by Tom Reiss
But even Alex Dumas could not bury the dark anxiety that overcame him as he faced the denunciation. He makes clear in his letter that he expects nothing to result from his defense other than his death—he particularly mentions poisoning, a fate that has recently befallen one of his colleagues who ran afoul of the Committee. He concludes with an uncharacteristic burst of anguished foreboding:
Without entering into too many details, I will submit to you some observations which will perhaps be striking to you. Three of us, among others, we were together in the Faubourg St. Marceau. And we were unvarying in our principles, and we’ve been happy enough to have an impact on the great revolutionary movements; Lazowsky, Basdelaune, and I. The first was poisoned to death. The second, brigadier general in the army of the Alps, was just assassinated in Chamberry, and as for me, I am being slandered, and I am expecting poisoning or assassination; but whatever fate awaits me, I will serve the Republic none the less right up to the last moment.
General Commander of the Army of the Alps
Alexandre
It seems the Committee found his explanations sufficient for the current moment, perhaps because it wanted to avoid having to search for yet another replacement to command the Army of the Alps. Dumas was allowed to go on to the mountains, but it was not by any means the last he would hear from the Committee of Public Safety.
SINCE the previous spring Dumas, Saint-Georges, and other elite men of color had sometimes found themselves under suspicion as potential counterrevolutionaries. (In September 1793, Saint-Georges and ten of his officers from the Black Legion were arrested for having “counterrevolutionary designs,” according to the recently passed Law of Suspects.) But even as the Jacobins and the Committee pushed the Revolution further into terror, Alex Dumas saw growing evidence around him that the French Republic—his nation—remained a land unparalleled in the opportunities it gave to people of color.
In June 1793, five officers of the Black Legion presented the Convention with a petition calling for “American liberty”—freedom for all black people in the islands. A group of “citizens of color” marched to the Hôtel de Ville carrying a banner that read THE RIGHTS OF MAN AND OF CITIZENS OF COLOR: LIVE FREE OR DIE. After a vigorous debate on what to do, members of the government escorted the petitioners to the Champ de Mars and officially saluted as they “renew[ed] their oath to spill their blood for liberty.”
And in the first days of February 1794, a remarkable three-man delegation arrived in Paris after an arduous journey from Saint-Domingue: Jean-Baptiste Belley, a black native of Senegal and a former slave; Jean-Baptiste Mills, a free Saint-Dominguan of mixed race; and Louis-Pierre Dufay, a white Frenchman who had worked for years as a clerk in the colony and now proudly identified himself as a “commoner.” Before the Jacobin-controlled Convention, Dufay made a passionate argument for the abolition of slavery—and the Convention unanimously acclaimed it. Then, in a single vote, the government became the first in history to abolish slavery.‖
At last Alex Dumas’s self-identification as a French republican and a soldier of the French Revolution had been wholly ratified. The vote seems to have given him a rare occasion to reflect on his roots. A letter he penned to the soldiers stationed at “Liberated City” on Ventôse 16, Year II—March 6, 1794, as France celebrated the abolition decree—shows Dumas swept up in the momentousness of the event. The letter is less a specific or practical military order than an emotional and highly uncommon reference to his own racial origins and their relevance to the Revolution. In it, Alex Dumas speaks of himself in the third person:
Your comrade, a soldier and General-in-Chief, is counting on you, brave brothers in arms.… He was born in a climate and among men for whom liberty also had charms, and who fought for it first. Sincere lover of liberty and equality, convinced that all free men are equals, he will be proud to march out before you, to aid you in your efforts, and the coalition of tyrants will learn that they are loathed equally by men of all colors.
* Of course, there was a newer weapon that did the same thing—the one that had made the pike obsolete in the first place: the bayonet. Frenchmen were thought also to have a particular love of and propensity for bayonet fighting. But pikes did not require attached firearms, which were still expensive to make and difficult to learn to use.
