by Tom Reiss
* The system of adolescent officership did not preclude talent—France’s brilliant general Maurice de Saxe displayed audacious courage at twelve and commanded a regiment by seventeen—but it left little clear opportunity for men of mere ability and initiative.
10
“THE BLACK HEART ALSO BEATS FOR LIBERTY”
A FEW hundred miles south, a far bigger border raid was under way. A combined force of tens of thousands of Prussians, Austrians, and Hessians—along with several hundred counterrevolutionary émigrés—crossed the frontier in wooded country east of the French border fortress of Verdun. France’s defenses crumbled before the advancing Germanic force. The commander of the Verdun fortress committed suicide.
As news of the invasion reached Paris on the second of September, conspiracy theories swept the city. Since the people’s armies were invincible, the only way the Germans could have crossed the frontier was … Treason! Betrayal by the enemy within! A monstrous aristocratic conspiracy must have sold out the revolutionary armies.
Mobs stormed the city’s prisons and turned on the inmates, “enemies of the state” rounded up over the preceding two weeks. Starting with priests, they moved on to former servants of the royal family, nobles, and finally petty criminals, too—prostitutes, beggars, and thieves. Impromptu “street trials” were followed by beheadings without the guillotine’s swiftness; the mobs used old swords, pikes, even kitchen knives, to murder at least 1,200 men, women, and children.
The September riots turned many foreign supporters of the Revolution against it, especially in England. The London Times published accounts that upped the death toll from 1,200 to 12,000 and exhorted Englishmen to “ardently pray that your happy Constitution may never be outraged by the despotic tyranny of Equalization.” Appalled by the events in Paris and with a warrant out for his arrest, General Lafayette himself defected across enemy lines.*
But along with bloody-mindedness, the German invasion also inspired a new sort of patriotism—a bold sense of citizenship as soldiering. Recruiting offices were swamped. Thousands of new French citizen-soldiers signed up to receive a weapon and a uniform, or at least a scrap of tricolor fabric, and a pass authorizing them to proceed to the front.
The French volunteers met the Germanic invaders at a little village called Valmy, not far from the fortress of Verdun, and at Valmy a new legend of French invincibility was born. French gunners used some of their newest weaponry, showing what twenty years of innovation in cannon design could do. They also showed what true patriotism from below could mean for an army defending its homeland: troops taunted the invaders with cries of “Vive la nation!” and “Vive la Révolution!” The revolutionary songs and chants they let loose echoed down the wheat fields and defied the battle’s torrential rains. “Here and now a new epoch in world history is beginning,”† remarked the poet Goethe, observing the French armies with amazement from behind the Prussian lines.
As part of the patriotic orgy in the wake of Valmy, the deputies in the National Assembly dissolved themselves and called for a new body to be elected directly by the People. This “National Convention” immediately voted to abolish the monarchy—the end of a 1,350-year journey—and to declare France a republic.
BY the middle of November 1792, the new French Republic had conquered territories all along its frontiers. Flush with a power that could, conceivably, even liberate the world, the republic pushed its perceived military advantage in all directions. It invaded the Austrian Netherlands, first liberating Brussels and then the whole of Belgium from the Austrian yoke. It then liberated a series of independent German states along the Rhine, long in the Austrian orbit, getting as far as Frankfurt. On the Republic’s southern border, its troops invaded Piedmont-Sardinia and captured the city of Nice.
The government issued the Edict of Fraternity, offering military support to any nation that wanted to fight for its freedom. It was an open invitation to radicals across Europe to overthrow their governments. In order to live up to this offer, France needed to increase the size of its army. Fast.
The government had already begun experimenting with a new system for recruiting fighting men based on an archaic French model dating back hundreds of years: the “free legions,” units independent of the regular army that could be called up in war and disbanded during times of peace. The formations would not replace but would exist alongside the regular army and the National Guard.
