The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

by Tom Reiss

  Out of a system where all administrative positions were appointed or bought sprang a system where nearly every position—down to the lowest level, practically to the file clerks—would be elected. Nearly a million positions now needed to be filled, and though the government was still broke, hundreds of thousands volunteered for service. Despite the economic crisis and the continuing shortages, and although nobody was really in charge, the entire country seemed to pull together and run on the fumes of enthusiasm.

  AT the Hôtel de l’Ecu in Villers-Cotterêts, Marie-Louise had been confirmed early on in her first impressions of the handsome soldier who was taking shelter under her roof.

  Three years in the army, living in the rugged garrison town of Laon, with its medieval air and eternal silent vistas, had changed Dumas. He had a cavalryman’s swagger and the convictions of a republican revolutionary. If in Laon Alex had lived in a world where time stood still, he’d ridden from its gates into a world where time had accelerated—where changes that might have taken decades, or even centuries, were happening over weeks or days.

  It must have been with some trepidation that he approached Monsieur Labouret to ask for his daughter’s hand. But Monsieur Labouret responded positively to Dumas’s proposal. Here, in this provincial place—as in the French army, too—race actually appears to have been a nonissue. Dumas’s whole picaresque life so far belied the idea that fortune could be determined at birth. The tricolor cockade pinned to both his and his future father-in-law’s hats told that it was a new day, when all men would be equal before the law.

  On December 6, Alexandre Dumas and Marie-Louise Labouret were engaged. Claude Labouret had a single request: that they postpone the wedding until Dumas had been promoted to sergeant. This could also have been a father’s test of a suitor’s fidelity, to be sure he’d remain loyal once he was away in the wide world, among all the other women he was bound to meet.

  Ten days later, Dumas and the Sixth Dragoons rode out of Villers-Cotterêts to do their duty and find their place in the Revolution. Surely Claude Labouret had doubts about how long it might take Dumas to make sergeant. But he could not have imagined how far his request would be surpassed.

  THE summer of 1790 was the second—and sunniest—of the Revolution, metaphorically anyway; in fact, it rained a lot. It was a summer of nonstop public parties and festivals celebrating the momentous changes under way in the country, feted at mass banquets and galas nationwide. The largest of these took place in Paris on July 14—the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille—on the Champ de Mars, the “Field of Mars,” named for the Roman god of war because it was a military parade ground. (It is now a public park accommodating armies of tourists visiting the Eiffel Tower.) The government declared the day the Fête de la Fédération.

  In preparation for the event, thousands of volunteers of all social classes donated their labor, joining more than twelve thousand hired workers, to prepare the field to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of expected revelers. They created the world’s longest set of bleachers, out of compressed earth. (The earthen tiers were so well built that they lasted until the mid-nineteenth century.) The volunteers built an ornate triumphal arch at one end. This orgy of labor culminated in what was dubbed the Day of Wheelbarrows, on July 13, when the final preparations for the events were made. By now, the former military practice grounds had been transformed into a stadium of pharaonic proportions.

  On July 14, under a driving rain, before hundreds of thousands of people, Bishop Talleyrand stood at a specially erected “Altar of the Nation” to bless the assemblage. A massive orchestra played a religious hymn arranged for military instruments. Both bishop and altar were symbolic of a melding of state and religion that was already becoming one of the Revolution’s hallmarks. On the side of the altar was inscribed:

  The Nation, the Law, the King

  The Nation, which is you

  The Law, which is also you

  The King, who is the guardian of the Law

  General Lafayette, still the hero of the American Revolution, swore an oath and was followed by King Louis himself. For the first time Louis used his new title, “King of the French”—not “King of France”—thus symbolizing his duty to the people. His sworn oath was “to employ all the power delegated to me by the Constitution to uphold the decrees of the National Assembly.” A cry went up from the crowd, pronouncing the theme of the summer: “Frenchmen, we are free, we are brothers! Long live the nation, the law, and the king!”

  Banners from National Guard regiments around France colored the field, and amid them all flew the first American flag ever displayed outside the United States—carried by a U.S. delegation led by John Paul Jones and Tom Paine.

  Then came feasting and public balls that went on for days and nights with performances by thousands of actors, opera singers, and musicians. Huge banquets took place around the city where members of different classes and political factions broke bread together. (They passed out their leftovers to thousands of eager Parisian poor; the underclass was not actually invited to dine with them.) Many individual Parisians were moved to demonstrate their fraternal enthusiasm by inviting visitors to stay at their homes and share their tables. That July, the revolutionary dream seemed momentarily to be coming true, with people of every class and background joining in celebration. As extraordinary as everything else about the day was Louis’s apparent enthusiasm for it. He permitted National Guards from all over the country to browse his library and stroll in his botanical gardens; a week before the Fête, he showed up at the Champ de Mars in person to inspect the progress of the preparations. Instead of a prisoner of the Revolution, in the summer of 1790 Louis was an active participant in it. This was not to last.

