by Tom Reiss
The nostalgia for this medieval battlefield weapon had been present well before the Revolution, as advocates had invoked its power in the hands of supposedly passionate French soldiers as a way of channeling the Frenchman’s primal, tribal past, and of allowing for individuality and impetuosity in combat.* A musket fusillade, conversely, required a high degree of coordination and unity among troops. What’s more, the pike was the anti-aristocratic weapon par excellence. In the waning Middle Ages, pikes had helped end the dominance of the aristocratic knights, who were unhorsed and overwhelmed by throngs of lower-class foot soldiers wielding deadly thickets of pikes.
Finally, in the neoclassical spirit of the times, pikes represented a return to the bravery of the ancient Greek warriors, who confronted overwhelming enemies with their close phalanxes of spears. “If we have not been either Spartans or Athenians, we should become them!” fumed one furious deputy when someone challenged the pike-making effort.
The romanticizing of primitive blade weapons over firearms was a peculiar strategy for a nation capable of producing the finest guns and artillery pieces in the world. But the French army in 1793 instead received hundreds of thousands of freshly forged pikes. If a general complained that these weapons were useless, his name could be put on a commissioner’s list for suspect counterrevolutionary conduct. He could receive a letter from the Committee of Public Safety summoning him to Paris.
Along with pikes, Carnot ramped up all French arms production at an exponential rate: the main French armory, which produced 9,000 muskets in 1793, would produce 145,000 muskets a year later.
The French recruits of the levée en masse were inexperienced and ill-trained, and to avoid a repetition of the panics and disorderly routs that had plagued the first few months of the war, revolutionary songs and music were played constantly to inspire them. Carnot and the Committee issued a never-ending stream of decrees, many restating the obvious with obvious impatience, such as Carnot’s directive number one: “Strike en masse and always offensively.”
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.
In any event, Alex Dumas’s general politics were close enough to the political inquisitors’ that he felt immune to intimidation. The military hero above worrying about political assassins is a story common to many revolutions and wars, though the story does not always work out well for the hero.
It was no coincidence that no one had yet heard of the brilliant artillery captain born Napoleone Buonaparte, though the Revolution would facilitate his military career just as much as Dumas’s. If the Ancien Régime had not fallen, the energetic young cadet from Corsica might well have ended up as a highly decorated junior officer, well respected in the War Ministry but nothing more.
The Revolution opened up huge opportunities for young Napoleon. But until the summer of 1793, he remained studiously aloof from events in France. This allowed him to stay away from Paris at a time when performing marvelous military feats under one political faction might lead to having one’s destiny cut short by another. At one point, in 1791–92, he was actually dismissed from the French army for failing to return from a three-month leave; he was in Corsica, involved in local revolutionary events as a volunteer. (A notation at the Ministry of War actually recorded that Lieutenant Bonaparte “has given up his profession, and has been replaced on February 6, 1792.”)†
Dumas, on the other hand, had the recklessness of a man who has discovered a cause worth dying for—a cause that has redeemed his world and given unlimited hope and meaning to his life. He would have many moments of reckless courage in his career, emboldened by each act of bravery to go on to greater ones.
On September 10, a week after his appointment as general of division, Marie-Louise had their first child, a daughter they named Alexandrine Aimée. Dumas rode to Villers-Cotterêts to be by their side. But after spending only four days with his wife and new child, he found himself appointed commander-in-chief of an entire army and had to depart. He was to head the Army of the Western Pyrenees, which had been skirmishing with Spanish forces on the French side of the border since it had been formed the previous April.
Things weren’t going well: in five months of conflict, the army had gone through four generals, each yanked by the Committee of Public Safety after another Spanish victory. “This appointment will afford you fresh opportunities for showing your devotion to the public welfare by beating down its enemies,” the war minister wrote now. “The zeal for the Republic you have hitherto displayed is a sure guarantee that you will not spare her enemies.” He affirmed that Dumas’s “sense of patriotism and his courage render him worthy of the confidence of the nation.”
Claude Labouret, who had begun referring to his son-in-law as “the General,” must have been equal parts astonished, proud, and intimidated by the rapid transformation of young Alex from mounted cavalryman to commander-in-chief. On September 20, he wrote to a family friend:
The General arrived here on the 15th, and left us yesterday, the 19th, by stagecoach. In a few days’ time he will be in the Pyrenees. The little girl is well, as, too, is Marie-Louise. She behaved with great courage in the presence of her husband, and shed tears only after he had gone. Today she is once more mistress of herself. She finds consolation in the thought that all these sacrifices must be for the good of the Nation.
It was the one-year anniversary of the founding of the Republic—and the establishment of the National Convention—and, to celebrate, the government declared the Christian calendar officially overthrown and a new revolutionary calendar in force. The revolutionary dating system used on documents written before then had taken 1789—the proclamation of the Rights of Man—as Year I of Liberty. But now 1789 was associated with the “false revolution” of the aristocratic patriots—the compromisers, the moderates—and anyway liberty was no longer the issue. The new calendar was only one of countless utopian measures the ruling Jacobins initiated in 1793–94, but it is notable because, apparently, not a single person had to be murdered to carry it out.
