7 
ON February 13, 1786, a contract of marriage was signed between Thomas-Alexandre’s father—“Alexandre Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, knight, former lord and owner of the parish of Bielleville [and other fiefdoms], gentleman in the former chamber of the Prince de Conti,” and so forth—and his housekeeper, Marie Retou, who was, as the contract stated, the daughter of a vintner. The wedding took place on Valentine’s Day.
Thomas-Alexandre appears not to have attended the wedding—he did not witness the marriage contract—and all indications are that he did not appreciate his father’s newfound happiness. The novelist Dumas writes that the “marriage caused a cooling-off between father and son. The result of this estrangement was that the father tied his purse strings tighter … and the son discovered one fine morning that Paris life without money was a sorry life.” Antoine had always supported his son generously, but his new wife was from a frugal lower-middle-class background, and perhaps she lacked the proper respect for a fashionable young man’s expenditures. She had known Thomas-Alexandre since he’d arrived in Le Havre nearly ten years earlier, and she had watched him grow into a dashing Parisian rake with neither a trade nor obvious aspirations to one.
At twenty-four, Thomas-Alexandre was conversant with Caesar and Plutarch, well versed in contemporary theater and in Palais Royal gossip, and, of course, an expert horseman and fencer. But he had not worked a day since stepping off the ship. There was only one profession really suited to a man of his style, skills, and temperament. In France, as a contemporary visiting English nobleman observed, “it is very dishonorable for any gentleman not to be in the army, or in the king’s service as they call it.”
Less than two weeks after his father’s marriage, Thomas-Alexandre made up his mind to enlist.
ALTHOUGH there could be no more traditional career move for a young man of his station, Thomas-Alexandre’s entrance into the military was fundamentally different from his peers’: he enlisted not as an officer but as a common soldier.
The Queen’s Dragoons, the regiment he picked, had flashy uniforms and a rugged, even reckless reputation. But, for the son of a marquis to enlist without a commission—as a private!—was unheard-of. The novelist recounts a conversation between his father and his grandfather:
[My father] told him that he had made a resolution.
“What is it?” asked the marquis.
“To enlist.”
“As what?”
“As a common soldier.”
“Where are you going to do that?”
“In the first regiment I come across.”
“Marvelous,” replied my grandfather, “but as I’m called the Marquis de la Pailleterie, am a colonel and commissioner general of artillery, I don’t intend for you to drag my name through the lowest ranks of the army.”
“Then you oppose my enlistment?”
“No; but you must enlist under a nom de guerre.”
“That’s fair,” replied my father. “I will enlist under the name of Dumas.”
“Very well.”
And the marquis, who had never been a very tender father, turned his back on his son and left him free to do what he pleased.
The novelist Dumas got paid by the line, and so was always making up dialogue when he could. But whether or not this exchange took place as written, it conveys Thomas-Alexandre’s insolence toward his father at that point.
ON June 2, 1786, Thomas-Alexandre signed the enlistment rolls of the Sixth Regiment of the Queen’s Dragoons. The document still exists, and it is the first record of the name “Dumas, Alexandre.”
Whatever combination of anger, pride, and determination caused him to give this name instead of any of the others he had been using since he came to France—“Thomas Retoré,” “Thomas-Alexandre Davy de La Pailleterie,” “Thomas Retoré (called Dumas-Davy)”—the young “American” had found his identity. Rather, he had invented it. Beneath that invention came another: “son of Antoine and Cecette Dumas.”
Alexandre—he never again used the name “Thomas”—had with the stroke of a pen inverted his family’s racial history: instead of the son of the Marquis de la Pailleterie and his black slave Cessette, he was now the son of Cessette Dumas and her husband, Antoine. He had made his father into a Dumas. It may have been expedient, but it was also a kind of poetic revenge. And it was the only concrete memorial he would leave his mother: to take her name. Next to his new name and family data was a description of Alexandre Dumas:
Native of Jemerie [sic] in Martinique, 24 years old, 6 feet tall, with frizzy black hair and eyebrows … oval face, and brown skinned, small mouth, thick lips.
The enlistment officer mistook “Jemerie” to be in Martinique rather than Saint-Domingue; future records of the Sixth Dragoons would often simply state that their unusual recruit was “from Jeremie, in America.”
Enlisting as a private in the dragoons was a bad place to start one’s career: from that rank, Thomas-Alexandre was unlikely to ever rise above the rank of sergeant-major, the cavalry regiment’s senior noncommissioned rank at the time.
