When Hugues arrived in June 1789 he could not locate Robespierre, but one of that leader’s friends, knowing of the invitation, introduced the newcomer to a powerful philosophical club, the Société des Amis de Noirs, whose revolutionary thinkers were delighted to find someone who had firsthand knowledge of the colonies and the problems related to slavery. Hugues was lionized, gave a series of explanatory speeches, proved himself to be at least as advanced in his practical thinking as they were in their speculative analyses, and marched with them on 14 July 1789 when they celebrated the fall of the Bastille. Late that night, when he finally went to bed with a young woman who had marched beside him screaming at the police, he told her in tired, almost dreamlike sentences: ‘It was fated that I should come to Paris. Great things are about to happen and men like me will be needed.’
His prediction came true dramatically, for when he finally did meet Robespierre, then on his bloody ladder to ascendancy, the fiery leader embraced him almost as an equal. And when the new government which had replaced King Louis XVI, the Legislative Assembly, decided to send a French army to St.-Domingue to pacify an island disturbance which threatened to interrupt the orderly flow of sugar to European markets, Hugues was asked to brief the commissioner who would be taking the troops to the island. He submitted such a perceptive oral report that the leaders of the government heard about it and marked him for preferment:
‘General-Commissioner, you’ll find three nations in St.-Domingue. The white French, who have all the apparent power; the mulattoes, who hope to inherit it if the French leave; and the blacks, who could possess it if they can ever organize themselves. No matter how large a French army you call in to help you, you’ll never have enough soldiers if you ally yourself only with the whites. If you can arrange a union of interest between the whites and mulattoes, you might achieve … well, at best perhaps a temporary truce.
‘But if you want a long-range peace in that island which I know so intimately, it must be based fundamentally on the blacks, with concessions to both the other groups. Failing that, I see only continued revolution in the years ahead, especially when the island hears about what’s happening here in France.’
The commissioner asked: ‘Couldn’t a union of white interest, mulattoes and a determined French army preserve peace and keep the sugar flowing?’ and Hugues said impatiently: ‘You’d never have an army big enough … or healthy enough. These are hot lands, Commissioner, and fever knocks down more men than bullets do.’
The commissioner did not appreciate such advice, and after Hugues had left the room he said to an aide: ‘What could you expect from a barber who runs a whorehouse? Probably got his ideas about black power from some African slave he’d been sleeping with.’
After this rebuff Hugues remained in shadows, living on the few coins he could scrounge from his revolutionary friends, but after January 1793, when the king was beheaded and terror began to grip the boulevards, his peculiar talents were recognized by Robespierre, who assigned him the job of whipping into line the smaller towns surrounding Paris. Then the barber, reinforced by a traveling guillotine which could be disassembled and packed onto a small cart, had the opportunity of revealing a long-dormant aspect of his character: mercilessness. Showing no emotion and indulging in no personal display, this extremely ordinary man marched his grisly entourage from one little town to the next, following identical procedures, which he exhibited first in Brasse, some twenty miles southwest of Paris. Accompanied only by two officials in their tricorn hats, he halted at the edge of town his entourage of cart, two carpenters and the two constables, walked slowly into the rural town of seven hundred, and without making a great fuss, demanded to see the mayor: ‘Orders of the National Convention. I want everyone in your town assembled in the square immediately.’ And when this order was obeyed, he indicated that local spies who had been identified long before should aid the two constables in keeping the citizens together.
Then Hugues walked slowly back to where his other men waited, signaled to them, and they brought their creaking cart drawn by two oxen into the center of the square, where he directed them in the fascinating process of reassembling their guillotine. First the two towers were brought upright, the ones that would guide the dreadful knife in its fall, then the supporting structure to keep the towers erect, then the platform on which the condemned would kneel, then the curved part into which the neck would fit and the movable piece that would hold neck and shoulders firm, and lastly the big, shining knife itself, heavy and swift and final. A test drop using a head of cabbage having satisfied Hugues that the miraculous machine was in working order, he signaled for his spies to point out the wealthiest landowner in the district and any others who might be assumed to be enemies of the new regime, and these frightened people, women among them, were immediately segregated and placed under armed guard.