Dumas arrived in Bayonne with a ten-page memo outlining the many goals the War Ministry had for the Army of the Pyrenees. He should lose no time in making an inventory of “the most important passes, ports, and highways, and if they are occupied by the Spanish, use his best endeavors to expel them and take possession of them.” He also had a reminder from the war minister, whose own career and life were on the line, that he “must maintain an accurate correspondence with the minister of war independently of that with [the Committee].”
Bayonne was a fortified city, and when General Dumas’s coach reached the gates, he was informed that the new commander-in-chief could not enter until the local representatives of the people, apparently out of town at the moment, had arrived. Only after much negotiation did General Dumas and his aides-de-camp receive permission from the political guard to go to their lodgings.
The rooms Dumas and his aides took overlooked the town’s main square, where the People’s Representatives had set up their guillotine. A small but telling episode then followed, for which the only source is his son’s memoir; it’s the kind of story the novelist loved to tell about his father—and loved to shape for maximum effect. Still, it sounds like Alex Dumas.
When the terrible hour
arrived, and all other windows were filled with spectators, my father would close his, pull down the blinds and draw his curtains.
Then, beneath his closed windows, a terrible commotion would begin; all the sans-culottes of the countryside would gather below and yell at him:
“Hey! Monsieur de l’Humanité [“Mr. Humanity,” the de making it sound as if weakness were compounded by aristocracy], come to your windows! Show yourself!”
Despite these catcalls—which often took on a character so threatening that my father and his aides-de-camp stood, sabers at the ready, pistols in their hands, readying themselves more than once to respond with arms to an attack—not one of the windows was opened, nor did one of the officers belonging to my father’s staff appear at the balcony.
As a result, the new general … ceased to be addressed as Citizen Alexandre Dumas, he was thenceforth known only by the name—strongly compromising at that time, especially among the people who had given it to him—of Mr. Humanity.
That winter, as France continued to languish under the dark spells of the Committee, Dumas got word that he was being transferred yet again, into what was one of the toughest and most challenging theaters of the war—in ways having to do as much with the natural surroundings and terrain as it did with the enemy. The soldier from tropical Saint-Domingue had orders to report to a glacier, 7,300 feet above sea level, to assume command of the Army of the Alps.
HIS orders from the War Ministry were a model of revolutionary understatement: since it was assumed that General Dumas would “live up to his reputation as a patriot and a great soldier,” he should arrange his affairs and ride to the Alps as soon as possible, to “ensure the protection, the brotherhood and the indivisibility of the Republic, as well as its continued liberty and equality.” No “or else” needed to be added. Commissioners of the Committee of Public Safety were everywhere, as were civilian representatives of other government departments who could sometimes mimic them in brutality. A bloodthirsty “political agent” of the Foreign Affairs Ministry who visited the Army of the Alps, one Pierre Chépy, had recently suggested that morale might be boosted only when every general who’d been condemned to death was beheaded “in the midst of the army he may have betrayed, [and] his body … hanged by its heels in the enemy’s territory, with the inscription, ‘This monster sold himself to the enemies of the country. The vengeance of the French people, which has taken his head, abandons his remains to birds of prey and to tyrants.’ ”
Dumas was the fourth commander-in-chief the Army of the Alps had had in a year. On accepting the post, he reported to Paris that he was taking along as adjuncts two old comrades from the Sixth Dragoons, Piston and Espagne. In the small world of revolutionary soldiering, this was a felicitous reunion. Espagne had served as a witness at Dumas’s wedding and was a personal friend. Piston was eight years older than Dumas, and an especially shrewd and reliable officer in a jam. Both men were happy to be reunited with the ever-adventurous Dumas and to follow their new commander-in-chief into mountains that promised more glory than did their current post.
The Army of the Alps was dispersed throughout five huge departments, all of them mountainous and difficult to traverse, making communication and logistics particularly challenging. When I went to visit the battlefields there, I had to wait until June for the highway to get to them to become passable. As I drove up into these snowy peaks—a surreal sight in summer—and got dizzy as I drove higher, my mind reeled imagining how Dumas and his men, without proper winter boots or gear, had made it through here in January on horseback. But they had done it. I had just spent hours examining a room-size oil painting of the scene, which hung in the bell tower of the town hall of Bourg Saint-Maurice, a ski resort. It was off-season when I arrived, but a friendly functionary took pity on my eccentric request and unlocked the town hall to let me stare at the painting, which showed thousands of republican and royalist forces fighting and marching around a glacial amphitheater, and, in the center, accepting the surrender of the Sardinian commander, was Alex Dumas.