A 1781 rule decreed that to qualify for an army commission, a candidate must “show proof of four generations of nobility on his father’s side,” certified by the royal genealogist. Thomas-Alexandre had such lineage—the Davy de la Pailleterie family tree went back to the 1500s—but the recently passed race laws made it hard for a man of mixed race to claim his rightful title or noble status. Infuriated as Thomas-Alexandre must have been to be held back by such restrictions, he must have felt relief to jettison the name of the man who had owned and sold him—and join up under a new name that was both his own invention and an homage to the slave mother he’d so thoroughly left behind.
Thirteen days later, on June 15, Antoine died. It was only four months after the old rogue’s wedding. He was buried in the cemetery at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Antoine’s death certificate states that mass was sung and lists the witnesses: Alexandre Dumas was not among them. It was lucky that the son was living the life of a soldier by then and did not need his father’s support, because the “fortune”—which had in fact been merely glorified support payments from the Mauldes in accordance with their arrangement regarding the Pailleterie estate—was revealed to be an illusion. A letter to the Count de Maulde written on the widow’s behalf by a lawyer a few months later indicates the severity of the want:
The death of M. le Marquis frees you of the life annuity … you were obligated to pay him I believe; please accept, sir, my compliments, but permit me to place before you the unhappy situation of an honest woman whom he had just married about 4 months ago, who had no possessions and on whom he meant to play a trick. In fact, the marriage contract … gave all the Marquis’s possessions and all his movable and immovable property to his wife, who recognizes today that M. le Marquis wasn’t living in his holdings and had only your lifetime payments, having spent all his money paying the debts for a young Mister Dumas (mulatto) who is said to be the illegitimate son of the deceased. This illegitimate child has cost him enormously, and he just ended up enlisting in the military as a dragoon. The poor widow has instructed me to make you aware of her sad state; she finds herself without bread; she relies on your bounty to assure a small pension for the rest of her days. Someone advertised your charitable sentiments and the small amount of resources you could give her would allow her to avoid hiring herself as a servant; it would not look good for the family of the Marquis to have a titled widow forced to become a servant.
The Count de Maulde refused. That summer he sold off the Bielleville estate, definitively ending its four-century-long connection to the Davy family, along with eighteen other properties that had somehow belonged to the family. Maulde did not do this lightly. It was an indication of how much his association with Antoine had cost him that he was selling all the lands and buildings that, in recent years, he had gone to great pains to buy back after Antoine summarily sold them to a neighbor. Maulde had tried to bring a measure of respectability to a family that did not want it. He used the money from the current sale—a serious sum, 350,000 livres—to pay off the marquis’s creditors and those of his widow, as well as his own.
MEANWHILE, after presumably putting his silks and velvet waistcoats in storage, Alexandre Dumas threw himself into the life of an armed man on horseback. Dragoons were light cavalry, used mostly for reconnaissance, skirmishing, and raiding. They got their name from their short carbine muskets, which were known as dragons because they spat fire.
The first regular dragoon regiments had served Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu in the previous century. They were introduced at the same time as the musketeers, who specialized in assignments in and around the capital. Like them, the dragoons were organized specifically to provide elite military opportunities to the sons of minor noble families or of those who had fallen on hard times. (The musketeers were phased out by Louis XVI in 1776 for budgetary reasons.)
For the government, a big virtue of the dragoons was that they were expendable. They got poorer horses and cheaper weapons than the elite heavy-cavalry or royal-guard units. Dragoons did the toughest and dirtiest jobs. In offensive warfare, they went in ahead of other troops, scouted enemy positions, secured bridges, took out enemy snipers, defused traps; and during retreats they held bridges and walls until the regular troops had gotten through. In peacetime, the dragoons took on highwaymen and secured the roads for the king and other dignitaries during their travels. The dragoons also battled smugglers, fighting the Crown’s constantly simmering war against dealers in illegal salt, which was then one of the most heavily taxed essential commodities in the kingdom.
Alexandre Dumas took to this rough-and-ready life, discovering a side of himself that the Palais Royal gallant would not have recognized. He trained hard on the northeast frontier of France’s so-called iron belt of fortresses. “The liberty that he had known in the colonies had developed his skill and strength in a remarkable way,” his son would write. “[H]e was a veritable American horseman, a cowboy. With his rifle or pistol in hand, he accomplished marvels that made St. Georges jealous.… And his muscular strength became legendary in the army.”
