13 
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 childrenperished—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 of 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.)
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. TheMoniteurreported, “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.”
It isn’t known what injury Dumas suffered during the battle, but it was not life-threatening. He spent the rest of the fall shuttling between various postings on France’s eastern frontier, both in Belgium and along the Rhine. Meanwhile, in Villers-Cotterêts, his beloved was pregnant with their second child. In January 1796, Marie-Louise wrote him:
My good friend,
The military post that stops here today on its way to Germany … will bring you this note which will convey our most tender wishes and which will tell you that the due date is coming soon and that I want to have you with me then. Don’t delay and bring me the courage I need. Everyone here congratulates you. Marie-Aimée [i.e., Alexandrine Aimée, their first daughter] sends you a thousand fond kisses, I add another thousand and I’m longing for you.
Marie-Louise Dumas.
Their second daughter, “Louise Alexandrine,” was born shortly after, and though it’s not clear if Dumas was able to attend the birth, his letters from that spring show he had more time to bounce this child on his knee than he had when Alexandrine Aimée was born, during the frenetic months of fall, 1793, just after his promotion to general’s rank. Not enough time, as fate would prove.
THROUGHOUT 1795 the government’s pursuit of stability ran into a roadblock: the rotten state of the French economy. Three years of war had brought on hyperinflation, since the government printed ever more paper to pay for the pikes, the muskets, the modern artillery pieces. The hyperinflationary cycle had been disguised somewhat by the intensity of feelings that attended the war fever, and then the Terror, but now that France had returned to something more like normalcy, the economic crisis drove politics.§
The current Committee members’ lack of extreme ideological convictions also made it a target for all sides, and Paris was rife with plots against the middle-of-the-road government. In spring hyperinflation and bread riots had sparked a rise in what was called “neo-Jacobinism,” and in May these far-left radicals staged an uprising; it was brutally suppressed. But the repression of the neo-Jacobins on the far left created an opening for the neo-royalists on the far right.
On October 5, 1795, the royalist-leaning sections of the city erupted in insurrection against the central government. Thirty thousand insurgents marched on the government, which had at most six thousand troops to defend it.
The government called on a man of influence, a provincial noble named Paul Barras—Viscount Paul de Barras—who was promoted overnight to command the Army of the Interior. Barras looked to the army and specifically to an up-and-coming general living in Paris. Napoleon Bonaparte did not disappoint him.
Napoleon’s use of canister shrapnel shells on the crowd—the “whiff of grapeshot” in Carlyle’s famous description—revealed the sour-faced artillerist’s chilling efficiency. Hundreds of royalists lay dead in the streets of Paris, hundreds more wounded. By comparison the Champ de Mars Massacre had been a bar fight. The counterrevolutionary uprising was suppressed.
In recognition of his services, Napoleon gained the patronage of Barras, who emerged from the crisis as France’s new strongman. The government was reorganized yet again: at the top was a five-man executive branch called the Directory, which swore itself in on November 3, 1795. The top “Director” of the French state was now Paul Barras. Among his four colleagues—plus ça change—was Lazare Carnot. There was also an oddly enormous new legislative body called the Council of Five Hundred.
Though the so-called Directory government that ran France in the mid- to late 1790s is usually derided as a low point in the Revolution—a time of cronyism and corruption—it is rarely credited with an amazing, quiet accomplishment: this period saw the French movement for racial equality persist not only in the colonies but in Paris itself. One emblematic example was the election and acceptance of black and mixed-race legislators in the Council of Five Hundred. Belley and Mills were the first, but at least ten more would hold political office in the 1790s, including the mixed-race men Jean Littée, Joseph and Jean-Louis Boisson, Louis-François Boisrond, Jean-Baptiste Deville, Jean-François Petitniaud, Pierre Thomany, Jacques Tonnelier, and the doyen of eighteenth-century black activism, Julien Raimond. Former slaves Etienne Mentor and Jean-Louis d’Annecy also served as representatives. Annecy held the position of secretary in the Directory’s Council of Elders.
Perhaps one of the most touching of the forgotten stories from this period was how revolutionary France, under the outwardly soulless Directory, instituted the world’s first color-blind elite secondary school. It gave the sons of former slaves—alongside the sons of privileged mixed-race and white abolitionists—one of the world’s finest educations at a time when the English-speaking world still considered it a crime for black children to learn to read.
