Alexandre Dumas was the most prolific and almost certainly the most popular writer in France in the 18th century. His Three Musketeers are still sought after by readers around the world today. And who doesn’t know the novel about the Count of Monte Cristo? The story of an honest but wrongly imprisoned man who, after escaping from prison, devoted his life to revenge. Dumas found inspiration for the famous Count in his father, whose life story truly resembles an adventure novel.
The son of an impoverished French nobleman and an African slave, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas became one of the most successful military leaders in the service of the Republic during the French Revolution. He was a national hero, so to speak, but you won’t find any monuments to him in Paris. In his prime, he ended up behind bars through a series of unfortunate circumstances, and the revolution he helped to build has since forgotten him. In fact, the Revolution was already gone, hijacked by the greatest warlord in French history.
Caribbean family
Thomas’s father was Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, a Normandy nobleman who, due to poor business decisions, lived a life that was anything but noble. He was penniless most of the time and even his title did not help him to build a decent career. Fortunately, his brother Charles, a successful and resourceful businessman living in the Caribbean, in what is now Haiti, came to his rescue.
Saint-Domingue, as the French called their colony, was considered a place of untold possibilities. In the first half of the 18th century, this Caribbean island was the largest sugar factory in the world. Sugar was a luxury in Europe, where it was extracted from sugar cane, which thrived only under the hot American sun.
Thomas’s uncle Charles was one of those who, with a bit of luck and a lot of guts, got rich on sugar in a few years. Luck is debatable, but there was certainly no shortage of daring in the Dumas family. Charles was, among other things, a smuggler. When France and England became embroiled in another war in the mid-18th century, trade in the Caribbean was banned, but Charles ignored this and continued to trade both sugar and slaves in secret. His smuggling base was a small island with a sonorous name off the west coast of Haiti – Monte Cristo.
When Charles was already a wealthy and respected merchant, he was joined in the Caribbean by his older brother Antoine, the father of our hero. He had hoped to strike it rich himself with the help of a successful relative, but things took a different turn. After ten years of living together, the brothers fell out to the death and Antoine embarked on new adventures.
Earlier, he had stolen three female slaves from his brother, and spent the next few months in the jungle, hiding from justice. He finally settled in Jeremie, which was considered the mulatto capital of the colony. He sold the stolen slaves and used the money to buy a small plantation.
The escaped nobleman had four children in Jeremie. Their mother was Marie-Cessette Dumas, and it is not clear to this day whether she was black or mulatto, only that she was a slave. Antoine simply bought his life companion for “a huge sum”. They raised their children together, but he never married her because it would have hit him hard in the pocket. In the French colonies, there was a slavery law, the Code Noir, the Black Law, which stipulated that a free man had to pay a penalty if he married and had children with his unmarried concubine. In this case, although the husband could also give them their freedom, Antoine did not take this step.
This was not unusual. Indeed, many French people lived a very real family life with a wife and children who were officially slaves to avoid fiscal consequences. Some, for example, freed only the member of the family to whom they were most attached, whether it was the child or the wife. Others believed in the sanctity of marriage and were even willing to pay the penalty for their beliefs.
This has led to the arrival of a number of newly arrived French citizens, who until recently were just commodities like any other. This was particularly noticeable in Jeremie, where there were many shops, taverns and even plantations owned by former slaves.
From slave to count
On 25 March 1762, Thomas-Alexandre, the future hero of the Revolution, was born in Jeremie. He grew up surrounded by the wild nature of the Caribbean. He hunted animals in the jungle with his father and learned to ride. Soon he felt so at home in the saddle that his father could no longer keep up. Thomas was born a horseman and his love of horses later led to an enviable military career.
He and his father also had a special relationship and Thomas could be said to have been his pet. Although this may sound cute, there is a certain tragedy to it. Antoine sold all the other members of his “family”. He sold Marie-Cessette to a Baron of Nantes and soon all traces of her were lost, and he also sold his other three children. In the slave-owning French colony of the 18th century, this was also not too unheard of, but we can assume that his father’s decision was not without consequences for little Thomas.
Antoine made this decision because he urgently needed money to travel to France. In a short space of time, all his French relatives had died, and overnight the entire Pailleterie inheritance fell into his lap and had yet to be officially taken over. Before boarding the ship, he sold his three children and pawned his pet Thomas.