  THE previous summer, even before the Bastille had fallen, Louis’s younger brother, Charles, escaped the country and took refuge in the territory of his father-in-law, the king of Piedmont-Sardinia. Piedmont-Sardinia, lying on France’s southeast border and controlled by the House of Savoy, was the most powerful of the many small kingdoms that would eventually become modern Italy; its territories included rich, important cities like Milan, much of the French Alps, and also parts of modern France, including Nice. Over the next few years, hundreds of thousands of aristocratic émigrés—this is the origin of the word—would arrive in Piedmont-Sardinia and neighboring monarchic states, eager to raise a counterrevolutionary force to restore order in France. But the émigrés had no power without the backing of a European state with an army. And their appeals for help from the great powers largely fell on deaf ears.

  No matter what sympathy they felt personally for Louis and the Bourbons, none of the European states yet saw any compelling reason to intervene in France’s internal affairs. Most thought that, according to traditional balance-of-power politics, France’s weakness would be their own strength. The idea that the Revolution might cross international borders and threaten their own cozy monarchies did not occur to them. Even that arch-opponent of the French Revolution Edmund Burke believed the French had “done their business for us as rivals, in a way which twenty Ramilies or Blenheims could never have done”—that is, had weakened their own country’s ability to project power more than any defeat on the battlefield had ever done. No one yet conceived that a state “weakened by revolution” could pose a serious military threat to its neighbors. The idea that revolution might actually make a state stronger was not even considered.

  France’s archrival England was certainly not inclined to help the Bourbons, and while British politicians on the left praised the Revolution, others expressed undisguised schadenfreude about Louis XVI’s plight. It served him right for supporting the American Revolution—that its ideology had come back to bite him showed that God was Protestant. Preoccupied in eastern Europe, neither Russia nor Prussia showed any interest in intervening. Spain was too weak to act alone or to lead a coalition, as were smaller monarchies like Piedmont-Sardinia. These states would take in émigrés but were not about to launch
an attack on revolutionary France.

  Louis’s last, best hope for help was his wife’s brother, Emperor Leopold of Austria. After Louis himself, Leopold was the most powerful monarch in Europe. In the eighteenth century, Austrian territory still made up the bulk of the “Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation”—a vast multilingual conglomeration of states that traced its origins to the high Middle Ages and included some of the wealthiest parts of modern Germany and Italy, as well as other territories in both eastern and western Europe. In fact, many of these principalities were along the French border, and while Vienna did not directly control them, it had a close alliance with their rulers, as was the case with Piedmont-Sardinia. This long frontier was one reason the French and Austrians had fought so many wars over the last several centuries. But since the 1750s, and the marriage between Louis and Marie-Antoinette, Austria and France had been in an uneasy alliance. If there was any monarch who should have come to King Louis’s aid, it was Leopold. The Austrian emperor, however, also bowed out of attacking France. Like the other European powers, Austria was shaken by the Revolution and feared it would spread, while also being happy to see France, that perpetual boss of European affairs, knocked down a peg or two.

  In the late spring of 1791, after a year of growing frustration and isolation in the Tuileries, the royal family decided to flee to the border of the Austrian Netherlands—the modern country of Belgium—where they believed that Emperor Leopold could protect them, and perhaps even launch their restoration to full power. Louis also held the delusional belief that once he was out of the Parisian hotbed of revolutionary extremism, his people would embrace him. On the night of June 20, the king, in a coach and disguised as either a valet or a merchant traveling with his family—the story is told both ways—made his “flight to Varennes.” There his identity was discovered, because he stopped the entourage to dine and the man serving him got suspicious: he supposedly checked the king’s face against the image on a coin or banknote and called the guards to arrest him. (Many accounts of this in the popular press lampooned the king’s gluttony, saying that he’d been too hungry to make it to the border without stopping for a snack.) The king and his entourage were arrested and returned to the Tuileries Palace under guard.

  The king had, in fleeing, publicly spurned the Revolution, but most revolutionaries were still not ready to spurn him and be without a monarch. The government crafted a cover story to explain Louis’s flight—the royal family had been kidnapped by counterrevolutionaries, who were to use them as pawns in a complex plot, until the patriots happily discovered the plot and liberated the royals. Nobody believed it for a second. Before fleeing, the king had left an angry denunciation of the Revolution behind at the Tuileries Palace. A petition was drafted denouncing Louis as a lying traitor and demanding that he make his attempted abdication formal. On July 17, a score of demonstrators brought their petition to the Champ de Mars, where a year earlier Parisians had come together harmoniously, in far greater numbers, in the Fête de la Fédération.

  What happened next has always been disputed. (If a crowd of thousands can obscure the truth behind mayhem caught on video at a rock concert today, how much more obscure must things have been before there were cameras of any kind?) It seems clear that angry shouting, then pushing, broke out in the crowd. Some would later say that the entire event had been infiltrated by foreign conspirators—or the ever-useful “brigands”—who had lured Parisians there to do them harm. Supporters of the petition would say that the violence arose from a royal plot to destroy republicanism.

  One thing is certain: the political throng on the field suddenly found itself joined by military units, mostly National Guardsmen, streaming in from all directions. At Lafayette’s importuning, the government had declared martial law: the factions denouncing the king as a traitor were being answered by an ugly mood in the street, and the constitutional monarchy was looking increasingly fragile.

