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“WHAT dark and bloody secrets the future hides from us,” Alexandre Dumas would one day write in his memoir, meditating on his father’s fate. “When they are revealed, men may realize that it is by the good providence of God they were kept in ignorance of them until the appointed time.”
By the time he returned to France, in June of 1801, the Revolution and the nation Alex Dumas loved had declined almost as precipitously as he had. He must have felt like Rip Van Winkle returning from the hills—only Rip Van Winkle had found a king replaced by a revolution, while Dumas found a revolution replaced by a king, of sorts. And it was the same king he had left Egypt to escape. When Dumas arrived on French shores, Napoleon had had over a year to remake France in his image and to turn the gains of the Revolution to his own purposes.
His first step in remaking France had been to make a government. Everything still had to look democratic, because this was the land of the Revolution, and this king still wore red, white, and blue. The idea of “the consuls”—there were three—created the fiction that executive power was still split at the top, as it had been under the Directory and, before that, under the Convention. (Revolutionary France had never tried a simple president or prime minister.) But clothing themselves in the trappings of democracy, dictators may, like drag queens, tend to overdo it, and Napoleon wanted there to be no doubt that his French Republic was more democratic than any before it. Where the Directory had shared power with two legislative bodies, now there would be no fewer than four: the Senate, the Tribunate, the Legislature, and the Council of State. Of course these many checks and balances made the democratic process as dysfunctional as possible. The tribunes were allowed to discuss laws but not to vote on them. The legislators were allowed to vote on laws but not discuss them. The senators were allowed to appoint members to both of those other bodies but could not themselves vote, except that they could vote to annul laws they judged unconstitutional. The Council of State was stacked with Bonaparte’s backers and cronies, and though it was the only body to have some real power, it still functioned, in essence, as his advisory board.
On December 15, 1799, just over a month after the coup, Napoleon and his plotters had published the Constitution of the Year VIII, with the following claim in its preamble: “It is founded on the true principles of representative government, on the sacred rights of property, equality and liberty. The powers which it institutes will be strong and stable, as they must be in order to guarantee the rights of the citizens and the interests of the state. Citizens! The Revolution is made fast to the principles which began it; it is finished.”*
At that time, the only people who really knew Napoleon Bonaparte—aside from his mother and siblings, who feared him—were his generals, who held him in differing degrees of fear, awe, contempt, and adulation. Most people outside the army command knew him only as a man who could deliver results. There were civilians who had spent time with Napoleon up close and reported some dark quality that belied all the public adoration. “The terror he inspires is inconceivable,” Madame de Staël wrote to her father after spending a weekend with him at the estate of his older brother, Joseph. “One has the impression of an impetuous wind blowing about one’s ears when one is near that man.”
DURING Dumas’s journey home, Marie-Louise had written him an unusual love letter about the ordeal in the dungeon and how she would overcome it for them both:
I promise to avenge myself by proving to you that I know how to love, and that I have always loved you. You know the price that I still place on the possession of your heart and, because it is with me, you should never doubt my happiness.
They were finally reunited in Paris at the apartment of Dumas’s old friend General Brune. One can only imagine how changed Marie-Louise found her husband, and how hard she must have worked to conceal her reaction. But their mutual happiness and relief can’t be doubted. Soon back at home in Villers-Cotterêts, Dumas basked in the love of his family. Although he didn’t regain his former vigor, he was soon able to ride again. He began to look forward to rejoining the service and taking up his career where he had left it when he got aboard the Belle Maltaise in Egypt.
But Dumas quickly found that there were other obstacles in his way. First of all, he had an urgent need of money. The family had not had an income while he was a prisoner of war, and when he heard that the French government had worked out a reparations deal with the Kingdom of Naples, he assumed his claim would be high on the list. On April 22, 1801, while Dumas was still in Italy, the French ambassador to Naples told Dumas that he was to “receive the sum of 500,000 francs payable by the Court of Naples, as compensation to French citizens who have lost their belongings.” The catch was that the money, so the ambassador said, had gone to Paris, and Dumas would have to request it there from the minister of foreign affairs. Dumas would try to pursue that claim, but never received a single franc.
Not only did he get no reply regarding the reparations money, he found that all his letters and inquiries met with stony silence. For Dumas, the most important ministers were those of the military; unfortunately, the new minister of war was none other than his old nemesis General Berthier, who informed him that the consuls had decreed that officers like Dumas were due only two months of active-duty pay no matter how long they were imprisoned. Dumas protested, in a September 1801 letter to Napoleon:
I hope … that you will not allow the man who shared your work and your dangers to languish like a beggar when it is within your power to give him a testimony of the generosity of the nation for which you are responsible.
