by Tom Reiss
The one thing he rejected about the American Revolution was its perpetuation of slavery. On this issue, the poverty-stricken journalist made common cause with Lafayette and La Rochefoucauld, working alongside these wealthy aristocrats in the Society of the Friends of the Blacks. Traveling through Virginia, Brissot met with General Washington and tried to convince him to start a new revolution for racial emancipation; Washington demurred, telling his French visitor that Virginia was not yet ready for such a thing. But Brissot insisted that racial liberation must respect no borders. Now he applied the same logic to the French Revolution.
Brissot was still passionate about the abolitionist cause, but in the winter of 1791–92 the slaves that concerned him were not the actual enslaved blacks in the colonies. Rather, Brissot and his followers now talked about metaphorical “slaves.” These slaves were the white European soldiers of all France’s enemies: Austrians, Prussians, Sardinians, Russians—it did not matter. So long as they marched against revolutionary France in the name of a king or emperor, they were slaves, pitted against the land of liberty. Thus the revolutionaries both belittled enemy soldiers and held out the prospect that they needed help and liberation. The rhetoric of slave armies attacking the Revolution implied a newly urgent task. France naturally needed to defend itself, but the attackers could not just be repulsed: they also needed to be liberated from their own masters, so as to spread the Revolution. In this way, the line between defense and offense was hopelessly blurred. France could not defend its revolution without attacking.
This essential idea would be captured in the words of the Revolution’s greatest song, which would eventually become France’s national anthem. The “Marseillaise” was originally titled “The War Song for the Army of the Rhine” and was penned in these fevered months to inspire Frenchmen to fight off the royalist armies massing on France’s eastern borders. The second verse told of the slave soldiers marching under their royal masters to crush the Revolution and put the freed French people back in chains:
What do they want, this horde of slaves,
of traitors, of conjured kings?
Meant for whom, these vile chains,
These irons long prepared?
Frenchman, for us, ah! what outrage!
What fury it must inspire!
It is for us that they dare plan
A return to the slavery of old!
As the Assembly’s most fervid warmonger, Brissot called for immediate action against the Revolution’s foreign enemies. “We cannot be at ease until Europe, and all of Europe, is in flames!”
Along with the French deputies, the Manège now contained various professional dissidents who had arrived from around Europe to join in the excitement. These international revolutionaries were followers of Brissot’s universalist creed. “It is because I want peace that I am calling for war!” shouted Anacharsis Cloots, a German baron who had shown up in Paris and taken to calling himself “Orator of the Human Race.” He vowed that the French flag would fly over twenty liberated countries within a month.
IN the 1750s and ’60s, when Alexandre Dumas’s uncle Louis de la Pailleterie was serving as a captain, and then a colonel, in the artillery, French warcraft was in a dreadful state. As one French commander lamented, “I lead a gang of thieves, of murderers fit only for the gauntlet, who turn tail at the first gunshot and who are always ready to mutiny … The king has the worst infantry under heaven, and the worst-disciplined, and there is simply no way to lead troops like these.”
Until the late eighteenth century, the “professionalizing” of the military had proceeded in fits and starts. For hundreds of years, professional military standards existed only among mercenaries, and these men fought alone or in small groups. Throughout the seventeenth century, European soldiers were still only slightly removed from thugs; they raped, robbed, and pillaged civilians as assiduously as they fought the enemy. Whole towns would be massacred without much thought, and even when soldiers attempted to behave with a measure of humanity, they still pillaged wherever they went, because pillaging was the only way to support their operations, especially on long campaigns. Since most of Europe lived harvest to harvest, an army often left famine in its wake.
After the horrors of the wars of religion, during which nearly a third of central Europe’s population was wiped out, various innovations were introduced to make armies less randomly destructive. Discipline was introduced in the form of drills, regimentation, uniforms. Most important, armies began clothing and feeding soldiers, so they’d have no need to pillage, and paying them in lieu of booty. As a result, European armies became less destructive. Ironically, less destructive wars could be fought more often—could in fact be fought more or less constantly, with short breaks for minor changes in coalitions. Europe thus remained in a near-constant state of low-level conflict between 1700 and 1790; during that time, the various powers fought more than fifteen different wars, with France almost always involved on one side or the other.
In previous centuries, the idea of joining an army to “serve one’s country” would have seemed ludicrous (though traditional national hatreds and rivalries could be a useful spur to those who’d joined). Soldiers fought because they feared not doing so. While an officer’s commission was a perquisite of the aristocratic class, soldiering was work for the dregs of society, and little more was expected of soldiers than to follow orders and not desert; every army had devised elaborate horrors to keep its men in line, like the “wooden horse” favored by the British—a stiff wooden board that a recalcitrant soldier would sit on for hours, muskets weighing down his legs—or the Prussians’ infamous “running the gauntlet,” where a delinquent soldier was forced to run between two lines of his comrades, who flogged him as he passed. In seventeenth-century France, it was still possible for a captain to cut off the nose of a soldier who had deserted before a battle, and branding as a punishment was common.