  Alex Dumas and the Sixth Dragoons also rode onto the field. Policing public events was one of their jobs, and they were good at it. They knew how to keep their cool in such situations better than regular soldiers. They were armed with their usual sabers and short muskets but also light cannons.

  General Lafayette, commanding the Paris National Guard, rode in on his white horse. The “hero of two worlds” ordered the rioters to calm down and go home, in his self-important, involuntarily aristocratic manner. The crowd jeered and threw rocks at his guardsmen.

  Seeing his orders emphatically disobeyed, Lafayette commanded the National Guard to fire, either above the heads of the crowd or—as some reports claim—directly into it. In one version, the mob attacks the guardsmen, causing them to panic, and they fire mostly to protect themselves. In any event, the day became known as the Champ de Mars Massacre. The number of dead is uncertain: the estimates range from twelve to around fifty. But such violence from the revolutionary government was at that point shocking: the guillotine had yet to make its debut on the political stage.

  Soon, though, the July 1791 violence would be overshadowed by revolutionary killing on an unimaginable scale. If in July 1790 the Champ de Mars Fête symbolized where the Revolution had come from, the Champ de Mars Massacre of July 1791 symbolized its future. By the spring of 1794, when the Revolution had turned to the bloody period called the Terror, Alex Dumas would be threatened with the guillotine for his mere presence on the field that day. By then, however, the association with a previous government, in any capacity, could be grounds for immediate execution.

  * Republicanism was an ideology—radical in the eighteenth century—that opposed the divine right of kings and favored representative government based on a constitution, elected leadership, and a free, responsible citizenry. It was not only about liberty and personal freedom, but also duty and sacrifice to the nation. The French republicans looked back more than two thousand years for their model, writing speeches, giving plays, and making art that glorified the ancient republics of Greece and Rome. But they also glorified the ancient “Frenchness” of the Celts and Franks. They considered more recent French history to be a period of dissolution and decline in the nation’s moral character, brought on because the formerly free French citizen-warriors had become decadent “subjects” of a falsely deified king.

  † Along with La Rochefoucauld and Lafayette, some of the Enlightenment’s leading lights—Brissot, Condorcet, Grégoire, Mirabeau, Raynal, and Volney, to name the most illustrious—would become members of this French “abolitionist international.” Incredibly, it would meet its goal of ending slavery after only six years of activism. The group would then operate as a sort of think tank, planning a post-slave economy for the colonies. During the Revolution, its mostly white membership would also include almost every major black and mixed-race activist in Paris.

  9

  “REGENERATION BY BLOOD”

  “REMEMBER those crusades in which Europe armed herself for a few superstitions,” wrote Jacques-Pierre Brissot, leader of one of the most powerful revolutionary factions, in his paper The French Patriot, on December 13, 1791. “The time has come for another crusade, and it has a far nobler, and holier, goal. This is a crusade for universal freedom.”

  Maximilien Robespierre, leader of a rival faction, objected that trying to turn the Revolution into a universal, military crusade for freedom would not work. France’s neighbors would not accept liberation at the hands of foreign troops, any more than France would have. He advocated maintaining peace with surrounding nations, and focusing on imposing ideological purity at home.

  France’s enemies had given the war faction a great boost: in the wake of Louis’s unsuccessful flight and arrest the previous summer, a coalition of royalist powers led by the Austrian emperor had issued a declaration threatening to summon “the forces necessary” to come to the king’s aid. It was actually a weak threat—the language was left purposefully vague so that no one had to commit to any concrete action—and any normal eighteenth-century government would have realize
d that and ignored it. But France did not have a normal government: it had a collection of caffeinated intellectuals conducting passionate nonstop shouting matches in the former royal riding school of the Tuileries Palace. The threat of foreign invasion now made the agenda of preemptive, revolutionary war seem sensible, even inevitable.

  “It is a cruel thing to think, but it becomes more striking every day: we are regressing through peace,” fumed one of Brissot’s followers. “We will be regenerated only by blood. Shallow character, corrupt and frivolous morals: these basic qualities, incompatible with liberty, can only be overcome by adversity.”

  Jacques-Pierre Brissot knew adversity firsthand. Though the son of a pastry cook, he knew what it was to go hungry. In the years before the Revolution, he had lived as a kind of freelance foreign correspondent and pamphleteer, recording his observations of events in the Austrian Netherlands (Belgium), England, Switzerland, and America, and finding paid work as he could. He served time in a debtors’ prison in London. He was short and slight, with a scribbler’s stooped shoulders and an awkwardness that ranged from timidity to belligerence. But his main character flaw was that of so many French revolutionaries: a zeal for human rights so self-righteous that it translated into intolerance for the actual human beings around him. Brissot had spent more time abroad than most of the other revolutionaries. During his travels in the brand-new United States, in 1788, he had become infatuated by the American republic and its spirit of “simplicity, goodness, and that dignity of man which is the possession of those who realize their liberty and who see in their fellow men only brothers and equals.” Brissot had determined to bring the American ideals to Europe.