As important to Dumas as getting his back pay was getting reinstated in the army and gaining a new command. In February 1802, he wrote to “Citizen Minister Berthier”: “I have the honor of reminding you of the promise you made to me when I was in Paris, to employ me at something you were working on at the time. I can say, without blushing, that the misfortunes that have so severely tested me must be powerful motives for the government to put me back into active service.”
But in the new climate his appeals went nowhere. In the early 1820s a historian still close to the events observed that Dumas “hardly showed himself at the new court, where his political opinions, and everything about him, down to the color of his skin, was out of favor.”
WHEN Napoleon seized power, it had been nearly eight years since republican France granted full rights and citizenship to free men of color in the colonies and five years since France had ended slavery. Since 1794, both the French constitution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen had applied anywhere in the world where the French flag was flown.† It’s worth repeating that the greatest emancipation in history had been initiated by the country possessing perhaps the world’s most lucrative slave empire.
There were many things wrong with the French Republic at the time of Napoleon’s coup, but there was one thing most modern people would see as marvelously right: it offered basic rights and opportunities to people regardless of the color of their skin. For all their faults, the revolutionary French governmental bodies—the legislatures in Paris with their ever-changing names—admitted black and mixed-race representatives among their members as equals. Although the French still referred to black and mixed-race men in their country as “Americans,” the American Congress at that time would rarely admit a black person into its presence except to serve refreshments or sweep the floor.
Much support for Napoleon’s coup had come from a coalition of slavers and exiled plantation owners, who calculated that a dictator in tricolor trimmings would mean a better chance for reestablishing slavery than any sort of actual representative government—especially one that included blacks, abolitionists, and assorted revolutionary idealists. Napoleon visited Normandy and was fêted at a banquet by Charles de la Pailleterie’s old rivals in the slaving business, Constantin and Stanislas Foäche, who hoped a new era of slave-driven profits was just around the corner.
These businessmen argued that, in a world where its global competitors still practiced slavery, France could not afford to continue with its bizarre policy of emancipation and equal rights. Revolutionary ideas simply cost too much. The exports of Saint-Domingue in the years 1799–1800 were less than a quarter of what they had been in 1788–89. Even General Toussaint Louverture—the French Revolution’s standard-bearer among Saint-Domingue’s blacks and a brilliant leader of men—struggled to get fieldworkers to go back to the plantations. Thousands of these former slaves had served as soldiers of the Revolution and had no desire to return to hacking cane.
Days after his coup, Napoleon received a proposal for lifting the French ban on the slave trade. It was too early for such bold action, but he did begin repaying his political debt to the pro-slavery lobby, which had lent him important support. He replaced the minister of the navy and colonies, a member of the Society of the Friends of the Blacks, and seeded pro-slavery figures throughout the government. The Constitution of Revolutionary Year VIII that Napoleon proclaimed in December 1799, a month after seizing power, was vague on the race issue but contained an ominous line for all people of color: “The regime of the French colonies is to be determined by special laws.”
But Napoleon played a double game. On Christmas Day, 1799, shortly after issuing the new constitution, he made a proclamation to the people of Saint-Domingue: “Remember, brave Negroes, that the French people alone recognize your liberty and your equal rights.” Five days later he made a secret decision to begin building a new armada, which would ferry forty thousand French troops across the Atlantic to the Americas. It would ultimately grow even larger than the one he had taken to Egypt. Its goal: the reconquest of France’s most profitable colony. Barely a month in power, Napoleon was planning a full-scale military invasion of Saint-Domingue.
There could be no misinterpreting the racial component of such an invasion: Saint-Domingue was not some foreign country. It had a French administration and had still considered itself part of the French Republic throughout the years since emancipation. Moreover, the educated black and mixed-race citizens of Saint-Domingue were devoted to French thought and politics, while the island’s white Creoles were quite ready and even eager to go over to the English or the Spanish in exchange for maintaining slavery. (Napoleon wrote to a Martinique planter to express sympathy for the man’s decision to defect to the English rather than lose his slaves.) No large invasion of Saint-Domingue would make sense unless it was part of a strategy to turn back the clock and reimpose white rule of the island. But Napoleon had to wait until he had a peace treaty with England, so the fleet would not be intercepted on its way across the Atlantic. For the time being, he would pretend to be a friend to the blacks and a republican defender of their universal human rights.
