by Tom Reiss
§ To top his report, Dumas could not resist adding another compliment about his troops that reflected his own meticulous standards for treating local populations: “The French soldier conducted himself with intrepidity and heroism, he honored misfortune and shared his bread with the inhabitant ruined by the scourge of war.”
13
THE BOTTOM OF THE REVOLUTION
ON June 24, 1794, Dumas received a letter, signed not only by Carnot but by Robespierre, ordering him to come immediately to Paris to appear before the Committee of Public Safety.
It was the height of the Great Terror. Two weeks before Dumas received his summons, the Committee had passed a law formalizing the informal policy of executing “enemies of the people” suspected of “abusing the principles of the revolution.” Trials were superfluous, since suspects were presumed guilty and the concept of self-defense was not granted to “conspirators”—and the penalty for every political offense was death. The atmosphere was so murderous and irrational that even the greatest victory could no longer protect a general from “the national razor” if his name came before the Committee.*
“I have received, Citizens, your letter,” Dumas wrote back. “I will leave for Paris immediately, in accordance with the Committee’s orders.”
However, that letter has a line crossing out part of the text, indicating that Dumas probably did not send it, and I found a second letter dated the same day showing that he thought better of leaving “immediately.” Citing some personnel decisions he needed to make, Dumas wrote, “I anticipate that I will only be able to leave around July 8.” The delay may have saved his neck.
Two days later, all Paris celebrated the news of a glorious victory against the Austrians at Fleurus, on the Belgian frontier. It was the capstone to a few months of good military news—including Dumas’s victories in the Alps, which had secured the southeastern frontier—and Fleurus was a place that had been the fulcrum of the revolutionary war, a source of great invasion fears.
War had made the Terror possible. The ongoing military crises on France’s frontiers had fed the mood of retribution and justified any kind of conspiracy theory the most extreme Committee members chose to invent. Now that the military situation was steadily improving, Carnot and other less fanatical members wondered about the pace of legislated murder.
By mid-July, as Dumas settled in Paris to wait his turn before the Committee, paranoia stalked the government: every deputy eyed his neighbor and feared for his own head. Anyone might reasonably expect to receive a letter in the mail or a knock on the door. Any appearance before the Committee might result in decapitation.
Then, on July 27, the 8th of Thermidor, the solution suddenly became clear: the heads that must fall to the guillotine were those of the chief hangmen themselves. Robespierre’s colleagues in the Convention, who had cheered his every whim, now declared him to be “outside the law,” which implied their right to imprison and execute him. Robespierre took shelter in the Hôtel de Ville, and when a mob of armed men and soldiers stormed the room, he shot himself. No one knows whether he was trying to commit suicide or whether the pistol went off accidentally, but in any event he aimed badly. France’s chief executioner had no experience with firearms. The bullet shattered his jaw, and he lay on a desk all night, attempting not to choke on his own blood. The next morning, a surgeon dressed his wounds, and he was given a clean shirt and tie, apparently his only request, and was led off to the guillotine. He was joined there by Saint-Just and the other ultra-radical members of the Committee.
With that, the Terror ended. The Committee was not abolished, but a new law restricted its powers to war making and diplomacy. It would no longer run France, nor would it be in the execution business. Lazare Carnot, who had helped plot the coup against Robespierre, became the Committee’s most powerful member.
THE newly reconstituted Committee appears not to have known what to do with Alex Dumas. To his chagrin, they did not send him back to the Alps. Instead, in early August they shuffled him around among temporary assignments, until they finally settled on a grueling new command that must hardly have seemed a reward for his performance in the spring. In mid-August, the Committee decided to send “the hero of Mont Cenis” to lead the Army of the West, whose mission was to combat a bloody royalist rebellion—some called it a civil war—in the Vendée, in western France.
While the majority of the revolutionary armies fought external enemies, a few targeted internal rebellion and counterrevolution. The Army of the West was particularly notorious in this respect: its task was to suppress the motley collection of aristocrats and peasants who called themselves the Catholic and Royal Army. Many factors had made the Vendéeans rebels: many of them opposed the Revolution from the beginning or were alienated by the persecution of priests and the confiscation of Church property or by the 1793 execution of the king. But the biggest cause of the rebellion seems to have been Carnot’s implementation of the levée en masse.
The draft was wildly unpopular among the region’s peasants. A year in the army for a farmer meant that his family might not be able to bring in the harvest and might starve. In the spring of 1793, angry peasants vandalized hundreds of town halls and local republican officials’ homes across western France. They killed or chased off officials, attacked National Guardsmen, whom they often murdered in gruesome fashion, and formed a “brigand army.” Victor Hugo would later describe it thus: “Invisible battalions lay in wait. These unseen armies snaked beneath the republican armies, sprung from the earth for an instant, then disappeared; they leapt into view, uncountable in their numbers, then vanished … [they are] an avalanche that turns to dust … jaguars with the habits of moles.”
