by Tom Reiss
DESPITE the good news about the liberty bonnets and trees in Turin, most of the surrounding Piedmont countryside was less interested in French patriotism. Many locals remained fiercely loyal to monarchism, for territorial as much as political reasons: first of all, they did not like being invaded, and, second, many were religiously conservative. The nobility and priests here were some of the fiercest critics of the French Revolution, and counterrevolutionary feeling pervaded the upper classes, who had welcomed King Louis’s brother and many aristocratic French émigrés.
Dumas’s letters to the Committee in March and April talk of his belief that the émigrés and various other hostile groups—brigands, armed antirevolutionary priests—were trying to sabotage the French war effort, spying on French troop movements for the enemy, all the while milling back and forth over the border transporting weapons and other contraband. As well as being preoccupied with these threats, Dumas needed to look over his shoulder constantly to make sure the local Jacobin clubs did not have him arrested and sent to Paris to be guillotined. Fortunately nothing satisfied the Committee of Public Safety better than talk of conspiracy—especially ubiquitous, insidious conspiracy all around.
Since the Army of the Alps was spread out over hundreds of miles of remote terrain, the French troops actually needed to cultivate local goodwill to operate. As commander-in-chief of an occupying army, Dumas was responsible for the impression they made on all the locals, including the nearby Swiss. Dumas proved a skillful and conscientious diplomat.
But Dumas’s diplomacy did not extend to the local Jacobins, and later that spring, he would learn he’d been denounced again, by the Popular Society of Chambéry. He had sense enough to be cautious with the Committee of Public Safety in Paris, but he drew the line at kowtowing to a bunch of hick mountain radicals. “An enlightened society must know that generals cannot and must not make their operations public without danger to the safety of the army,” he wrote to this particular “enlightened society,” and requested the names of his accusers so he could confront them personally.
Dumas survived these clashes largely owing to the fact that he’d charmed the commissioner who, since his arrival in the Alps, had been charged with watching over him. This man, “People’s Representative” Gaston, apparently took a liking to the unorthodox republican general and sent a glowing report addressed to “my colleagues” on the Committee of Public Safety in Paris, backing up what Dumas said about the military situation:
The General in Chief and I have reconnoitered all of the positions on our frontier. We have climbed on foot through the snow to the base of Mont Cenis and Petit Saint Bernard pass. As of today the snow is not hard and will not support the weight [of a man]. We hope that the snow conditions will soon be as you require, and that we will be able to accomplish your objectives and ours.
But in the same letter Gaston demonstrated his revolutionary zeal vis-à-vis everyone else in the Alps:
I have seen all of the constituted authorities of this country and talked to them in the language of fervent Republicanism. Some of these authorities are weak, others are misguided. Several, however, are committed to serving the Revolution well.… In the towns where inhabitants were too moderate, I thought I had to take action to warm them up to the interests of the Republic. Leading by example, I had them choose between victory or death. Everyone signed … and declared on their blood an eternal war with the nearby petty tyrants [and] declared their readiness to plunge a dagger in [the tyrant’s] breast at the first chance they got.
AS April approached and the weather began to turn warmer, Dumas ordered preparations for full-out assaults on the passes. Although generals didn’t usually do their own reconnaissance, Dumas led forty-five men out on a multiday mission to gain intelligence on the enemy positions on Mont Cenis.
On the night of 16 Germinal, Year II—April 5, 1794—the operation against the enemy positions on Mont Cenis began in earnest. Dumas’s plan was to move against the passes on the north and south sides of Mont Cenis at the same time, with about four thousand men. One force, of 2,100 men, would attack Mont Cenis, while another force, about equal in size, would move against the Saint Bernard Pass. In a rare break from style, General Dumas did not go at the head of his troops but left two subordinate generals to take field leadership of the mission. He gave the Mont Cenis column to a trusted subordinate with long experience, General Sarret—a decision he would come to regret.