GENERAL Toussaint Louverture, a skilled diplomat as well as a military tactician, also kept his cards close to his vest. He played the British and Spanish off against the French, as he had for much of the past decade, and cut deals with whoever he thought might increase his own and his island’s power. Unlike many other black revolutionaries, he was a pragmatist and a long-term thinker, determined to bring prosperity back to Saint-Domingue and even to reintegrate white plantation owners, if necessary. There was only one red line that could not be crossed: slavery must never return.
General Louverture had two sons who were living in Paris. Isaac Louverture was studying full-time, while his half brother, Placide, was serving as an aide-de-camp to a French general. At the beginning of 1802 these two distinguished young men of color were still living an existence that, while unheard-of in any other country, was not only possible but was almost normal in France. They were nervous, however, about certain changes in the city, and about rumors of a “formidable expedition” the government was preparing to send to their homeland. They had heard warships were massing at many of France’s Atlantic ports—Brest, Lorient, Rochefort, and Toulon.
One day the headmaster of Isaac Louverture’s college was surprised by an order to appear before Minister Denis Decrès at the Ministry of the Navy and the Colonies. Knowing that Decrès hated people of color and was opposed to mixed-race education, the headmaster must have feared a diatribe or a fine, or worse. Instead, Minister Decrès “invited” the headmaster to accompany the sons of Toussaint Louverture back with the French armada to Saint-Domingue. Though this might have been interpreted as a deportation order, Minister Decrès played his part well, since the headmaster returned to his college where, as Isaac later remembered in his memoir, he “announced the news to his young scholars, and embraced them, saying with tears in his eyes that the French government was motivated only by peaceful considerations.” A few days later he sent the headmaster a letter saying that the first consul himself wished to see the Louverture brothers before their departure. Decrès arrived at the college personally to escort the boys to the Tuileries Palace to meet Napoleon, who gave them a hearty welcome.
“Your father is a great man,” said Napoleon, addressing Isaac Louverture:
He has rendered eminent service to France. You will say to him that as the first [consul] of the French people, I promise him protection, glory, and honor. Do not believe that it is the intention of France to carry war into Saint-Domingue. The army sent by France is not destined to combat the troops of the country, but to augment their force. Here is General Leclerc, my brother-in-law, whom I have named captain-general, and who will command this army. Orders have been given that you may be fifteen days in advance at Saint-Domingue, to the end that you may announce the coming of the expedition to your father.
Napoleon also quizzed Isaac on mathematics and acted pleased with his answers. Before their departure Minister Decrès presented both young men with a suit of dazzling armor, manufactured at Versailles, and “a rich and brilliant officer’s costume, in the name of the government of France.”
The sons soon determined that they were being used against their father—the trip across the Atlantic with Napoleon’s brother-in-law General Leclerc and forty thousand French soldiers left little doubt in their minds—and by the time they reached Saint-Domingue they were more or less officially acknowledged to be hostages. Still, once the fighting began, their father would repel the French invasion forces for four months before agreeing, after an even more venal deception on the part of the French command, to come to an informal diplomatic meeting. On the way, Napoleon’s soldiers ambushed the black republican hero of Saint-Domingue and sent Toussaint back to France in chains. This man of the tropics was thrown into a freezing cold cell with dripping wet walls and a fire that, on orders from Napoleon, was inadequately fed with wood. “His iron frame, which had withstood the privations and fatigues of ten incredible years, now huddled before the logs measured out by the orders of Bonaparte,” wrote C. L. R. James. “The hitherto unsleeping intellect collapsed periodically into long hours of coma. Before the spring he was dying. One April morning he was found dead in his chair.”
Toussaint’s capture did not stop the resistance. By August, a despairing General Leclerc wrote to Napoleon: “It is not enough to have removed Toussaint. Here there are two thousand leaders to arrest. If I take the weapons the taste for insurrection still dominates. I have captured 20,000 guns but there are at least as many still in the hands of the freedmen.”
Napoleon gave Leclerc strict orders that no officers of color over the rank of captain could be left alive in Saint-Domingue—they were all to be either killed, or captured and deported back to France. Rekindling the cruelest traditions of Ancien Régime slavery in the sugar islands, French soldiers tortured, raped, and murdered blacks in every gruesome way imaginable. Most of the more than three thousand soldiers of color deported at gunpoint were illegally sold into slavery elsewhere in the Caribbean by corrupt naval commanders.