Private Dumas was a showoff, and he loved doing tricks that displayed his strength and agility. His son captured these as well as anyone, since no one is bigger or stronger to a young boy than his father:
More than once he amused himself in the riding-school [manège] by passing under a beam, grabbing it with his arms, and lifting his horse between his legs. I have seen him, and I recall this with a childish amazement, carry two men on his bent leg and hop across the room with these two men on [his back]. I saw him, in a painful motion, take a medium-sized rush in his hands and break it by turning one hand to the right and the other to the left. Finally, I remember, one day leaving the little château des Fossés where we lived, my father had forgotten the key to a gate; I remember seeing him get out of the carriage, take the gate crosswise, and at the second or third shake, break the stone in which it was fixed.
Another anecdote his son tells—and which was recounted throughout the nineteenth century by many others as though it were fact—involves a trick Alex Dumas performed with a bunch of military muskets. The novelist paints it a bit like a barroom dare:
On the evening of his arrival, by the campfire light, he watched a soldier who, among other feats of strength, amused himself by putting his finger into the mouth of a heavy musket and lifting it up, not with his arm but on his extended finger.
A man wrapped in a cloak mingled among the onlookers and watched with them; then, laughing and flinging back his cloak, he said:
“That’s not bad—now bring four guns.”
He was obeyed.… He then put four of his fingers in the four gun bores and lifted the four guns with as much ease as the soldier had lifted one.
“There you are,” he said, laying them gently on the ground, “when you want to get into tests of strength, that’s how it should be done.”
When [the witness] recounted this incident to me, he still marveled at how any man’s muscles could bear such a weight.
At all times and in all places, tales of strength and power are prone to exaggeration. But no matter how much one exaggerates the feats of the strongest man in the barroom—or the barracks—he is still the strongest man, just lifting a little less weight. A French infantry musket of the period weighed at least ten pounds; it was not very likely that Alex Dumas lifted four quite like that, for it would have meant hoisting nearly forty pounds with only his fingers. The horse-lifting claim is even wilder: the dragoons’ Norman horses weighed perhaps 1,500 pounds each. Even assuming Dumas could perform “many feats which might draw an envious groan from the strongest of professional ‘strong men,’ ” it seems impossible that he actually lifted his horse by squeezing his legs around it and grabbing a beam, as he was reported to do.
This is how tales of strength were spread in a world before the Guinness Book. Private Dumas was clearly reputed to be one of the strongest men in the French army, but proof of his achievements would have to wait for real combat, real injuries, and real deaths.
Though duels were illegal in Paris, they could still be fought in the army without risking arrest. In fact, the aristocratic tradition of dueling for the “slightest offense” was maintained, and even encouraged, by the army, as a means of sharpening combat skills. This was especially true among the dragoons, who needed to be ready to grapple hand to hand with both enemy soldiers and ruthless highwaymen. Another oft-repeated story from Private Dumas’s early days as a soldier was the one about his fighting three duels against fellow soldiers in a day and winning all three, despite being gashed twice in the head. During one of them, he received a blow across the brow that may have been responsible for terrible headaches he suffered later and for problems with his vision.
It was also common among the dragoons to fight group duels with other regiments. Such practice bloodshed could start with a disparaging remark about another regiment’s skills or record, and nothing was thought better for esprit de corps than going up against rivals blade to blade. Raised on stories of these contests recounted by his father’s retired comrades, Alexandre Dumas would transpose the fights to the early 1600s to create his tales of musketeer derring-do. In the memoirs he delights in presenting them with his tongue-in-cheek bravado:
My father had hardly rejoined his regiment before an occasion for displaying his skill as a pupil of La Boëssière presented itself.
The King’s regiment and the Queen’s regiment, which had always been rivals, both happened to be stationed in the same town. This offered the perfect opportunity for staging a small war; such worthy rivals were not about to let such a chance escape.
One day a soldier of the King’s regiment passed by a soldier from the regiment of the queen.
The former stopped the latter and said, “Comrade, do you know something?”
“No,” replied the other, “but if you tell it to me I shall know it.”
“All right! The king f—the queen.”
“That’s a lie,” replied the other, “it’s the other way round, the queen f—the king.”
One insult was as grave as the other, and they could only be erased by a recourse to arms.