Since reconnaissance reports had indicated that the redoubts atop Mont Cenis were lightly manned or abandoned, the enemy not expecting an attack this early in the spring, the French assumed they would have the advantage of surprise. Commanded by General Sarret, the main column left the French base at 9 p.m. The plan was to reach the Piedmontese redoubts before dawn, but fierce weather conditions slowed its pace; a number of men slipped on the icy trail and fell into the gorge. When the trail became too slippery and treacherous for the column to continue at all, they were forced to retrace their steps, losing precious hours and energy, until they’d found another trail and resumed their ascent.
When General Sarret’s column finally reached the first redoubt below Petit Mont Cenis pass, after dawn, they found it not unmanned but “full of so many people and [so] many small cannons [that] it was impossible to turn them because of the steep hillside. Despite the obstacles, General Sarret decided to take them by force. He left his column and took over the advance guard.”
After climbing all night from the valley to the pass near the summit, Sarret’s troops were exhausted and suffering the effects of cold and lack of food and water. Now they found themselves suddenly engaged in a fierce battle, with the enemy making short work of them, as their blue coats made them targets against the snow. Artillery rained fire on them all day. But General Sarret pressed on with his hopeless attack. Another general who witnessed what befell General Sarret and his men described the scene this way:
Those who came were killed or wounded, the hillsides … were so steep, the snow made it impossible to walk [and] whoever attempted to [walk across] fell down the precipice. General Sarret was only 110 feet from the summit when he was fatally wounded. Several grenadiers were killed or wounded at the same time. This scene frightened many within the division; there was a moment of terror.
With their commander dead and the subfreezing temperatures of the night approaching, the surviving soldiers began the long and treacherous descent, leaving behind red-stained heaps in the snow and “the horrible sight of the wounded who fell down the crevasses.”
In the aftermath of the operation, General Dumas wrote a report to the Committee citing the high winds and the fact that the Piedmontese had apparently been tipped off: “Two Piedmontese deserters assured us that [local villagers] had warned the Piedmontese of our march and that it was by means of this warning that Mont Cenis was reinforced by 2,500 men,” he wrote. In short, General Sarret and his men had walked into not only a trap but an overwhelmingly well-defended one. One can only imagine the anguish Dumas felt personally at the suffering of Sarret and the men. He would spend the rest of the campaign trying to avenge them.
Meanwhile Representative Gaston remembered the threat not only from the enemy but from Paris. Bold talk was needed to save the general’s head as well as his own. “The enemy was not surprised,” Gaston wrote the Committee. “It seems that they were rather certain of the attack, since they had brought forces to all points, and their batteries kept up extensive fire.”
“The War Office is infested with corrupt men,” his letter to the Committee went on, describing how these supposed double agents had sent “extraordinary couriers to the court of Turin to warn them of our plans for Mont Cenis and Petit St Bernard.” Without accusing the minister of war himself of being in on the plot, Gaston managed to cast suspicion back at Paris, rather than leaving it with himself and Dumas in Grenoble. Gaston then tried swagger: either trust us or arrest us, he said in effect, but don’t expect us to do our duty under a cloud of suspicion. “Either th
e Representatives of the People who are close to the Armies have your confidence or they do not,” he wrote.
Gaston’s brashness worked. One of the savviest things Dumas did in the course of his service was to cultivate the friendship of this decent Jacobin official. It was a savviness, alas, that he would soon fail to apply to an up-and-coming general who would hold far more control over his fate.‡
APRIL turned luckier for the French, and after a bloody assault Dumas’s forces were able to capture the smaller of the two main objectives, the Petit Saint Bernard Pass, as well as a Piedmontese fort lower down the mountainside, which yielded them a fresh supply of captured cannons and guns. Along with his letters to the Committee of Public Safety, Dumas also wrote a jubilant note to his loyal adjunct, Piston, who had stayed behind in Grenoble:
Victory, my dear Piston! Our intrepid Republicans … seized the famous post of Petit St Bernard … the obstacles of nature ceded to their valor, all the redoubts were taken. The enemy lost many people, our brave brothers in arms worked miracles. Cannons, howitzers, ramparts, rifles, and lots of prisoners, are our trophies, and we only have to regret sixty men wounded, who are as many heroes.