By 1804, Haitians had succeeded in creating a new nation and identity. More than forty thousand French soldiers died in the futile operations—half the number sent—and many times that number of blacks and mulattos, both military and civilian, perished. Evoking a particularly chilling image in light of twentieth-century mass murders, some blacks were killed by deliberate asphyxiation using burning sulfur in enclosed spaces aboard French vessels in Port-au-Prince harbor. Black fighters were equally vicious in their treatment of the local white population, but they also welcomed some whites (such as units of Polish soldiers who had arrived with the French but switched sides).
In the summer of 1802 French forces also invaded Guadeloupe, the other French sugar island where the emancipation had applied, and rampaged through the colony, seizing any uniformed blacks they came across and either killing them or throwing them in irons. Cornered at a plantation on the slope of La Soufrière volcano, some three hundred of the island’s leading black and mulatto rebels—men and women—chose to take their own lives rather than live to see slavery return. Screaming “Live free or die!” they blew themselves up with their remaining gunpowder. Their leader was Louis Delgrès, a colonel who had served in the Black Legion in 1792 under Dumas’s command.
DURING the 1790s, the National Colonial Institute in Paris had taken the revolutionary step of educating black, mixed-race, and white children together. Now Napoleon’s government cut the Institute’s funding and ended its experiment in color-blind education.
One of its students, Louis-Blaise Lechat, the son of a black French officer from Saint-Domingue, remembered an official school visit in 1801 by the same minister of the navy and colonies who “invited” Isaac and Placide Louverture to return to Saint-Domingue. Lechat described the visit in a letter to Isaac and Placide some years later: “Minister Decrès came to the Institute, assembled all of the Americans [i.e. the blacks] into the courtyard, and gave them a very harsh speech. The government would no longer pay for their education: They had already done too much for the likes of us.”
As the school’s reputation quickly plummeted, the paying students abandoned it, and by 1802 there were only about two dozen pupils on public scholarship attending: of these, nine were black, six mixed-race, and seven white. At the end of the year, the school abruptly closed its doors. Many students of color were sent to orphanages, while the older ones, though only in their teens, were put into military service as errand boys.
Ten-year-old Ferdinand Christophe, the son of Henri Christophe, one of Saint-Domingue’s top black generals—and the future King Henri I of Haiti—had the misfortune to arrive at the Institution’s gates in 1802, just as it was being dismantled. Taken by the authorities, he was put into an orphanage called La Pitié (“The Merciful”), and the “small fortune” in jewels and gold that he carried to support his education was stolen. The last anyone saw of him, the young man had been turned into a kind of security guard for the orphanage. A woman in 1814 recalled the following incident, witnessed ten years earlier, to a memoirist:
[She] saw a young man standing guard at the gate of La Pitié. Because Mlle Marie had told them about Christophe’s son, they went over to him, crying out, “Here is the son of Christophe.” The young man joyfully said, “Yes it’s me.” But in the same moment a man who was at the gate of La Pitié gave Christophe two powerful blows that made Christophe drop his rifle and fall over, after which it was necessary for him to retreat inside. It was impossible to catch a glimpse of him from this time forward, but it is known that they sent him to learn the trade of shoemaking, requiring him to take it up. Christophe continually refused, saying that his father had sent him to France to get a fine education, not to be a cobbler.
Ferdinand Christophe continued to refuse to take up the manual trade the government had chosen for him. In 1805 he was found dead at the orphanage. He was twelve years old.
ONE of the institutions Napoleon is best remembered for is the Legion of Honor, the first “order of merit” that really deserved the name. Though it took its cues from the monarchic tradition of knighting individuals as a reward for outstanding service, the Legion was genuinely open to men of all professions and backgrounds. It was proclaimed law on May 19, 1802, and even today it remains indelibly associated with the best legacy of Napoleonic France.
General Dumas’s son would later lament that his father died “without even having been made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor—he who had been the hero of the day at Maulde … at Mont Cenis, at the Siege of Mantua, at the bridge of Brixen, at the revolt of Cairo, the man whom Bonaparte had made governor of Treviso and whom he presented to the Directory as the Horatius Cocles of the Tyrol.” (Indeed, I would find a letter to General Dumas from Murat indicating that he would “pass on with pleasure” General Dumas’s own request to be admitted to the Legion.)