After making all the necessary arrangements in Normandy, he sent money to Saint-Domingue, used it to buy his son and pay his ticket for the transatlantic journey. In the logbook, Thomas-Alexandre was recorded as “slave Alexandre”.
In August 1776, he set foot on European soil for the first time in Le Havre. His father had big plans for him. For the first time in his life, he had enough money to give his son the life of a French nobleman. Sixteen-year-old Thomas quickly adapted to his new surroundings. He attended an excellent academy, learned Latin, read the classics and trained in fencing. He was incredibly strong for his age and almost a head taller than his classmates. He also stood out because of his dark complexion, but at that time Paris was probably one of the most tolerant cities in the world.
Although France was heavily dependent on colonies such as Saint-Domingue, where the entire economy was based on slavery, demands for its abolition had been made since the Enlightenment. The 17th century Black Law also guaranteed French slaves certain rights that were unthinkable in other colonial empires.
Thomas lived on his father’s generous allowance. He had his own servant and an apartment in the centre of Paris. Since his father had inherited the title of Marquis, the former “slave Alexandre” automatically became Count. Father and son were inseparable throughout their lives, but their relationship began to fray when Antoine married his housekeeper. Thomas must have resented him for not having a similar love for his Caribbean companion. It would be hard to argue with him.
When they finally became estranged, Thomas was left without pocket money and had to stand on his own two feet. He knew the rules of good manners and all Plato’s treatises, but he had never worked a day in his life and his career prospects were therefore quite limited. For a young man of his calibre, military service was the only solution.
The unusual soldier
In March 1786, he became a dragoon, a member of a cavalry unit of the French army. He became an ordinary soldier, which was unheard of. There were no noblemen in the French army who were common soldiers, because blue blood automatically conferred the rank of officer. Alexandre made this decision in defiance of his father. He also took his mother’s surname and abandoned the name Thomas. From then on, he was known as Alexandre Dumas. He thus paid tribute to his mother’s memory and at the same time paid a symbolic farewell to his father, who had died just two weeks after his son had joined the army. Alexandre was so angry with him that he did not attend the funeral.
In peacetime, the Dragoons were in fact the armourers. They roamed the French countryside hunting down smugglers and bandits who harassed the helpless population. Alexander’s life was not particularly exciting. He spent most of his days in the barracks and occasionally jumped on horseback to chase the villains.
But soon everything turned upside down. For several years, the Treasury had been empty because of King Louis XIV’s unwise decisions, and food was becoming scarce in the countryside. Discontent spread throughout the country at the incompetence and injustice of the regime. The pent-up anger of the oppressed sections of the population quickly turned into a spontaneous revolt of unprecedented proportions, and in July 1789, revolution broke out in France.
King Louis XVI tried his best to preserve the thousand-year-old monarchy, but finally had to give in to the revolutionary demands of the angry masses. Power passed into the hands of the people, or rather their most ardent representatives, gathered in the National Assembly, later renamed the Constituent Assembly. Dumas immediately sided with them. For the child of an African slave, “liberty, equality and fraternity” were not just high-flown words. Despite being a nobleman, he believed in the power and ideals of the revolution.
After the fall of the Bastille, the countryside was engulfed in a wave of unrest in which peasants sought to settle scores with their former masters. The new revolutionary authorities tried to tame the rampaging mobs, who pillaged villages and burned castles. The dragoons were charged with quelling the revolts, no longer serving the king but the people, or rather the revolution.
In August 1789, Alexandre Dumas and his troops entered Villers-Cotterêts, a small town north-east of Paris. It was not the first time he had hunted bandits, but this time he was swinging a sabre in the name of the Revolution. There he met Marie-Louise Labouret, the daughter of the innkeeper where the dragoons were billeted. They soon fell in love, but marriage had to wait, as his father promised to give his blessing only when Alexandre had reached the rank of guide. Little did the innkeeper know then that his future son-in-law would spectacularly exceed his expectations.
From freedom …
At the same time, history was being made in Paris. The Constituent Assembly abolished feudalism and stripped the nobility and clergy of their privileges. At the end of August, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was adopted, which became the foundation of a new social order in which all men were to be equal. A new and different France was beginning to emerge from the ruins of the old regime, but the future had never been more uncertain.