The repression the Republic imposed in the Vendée escalated to a level of surreal violence that dwarfed the Parisian Terror. Here the most extreme rhetoric of revolutionary war became reality—the idea of “exterminating angels of liberty” that came to earth and left miles of corpses in their wake. “We burned and broke heads as usual” was a typical report from a brigadier. What this meant in sheer numbers was, by eighteenth-century standards, almost unimaginable: up to a quarter of a million men, women, and children perished—one out of four residents of the Vendée region. (When historians quote figures for the number of people who died in the Terror, the majority of the deaths always come from the mass executions the army carried out in the Vendée, along with epidemics and starvation in the wake of that war.) Among many signature atrocities perpetrated there were those of the army’s “hell columns”: approximately thirty thousand soldiers, divided into a dozen equal columns, marching through the countryside in a grid of destruction that wiped out everything in its path—men, women, children, animals, trees, and any other living thing that could be shot, stabbed, or burned to death. In Nantes the army saved costly lead musket balls and time by organizing mass drownings. As Thomas Carlyle described it, “Women and men are tied together, feet and feet, hands and hands; and flung in: this they call Mariage Républicain, Republican Marriage.” The Army of the West carried out most of its mass drownings using specially constructed barges that they floated into the middle of the Loire, loaded with approximately 130 victims each, and scuttled by opening special trapdoors designed for the purpose. (Many details of this atrocity came from the trial testimony of one of the carpenters in charge of building these “floating coffins,” who described how they worked and how his first one was used to drown a boatload of priests.)
A decent man could not last long in the Vendée without becoming either a bloodthirsty killer or a victim. This was the case for Dumas’s old commander General Biron. Biron had been sent to the Vendée in May 1793 to fight the insurgency. He had achieved immediate military successes, but the insubordination and continued violence toward civilians on the part of his troops caused him to resign. Another general then accused him of incivisme because he had been too lenient with the insurgents. This was enough to land Biron on the guillotine in December 1793, the very month that the Army o
f the West declared provisional victory over the insurgency.
Though the Vendée was no longer in open revolt, it was still a problem for the central government. The bloody crew that the Army of the West had become needed to be taught how to be a proper army again. General Dumas was a useful man for the job because he was a “good republican” without being a Jacobin fanatic. He inspired respect among subordinates, was known for both his sense of fair play and his toughness, and had shown keen organizational abilities in the Alps.
Dumas arrived in the Vendée in September 1794 and was appalled at what he found. “The Vendéeans no longer needed the pretext of religion or royalist sentiments to take up arms,” he later wrote. “They were being forced to defend their homes, their women who were being raped, their children who were being put to the sword.” His first order, on September 7, was to the chief of staff of the Army of the West:
The chief of staff will … establish a police force that is as strict as it is fair in the location of the General District. [He will] assure that no soldier, no matter his rank, will be there without being attached there or without a mission. It will be the same for all the agents employed in the army, and no one will leave his camp or quarters, for any reason and without a formal order.
Dumas threw himself into cleaning up the republican forces under him. The Army of the West was living high off plunder. Dumas set about making it relearn the simple soldier’s virtues, like sleeping outdoors. He was always hardest on fellow officers: “The officer must provide an example to the soldier … and sleep like him in a tent.”
His orders here show his trademark attention to detail and concern that his army receive its fair share of provisions and matériel. But whereas in his other commands Dumas had habitually praised his men and written as their advocate, in his letters from the Army of the West he sounds less like the general of a professional army and more like a new principal brought in to fix a particularly bad school. A selection of his typical orders, in reference to a junior officer, gives an idea of his assignment:
He will tell me why there are 288 men in the garrison … If they are not necessary there, [he] will give them the order to rejoin their battalion.
… I have received information that soldiers are selling their cartridges to bandits. You will mention that fact in the order of the day, with the expression of my indignation about such an offense. To [ensure that] it does not happen again, you will order daily inspections and … punish all those who are proven to have sold their cartridges or to have lost them due to negligence.
… Any soldier who crosses the boundaries of the camp except for military reasons will be considered a deserter; the reading of the penal code will take place every ten days. The General Officers and the Corps Chiefs are personally responsible for carrying out this order.
Dumas showed no shortage of his usual zeal, but his efforts went toward a thankless task. Throughout September and October of 1794, he inspected thousands of republican troops, from the great slave-and-sugar port of Nantes to the hamlets and wheat fields where so many villagers had stories of atrocities and mass graves. An official report by General Dumas summing up his observation of the Vendée command, reproduced by his son in the memoir, captures this good man’s feelings about this very ugly conflict:
I have delayed my report on the state of the army and the war of the Vendée in order to base it on sure facts, seen by my own eyes.… It has to be said that there is no part of the Army of the West, either military or administrative, that does not call for the stern hand of reform.…
You must judge from this, by the numbers of their new recruits, by the utter incompetence of these battalions, of which the fit portion finds itself paralyzed by the majority’s inexperience, even as the officers themselves are so undisciplined that there is no hope of training new recruits.