The legions were an eye-catching bunch, owing largely to the political refugees who had streamed into France during the first years of the Revolution and begged to take up arms in the fight for European liberty. Few of the refugees had actual military training. The government simply separated them out from the military mix by allowing them to form their own legions: soon there was a Belgian legion and a Germanic legion, and even an English one.‡ Baron Anacharsis Cloots offered to raise a legion of “Vandals,” his term for his fellow Prussians, though it didn’t come to anything.
And, on September 7, a delegation of free blacks from the colonies went to the Manège to lobby the government to approve a legion of their own. The group was led by Julien Raimond, a well-to-do planter born in Saint-Domingue to an illiterate white Frenchman and wealthy mixed-race mother native to the island. The result of their petition was the Légion Franche des Américains et du Midi—the “Free Legion of Americans and of the South.” And though most legions had the word “free” in their names, to indicate that they were independent of the regular army, in this case the word had a double meaning: every member of this legion was a free man of color. It would soon become known as the Black Legion.
The new Black Legion was also known by the name of its commander—the Légion de Saint-Georges. Saint-Georges had lived high in the last years of the Ancien Régime but had, like all noblemen of color, experienced the increasing racism of those years. In his midforties when the Bastille fell, he volunteered for the National Guard the following year; he was made a captain in 1791. Hearing about the new legions, Saint-Georges leapt at the chance to command a legion of mixed-race and free black men, and to get Alex Dumas into the formation.
The problem was that another officer, Colonel Joseph Boyer, had already recruited Dumas to a legion called the Hussars of Liberty and Equality, or the Hussars of the South. (The paperwork on these legions, which I experienced in all its florid immediacy in the old Château de Vincennes military library, reveals that they didn’t pay much heed to consistency: many legions had multiple names.) With his recent success on the Belgian frontier, capturing those twelve prisoners single-handedly, Dumas’s reputation now preceded him. Any legion forming in the fall of 1792 would want to have the hero of Maulde riding with it. It was not that different from drafting players for a football team.
A kind of bidding war ensued, with the two legions offering higher rank instead of higher pay. Dumas had agreed to be first lieutenant of the Hussars of Liberty and Equality when Saint-Georges topped that with an offer of the rank of lieutenant colonel, and also offered Dumas second in command of the Free Legion of Americans—the Black Legion. So Dumas joined up with the Americans and the Chevalier de Saint-Georges.
The date at the top of Dumas’s commission (which I found in the safe at Villers-Cotterêts) provides a fascinating snapshot of the tumult of that time:
Paris, October 10, 1792. Year IV of liberty, and Year I of equality and of the French Republic
While the official “republican calendar” was not introduced until late 1793, the War Ministry had started printing letterhead and forms in revolutionary time much earlier. “Year IV of liberty” referred back to the taking of the Bastille and the declaration of the National Assembly. “Year I of equality,” also printed, referred to the establishment of the Republic, just one month before. But the words “and the French Republic” were not even printed but scrawled beside the printed header. Events were moving so fast the stationers could not keep up.
The document itself is addressed to “Alexandre Dumas, Lieutenant Col
onel,” and reads:
Sir, I am giving you notice that you are appointed to the vacant post of lieutenant colonel of the cavalry in the Free Legion of the Americans.…
It is imperative that you join your post within one month at the latest, from the date of this letter, otherwise we will assume you have relinquished this position and it will then be given to another officer. You will be attentive enough to let me know when you receive this letter and forward me the original papers documenting the service you may have in the troops of line, in France or with the Allied Powers. These documents are necessary to expedite your certificate [brevet]. I will ask the Colonel to inform me of your arrival at the Regiment.
Acting War Minister
Le Brun
IN October 1791, the Friends of the Blacks had persuaded the king to sign a law reaffirming the freedom principle and banning all distinctions of color in assigning citizenship rights in France proper. But the plantation owners continued to resist any extension of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen to blacks in the colonies, whether free or not. The richest planters mostly lived in Paris, and those who didn’t hired lobbyists to work the deputies in the Assembly.