Years of instability followed, marked by all kinds of rebellions, attempted coups and a constant struggle for power between different political forces. The revolution was unpredictable and bloody, but many were prepared to die for the humanist ideals to which it appealed.
In Vienna and London, they were initially delighted to see France plunged into the chaos of the Revolution. But when King Louis XIV and Queen Marie Antoinette were guillotined in 1793, Europe’s monarchs realised they were no longer joking. France suddenly became the greatest threat to stability on the old continent. Not least because in Paris they decided that the time had come to export the ideals of the Revolution. The first target was what is now Belgium, which was then in Habsburg hands. Citizen Dumas also helped to spread liberty, equality and fraternity among France’s northern neighbours.
Before that, he was a troublemaker and a bandit hunter, but he also excelled in war. He drew attention to himself by virtually single-handedly disabling and capturing 12 Austrian soldiers. From then on, his career only went upwards. The Revolution needed reliable soldiers, and Dumas proved with his courage that he could be counted on in Paris.
After his success in Flanders, he was so famous that he could choose which unit to join. He chose the Black Legion, made up of freed slaves from all corners of the empire. He was promoted to lieutenant-colonel, thus satisfying the request of the father of his chosen one. After three years, he was finally able to marry. In accordance with the new times, the newlyweds did not appear before a priest, but before a registrar. French churches were then already hung with cockades instead of crosses and held political club meetings instead of masses.
The path to the guillotine
In the autumn of 1783, the Jacobins, radical left-wingers led by Maximilien Robespierre, took the reins of the revolution. France was then on the brink of civil war. The unsustainable situation led to a series of uprisings in the countryside against the new authorities. In addition, the European monarchies had formed a coalition with the aim of suppressing the revolution before it could splash across the French borders.
The new republic was opposed by mighty Austria, Prussia, Great Britain, Russia and virtually every other European monarchy. Robespeierre responded to internal and external threats with violence. A period of terror began in which any dissent from the decisions of the Jacobins was considered treason against the revolution. In less than a year, more than 15,000 people were guillotined.
During the Reign of Terror, every civil servant was replaceable. This was also true for the senior staff in the army. Commanders who did not comply with the demands of the Paris radicals on the battlefield were dismissed and, in some cases, executed. The flexibility of jobs, as modern economists would call it, also offered an opportunity to Alexandre Dumas. In a very short space of time, he rose from being a common dragoon to the rank of lieutenant-colonel, then brigadier-general, until finally he was given the responsibility of leading an army of 50,000 men.
In the winter of 1794, the child of the sunny Caribbean was relocated to the snow-covered Alpine peaks on the present-day French-Italian border. Alexandre Dumas became Commander-in-Chief of the Alpine Army.
The trumpet on the roof of Europe
It was a thankless job. In less than a year, the Alpine Army changed four commanders, none of whom managed to break through the enemy’s defensive positions. At best, failure would have meant the end of Dumas’s career.
For the Jacobins in Paris, the Alpine offensive had both strategic and symbolic significance. The Revolution demanded that the French tricolour should fly on the highest peaks in Europe.The 3000-metre Mont Cenis and the Great St Bernard Passes, which were part of the kingdom of the Savoyards, Habsburg allies, were also the gateway to the rich Po Valley. In the event of victory, Turin and Milan would be within reach.
Dumas was under a lot of pressure from day one. From Paris, he was told without hesitation that he had to launch an offensive as soon as possible, no matter what it cost. But the snow and the low temperatures would have made an attack on the well-fortified mountain passes tantamount to suicide. Dumas delayed as long as possible, risking being summoned to the capital to plead his case, like his predecessors. The commander of the Alpine Army was walking on thin ice.
It was not until April 1794 that the weather smiled on the Revolution. “Captain Dumas led his men to the top, from position to position, all the way to the artillery fort. The difficult terrain and the enemy fire only served to fuel him. He scaled the wall and took the fort. 1700 prisoners and 40 pieces of artillery were taken,” we read in the report on the offensive. Thanks to Dumas, the roof of Europe was in the hands of the Revolution.
Alexandre Dumas’ exploits in the Alps made him the most famous commander in the service of the Revolution, but he received an invitation to report to Paris as soon as possible. The Jacobins resented him for delaying the offensive and ignoring their orders.