A hundred duels took place during the next twenty-four hours. My father fought three of them.
There is no evidence that anyone in the dragoons bothered Dumas about his unusual family history or his skin color. Records from his regiment indicate that at least two, possibly three, other “Americans” served in it at the time, though one of them was a bugler. If Dumas did get harassed about being a man of color, here he was free to defend his honor. Such duels would be only slightly more serious than the novelist’s caricature of them suggests. But they would have given Alex Dumas’s fellow soldiers a glimpse of what the tall black private might be capable of if circumstances required.
IN the summer of 1788, two years after Alexandre Dumas enlisted, France began falling apart. Although frequently at war with her neighbors, the country had enjoyed ten centuries of uninterrupted monarchy—the throne had stayed in the same family for eight hundred years—and king after king had, by monarchical standards, done a pretty decent job. For centuries, people shouted “Vive le roi!” when they meant “Vive la France!” And there was little reason to think this was bound to change. True, Louis XVI’s coronation, in 1774, had coincided with the biggest grain riots in seven years. And pairing his rumored impotence with his outsize passion for traditional pursuits like hunting, his subjects often treated the king as a figure of fun. Even so, the idea that this Louis—who, unlike some of his predecessors, showed an obviously sentimental devotion to his people and the throne—could one day lose his head must have seemed unthinkable.
But the royal finance minister had by this point discovered that France was on the verge of bankruptcy, and had presented King Louis XVI with a famously brief “to do” list:
1. The present situation
2. What to do about it?
3. How to do it?
He presented one solution: a plan for comprehensive tax reform which would remove the old privileges that largely shielded the aristocracy from taxes.
As the American Revolution had been sparked by a tax revolt, the same would now be true in France, though the many heady ideas in the air obscured the heart of the matter: France was broke.
THAT June, crowds in Grenoble pelted royal troops with red roof tiles. The troops fired back, killing three people. At the time it seemed like a disturbing trifle, a crowd temporarily carried away by antiroyalist feeling, quickly dispersed. But in fact it was the first blood of the Revolution, a year before the fact, for the sentiment that animated the Grenoble crowds would soon overtake the country.
In July, a freak storm dropped hailstones so big they killed animals and destroyed nearly all the crops around Paris. Harsh weather hit almost every region in the kingdom, dooming the harvest.
In August, a new finance minister informed the king that the treasury was officially empty. Many people blamed the empty coffers on aristocratic frivolities and on their Austrian queen. The bitter irony was that the financial crisis had largely been caused by French support of the American patriots; in getting back at the English, Versailles had committed not only ideological but fiscal suicide. The finance minister brought the unwelcome news that something must be done to avoid default and that that something was raising taxes. The people burned effigies of him in the streets.
In order to satisfy one of the demands of the nobles, the minister advised the king to reconvene an ancient political body known as the Estates-General. The Estates-General, a kind of class-based legislature, was almost a mythical organization, however; nobody was clear about how it worked, since it hadn’t been convened since 1614. Since then, one King Louis after another had simply ruled, albeit constantly vexed by the nobles and their parlement courts.
The Bourbon kings had fiercely resisted reconvening the Estates-General, but in this case Louis XVI finally conceded and the country breathed a sigh of relief. Slated to convene the following spring, the Estates-General would be France’s salvation, everyone was certain. That 1788 was the hundredth anniversary of England’s “Glorious Revolution” led to speculation that a Gallic version of such a bloodless shift to constitutional monarchy might be just around the corner.
Freakish weather returned in the winter of 1788–89: the Seine and other rivers froze, roads were blocked, and gristmills seized up. Bakeries baked no bread, and the penniless starved or froze to death. The remnants of the French economy ceased to function: shops were empty; Lyon’s looms stopped weaving. A broke government was powerless to help.
When spring finally arrived, a desperate euphoria greeted the prospect of the Estates-General. Preparations included not only the election of representatives but also the compilation of cahiers de doléances—“complaint books,” lists of grievances—stating all the things a local district’s people disliked about how France was run and how they wished to see them changed. Any subject of the king could complain about anything, provided he was over twenty-five and entered on the tax rolls. (Some widows tried to add their complaints, insisting that there was no explicit gender requirement.) All across the country, people gathered in improvised town-hall-style meetings to decide what to complain about. The complaints could also be about the nation’s empire, and some notebooks contained complaints about slavery and calls to end it. Educated nobles tended to dress up their complaints in philosophical rhetoric about citizenship and the nation, while members of the lower classes stuck to more down-to-earth concerns. Most complaints addressed the continuing domination of peasant life by relentless taxation, pitiful wages, and the remnants of feudalism, with its exploitation of cheap labor.