Officers fought for the glory and honor of their rank and family name. Until the mid-1700s, an officer’s commission had been seen as a social and monetary sinecure, an object of inheritance, favoritism, or sale. For the old “sword nobility,” supposed descendants of the chivalric knights, a commission was a means of keeping up family tradition; for the newly wealthy, it was a means of fabricating status. For the monarchy and the state, it was a means of collecting revenue—effectively, a tax. The most prestigious French commissions sold for what it would cost to build a great château and required even more funds, because a commission came with a regiment of soldiers, which the purchaser had to equip and pay. A businessman who’d saved the necessary pile could make his adolescent son a colonel or his ten-year-old a captain, although he first had to purchase his family’s noble rank.*
An entire army held together by common training, discipline, values, and purpose had long been a theoretical dream—widely contemplated in ancient Greek and Roman texts but not to be found on the battlefield. But then France benefited from its overwhelming defeat in the Seven Years’ War, which brought not only the loss of the French Empire in North America but humiliation by the Prussians. In the can-do spirit of the Enlightenment, a small group of scholar-officers became determined to reform the military.
Most Enlightenment intellectuals regarded warfare with contempt, as an atavistic remnant of mankind’s irrational past and medieval values, along with plain old-fashioned brutality, greed, lust, and cruelty. They thought that as society matured into a more rational, scientific age such barbarism would wither. But alongside these pacifist philosophers, France also produced a generation of military philosophers dedicated to remaking the French army into an invincible tool of conquest. At the forefront of these was Count Jacques de Guibert, who—in 1770, at the height of the Enlightenment—called on the French army to resurrect the lost spirit of the Roman legions and predicted great things if it could be done: “Now suppose there arises in Europe a vigorous people, with genius, resources, and government; a people who unite austere virtues and a national militia w
ith a fixed plan of military expansion, who would not lose sight of this plan, who, knowing how to wage war at little cost and subsist on their victories, are not reduced to laying down their arms because of financial calculations. One would see such a people subjugate its neighbors, and overthrow our feeble constitutions, as the north wind bends the frail reeds.” Much as Rousseau advocated stripping human life down to a “natural” state, Guibert called for sweeping away the decadence of the foppish eighteenth-century French officer to discover a neo-Roman ideal. He imagined an army of self-sacrificing, physically courageous citizen-style soldiers. Guibert and his fellow military philosophers laid the groundwork for patriotic warmongers to come. Their reforms of the French army transformed it, preparing it for the revolutionaries’ extreme ambitions.
Guibert and his colleagues focused on professionalizing the officer corps through education and created Europe’s finest military academies. They also took the first steps toward endowing soldiering with dignity and regularity. They built barracks, so that soldiers constantly trained with their regiments, instead of haphazardly coming and going from their houses. They introduced uniforms for officers as well as soldiers, though some officers still resisted wearing them—why would an officer dress in livery, like a lackey or coachman? They provided the French army with the plans and the tools for melding France’s infantry, cavalry, and artillery into Europe’s first modern army. And they created written orders and maps, both high-tech innovations in an age when armies arrived days late for battles and rarely had a clear idea of the terrain they crossed.
The French military philosophers created a whole new generation of guns, designed to be lighter and more accurate than anything anywhere. These new guns would allow a new kind of offensive warfare—based on mass, maneuverability, and the ability to strike quickly over long distances. France’s budget crisis in the 1780s kept many of these weapons from going into production in the monarchy’s last years, but the technology was there, waiting for a government with the wherewithal and drive to use it.
France, which had long had Europe’s largest population, now had the unique power of the revolutionary idea to create citizen soldiers. Since France’s most entrenched aristocratic officers had defected to the émigrés, the field was unusually wide open for brains, bravery, and enthusiasm.
THE revolutionary government began its universal crusade for liberty with a preemptive strike on the Austrian Netherlands, as a way both to protect its frontier and to attack its great royalist enemy and the émigrés’ supporter. The men in Paris believed this would mobilize the French-speaking population there against their German-speaking overlords. The Austrian Netherlands had exploded in an American-and-French-inspired revolution only two years earlier: six months after the Bastille fell, Brussels patriots proclaimed “the United States of Belgium” and declared their nation’s independence from the Austrian Empire. But then the emperor sent in more Austrian troops and claimed the region back. The French now hoped that their incursion would spark a renewed uprising.
Alex Dumas, recently promoted to corporal, accompanied one of three columns that were to carry out the attack. Dumas was still just one of thousands of faceless soldiers, only one rank above a private, so no other records survive of his presence. His column of ten thousand men was led by the Duke de Biron, another member of the 1776 generation who had served with Rochambeau in America. The column met with initial success, taking a key strategic town on the border and continuing deeper into Austria’s Belgian territory. Later that day, April 29, the column was attacked by Austrians but successfully beat them back. However, the inexperienced among the French soldiers panicked, and that evening two cavalry regiments actually mounted their horses and rode off. General Biron rode after the deserters himself, alone, and eventually caught them and, by argument rather than orders, persuaded most of the men to return to the camp.