Ironically enough, this was exactly how Julien Raimond, father of the Black Legion, had first become involved in politics. For all the similarities between his background and Dumas’s, there was one crucial difference. Like his parents before him, Raimond was a successful slave owner who outfitted his Saint-Domingue plantation in sophisticated luxury; he spent his money on everything from books and sheet music to silver, crystal, and a slave who had been specially trained as a pastry chef. When he arrived in France in 1786 to claim an inheritance left to his wife, Raimond pushed for specific racial reforms that would have benefited him as a free black property owner of two indigo works and hundreds of slaves. He made the case that free blacks should be considered as whites’ natural allies against potentially rebellious slaves—a point he stressed by referring to light-skinned people like himself as “new whites.”
In a short time republican ideals and the fervor of the times turned Raimond from a member of the slaveholding faction to an increasingly committed—if practical-minded—abolitionist. As a member of the Jacobin Club, he campaigned for men of color born to free parents to be able to vote in colonial elections, an achievement that, when it was passed into law on May 15, 1791, presaged even greater changes. But Raimond’s pragmatic bent led him to make common cause with fiery white radical allies like the Abbé Grégoire, a member of the Friends of the Blacks, who railed against the colonists’ demand “that there will be no change in the status of the people on our islands, except at the colonists’ request”:
The National Assembly will not stamp out injustice except at the request of those who feed on the situation and want to prolong it!… Put another way, these men will be the victims of oppression until their tyrants agree to lighten their fate.
The volcano of liberty that has been lit in France will soon bring about a general explosion and change the fate of the human species in the two hemispheres.
Grégoire’s words pointed to the sugar islands, and especially to Saint-Domingue, where by 1791 the volcano of liberty was already erupting. Since the summer of 1789, the Rights of Man and of the Citizen had been clashing head-on with the Code Noir. It was now two years into the Revolution and black slaves were still toiling and dying in the fields. Many had had enough. Also, as the French colonies got word of the mother country’s revolution, the islands had been filling with rumors. One was that King Louis had invoked the universal rights of man and freed all slaves. Another was that he had merely abolished the whip and ordered that slaves be given three days off from work. Much as rumors of another mythical royal order had contributed to the Great Fear in August 1789, now slaves throughout the sugar islands felt they had royal sanction to rise up.
Reports reached Paris that the Saint-Domingue slave uprising, by far the largest slave revolt in history, had already taken thousands of white lives and set fire to tens of thousands of acres of sugarcane. The death toll was exaggerated, but many deputies in Paris panicked at the thought of losing France’s economic backbone and supported repressing the rebellion by any means. French national security seemed to call for sacrificing principle, and the planters’ lobby argued for repression of all the islands’ blacks and people of color, both free and slave. The revolutionary government sent in troops to suppress the slave revolt, even though that revolt proclaimed itself part of the wider French Revolution: for the next decade, the black insurgents of Saint-Domingue would demand nothing so consistently as to be accepted into the new world of free French citizens.
By the end of 1791, slave insurgents had managed to take control of the northern half of Saint-Domingue. But when they confronted the heavily armed and trained white French army and colonial militia, the results were disproportionate casualties on the black side—ten insurgents killed for every white death. In the wake of this repression, the deputies in Paris furiously debated what to do about slavery. One of the few things Brissot’s followers and Robespierre’s followers agreed on was support for racial equality and disapproval of slavery. But both sides feared taking any step that could economically weaken the Republic during wartime.
“The black heart also beats for liberty!” Brissot cried to the Assembly in December 1791 in one of a series of fiery speeches defending the rights of the colonies’ black and mixed-race people. It was the white planters who had sown the seeds of unrest, Brissot said—perhaps the one point on which he and Robespierre would remain in perfect agreement.
