The Black Count

1) Alex Dumas first came to the army's attention when, still a lowly corporal, he single-handedly captured twelve enemy soldiers and marched them back to his camp. Not long afterward, he led four horsemen in an attack on an enemy post manned by over fifty men—Dumas alone killed six and took sixteen prisoner. As a Parisian society journalist in the early nineteenth century summed up, "Such brilliant conduct, on top of a manly physiognomy and extraordinary strength and stature, secured his quick promotion; it wasn't long before his talents proved he deserved it."

2) "Among the Muslims, men from every class who were able to catch sight of General Bonaparte were struck by how short and skinny he was," wrote the chief medical officer of the expedition. "The one, among our generals, whose appearance struck them more was... the General-in-Chief of the cavalry, Dumas. Man of color, and by his figure looking like a centaur, when they saw him ride his horse over the trenches, going to ransom prisoners, all of them believed that he was the leader of the expedition." [At] over six feet, with an athletic physique, Alex Dumas cut a dashing figure among the French elite. But how was it that he could enter the elite—and indeed be celebrated as a national hero—at a time when the basis of French wealth was black slavery in the colonies?

3) Many of the Founding Fathers themselves foresaw that their compromise with southern states was a poison pill that would eventually lead to tragedy. But the French stalwarts of the new America found every way of glossing over the problem. Paris theaters staged plays about the idyllic life in Virginia, where black slaves and their masters sang songs of liberty as they worked together side by side.

4) In those days, most Parisian cafés didn't spill into the street but served their customers in great interior rooms with marble-topped tables, gilt walls, mirrors, and chandeliers. But in the Palais Royal, with its large, protected courtyards, the cafés could set up outdoor tables where customers could read or talk amid the throng. Nearby were open-air billiard tables, musicians playing bawdy songs, magic-lantern shows, displays of electromagnetism, and political satires of all kinds—often distributed by freethinking agents of the Duke d'Orléans—mocking the king. Men and women crowded into these courtyards day and night; at the tables sat groups of men in intense discussion on the matters of the day. Anyone could read what they liked here and argue as loudly as they wished about it. The brilliant thing was that since the Palais Royal belonged to the duke, the entire space was off limits to the Paris police. Only the duke's own guards held sway within these walls, and the family had given strict instructions to allow the public a long leash. Philosophers, politicians, doctors, lawyers, workmen, and aristocrats all bumped up against one another, and many political clubs of the French Revolution began their debates here. (A little over half a century later, Karl Marx would first meet Friedrich Engels at a Palais Royal café, making this birthplace of eighteenth-century revolution that of twentieth-century revolution as well.)

5) Until the Committee's downfall, in 1794, Dumas would be forced to correspond with it on a regular basis about nearly all logistical, tactical, and strategic matters of his command. He received many letters a week signed by Carnot and the other members of the Committee. He must have been aware of the situation when he received his promotion, but Alex Dumas was brave, self-confident, and stubborn. Also, his own zeal gave him the kind of protective faith that true believers have. Dumas had thrown his life and soul fully behind the Revolution, even though he was not inherently a political man. For him, there was no going back. Unlike many others, he couldn't emigrate if pushed too far—where would he go? In a world where men of his color were slaves, revolutionary France was his promised land, even if he had to share it with some unsavory characters.

6) In mid-August, the Committee decided to send "the hero of Mont Cenis" to lead the Army of the West, whose mission was to combat a bloody royalist rebellion—some called it a civil war—in the Vendée, in western France. While the majority of the revolutionary armies fought external enemies, a few targeted internal rebellion and counterrevolution. The Army of the West was particularly notorious in this respect: its task was to suppress the motley collection of aristocrats and peasants who called themselves the Catholic and Royal Army. Many factors had made the Vendéeans rebels: many of them opposed the Revolution from the beginning or were alienated by the persecution of priests and the confiscation of Church property or by the 1793 execution of the king. But the biggest cause of the rebellion seems to have been Carnot's implementation of the levée en masse.

7) A decent man could not last long in the Vendée without becoming either a bloodthirsty killer or a victim. This was the case for Dumas's old commander General Biron. Biron had been sent to the Vendée in May 1793 to fight the insurgency. He had achieved immediate military successes, but the insubordination and continued violence toward civilians on the part of his troops caused him to resign. Another general then accused him of incivisme because he had been too lenient with the insurgents. This was enough to land Biron on the guillotine in December 1793, the very month that the Army of the West declared provisional victory over the insurgency.

8) The current Committee members' lack of extreme ideological convictions also made it a target for all sides, and Paris was rife with plots against the middle-of-the-road government. In spring hyperinflation and bread riots had sparked a rise in what was called "neo-Jacobinism," and in May these far-left radicals staged an uprising; it was brutally suppressed. But the repression of the neo-Jacobins on the far left created an opening for the neo-royalists on the far right. On October 5, 1795, the royalist-leaning sections of the city erupted in insurrection against the central government. Thirty thousand insurgents marched on the government, which had at most six thousand troops to defend it. The government called on a man of influence, a provincial noble named Paul Barras—Viscount Paul de Barras—who was promoted overnight to command the Army of the Interior. Barras looked to the army and specifically to an up-and-coming general living in Paris. Napoleon Bonaparte did not disappoint him.

9) In January 1797, Napoleon reorganized the French Army of Italy into three main columns, with the goal of driving the Austrians up into the Alps and out of Italy. If the French columns succeeded in this, they might even follow their enemy and burst down into the heartland of Austria itself, from which the enemy's capital, Vienna, would be just a day's ride away. For the first two weeks of February 1797, Dumas and a small band of dragoons under the command of General André Masséna advanced relentlessly, driving the Austrian army ever farther north toward their own border. "[Dumas] flies from one city to another, from one village to another, hacking everything to pieces," runs one account, "capturing two thousand prisoners here, one thousand there, he performs truly fantastic charges." The Austrians came up with a name for the relentless French general who stalked them through the snow: die schwarze Teufel, the "Black Devil."

10) Napoleon, who styled himself an intellectual and was proud of his membership in the French Academy in Paris, showered the Institute with problems both great and small: How do we purify Nile water? Which would be more practical in Cairo, windmills or watermills? What is the civil and criminal law in Egypt and what elements should we keep or throw out? Is there a way of brewing beer without hops?

11) That night a group of allied deputies stayed up late with the plotters, working by candlelight, taking votes and drafting papers, to make it all legal. By 3 a.m. it was finished. France had a new government, with Napoleon appointed first consul at the head of a ruling body of three consuls. Naturally, the other two would do his bidding. "Consul" was an evocation of Rome, and everyone could see that, as in Rome, one Caesar had emerged supreme. The fate of everything and everyone in Europe would soon hang on the whim of this dictator in a tricolor sash. The decade of French republicanism and democracy—the age of seemingly infinite emancipation, with all its expansive horrors and hopes—was over.

12) Dumas attributed his own salvation to the "forty enemas in three hours."

13) By the time he returned to France, in June of 1801, the Revolution and the nation Alex Dumas loved had declined almost as precipitously as he had. He must have felt like Rip Van Winkle returning from the hills—only Rip Van Winkle had found a king replaced by a revolution, while Dumas found a revolution replaced by a king, of sorts. And it was the same king he had left Egypt to escape. When Dumas arrived on French shores, Napoleon had had over a year to remake France in his image and to turn the gains of the Revolution to his own purposes.

14) During the 1790s, the National Colonial Institute in Paris had taken the revolutionary step of educating black, mixed-race, and white children together. Now Napoleon's government cut the Institute's funding and ended its experiment in color-blind education.