This public venting stoked participation in politics. It got ordinary people involved in government and made them hopeful—too hopeful—that once these complaints reached the king, he could make everything all right.
In a working-class district of Paris in April, one meeting caused a riot. A local wallpaper manufacturer’s remark started rumors that he—along with other bosses—was trying to use the occasion to cut workers’ wages. In fact, this manufacturer, who barely escaped with his life, was a proponent of workers’ rights whose remark had been misunderstood. The French Guards, responsible for the city’s policing, rode in to disperse the rioters. In their blue coats, red collars, and white breeches, they sported the colors that would be adopted by the Revolution but were in fact their age-old livery at Versailles, where they performed palace security along with the Swiss Guards, the mercenaries of European kings and the pope. The French Guards were elite troops, and, though recruited from all over France, they lived in Paris among the population. The king depended on them to restore order when crisis threatened. On that afternoon, they did not let him down. The French Guards fired into the crowd, ending the riot and killing at least twenty-five people.
A week later, on May 5, 1789, the delegations to the Estates-General gathered before the king at Versailles. The seat of the monarchy was transformed into a vast political carnival. Delegates came from every town and region in France, bearing the complaint notebooks of their local constituents, and as they met and mingled in the shadow of the legendary palace, they naturally split into smaller groups to eat, drink, and argue about what was to be done. A cluster of Breton deputies formed one little chat group that, once the carnival moved on to Paris and the Palais Royal, would become known as the Jacobin Club.
Before any representative governing could begin, a battle had to be fought over how voting would work. The Estates-General got its name from the traditional division of France into three “estates”: clergy, nobility, and commoners. The way it had originally worked was that each of the three estates got an equal say: each had an equal number of “deputies” to represent it. This meant that the clergy and the nobility together could outvote anything that the rest, collectively known as “the Third Estate,” wanted; the idea of proportional representation—or any meaningful voice for the people—was a sham.
The energized and emboldened delegates of the Third Estate, the “99 percent”—in reality, closer to 96 percent—of the French population who paid the bulk of the taxes, demanded that its number of representatives be doubled so that commoners’ votes would equal the combined votes of nobles and clergy. In other words, the Third Estate was still demanding only half of the total political power. After weeks, the king was convinced to allow the doubling of the Third. But by this point a group of radical delegates had convinced a majority of commoners and liberal nobles that the entire archaic structure of the Estates-General should simply be thrown out and replaced by a national assembly in which there would be no estates and everyone would have an equal vote. This meant that the 96 percent who were neither clergy nor noble would dominate.
On Wednesday, June 17, 1789, France went from a system where only the nobility and the church had power to a system where, at least theoretically, the common people did. Europe’s most renowned absolute monarchy was suddenly the widest system of suffrage in the world. But on Saturday morning, the deputies arrived at the hall of their new National Assembly to find that royal troops had blocked the gates and put up notices telling the deputies to return the next week for a special “royal session,” at which Louis plannedto inform them personally that their actions were illegal and invalid. But instead of dispersing, the infuriated deputies marched to a nearby indoor tennis court, where they swore an oath not to leave until France had a constitution. Frenchmen were finally taking the “extreme measures” of which Lafayette had not believed them capable.
The king ordered garrisons around Paris to be reinforced in case force was needed. As against a Parisian population of 650,000, the Swiss and French Guard regiments at the king’s immediate disposal totaled fewer than ten thousand men. In ordinary circumstances, Dumas’s unit, the Queen’s Dragoons, might have been among those called to Paris. But in a crucial sign of the way things were going, a full third of the twenty thousand reinforcements summoned by the king were foreign mercenaries. The king’s ministers feared that French soldiers might at this point be too easily turned to the patriot cause. Activists had been arrested for giving out pamphlets that read, “We are Citizens before Soldiers, Frenchmen before slaves.” When news of the king’s calling in foreign troops reached the Palais Royal, its arcades exploded. “The ferment at Paris is beyond conception,” an observer reported. “Ten thousand people have been all this day in the Palais Royal … the people seem, with a sort of phrenzy, to reject all idea of compromise.”