On April 4, 1792, eight months after full-out rebellion exploded on Saint-Domingue, the National Assembly extended full citizenship to free blacks and “men of color”—people with some European blood—in the colonies as well as the kingdom, but took no action against slavery itself.
The extension of full citizenship to mulattos and freed blacks was not the same as ending slavery outright, but it put France and its colonial empire in the vanguard with regard to racial emancipation. The French multiracial citizenship act had the effect of setting the British abolitionist movement back a decade, since now any political gesture on behalf of blacks was taken as evidence of crypto-French beliefs.
Within the French Empire, the declaration definitively turned most planters against the Revolution in all its facets. A decree passed by Saint-Domingue’s Assembly the month after the citizenship act prohibited the “sale, impression, or distribution” of any coins or medals depicting or commemorating “the politics and revolution of France,” as if stomping out republican paraphernalia could curtail the Revolution itself.
On the other side, France’s free black population now felt an even more fervent allegiance to the nation and the government. Dumas’s ardent republicanism and devotion to the tricolor put him in perfect sync with the nation taking shape around him. France’s citizens of color now wanted to express their devotion by risking their lives to defend the Revolution. The legions would give them a chance to make that sacrifice while claiming the full privileges and dignity their newfound political status afforded them. Raimond handed an eloquent statement to the president of the National Assembly—“If Nature, inexhaustible in its combinations, has differentiated us from the French by external signs, on the other hand it has made us perfectly similar in giving us, like them, a burning heart to fight the enemies of the Nation”—and placed 125 livres in notes on his desk. This was the first contribution toward equipping and training what would become the Black Legion.
The president’s reply is worth noting:
Sirs, Virtue in Honor is independent of color and climate. The offer that you make the Fatherland of your arms and your strength for the destruction of its enemies, in honoring a great part of the human species, is a service rendered to the cause of all humankind.
The Assembly appreciates your devotion and your courage. Your efforts will be all the more precious since love of Liberty and Equality must be a terrible and in
vincible passion in the children of those who, under their burning sun, have groaned in the irons of servitude; with so many men gathered to harry the despots and their slaves, it is impossible that France will not soon become the capital of the free world and the tomb of all the thrones of the Universe.
CITIZEN Claude Labouret must have been the proudest man in eastern France. The unusual soldier who had swept his daughter off her feet in the summer of 1789 had now returned, in the fall of 1792, to claim his bride, not an officer of some minor unit but the lieutenant colonel of a free legion. The little town had its hero of the Revolution, and he was about to be Labouret’s new son-in-law.
On November 18, 1792, a Sunday, a notice went up on the main entrance of the Villers-Cotterêts town hall announcing:
The future marriage between Citizen§ Thomas-Alexandre Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie, 30 years and 8 months old, Lieutenant Colonel of the Hussars of the South [sic], born in La Guinodée, in Jérémie, in America, son of the late Antoine Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie, former Commissioner of the Artillery, deceased in St. Germain en Laye in June 1786 & of the late Marie Cessette Dumas, deceased in La Guinodée near Jérémie in America in 1772, his father and mother, on one side. And Citizen Marie-Louise Elisabeth Labouret, grown daughter of Citizen Claude Labouret, Commander of the National Guard in Villers-Cotterêts and owner of the Hotel de l’Ecu & of Marie-Josèphè Prevot, her father and mother, on the other side.
The said parties are domiciled as follows: the future husband in garrison in Amiens, the future wife in this town.
The Revolution had brought many changes to Villers-Cotterêts. In 1791 the Orléans’ magnificent château, originally built for Charles de Valois in the thirteenth century, had been turned into an army barracks. As commander of the National Guard, Claude Labouret had overseen the conversion. More recently he’d been busy turning part of the grounds into a public sheep meadow. The current Duke d’Orléans, who had renounced his family title to become Philippe Égalité, or “Philip Equality,” had not protested.