But there is a greater evil than this.
The evil lies deeper, in the spirit of indiscipline and pillage that rules throughout the army, a spirit produced by habit and nourished by impunity. This spirit has been carried to such a point that I dare to tell you that it is impossible to repress, except by transferring these corps to other armies and by replacing them with troops that have been trained in subordination.
[The] soldiers have threatened to shoot their officers for trying at my orders to stop the pillaging. You may at first be amazed at these excesses; but you will cease to be shocked when you realize that it is the necessary consequence of the system followed up to present in this war.… You will not find even among the general officers the means to remind the rank and file of a love of justice and upstanding comportment.…
And yet military virtues are never more necessary than in civil warfare. How, in their absence, can we carry out your orders?… [For] I wholly believe the war could be ended quickly if the measures I have proposed are adopted. They are:
1. The reorganization of the army;
2. The reorganization of the general officers;
3. A carefully vetted selection of officers destined for the Vendée …
While matters remain in the same state it is impossible for me to respond to your expectations and assure you of the termination of the war in the Vendée.
In late October, Dumas was transferred out of the Army of the West. The official Moniteur gazette printed a statement by local representatives in the Vendée that thanked General Dumas for bringing a new discipline to the Army of the West and for “deploying a character of justice and inflexibility whose effects are already being felt.” The representatives regretted his departure after such a short time but affirmed that even that short time had made a difference.†
Dumas’s indictment of the atrocities would not be forgotten, especially not by the chroniclers of their victims. In the following century, as the memory of the Vendée would continue to divide French society, as civil war memories do, Dumas would have the rare distinction of being praised for his conduct both by enemies of the Republic and by its supporters. “Fearless and irreproachable,” wrote a pro-royalist historian of the region nearly a century after the terrible events there, General Dumas “deserves to pass into posterity and makes a favorable contrast with the executioners, his contemporaries, whom public indignation will always nail to the pillory of History!”
THE Vendée posting took its toll on the victor of Mont Cenis, both mentally and physically. Dumas began reporting severe headaches, and also trouble from a cyst above his left eye—the leftover scar from his duel back in the Sixth Dragoons. In early December, the Committee gave him leave to return home to Villers-Cotterêts to recuperate. There, he divided his time between doting on his little daughter Alexandrine Aimée and hunting in the forests.
Compared to the past years, France was quiet in the fall and winter of 1794–95. The government benefited from continued military success, and though the Committee continued to govern, sober men now sat in place of fanatics. The guillotine was once again reserved for something like actual crimes—more or less the equivalent of any other public method of execution, but supposedly more painless, as Dr. Guillotine had intended.‡ In the Vendée the government agreed to exempt peasants from the normal draft laws.
Meanwhile, Napoleon Bonaparte, who had been lying low in Marseilles the past few months, moved to Paris and cultivated relationships with members of the government, especially Carnot. By summer Napoleon wrote to his older brother Joseph that he was “attached to the topographical bureau of the Committee of Public Safety.”
In the summer of 1795, most of the powers in the anti-French coalition had pulled out to concentrate on other issues—Prussia, the Netherlands, and Spain all signed truce agreements with Paris—and Austria was left to conduct the land war against France virtually alone. Austria’s one stalwart ally against revolutionary France was Great Britain, whose navy continued to harass French ships on the high seas and block colonial trade with the sugar islands. (It also continued to provide cash to whatever other power wanted to challenge France.)
&nbs
p; Carnot decided that France should use the dissolution of the antirevolutionary coalition to attack Austria. If the Hapsburg Empire fell, or was greatly weakened, the affairs of Europe would be dictated from Paris. To this end Carnot launched the great Rhineland offensive of 1795. He was determined to beat the Austrians in their own imperial backyard.
Dumas, who was not cultivating his career very carefully but was always eager for action, got himself a posting with General Jean-Baptiste Kléber and the Army of the Rhine. General Kléber was a stoutly framed builder’s son from Strasbourg, with a wild head of curly hair, a huge jaw, and a love of fighting. He’d actually gotten his start in the military when as a boy he had helped a pair of nobles in a tavern brawl in Munich, and his first commissions had been in the imperial Austrian army. But like so many others of low birth, Kléber had seen his opportunity in the French Revolution and enlisted in the Fourth Battalion of the Upper Rhine.
Dumas and Kléber understood each other perfectly and this would be the beginning of an important friendship for Dumas. In September 1795, they crossed the Rhine together and attacked Düsseldorf in the name of liberty, equality, and fraternity. The Moniteur reported, “The loss of Frenchmen during this great expedition was calculated to be 400 men, including both dead and wounded. General Dumas is numbered among the latter.”