But there was an obvious reason Dumas could not have been admitted, even if Napoleon had not personally detested him. On May 20, 1802, the day after creating the Legion of Honor, Napoleon issued another proclamation, one that revealed his true position on slavery in the French Empire. Colonies where the 1794 abolition hadn’t gone into effect—those, like Martinique, which the British had seized during the revolutionary wars and only recently returned to France—were to officially remain in a state of pre-1789 slavery. Though Saint-Domingue and Guadeloupe weren’t explicitly affected, the proclamation included a clause stating that for ten years, “in spite of all previous laws,” all colonies would be subject to new regulations imposed by the central government. The door to the complete reimposition of slavery had been opened. This infamous clause was followed by a series of now forgotten laws that crushed the rights the Revolution had given to men of color within France.
Two weeks after the slavery decree, Napoleon issued a law banning all officers and soldiers of color who had retired or been discharged from the army from living in Paris and the surrounding area. In July, a new order revived the old royal Police des Noirs laws, except now they forbade “blacks, mulattos, and men of color … from entering the continental territory of the Republic under any cause or pretext, unless supplied with special authorization.” And this time the racist laws would be enforced, not merely proclaimed. All those in noncompliance would be held until deported. In such circumstances, the Legion of Honor was a pipe dream.
The following year, Napoleon outlawed marriages between people of different skin colors. The minister of justice wrote to all prefects that it was “the intention of the government that no act of marriage between whites and blacks will be accepted” and that it was their duty to enforce the law. When a mulatto servant in Napoleon’s own household wished to marry a white man, Josephine had to personally intercede with her husband for an exception to the no-mixed-marriages law.
Dumas had been released from the fortress dungeon only to find his world transformed into one. Surreal degradations now menaced him in his own country, as the government methodically restricted, rolled back, and finally eliminated rights for French citizens of color. Less than a year after arriving back in France, General Dumas would need to request a special dispensation to be allowed to stay in his own house in Villers-Cotterêts—part of the zone forbidden to retired military men of color.
The war hero now had to appeal to his former army comrades to pull strings so he wouldn’t be deported.
Once, when Dumas had felt slighted by the army’s failure to give him an important combat posting, he had written an angry letter to the minister of war stating that if he really merited such poor treatment, then he would prove to be “no longer worthy of the cause for which I have a dual interest because of the climate that saw my birth.” This was as close as Dumas ever came to invoking the deepest origins of his zeal in the service of the French Republic. He did not invoke such things now.
IN reading through Dumas’s letters from these years at the archives in the Château de Vincennes, I came across another folder of letters written at the time, by members of the Black Pioneers—a battalion initially made up of some eight hundred prisoners of war from Saint-Domingue and Guadaloupe who had been deported to France and forced to serve in the same military that had invaded and routed their homeland. The side on which they had fought in the complex island conflicts often made little difference. Napoleon shipped them south to Italy, where for years they were given only hard manual labor to do. In French military parlance, “pioneers” signified companies of infantry troops who often did the army’s dirty prep work, building fortifications and digging trenches before the soldiers rushed in.
The Black Pioneers folder was full of letters from demoted black officers. In the same period when Dumas was asking his comrade generals to help him attain some small measure of what he was due, unbeknownst to him, these officers—of much lower rank—were also writing, begging to resume their commands. They and Dumas were experiencing the same betrayal. Starting in 1802, just as Dumas was being released from prison, Napoleon attempted to impose a return to the pre-revolutionary standard of allowing only white officers to command. The folder also contained an order, signed by Napoleon and Berthier, creating segregated infirmaries so that “colored men who will be treated there will be placed in a separate room, so that they have no communications with the White patients.”
Talented men of color were so bereft that even membership in the segregated Black Pioneer companies became fiercely competitive. Looking through the voluminous correspondence in the archives, I read dozens of long and eloquent letters from black soldiers explaining why they should merit a spot in one of the units and how grateful they would be to be so blessed by the generous French state. Often the letters begin, “I find myself stranded in France in a difficult situation. I cannot return to my homeland and am no longer allowed to report to my job.”
The roughly one thousand soldiers who served in this battalion were eventually formed into the so-called Royal African Regiment, which greatly distinguished itself in service in 1805 and 1806. But having enjoyed prestige as “Americans” during the Revolution, black and mixed-race soldiers now found themselves denigrated as “Africans.” As France rejoined the wider world of slaveholding nations, the elevation of nonwhites to positions of power or respect became a dangerous anachronism. In the armies that General Dumas once led, suddenly the very concept of a black soldier commanding white troops was impossible—a black general of division or general-in-chief of an army, unimaginable.