† The young artillery captain was back in Paris, however, on June 20, 1792, to witness the storming of the Tuileries Palace, which provided him an important political lesson. As his companion and later secretary Bourrienne would remember, he and Napoleon watched from the street as the king came to the window of the palace with a red revolutionary cap on his head. “What a fool!” Napoleon scoffed. “How did this rabble gain entrance? If four or five hundred of them had been shot down by a volley of grapeshot, the rest would have run.”
‡ Dermoncourt would stay by General Alex Dumas’s side for years, sharing with him the most perilous and glorious combats, especially in Italy and the Tyrol. Dumas trusted him completely, probably more than any other officer, and Dermoncourt looked up to Dumas. But Dermoncourt would outlive General Dumas by more than forty years, and go on to a career full of status and honors in its own right, becoming an officer of the Légion d’honneur and a Napoleonic “Baron de l’Empire.” In his retirement, in the 1830s, Dermoncourt got to know his former comrade’s son very well when he hired the writer Alexandre Dumas to help him complete his own memoir, La Vendée et Madame. This collaboration was the perfect chance for the young writer to pick the old general’s brain for everything Dermoncourt remembered about his father.
§ This letter, which I picked out from among the stacks of his military dispatches, reveals Alex Dumas’s presence at that major event of the early Revolution. His son’s memoir glosses over the whole period with the sentence “My father took no part in the earlier events of the Revolution.” The rather poor condition of the letter might explain why it was overlooked before, but the infamous date—17 July 1791—grabbed my attention.
‖ In fact, slavery had already been abolished in Saint-Domingue’s Northern Province, the locus of the rebellion, in August 1793 by Léger-Félicité Sonthonax, a French commissioner who had been sent to quell the revolt. A few months later, in an effort to win support from former slaves, Sonthonax declared that the government in Paris had abolished slavery in all the colonies—a risky move, considering that at the time he had no news of the Convention’s vote.
12
THE BATTLE FOR THE TOP OF THE WORLD
ALEX Dumas had never even seen snow until he got off the ship in Normandy when he was fourteen. Now he found himself in a world of it: the glacier of Mont Cenis, high in the French Alps, with its two strategic passes that guarded the route from France to Italy. The local people, the Savoyards, had been annexed into the new French nation. But the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, Austria’s ally, which had joined the anti-French coalition, held the key mountain passes in the region. Dumas was supposed to dislodge them and their Austrian allies and open the Alps, and the Italian territories beyond them, to French invasion. (Italy did not yet exist as a single nation—and would not until 1861—but instead was a collection of independent kingdoms, and of territories, some held by the Austrian Empire, others by the pope.)
Dumas would be fighting against the Austrians, who had trained their whole professional lives amid ice and glaciers. The Piedmontese were also used to defending the Alpine country. Dumas had approximately fifty-three thousand men under his command, of varying quality and spread over a large and rigorous terrain. “The enemy he needed to get at were bivouacking in the clouds,” his son puts it aptly in his memoirs. “It was a war of Titans: the heavens had to be scaled.”
The war in the Alps was symbolic—the French Republic wanted to conquer the highest peaks in Europe. But it was also strategic: the Army of the Alps was to prepare for a major invasion. For the first time in three hundred years France would invade the Italian kingdoms, and strike directly at its chief enemy, Austria. A great deal was a
t stake for the Republic, as it was for General Dumas. The post was vastly more important than any with which he had previously been entrusted and would make or break his career.
General Dumas vigorously set about whipping his army into shape, a task made difficult by the fact that his battalions were stationed on different peaks that, depending on snow conditions, could take up to a week to reach from his headquarters in Grenoble. Dumas himself often went on two-week-long inspection tours, which could be further delayed by snowdrifts.