One with a hand blown off was climbing the redoubt with his bloody arm, another, with a broken leg, consoled himself by saying it’s nothing. Victory is ours. Each, in a word, gave dazzling proofs of valor during this day, and all fought like Frenchmen!
Salute and Brotherhood!
Alex Dumas
Pressing the advantage, Dumas prepared for a final assault on Mont Cenis. On May 14, he set off with a force of approximately three thousand, who donned woolen socks and fastened iron crampons over their boots for the occasion. Dumas also had the troops put on white hunting smocks over their blue coats in order to disguise themselves against the snow the way the chamois hunters did. Their weaponry was the usual assortment of sabers, knives, grenades, clubs, blunderbusses, pikes, and bayoneted Charleville muskets, including some of the better model 1777s, which could take down a man at up to eighty yards.
Mont Cenis could be assailed from only three sides because the fourth was “defended by nature”—by a set of ice cliffs. The Piedmontese had not even bothered to put a battery on this side but merely a stockade. The battle for this peak was the first time General Dumas was written into history books outside France. An account of it appeared in The Naval and Military History of the Wars of England, a general English military history book published in 1795, just a year after the events, and it begins: “Dumas, commander in chief of the army of the Alps, obtained a most decisive victory at Mount Cenis. On this celebrated mountain the Sardinians [Piedmontese] had doubled their forces; and on this account the French general, who seems to have acted with great ability, formed a system of vigorous diversions, extended over all the line.”
The English account states that Dumas and his men “ascended the mountain, and amidst volumes of fire, they carried all the redoubts with fixed bayonets.” Nothing could better evoke the “French fury” than a bayonet charge across a glacier against entrenched artillery batteries firing all manner of shot and ball. A Scottish history book that repeated this account some years later added the blustery line: “How harmless may volumes of fire be when French Republicans have occasion to pass through them!”
There was nothing harmless about such a barrage. The “bullets” of the time were musket balls two-thirds of an inch in diameter that moved far more slowly than modern bullets, often colliding with just enough force to penetrate a soldier’s jacket and vest and enter his chest cavity, where they would get stuck, ricocheting off ribs and doing the damage of later dumdum bullets. The iron cannonballs the Piedmontese were firing obliterated soldiers where they hit and then continued along down the field like bowling balls, killing or maiming anyone in their path. There was nothing worse than when they bounced at about chest or head height, and artillerymen were trained to place them so that they would. (The one thing Dumas could benefit from was the difficulty the enemy artillery had in calculating their bounces on uneven mountain terrain; eighteenth-century artillery was deadliest on flat ground.)
“Torrents of fire rolled down on our brave brothers in arms,” reads the account General Dumas sent to Paris immediately after the battle. But though the barrage was fearsome, Dumas’s men continued to surge the Piedmontese positions, chanting “Long live the Republic!”; and soon “the mouths of fire are turned against the enemy, I have the drums beat the charge, and bayonets in front of us, we took all the redoubts, [turning] the enemy toward the horrible precipices.”
Their own guns turned against them, beset by chanting, fanatical French blues on one side and the fearsome ice cliffs on the other, the white-jacketed Piedmontese “fled before the brave, conquering Republicans,” as General Dumas put it, “abandoning their superb and numerous artillery, their equipment, and their immense storehouses.” Dumas led his men in pursuit down the other side of the pass and chased them three leagues from Mont Cenis. “We took 900 prisoners, killed many men, and our losses, unbelievably, rose to only seven or eight dead and around 30 wounded. Europe, astonished, will learn with admiration of the great deeds of the intrepid Army of the Alps. Long live the Republic!”§
Later French accounts of the battle raised the number of those captured considerably. An account published in 1833 said that General Dumas led his troops “from position to position, and arrived at the foot of Mount Cenis crowned by a large artillery fortification. But the obstacles did nothing but increase his courage; he climbed the rocks, captured the fortification. The Sardinian troops defeated, cut to pieces, gave us 1,700 prisoners and forty pieces of cannon.”
What was undisputable was that the Piedmontese had been routed and Mont Cenis belonged to the French Army of the Alps. General Dumas had captured the seemingly impregnable mountain passes, which opened up not only Piedmont but the riches of the entire Italian peninsula waiting down below.