ON July 24, 1802, Marie-Louise bore their third and last child. Alex Dumas would spend the last four years of his life inseparably attached to little Alexandre.
But even in the joy of his son’s birth, General Dumas was reminded of his new fallen status. In his memoir, his son recalls how “before the Egyptian campaign it had been settled that if my mother bore a son, the godparents of this said son were to be Bonaparte and Josephine. But things had changed greatly since then, and my father had no inclination to remind the first consul of the general-in-chief’s promise.”
Instead, two days after the birth, Dumas wrote to an old friend, General Brune:
LIBERTY, EQUALITY.
From the Headquarters of Villers-Cotterêts, 7 Thermidor Year X of the French Republic.
ALEXANDRE DUMAS, General of Division,
To his best friend General Brune,
I hasten to announce, my dear Brune, the happy delivery by my wife of a large baby boy who weighs 10½ pounds, and at 18 inches, you see I hope that if this child has no accidents he will not be a pygmy by age 25. This is not all, my friend, you have to prove yourself to me, to pass muster, my friend, by being the godfather, [along] with my daughter. The matter is not urgent, because the child carries himself well, and my daughter will not be here for a month, when she takes her vacation. I need a prompt response from you, my dear Brune, to know what to expect—farewell, my friend, you have no better one than
Alex Dumas
To this warm note, Brune replied that “a superstition prevents my complying with your request,” and he asked Dumas’s “indulgence” on his having to offer his “sincerest regrets to [Dumas’s daughter Aimée Alexandrine] and to your charming wife.”
Dumas couldn’t help wondering at his friend’s coolness and his refusal to attend. Dumas refused to accept his friend’s rejection. He tried for weeks to get him to come to Villers to be Alexandre’s godfather. But Brune only made excuses. Finally he agreed to be the godfather, but would not come to the ceremony, and so Claude Labouret, the baby’s grandfather, stood in for him.
DUMAS continued to write to Napoleon, offering his services in combat. Dumas’s final appeal asked for a chance—despite his impaired health—to fight England: “As soon as the current war started I have had the honor of twice writing you to offer you my services. Please accept that I once again offer you that service now.” In another letter he’d written, with a glimmer of his old swagger: “Whatever my sufferings and pains, I will always find enough moral force to fly to the rescue of my country at the first request the government sends me.”
The general loved playing with his precocious son, telling him stories of his childhood in Jérémie and pretending there were alligators in the moat of the small castle outside Villers-Cotterêts that the family managed to rent for a time. Though they were outcasts, they were happy together, especially big Alex and little Alexandre, who was described as “a kind of giant” from toddlerhood on, inheriting his father’s prodigious strength, size, and constitution. Even if never again restored to full health, Alex Dumas was capable of physical feats that made a lasting impression on his son. In the memoir, Alexandre recalls how he saw his father emerge after saving a servant from drowning: “It was my father’s naked form I saw, dripping with water; he smiled an almost unearthly smile, as a man may who has accomplished a godlike act, the saving of another man’s life.” As he watched, Alexandre was struck by “my father’s grand form (which looked as though it might have been made in the same mold as that which formed the statues of Hercules or Antinoüs) compared with [the servant’s] poor small limbs.”
“I adored my father. Perhaps, at so early an age, the feeling which today I call love was only a naïve astonishment at that Herculean stature and that gigantic strength I’d seen him display on so many occasions; perhaps it was nothing more than a childish pride and admiration for his braided coat, his tricolor cockade, and his great saber that I could barely lift. But, in spite of all that, even today the memory of my father, in every detail of his body, in every feature of his face, is as present to me as if I had lost him yesterday. No matter what the reasons, I love him today with a love as tender, as deep, and as real as if he had watched over my youth and I had had the happiness to go from childhood to manhood leaning on his powerful arm.”
“On his side, too, my father adored me,” Alexandre wrote. “I have said it, and I don’t know how to say it too often, especially if the dead can hear what is said of them; and though at the end of his life the suffering that he bore tormented him to the point where he could no longer stand any noise or movement in his bedroom, he made an exception for me.”
In 1805 General Dumas’s health took a sharp turn for the worse, and his stomach pains were diagnosed as cancer. He visited a famous doctor in Paris. Afterward, he held a lunch where little Alexandre met Generals Brune and Murat, and Alex asked his old comrades to take care of his family after he was gone. The boy would remember playing with Murat’s sword and Brune’s hat. At the end of the luncheon, “My father embraced Brune, shook Murat by the hand and left Paris the next day, with death in both his body and his heart.”