Dumas arranged the formation of an elite company of Mont Blanc guides to handle the most difficult passes and provide basic logistics to the other troops. But high winds made movement around the peaks all but impossible that January. Making things worse, the weather was not quite cold enough to produce a solid top layer of ice; anything attempting to move immediately sank. One of Dumas’s generals of division sent him a report on the condition of the roads: “Mont-Cenis is currently covered in snow, as is Mont Saint Bernard.” Mont Saint Bernard was another objective. “As it did not frost vigorously, the snow is not holding up” (i.e., to the weight of men and horses), “and the wind which is called in this country ‘the Torment’ has filled all the hills with snow and has made the roads and the trails impassable.” The general also informed his new commander that he had deployed spies in the area, disguised as merchants: “I have two spies of which one is currently at Turin, and the other at the frontier, selling butter, cheese, and cattle to our enemies.”
Nothing in Dumas’s experience had prepared him for the challenges of mountain fighting. Among his first requests were maps. “I cannot procure those of the Alps at any price,” he wrote the war minister. “I am obliged to rest, arms folded, until they arrive.” Dumas also asked for rifles, cannon, saddles, gunpowder, bandoliers, howitzers, and mules, horses, and lots of hay to feed them. To feed his men, he requested hunting gear, including game bags, and encouraged the men to hunt chamois, the goat-antelopes that pranced through the mountains, which was also good practice tracking in the snow. (Dumas himself went on hunting expeditions with the local chamois hunters and, in addition to some fine pelts, in this way he acquired the trust and friendship of some of the mountains’ best guides.)
The hundreds of pages of field reports, memos, and orders Dumas wrote just in January and February of 1794 reveal that, remarkably, the natural fighter had a gift for logistics and planning. Days after establishing his base in Grenoble, Dumas had worked out an elaborate operation that—as per instructions—he kept secret from all but his most trusted right-hand men. He wrote long letters on organizing communications as well as on ordnance and intelligence. He successfully brought off the movement of hundreds of horses and their food supply. When the army sent him horses that were too small to walk through the snowdrifts, he had them sent back, requesting taller ones. He mastered every detail, down to equipping fifteen thousand of his men with special snowshoes and placing an order to his commissary for “four thousand iron cleats made according to the mold I gave him.” Though desertion had been a problem, after General Dumas’s arrival it became less of one.
On January 27, Dumas received an order from the minister of war, referring to a decree by Citizen Carnot and the Committee of Public Safety telling Dumas to launch a major campaign to take the passes as soon as possible.* The order amounted to insisting that General Dumas break the stalemate that had prevailed ever since the French had occupied the region two years earlier—and it contained a rebuke, with the sort of impatient language common to Committee letters:
We want the conquest of Mont Cenis and Petit Saint Bernard without delay. We know as well as you do that the earth is covered with snow; that’s precisely why we want a prompt attack. You want to wait until it’s melted and that’s a true way to fail.… The National Convention wants its generals to obey the orders of the Committee; you will answer with your head for their implementation.
Signed, Carnot and Barrère
Dumas wrote back to the Committee that “these parts are very difficult to maneuver, and Nature’s insurmountable aspects are for now thwarting our plans.” As if to reasonable men, he explained that the passes could not be crossed until either the weather got colder and the snow froze, or it got warmer and the snow melted. “The snow’s massive quantities and little firmness have opposed us.” Then, with the enthusiasm of a new general, Dumas suggested a productive use for him and his men while they waited to attack the passes. He knew the great value of the upper Po River Valley, which lay below them, the key to the city of Turin in the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia. Dumas suggested they find an alternative way of getting there and attacking it. He went on to report, after some investigations, that if his army could gain permission from the local Swiss—which he thought possible—there was a pass at Saint-Gothard they could use to outflank and surprise the Piedmontese-Sardinians.
Then he added: “The Republic can count on me to battle its enemies.… Offensive war suits the passionate character of the French, but it is the responsibility of the man in charge of leading them to prepare with caution and wisdom everything that leads to victory.”
The letter received a prompt reaction, but instead of writing directly to Dumas, the war minister wrote a sarcastic critique about Dumas to the Committee of Public Safety. “I never imagined, Citizen representatives, that the expeditions stipulated in your decree from the 6th pluviose for the Army of the Alps could prove so difficult to execute,” wrote the minister.