It began in the mid-1790s, when, at the invitation of prominent members of the Society of the Friends of the Blacks, revolutionaries “of color” in the French colonies began sending their children to school in Paris. The government responded by creating an elite boarding school, the National Colonial Institute, which would be the world’s first experiment in integrated secondary education. Among its founders were leading civil rights activists like Julien Raimond, the Abbé Grégoire, and Léger-Félicité Sonthonax, the man who had first ordered abolition in Saint-Domingue.
The headmaster was a revolutionary preacher close to the Society of the Friends of the Blacks. Pupils included the children of deputies Belley, Dufay, and Thomany, Sonthonax’s own mixed-race children, and the son of Henri Christophe (the future King Henri I of Haiti). In this it mirrored the revolutionary colonial elite but did not reflect the growing political rift between blacks and mulattos in Saint-Domingue: in Paris, the children of black general Toussaint Louverture and mulatto general André Rigaud were classmates at the Institute, while in Saint-Domingue their fathers were bitter enemies in a civil war.
The Directory passed a law mandating that “every year, in each department, for the 1st of Germinal (the Festival of Youth), six individual children will be chosen … without distinction of color, to be transported to France and looked after in special schools, at the cost of the government, during the time necessary for their education.” The Institute therefore took in not only children of the elite but also many black scholarship students.
The minister of the interior also mandated that students be recruited from places other than the West Indies, such as Egypt and East Africa. In addition to scholarship tuition for children of black or mixed-race heritage, the government also funded some white children, especially the sons of prominent revolutionary abolitionists such as Brissot. (Interestingly, among the non-scholarship students at the school in this period were a number of openly racist planters’ sons.)
The Institute was not merely an experiment in race mixing. It provided its black and white students with one of the most rigorous educations in the world, and the school’s best students, of whatever complexion, could take the examination for the École Polytechnique, then France’s most elite military academy. From the perspective of early 1796, Alex Dumas might well have assumed that his son, when he had one, would attend this school or a similar one. He could not have known that his son Alexandre, brilliant as he would be, would instead be unable to attend any secondary school at all, because of a man whose name was still unknown to all but a small circle in the government and the War Ministry but who would soon remake France, and the Revolution, entirely.
In early 1796, Director Carnot opened a new front against the Austrians in Italy, and he gave the post of general-in-chief of the French Army of Italy to a talented Corsican artillery man, Napoleon Bonaparte, who had recently done the government a favor. At the time, many saw it as an insult because the Army of Italy was known to be decrepit and underfunded. Napoleon knew it was an opportunity.
* Perhaps feeling it couldn’t execute the living fast enough, the previous summer the Committee had decided to attack the dead: it ordered the systematic desecration of the royal tombs. The kings and queens of France had been interred in the Abbey of Saint-Denis, just north of Paris, since the sixth century, but in a frenzy of historical obliteration, each royal corpse was exhumed, tossed in a common grave, and covered in quicklime. A “Committee of Jewelers” seized and inventoried the jewels and precious metals found in the coffins.
† An 1823 biographical dictionary of French generals quotes from “General Dumas’s memoir from the Vendée campaign,” which claimed that he was forced out of the position: “I wanted to discipline the army and put the principles of justice and humanity into practice on the field.… Villains, whose power was brought to an end by the anarchy [they caused], denounced me: they slandered me with the design of wanting to stop the bloodshed.” But I have never located such a memoir and this 1823 entry is the sole reference to it.
‡ In fact, a lively debate in the press concerned the unanswerable question of whether people died instantly upon being guillotined. Witnesses to the execution of Charlotte Corday, the prim Girondin assassin who had stabbed Marat to death in his bathtub, said they saw Corday’s severed head flush when it was slapped by the executioner. A famous surgeon published an article stating that severed heads may continue to live for some minutes and have “a perception of [their] own execution.”
§ The French economy ran on a bizarre kind of money called the assignat. Since a debt crisis had sparked the Revolution in the first place, one of the revolutionary government’s first goals had been to provide capital. It did this by nationalizing the property of the Catholic Church—monasteries, convents, churches, bishops’ tea sets, and jewelry collections—and issuing a new sort of circulating bond backed by nationalized Church property: the assignat. But the government issued more assignats whenever it felt like it, and the ensuing hyperinflation caused food riots, which increased instability, which caused the government to print more assignats, which increased hyperinflation. The paper bills had long since ceased to represent anything, except perhaps the belief in world revolution. Finally on October 19, 1795, the floor literally fell out from under the assignats: in Paris, at the printing house that manufactured them, someone simply piled too much worthless paper currency in one spot and the wood floor collapsed under the weight.