The novelist also remembered going with his father to pay a visit to Pauline Bonaparte, the most beautiful of Napoleon’s sisters and the young widow of General Leclerc. Father and son went to her château, just outside Villers-Cotterêts, and in the memoir there is the following description:
A woman reclined on a sofa, a young and beautiful woman, very young and very beautiful; so beautiful that even I, a young child, noticed it.… She did not rise when my father entered. She extended her hand and raised her head, that was all. My father wanted to sit by her in a chair; she made him sit at her feet, which she placed on his knees, the toes of her slippers toying with the buttons on his coat.
That foot, that hand, that delicious little woman, white and plump, near that mulatto Hercules, still handsome and powerful in spite of all his suffering, made the most charming picture you could hope to see.
I laughed as I looked at them, and the princess called me to her and gave me a tortoiseshell bonbon box, all inlaid with gold.
I was shocked to see her empty out the bonbons that were inside before she gave me the box. My father made an observation to her. She bent toward his ear, said a few hushed words, and the two began to laugh.
As she bent down, the princess’s white and pink cheek brushed against my father’s brown one, making his skin look darker and hers, more white.
Inside the safe, I found a note inviting “Madame Dumas” to visit “her Imperial Highness the Princess Pauline” at her mansion in Paris. It gave the time, 2 p.m., and the address, but the date was obscured. I thought it was probably from 1807, following General Dumas’s death. Perhaps the princess tried to help the widow and her children. But it’s impossible to know. From the time of the visit to Pauline, Alexandre Dumas would write, “Soon after, my father grew weaker, went out less often, rarely mounted a horse, stayed more in his room, took me on his knees with greater sadness. Once again, all this has since come back to me in glimmers, like things seen in a flash of lightning on a dark night.”
The night of February 26, 1806, the final night of his father’s life, remained illuminated in his mind, surely as his mother described it to him:
“Oh!” he cried, “must a general who at thirty-five was at the head of three armies die at forty in his bed, like a coward? Oh my God! My God! What have I done that you should condemn me so young to leave my wife and children?” …
[The next day], at ten at night, feeling that death was approaching, he asked for [his priest].… It was not a confession that the dying man wanted to make. All his life, my father had never done a single bad thing, committed a single action that could be reproached; perhaps some hatred for Berthier and Napoleon remained at the bottom of his heart.… But all feelings of hatred were suspended in those hours before his death, which were spent in trying to comfort those he was to leave alone in the world, when he had departed from it.
Once, he asked to see me; then, as they were about to get me from my cousin’s, where I had been sent:
“No,” he said. “The poor child is sleeping; don’t wake him up.”
That night, after they’d heard the knock at the door and his cousin had put him to bed again, and before he’d gone back to sleep, the child felt “something like an exhaled breath” pass over his face, and it calmed him. Of that moment, Alexandre Dumas wrote, “It isn’t surprising that my father’s soul, before rising up to heaven, hovered for a second over his poor child, whom he was leaving so bereft of all hope on this earth.”
I found a detailed inventory of General Dumas’s household belongings made the day after his death by a notary, apparently with a view to the family’s outstanding debts, which are also listed in detail. In the middle of a list that included side tables, armchairs, “one pair of firedogs in glazed brass,” and “30 canvas shirts—360 francs,” I found the following entry:
one painting in its black wooden frame representing Horatius Cocles, Roman, estimate—10 francs.
Everything changed for Alexandre when his father died. The pension that was owed General Dumas was withheld and the family was plunged into a poverty that would stretch throughout his childhood.
Marie-Louise supported her children by working in a tobacconist’s shop. The impoverished boyhood Alexandre Dumas writes of pluckily in his memoir must, in fact, have been a depressing and humiliating time. Despite his brilliance, he missed a basic secondary education, for lack of scholarship funds. He believed that the rejection was due to Napoleon’s hatred for his father: “this hatred extended even to me, for in spite of the attempts made on my behalf by my father’s old comrades, I could never gain entrance to any military school or civilian college.”
