hundred years ago was a new experience for me. I met many wonderful people along the road, as I always do, but none of them had known my subject personally. This time I had to rely on old papers—letters, diaries, memoirs, manuscripts, newspaper cuttings, and battlefield reports. That’s why now I must first give thanks to the many people who watch over these precious scraps of paper and parchment and who gave their time to help me sift through the thousands of puzzle pieces to put this story together. I want to thank all the archivists and librarians of France for preserving their country’s heritage with such exemplary zeal—when you are the center of the Western world for so long, there is a lot of patrimoine to preserve—and I want to give a special thanks to the generosity and care of the following people and institutions: first and foremost, the former, current, and future staff at the Musée Alexandre Dumas (Viller-Cotterêts); the Société historique régionale de Villers-Cotterêts; Madame Decubert and Alain Guena at the Archives de l’armée de la terre at the Service historique de la Défense (Chateau de Vincennes); Claudine Boulouque at the Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris; Gilles Henry; Aurelia Rostaing at the Archives nationales; Baron de Méneval and the library staff at the Fondation Napoléon; Catherine Fevrier at the Bibliothèque universitaire de Nantes; Jean Hournon; Alfred Fierro; Brigitte Julien-Leynaud at the Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne; the research staff of the Bibliothèque nationale de France; Michel Albert and Pierre Kerbrat at l’Académie des sciences morales et politiques; Mireille Pastoureau at the Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France; Bibliothèque central du Service de santé des armées; Agnès Plaire at the COARC (Conservation des oeuvres d’art religieuses et civiles); the Bibliothèque du musée de la Préfecture de Police (Paris); Frédérique Desmet at the Archives départementales du Pas-de-Calais; the Archives départementales de l’Aisne; the Archives départementales du Morbihan; the Archives nationales d’outre-mer (Aix-en-Provence); Valérie Hubert at the Archives départementales de Seine Maritime; Carole Pilarz at the Bibliothèque des arts décoratifs; Véronique Nachtergal at the Centre des archives économiques et financières of the Ministère de l’Économie, des Finances et du Commerce extérieur; Alexandra Vaquero Urruty and Sophie Harent at the Musée Bonnat-Helleu of Bayonne; André Azzam at the Institut français d’archéologie orientale (Cairo); the Institut d’Egypte (Cairo); the officers of the Italian Navy at the Castel Sant’Angelo (coastal fortress) at Taranto, and the sea and inland fortresses at Brindisi, Italy; the Biblioteca Nazionale, Napoli; the Archivio di Stato di Taranto; Cécile Bosquier at the Centre de documentation at the Atelier de Restauration et de Conservation des photographies de la Ville de Paris; Jean-Christophe Clamagirand at Roger Viollet; Jessica Almonte at the Image Works; Mimi Awad at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (Alexandria).
Once again, countless people on various continents sustained the author in his wanderings and helped him on his quest, and I thank everyone for their hospitality, their generosity, their company. First, I must give special thanks to the Dumasians of Villers-Cotterêts, who helped get my hunt off to such an explosive start, and who made it always enjoyable on subsequent visits: Chief Musketeer François
Angot, Alain Goldie, Xavier Blutel, Barbara Neavyn, and former Deputy Mayor Fabrice Dufour. A bit outside of Villers-Cotterêts, I owe particular thanks to Erick Noël, who showed me the slavers’ mansions in Nantes and Paris; Claude Schopp, maître of all things Dumas; and Ulrike Voswinckel, who introduced me to the wonders of Apulia. Thanks to Andre Aciman, Madame d’Albufera, Charles Ardai, Noga Arikha, Chahira Arnaout, Jojo Boulad, Eliane Bros-Brann, Peter Canby, Jean Charles de Castelbagac, Marion Charobim, Jean Luc Colonna, the Daubeuf family, Carine Delaporte, Patricia Delouard, Amir and Nathalie Farman-Farma, Henry Finder, John Glassie, Betsy Gotbaum, Prince Michel de Grèce, Nigel Hetherington, Todd Jackson, Melik Kaylan (for his obsession with the death of Porthos), Sylvie and Keith King, Ali Korhan, Liz Macklin, Dott. Gino Maddalena, Chah Mafouz, Ada Martella, Maestro Ramon Martinez (of the Martinez Academy of Arms), Meryam Mashak, Amy Matouk, Fabienne Meurrens, David Remnick, Aaron Retica, Beatrice Monti von Rezzori, Claude Ribbe, Admiral Francesco Ricci, Jacqueline Jorcin Roch, Paola Romagnani, Mahmoud Sabit, Henri and Estelle Saint-Bris, Commissaire Julien Sapori (de la police), Sue Shapiro, Dan Simon, Marcello Simonetta, Raymond Stock, Ben Tyner, Bob Weil, Marc Weitzmann, Dorothy Wickenden, and Massimo Zanca. Thanks also to three people whose names I neglected to write down: the Haitian man who showed me how to cut cane, the Dominican farmer who taught me about coffee growing, and the Apulian fencing coach who demonstrated how Dumas likely fought off his attackers in the cell with his cane.
On to the people who helped me bring this story from the world to the page, beginning with those who kept me sane, organized, and alive during the process:
Until she went off to China to become a television host, pop singer, and movie martial artist, the inimitable Aventurina King was the world’s best assistant. She lent me a hand with, among other things, document photography, computer programming, archive sifting, arm twisting, and strategizing, not to mention French, Italian, and Arabic translation, dietary advice, and music selection. (I was annoyed to find out she knew nothing about auto repair.) Along the way, she kept accumulating new skills so frequently that I was reminded of a useful truth: you can self-improve your way out of almost anything.