Fortunately, the situation in Paris had changed dramatically before Dumas arrived in the capital. In July 1794, Robespierre also ended up under the guillotine and the terror was over. The fanatical Jacobins were replaced by more moderate forces. Despite the fact that the Revolution was experiencing one victory after another in its wars with the European monarchies, the situation at home was still very unstable.
Especially in the west of the country, in the Vendée region, where a major revolt against the Paris authorities has broken out. Dumas spent the next few months again as a gunman. For the locals, hostile to everything coming out of Paris, he was the only republican they respected, because he refused to allow his soldiers to loot and to take revenge on civilians. His sense of justice and his mild character were rare in those savage times.
The most famous islander of the revolution
In the autumn of 1796, the Revolution sent him back to the battlefield. He was transferred to the Italian Army, fighting against Habsburg forces in the north of the Apennine Peninsula. France had already occupied the Austrian Netherlands and dealt a heavy blow to Prussia and Spain. The Revolution was destroying everything in front of it and the Habsburgs, who controlled northern Italy, were the last bastion of old Europe.
This time, Dumas was given the role of second violin. The commander-in-chief of the Italian army was one of the most influential men in the country, Napoleon Bonaparte.
Like Dumas, the democratic chaos of the revolution gave him a meteoric career. In less than ten years, he rose from an anonymous lieutenant in provincial Corsica to one of the highest positions in the French army. But the similarities between them end there. One could say that Dumas was merely an above-average conscientious civil servant. Politics was alien to him, because he saw the world through military eyes.
Napoleon, however, had an excellent knowledge of the laws of politics, which probably served him even better in life than his knowledge of the skills of warfare. While Dumas was married to the daughter of a country innkeeper, Napoleon married the ex-wife of the President of the National Assembly and one of the most important military commanders of the Revolution.
The two islanders were also quite different in character. Despite coming from a family of delinquents and heartless slave-owners, Dumas was, by some miracle, an incredibly honest and principled man. While many commanders got rich during the war, he was publicly praised on several occasions for having put every spoil of war “into the hands of the revolution”. Dumas, in his simplicity, believed in liberty, equality and fraternity. There is probably no point in wasting words on Napoleon’s ambition. For him, revolution was more often than not the tool with which he paved the way to immortality.
Their relationship began to fray as soon as Dumas arrived on the Apennine peninsula in November 1796. Much of Piedmont and Lombardy was already in French hands. The soldiers of the Revolution, however, behaved more like bandits than liberators. Hundreds of works of art disappeared from Milan’s museums at that time, and ordinary people were not spared. Farmers were left without crops, wealthy citizens without money. The war was long over, but the rapes, ill-treatment and looting continued. Dumas repeatedly expressed his disapproval to the Commander-in-Chief, but it was of little use.
The Black Devil
The next time they clashed was in January 1797, when the French army besieged Austrian forces in Modena, a strategically very important city halfway between Venice and Milan. Both sides were waiting for reinforcements, as the balance of forces was even.
The Austrians were the first to approach the city walls, but were routed by a cavalry unit led by Dumas before they could come to the aid of their beleaguered comrades. The scales were finally tipped in favour of the French and a few days later the white flag flew over Modena. Alexandre Dumas had once more secured victory for the Revolution.
In his report on the capture of Mantua, Napoleon praised every commander who took part in the battle by name, but he did not mention Dumas. This wounded his military pride. His soldiers were also angry and sent a letter to Paris praising the courage of their commander. Dumas fell down the career ladder as a result, but he even managed to turn this humiliation to his advantage. He was now in command of a small cavalry unit and, as a former dragoon, he excelled in this role.
Meanwhile, the front has moved into the mountain passes of the Dolomites, where barbarians once invaded the Roman Empire from the north. In 1797, however, the French were pushing the Austrians in the opposite direction, towards Tyrol and onwards as far as Vienna.
In the Dolomites, Dumas proved that he is still a great frontline rider. In the saddle, sabre in hand, he was second to none. After he single-handedly incapacitated a small company of Austrian cavalrymen on a bridge over the Eisack River, he was nicknamed “der shwarze Teufel”, the black devil, by his enemies.
At that time, Napoleon also acknowledged his contribution to the victory and bestowed the title on him. He named him Horace Kokles of Tyrol, after the ancient Roman commander who, on a bridge over the Tiber, defeated Etruscan forces trying to break through to the Eternal City. Napoleon must have realised that Dumas, because of his nature, was no threat to his ambitions.