Alexandre Dumas would continually meet up with men who wanted to pay their respects to his father. One of the first I found a record of had sent Marie-Louise a note, in September 1807, thanking her for her hospitality when he had come to town to call on the general, not realizing he had died. “What a shock to find only the ashes of our common friend. I left Paris in hope of seeing him. That hope was soon covered in tears and regrets. What subject is more dignified than General Dumas? Who … could cherish the beautiful qualities of his soul?” The letter writer, a Monsieur Doumet, reassures Marie-Louise that “his traits and his virtues are reborn in your lovable children.… Your son will resemble his father; he already has the sincerity and the kindness as much as his age permits it.”
Marie-Louise would spend the next decade petitioning the emperor through every possible channel for the minimum of support to which she and her children were entitled. But the first modern-world bureaucrats proved implacable. She paid calls on whichever of Dumas’s colleagues would see her. Her letters in the War Ministry archives are a sad testimony to an individual’s persistence in the face of obdurate officials directed from the very top to ignore her claims. She briefly had hope in 1814, when Napoleon was forced into exile on Elba and she could write the new war minister with candor:
The death of General Dumas left his family without fortune and without any resources or hopes for his widow to receive the pension normally allocated to the widows of generals, and which, by the most unjust exception, has been refused her.… The brave General Dumas, whom the fates of combat had spared, perished in misery and grief, without decoration or military compensation, and victim of Bonaparte’s implacable hatred and of his own tenderheartedness.
Widow Dumas
Villers-Cotterêts, October 2, 1814
Murat and Brune tried—“Brune zealously, Murat halfheartedly,” Dumas’s son wrote—to keep their promise to Dumas to try to help his family. “But it was quite useless.” When one of Napoleon’s generals once tried to bring up the question of General Dumas’s family, the emperor is said to have stamped his foot and said, “I forbid you ever to speak to me of that man.”
MARIE-LOUISE lived till the age of sixty-nine, long enough not only to pass on to Alexandre all her memories of his father but to watch her son achieve international fame and fortune. Ironically, in his novels the writer would capture—perhaps better than any other novelist—the particular mystique Napoleon held for all Frenchmen of the early nineteenth century and, indeed, continues to hold for young readers introduced to him through Dumas novels.
And of course Napoleon is ultimately the man behind Edmond Dantès’s suffering and imprisonment; if not for the innocent task he does on the emperor’s behalf, Edmond would have married his true love, avoided prison, and lived happily ever after. But then there would have been no story.
“Unhappiness cannot but draw tighter the bonds which hold us fast to one another,” General Dumas had written to Marie-Louise as he made his way home. His son has Edmond Dantès express the same sentiment in a letter to his friend at the close of The Count of Monte Cristo: “He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness.… Live then and never forget that until the day when God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these two words—‘Wait and hope.’ ”
Out of the deepest betrayal Alexandre Dumas would weave imagined worlds that resurrected his father’s dreams and the fantastical age of glory, honor, idealism, and emancipation he championed.
“You see, Father,” he writes in his memoir, as if for himself, “I haven’t forgotten any of the memories that you told me to keep. From the time I could think, your memory has lived in me like a sacred lamp, illuminating everything and everyone you ever touched, even though death has taken it away!”
* In another faux-democratic sleight of hand that would set a model for the future, Napoleon submitted his personalized constitution to a plebiscite to receive the stamp of popular approval. With his characteristic impatience, he did not wait for the plebiscite’s results to be tallied before declaring the new constitution in force; but he would return frequently to the plebiscite ruse whenever he wanted to justify some fundamental change in France’s government or law. Even if it was a rubber stamp, it gave him the best excuse for outrageous policy shifts: the people’s will. Napoleon had also learned the value of the press during the Italian and Egyptian campaigns. In December 1799, there were seventy-three independent newspapers and journals publishing in Paris, offering a wide opportunity to broadcast critiques of the government. Within less than a month of proclaiming a constitution to “guarantee the rights of the citizens,” he had closed sixty of them. The Moniteur, the main newspaper of the Revolution since 1789, was allowed to remain as an official mouthpiece of the government.
† Though mandated by the 1794 law for all French territories, slavery had been effectively abolished in only three of them: in French Guyana on the northern edge of South America, on the island of Guadeloupe, and above all on Saint-Domingue, whose massive slave insurrection had precipitated French colonial emancipation to begin with. On many other islands—Martinique, Saint-Lucie, Réunion, Île-de-France, and others—the 1794 emancipation had been blocked, either because those places had been under British occupation, or because slaveholders themselves had successfully repulsed the attempt by the distant government in Paris to impose the new law, as happened in France’s Indian Ocean colonies.