The novelist Dumas told a story about his father’s stop at Saint-Maurice. In the memoir, he said the anecdote came from his father’s longtime friend and aide-de-camp Paul-Ferdinand Dermoncourt:
My father passed through the village of Saint-Maurice during a bout of particularly harsh weather. The first thing he saw on the main square of this village was a guillotine, fully erected and ready to perform its function. He had learned that four unfortunate men were about to be executed, for having hidden a church bell to keep it from being melted down. The crime did not seem to my father worthy of death, and, turning to Captain Dermoncourt, soon to become his aide-de-camp, he said: “Dermoncourt, it is very cold, as you can see and very well feel for yourself. We may not find any wood where we are going; therefore, have that devilish red-painted machine you see there pulled down and cut up to make wood we’ll warm ourselves up with.”
I have no doubt that the novelist heard some such tale from the old warhorse Dermoncourt, long since a general.‡ But that he willfully burned a guillotine—in January 1794, with the Terror raging across France—seems unlikely. By now, thousands of independent Jacobin clubs existed in municipalities throughout France—a bit like local franchises of the Terror business, getting guillotine kits and denunciation guidelines from the central office in Paris. One did not cross these local clubs—“popular” societies, they were called—lightly. The novelist Dumas here portrays his father facing the Terror with a spirit that matches his way of regularly facing death in battle, with a soldier’s fatalism. But while General Dumas was certainly one of the bravest men in the French army, there is no evidence to suggest he was suicidal.
The writer Dumas clearly thought his father the purest, noblest man who ever lived, incapable of understanding intrigue—an Edmond Dantès before his education in the dungeon transforms him into the Count of Monte Cristo. Alex Dumas had the confidence that accompanies a life of physical exploits, along with an unwavering faith in the rightness of his actions that made him tough to intimidate. But to survive the treacherous waters of the time, which claimed the lives of hundreds of respected, patriotic officers, he needed more than naive bluster and love of justice.
General Dumas would in fact have a number of confrontations with the Committee of Public Safety over the coming months, beginning with one involving an incident that by then belonged to another time entirely.
ON their way north, General Dumas and his adjuncts passed through Lyon, Piston’s hometown. In October, after a two-month siege, the government had retaken Lyon from a group of moderates who had overthrown the local Jacobin club the previous spring; the government carried out reprisals intended to punish the entire city, destroying many of its finest buildings and murdering nearly two thousand of its residents. The Jacobins then proceeded to rename Lyon—with no apparent irony—“Liberated City.”
We don’t know what Dumas and Piston said to each other in Liberated City—or what cruel sights they saw there—but Dumas did not pass through unnoticed. The People’s Representatives in Liberated City warned Dumas to be careful: there were traitors all around. And someone denounced him as one of the soldiers who had been on the Champ de Mars in July 1791 when troops fired into a crowd of stone-throwing protesters. Dumas’s mere presence among the government forces that day meant he was suspect, in all likelihood a patriot of the old, Lafayette variety—an upper-class-liberal enemy of the true Revolution.
Dumas mailed his response to the denunciation both to the “People’s Commission of Liberated City” and to the Committee of Public Safety in Paris.§ He freely acknowledged having been at the Champ de Mars with the dragoons that day. But rather than suppressing the demonstration, Dumas said, he and his comrades had risked their lives to enter the fray and, he believed, saved “up to 2,000 people” who could have been massacred. (They presumably did this by keeping the conflict between the crowd and Lafayette’s National Guard from escalating further.) He went on:
Eve
n though it infinitely repulses me to speak of my exploits, I cannot hide from you the truth of the adventures of which they are trying to [accuse me] and against which I am only fully supported by my love for the community and the common interest. You know the absurd manner in which I was denounced to you. Now they blame me, and they denounced me in front of you. They accuse me, perhaps, of having ordered two cannons to the Champ de Mars on 17 July 1791. Yes, I ordered them, and I thank heaven I did, because my comrades and I not only had neither the intention nor the idea of shooting at our fellow citizens, but at the risk of our lives, we threw ourselves into the fire to stop it, and by these acts of humanity, of which we try not to boast, we may perhaps have saved the lives of 2000 people, who would have perished victims of the deeply treacherous designs of the perpetrators of that awful day. At the time everyone involved congratulated me and my men for our conduct.
It is impossible to know exactly what he and his men did do that day, since this letter is the only evidence that they were there at all. But no matter how the Jacobins interpreted his explanations, Alex Dumas’s heart would have been with the protesters that day. In all his adventures, the main thing that set Dumas apart was his refusal to countenance the bullying of the weak by the strong. This meant that whenever a unit he commanded seized a thousand prisoners or the wealth of a town, he told his fellow officers and his men, perhaps too often for their taste, that they must restrain themselves from taking the slightest advantage. Dumas was unrestrained when outnumbered and outgunned, just as he was unrestrained when he disagreed with his superiors. But toward anyone less powerful than he was, Alex Dumas showed nothing but self-restraint, and a kind of violent love. It would have been typical of him to have pointed his artillery directly at the National Guardsmen if he thought they were about to fire again, or, by the same token, at out-of-control rioters.