As if nature again were conspiring to foment revolution, northern France now ran out of grain completely. Bread riots swept from Normandy to Picardy and threatened Paris, too. Rumors grew that royals and aristocrats were in league to starve the patriots before attacking them with foreign troops.
Spurred on by such rumors, the crowds in the Palais Royal rushed to arm themselves, and suddenly all of Paris was on the move. On the night of July 12 and throughout the next day, people broke into shops and houses, grabbing every gun, sword, pike, dagger, and kitchen knife. They also raided bakeries, in a desperate search for scraps of bread. The mob secured thirty thousand Charleville muskets from the Invalides armory, but the government had prudently removed both shot and powder to the Bastille, the prison-fortress in the heart of Paris. By 1789, it housed only a handful of prisoners and was actually slated for demolition (its most prominent prisoner, the Marquis de Sade, had just been moved). For most people, though, it remained a hated symbol of oppression. On Tuesday, July 14, crowds stormed the Bastille and, after negotiating the prison governor’s good-faith surrender, stabbed him to death, shooting the corpse for good measure and parading its severed head around the city streets on a pike.
The day would become France’s version of July Fourth, though Bastille Day commemorates a far bloodier, more contested event than the signing of a Declaration of Independence.
One fundamental development that made the storming of the Bastille—and indeed the entire Revolution—possible was, with a mysterious alchemy, the advance revolutionizing of the French military. Three months earlier, in that first riot, the French Guards had followed orders and fired on the rioters. Yet on July 14, instead of doing their job and defending the Bastille, the French Guards joined the rioters, and would soon declare themselves the National Guard. The war minister informed the king that he could no longer guarantee the loyalty of any French soldier or junior officer. Without its army, the royal government collapsed.
At the Hôtel de Ville—the city hall—on July 17, the cornered king met the new Paris municipal government and gave General Lafayette his blessing as official head of the new Paris National Guard. The king acknowledged his acceptance of the Revolution by allowing Lafayette to pin a cockade—the showy round fabric ornament by which revolutionaries recognized one another—on the royal hat. The assembled patriots cried, “Vive le roi!”*
WHILE Paris rioted, Alex Dumas and his regiment remained in their garrison, awaiting orders. He had spent the last year of the Ancien Régime, with the Sixth Dragoons, stationed in the provincial town of Laon, a hundred miles northeast of Paris, with a long view over the Picardy plain toward the French border with the Austrian Netherlands. This was one of the poorest regions of the country, and a hotbed of patriot sentiment; Picardy had sent more soldiers and junior officers to fight in the American Revolution than any other place in France.
Yet it was hard to find a more surreally calm place in the summer of 1789—less than a hundred miles from Paris but centuries removed from the events taking place there. Perched on a hill above the plain, Laon uncannily afforded views for miles from almost every spot in town. While Paris had undergone a century of remodeling, breaking down medieval walls and creating boulevards and public spaces—currently packed with revolutionary mobs—Laon remained surrounded by one big wall, with gates for horsemen to ride through to defend the towns and cities below. Since the days of the Roman Empire, Laon had protected northern Gaul from the Vandals, Alans, Huns, Burgundians, and Franks, until the Franks eventually broke through and became its new landlords. After that, for another thousand years, it had protected France. Walking around this perfectly sited fortified town today, one may picture a scene from The Lord of the Rings. A stone city on a hill—a spot of magnificent, even desolate, beauty.
On August 15, the Sixth Dragoons at last received their orders. They were to ride down to the town of Villers-Cotterêts, to defend the château of the Orléans family—princes of the blood still, though patriots—against mobs of brigands. The soldiers were also to protect the townsfolk. The order had come via the regional headquarters at Soissons but had not originated in Versailles’s war office or, indeed, with any officer of the kingdom. It came instead from a common innkeeper named Claude Labouret, who had just been elected commander of the Villers-Cotterêts National Guard.
*Initially cockades were various colors—the crowds storming the Bastille may have been wearing green ones in their hats—but this historic meeting at the city hall marked the christening of the cockade as a red, white, and blue symbol of the Revolution. Red and blue were chosen because they were the colors of the city of Paris, though they were also the colors of the House of Orléans. White was the color of the Bourbon monarchy. It is said that when the mayor first presented the cockade to the king, it was only red and blue. Then Lafayette stepped in to propose adding the Bourbon color white to acknowledge the king’s gesture of accepting the Revolution.