DUMAS’S conquest of Mont Cenis lifted him to a new place in the pantheon of the heroes of the French revolutionary war. Until then, his heroics had been a kind of soldiers’ legend: the great horseman with incredible dueling skills and a knack for capturing enemy outposts at the head of a small band of dragoons. It was a legend of the kind of man whom men liked to follow, a warrior’s warrior—but the kind of thing mostly told over a few glasses too many by other soldiers. Now, General Dumas had led thousands of soldiers to a great strategic victory, while still facing enemy fire in front of them and risking his life alongside them.
Among the hundreds of battle reports sent regularly to the Committee by Dumas’s colleagues, I occasionally came across one that really captured the way men talk about their commanding officers. In a June 28, 1794, letter, an officer named Jean-Jacques Rougier—who served under Dumas all that spring—wrote,
At each place, the slaves bit the dust and we took lots of prisoners. Only a few republicans lost their lives. Brave Dumas is tireless, he is everywhere, and everywhere he shows up, the slaves are defeated.
Rougier wrote that the troops felt a new spirit sweeping over the region in the wake of General Dumas’s conquests:
Dozens of deserters come here every day: recently, a captain and an artillery lieutenant have been among them and told us the revolution was starting in Turin: patriots … are jailed by force. But far from having such a tyranny block the progress of reason, tempers flare, minds are electrified. And soon the Italians will be worthy of their ancestors.
The Committee of Public Safety displayed almost equal enthusiasm in addressing the Army of the Alps, in a proclamation letter signed by the Organizer of Victory, Lazare Carnot, himself:
Glory to the conquerors of Mont Cenis and of Mont Saint Bernard.
Glory to the invincible Army of the Alps and to the representatives who have guided it on the road to victory! We cannot tell you, my dear colleagues, of the enthusiasm that has been created here as a result of the news you have announced.… We place the greatest confidence in you and in the energy an
d talents of the brave General Dumas.
Dumas had fulfilled the mission demanded of him. He had secured the top of the world for the French Republic of Liberty and Equality—the highest point it would ever reach.
* The military correspondence in this period, winter and spring of 1794, was more voluminous and complex than usual, since the war minister wrote to generals but so did the Committee itself, which was clearly running the show. The war minister himself was a pawn of Carnot, Saint-Just, and the other Committee members and worked closely with them; often they wrote almost the same letter to Dumas, necessitating two replies, and they also jointly signed orders to him.
† The red felt liberty bonnet and the liberty tree were two of the most ubiquitous symbols of the French Revolution, along with the cockade and the tricolor flag. (Sometimes they were combined, in effect, by placing the red bonnet on top of a liberty pole.)
The bonnets were actually an adoption from, or homage to, ancient Rome, where they had been called Phrygian bonnets and had supposedly been worn by freed slaves. Both the French and the American revolutions used the Phrygian bonnet as a symbol of liberty. (Though its use in the United States has been forgotten, throughout the late nineteenth century it was common on U.S. coins and patriotic paraphernalia—usually either worn by “Miss Liberty” or perched atop a flagpole flying the Stars and Stripes—and it continued to appear on U.S. half-dollar coins until 1947.)
The liberty tree was a French homage to the American Revolution—to the famous elm tree near Boston Common that had been a rallying point for the American patriots in their escalating resistance to British oppression in the 1760s and 1770s.
‡ In fact, it was from this month, March 1794, that I discovered what seems to have been the first contact between General Dumas and the man who would one day do him so much harm. It was a trivial contact, and the name Napoleone Buonaparte—as the Corsican still called himself—meant nothing to General Dumas at the time. But when I saw the name on one of Dumas’s orders, it of course jumped off the page at me. Napoleon had just been appointed commander of the artillery corps of the Army of Italy, the poorer sibling of the Army of the Alps, and he had sent Dumas’s army a request to borrow some cannons. These being in very short supply, General Dumas had simply denied the request, writing that no guns should be sent to “the artillery General Buenaparte [sic] employed in the Army of Italy.”