In the autumn of 1797, the French overwhelmed the Austrians and drove them from the Apennine Peninsula. It was a great victory for the Revolution and an even greater one for Napoleon, who received a triumphant reception on his return to Paris. Thanks to him, France won virtually all the wars in which it took part. All the old European monarchies that had resisted the progressive ideals of the Revolution were defeated. All but one. Napoleon, who was already the most powerful man in Europe at that time, therefore began to prepare a new conquest.
Exit to the unknown
In the spring of 1798, Dumas received a letter asking him to report immediately to Toulon, a port city on the Côte d’Azur. On arrival, he saw thousands of soldiers and sailors loading ships with animals, weapons and enough food to feed a medium-sized French city.
At the end of March, the huge fleet set sail from Toulon, but no one knew where they were going except Napoleon and a few of his closest colleagues. It was only when they arrived in Malta that the Commander-in-Chief revealed his plan. Egypt was to be the destination of the expedition. By conquering this Turkish province, Napoleon wanted to strike a blow at the commercial interests of Great Britain, the only country that had not yet felt the crushing force of the Revolution. Egypt was the crossroads of British trade routes leading to the Orient.
The decision to abolish it was a major strategic mistake. In the land of the pyramids, Napoleon suffered the first defeat of his glittering career. He misjudged the political, social and, not least, climatic situation in Egypt. In addition, the British fleet, led by Admiral Horatio Nelson, was on his heels all along, uncovering his secret plan. Just a few months after the French landed in Alexandria, the British destroyed almost all their ships. Napoleon and his army were virtually trapped in Egypt, but the march of conquest towards Cairo continued.
Napoleon gave the command of the French cavalry forces to his old comrade Dumas, who, like the expedition’s objective, was not a little surprised. He knew Dumas’s military skills well, but as a resourceful man, he also took advantage of his skin colour. He was sure that the locals would be more receptive to talking to a black man. He was right, but he probably did not like the fact that they mistakenly thought that it was the tall, stocky Dumas who was the commander-in-chief of the French army, not him.
Clash in the desert
This time, however, it was not a wounded self-esteem that was to blame for their renewed and final conflict, but rather differences over the course of the expedition or the expedition’s rationale. Dumas was not the only one who wondered in whose name the French soldiers, dressed in woollen uniforms and equipped with 20-kilogram rucksacks, were marching through the desert and dying one after the other. Dehydration, exhaustion and disease have mowed down almost as many Frenchmen as Turkish sabres. Are they in Egypt because of a revolution or because of a man who has had power go to his head? In the tents where the officers were staying, similar questions could be heard more and more often.
The Commander-in-Chief soon heard of the dissatisfaction and one evening he visited Dumas in his tent and threatened him, “You have incited a rebellion. Be careful what you do. Even your 185 centimetres will not prevent me from having you shot.”
Napoleon did not suffer disobedience, and although he was officially only one of the top commanders in the French army, the traits of a future dictator were already showing. Dumas continued to command the cavalry for some time, and was as conscientious as ever in his duties, but he wanted to go home, as he was no longer convinced that he was fighting for the ideals he believed in.
With Napoleon’s permission, he went to Alexandria, boarded the Belle Maltaise and sailed for France in March 1799. The journey, which should have taken a few weeks at worst, dragged on for two years.
Pitch
Dumas was very unlucky. After a few days of sailing, his rickety ship started leaking water and he was forced to sail to the nearest port. At that time, much of the Mediterranean was in French hands, but Dumas was again out of luck. He sailed to Taranto, a port on the heel of the Italian boot, where only a few weeks before the French trumpet had been flying.
But when the Belle Maltaise dropped anchor in the local harbour, power was in the hands of the King of Naples, a fierce opponent of the Revolution and an enemy of everything French. Dumas was rounded up and thrown into prison.
He spent the next two years in a spacious but humid cell. It was in his father’s captivity that his son, then unborn, found the inspiration for his Count. Unlike the literary hero, who ended up behind bars as the victim of a conspiracy, the real Count was merely the victim of unfortunate circumstances.
Dumas was then thirty-eight years old and still in good physical condition. He had won many victories on the battlefield and was considered a hero in his homeland. Everyone knew the black commander who had fought on behalf of the revolution. It was therefore all the more tragic that he was forgotten in France. Everyone except Marie-Louise, his wife.