General Dumas, from the depths of his apartment in Grenoble, has judged impossible an operation which men placed at the foot of the mountains deemed very doable. You will notice with astonishment the rambling ideas of his letter: he wants to cross the Alps, plant the tricolor flag on the banks of the Po, pass through Switzerland to go to Milan, penetrate via Mont Saint-Gothard to bring war into Italy.
The following day, the Committee of Public Safety sent Dumas an angry letter full of rebukes and also a veiled threat:
You say that the Republic can count on you, but the Republic counts only on the nation.… it cannot be concerned with a single citizen. The provisional executive council is waiting for you to explain your conduct.
The Committee goes on to wonder whether Dumas is “a Republican as firm as he is enlightened”—and demands to know where he got the crazy idea of violating Swiss neutrality.
In Paris the Reign of Terror was approaching its cruelest phase, with hundreds being executed daily on lesser charges than insubordination to Citizen Carnot’s wishes. Dumas had had reports of what was happening in Paris, and he brooded on the fate of the generals who had preceded him in his command in the Alps.
On February 26, he called a council of war with his generals (with the government’s representatives attending, as well) to prepare for an attack on the passes held by the enemy, especially the ones on Mont Cenis and Mont Saint Bernard. Dumas believed that the snow was simply too soft to assure the safe movement of troops and horses, but he gave the generals their assignments:
Each general will try to surprise the enemy and, once established on Mont Cenis and Petit Saint Bernard, he will take all necessary measures to hold his positions and take full advantage of the equipment the enemy will have left in its defeat and flight.… He will hasten … to re-orient the artillery the enemy has abandoned on them, construct entrenchments on the enemies’ route, and destroy those [entrenchments] that the Piedmontese constructed and which served against us.
Dumas emphasized the need to keep the operation a secret from enemy spies by conducting a campaign of planted misinformation and rumors.
The operation was ready to move, but then it snowed hard. Dumas knew this made the plan impossible—the soldiers would die of exposure before the Piedmontese guns ever got them. On March 1, he wrote a careful letter to the war minister, emphasizing the weather and the difficulties the terrain involved.
In the face of potential execution for incivisme—“lack of civic consciousness,” the Revolution’s version of treason�
�or for defeatism, Dumas shows surprising firmness and calm. He explains that he has been unable to write for the last two décadis, or twenty days—in throwing out the backward twelvemonth calendar, the Revolution had also done away with the seven-day week, replacing it with this ten-day increment—because he was touring the outposts to see the snow conditions for himself. He reiterates that he is “looking for the most favorable opportunity to execute the offensive projects you prescribed to me … on Mont Cenis and Petit Saint Bernard.” But he maintains that he is not ready to risk his army in the current conditions.
Penned in the margins of this letter was a note, presumably written by someone at the Ministry of War, mentioning “attacks against the Sardinian king” by local patriots and that “400 trees of liberty have been planted.” The note also mentioned in two places that “liberty bonnets”† had been spotted on flagpoles in downtown Turin. This, the note said, was a very good sign of the rout of the “local aristocrats.”
In his correspondence with the Committee, Dumas also insisted that it take into account and address what provisions his men would need to make the operation come off; he even detailed how the quartermaster should store and transport everything in the extreme climate of the mountains. Dumas requested 300,000 cartridges, “cannons firing 500 shots each, 2,000 firing pins, and around twenty rockets.” He also said he desperately needed materials for hideouts, caissons for the artillery, twelve thousand rifles, and lots of gunpowder.
Finally, as if to defend himself against the inevitable charges of disloyalty, Dumas even told the Committee of Public Safety something about his writing style:
In speaking to the Minister in this way, it was not my intention to respond evasively to your decree. I am too frank by nature to speak any other way but bluntly. I meant to tell the truth and not shy away from your orders.