Meanwhile, on the same day, another French general, Théobald Dillon, was less lucky. Dillon was leading ten squadrons of cavalry across the frontier at a different point, to the north, and, coming under Austrian fire, these soldiers panicked, fled back into French territory, and barricaded themselves inside the walled city of Lille. When General Dillon came looking for them, a mob of his own troops shouted that he had betrayed them to the enemy. They seized him and tore him to pieces. In Paris the Assembly tried to organize a court-martial to investigate the incident, but Robespierre, a mastermind of mob mentality, in a chilling foreshadowing of the course he was to follow, congratulated the troops who had murdered their commander. (Members of Dumas’s own Sixth Dragoons were recommended for court-martial for the incident.) Though generals like Biron and Dillon supported the Revolution—they had become émigrés, after all—they were still nobles and moderates, hence, suspect. To a man like Robespierre, only the lowest soldiers could really be trusted. Lucky for Dumas that he was still only a corporal.
With the French troops a danger more to their own officers than to their enemies that spring, the Austrians and Prussians easily gained the advantage. But then, in late July, the Austrian-Prussian coalition blew this advantage by issuing another threat: once again it warned of retribution should any harm befall King Louis or his family. Like its declaration almost a year before, the July 1792 manifesto backfired, only this time more severely.
On August 10, pike-wielding mobs stormed the Tuileries Palace, massacred the Swiss Guards, the last troops loyal to the king, and turned the neighborhood around the Palais Royal—now called the Palais Égalité—into a charnel house. The king and his family survived only by running to the Manège and begging refuge from the deputies of the Assembly who were gathered there. That day, the French monarchy effectively ended, and the Assembly immediately began preparing to declare a republic. The royal family, under arrest, would henceforth live in the Temple—the old Knights Templar headquarters, now a revolutionary prison—just around the corner from the Nicolet Theater.
CORPORAL Alex Dumas remained on the Belgian frontier, far from Paris. Here among bleak hedgerows and turnip and bean fields, the Austrians and the French fought a war of cross-border raids. The most important French cavalry base in the region was at a little town called Maulde, where they created a large armed camp.
Dumas worked out of the camp at Maulde. His job was to lead small units of dragoons and other cavalry, usually four or eight horsemen, on scouting missions to forestall enemy incursions. Most of the time, the scouts saw more cows and sheep than Austrian troops. But on August 11 they ran into a raiding party. Dumas spotted the enemy riders, a force considerably larger than his own. But rather than try to escape or evade, Corporal Dumas led his little band in a charge on the startled Austrians. The Austrians, perhaps stunned at the mere sight of a six-foot-one black man riding full tilt out of a Belgian bean field, quickly surrendered to him en masse. His son the novelist would take evident delight in describing the incident:
Spotting them, despite his inferiority in numbers, he gave the order to charge in an instant. The [Austrians], who were unprepared for this sudden attack, retreated to a small meadow surrounded by a ditch large enough to stop cavalry. But, as I’ve said, my father was an excellent horseman; he mounted a good horse that he called Joseph. He took the reins, spurred Joseph on, leapt the ditch,… and in an instant found himself alone in the midst of the thirteen chasseurs, who, stunned by such audacity, handed over their arms and surrendered. The victor piled up the thirteen carbines in a stack, placed them on his saddle-bow, made the thirteen men march to meet his four dragoons, who had stopped on the other side of the ditch which they could not cross, and, being the last to pass over the ditch, he led his prisoners to the camp.
Prisoners were rare in those days, and the sight of four men leading thirteen produced a major sensation in the camp. This proof of the young officer’s courage was much discussed; General Beurnonville wanted to see him, made him sergeant, invited him to dinner, and mentioned his name in the day’s report.
This was the first distinction to fal
l on this new name, Alexandre Dumas, adopted by the son of the Marquis de la Pailleterie.
That the father’s heroism was equal to the son’s description was confirmed by the Moniteur Universel—the paper of record in revolutionary France—in its edition for Saturday, August 18, 1792. Corporal Dumas, the newspaper states, “cut [the enemy riders] off so deftly and fell upon them with such alacrity that they all surrendered with their rifles loaded, without having had time to so much as fire a shot.” His son gave Alex Dumas thirteen adversaries, while the newspaper mentions only twelve.
Three months later, the newspaper was still talking about Dumas’s exploits, and was particularly impressed by his decision to donate his portion of the spoils to the French nation: “Citizen Dumas, American, who offered as a patriotic gift the sum of 12 livres, 10 sous, his share of the proceeds from the captured rifles, taken by him and his companions from the 12 Tyroleans whom they took prisoner.” A suitably grand, patriotic gesture for an army that seemed to offer limitless possibilities for glory.