Then, with a speed which seemed incredible to the terrified watchers, Hugues said, in a low voice which only a few of the watchers could hear: ‘Let the accused be brought forward,’ and in these opening moments of his performance he always liked it best if the most powerful representative of the old regime was dragged before him, some petty nobleman who had been ostentatious in the exercise of his prerogatives or some landowner fat from the produce of his many fields. On this day he was pleased, for when he asked in his low, menacing voice: ‘And who is this prisoner?’ one of his spies shouted accusingly: ‘The Compte Henri de Noailles!’ and when Hugues continued: ‘And what are the charges against him?’ any impartial listener would have been aghast at the meanness and lack of specificity as the count’s accusers poured forth their accumulation of petty grievances:
‘He was always an enemy of the people.’
‘He let his pigs roam in my garden.’
‘He made us work on feast days and paid low wages.’
Raising aloft both hands to stanch the flow of charges, Hugues said in a sepulchral voice: ‘He is condemned!’ and the quivering wretch, too frightened to comprehend fully what was happening, was dragged by the constables to the guillotine and up its three steps to the fatal platform. There the carpenters took charge, bound his hands behind his back, forced him onto his knees, and brought his head forward so that his neck fitted into the curved portion of the block. With a noisy creaking of wood against wood, the upper bar was brought into play, pinning the neck fast. Then, slowly, one of the carpenters cranked a windlass, dragging the immense slanted knife high aloft in the twin grooves of the tower. When it was in position, Hugues addressed the crowd: ‘This is the punishment that overtakes all enemies of France,’ and with an upraising of his right hand he signaled the carpenters to release the knife, which fell with silent swiftness onto the exposed neck and with such awful force that the head rolled away while the severed neck gushed blood.
In each small town he visited, Hugues liked to guillotine three prominent citizens on the first day; he had learned that this brought the whole area to attention and made his inquisition of the remainder easier, for each man was eager to testify against his neighbors before they testified against him. His procedures, swift and remorseless and certain, caused two different reports concerning his work to be sent to Robespierre:
Hugues is a tyrant. He makes no pretense at a legal trial. He absolutely never finds innocent anyone charged hastily by locals. And he leaves behind a sense of shock which may in time work against our general aims.
But a second report represented the majority of judgment on his work in the near provinces:
The great virtue of the way Hugues conducts his raids, for that is what they are, is that he works swiftly, never postures to bring attention to himself, and appears so remorseless and inevitable that he seems to speak with the authority of the entire Convention. He sweeps in and out like some inevitable storm, leaving nothing to be angry at.
He has only one weakness, but in time it could undo him. He seems to have an insatiable desire for women, and in town after town he grabs onto the first one available. He finish
es his guillotine at dusk, eats a big dinner, and is in bed with some local lass an hour later. It is rumored that he wins their favors by threatening them with his guillotine if they do not comply, or equally effective, threatening the neck of their husband or son. One day someone may shoot him or pierce him with a rapier.
Robespierre read these reports in September 1793, and thought: How effectively the barber gives his haircuts. I do wish I had a dozen more like him in Lyons and Nantes. These were two strongholds of Royalists where shortly an appalling number of resisters would be slain in ways far less neat and effective than those utilized by Hugues and his traveling guillotine. Ten thousand would die in Lyons in mass murders of the wildest frenzy involving all sorts of excesses, fifteen thousand in Nantes while Hugues plodded along, methodically lopping off the heads of his eight and ten, day after day, with never an uprising in protest. ‘The man’s a genius,’ Robespierre told his associates, and when in mid-October, Queen Marie Antoinette, that foolish, giddy thing, was to be beheaded, Hugues was invited back to Paris to participate in the celebrations that followed. It was during this holiday that Robespierre intimated to him that a more important assignment was in the offing. Since he did not say what, Hugues returned to his deadly travels and lovemaking, assured that his efforts toward freedom were appreciated in Paris. Then, at the close of that frightful year, came the communication he had been awaiting:
Citizen Hugues, in the revered name of the Cult of Reason you are ordered to proceed immediately to the Port of Rochefort, assume command of the ships and troops assembled there and sail to our Island of Guadeloupe, where you will serve as Agent Particulier, our Commissioner in Charge, with one responsibility. See that this island remains in French hands. Your exemplary work in the environs of Paris satisfies us that you are equal to this important promotion.
Repairing at once to Rochefort, a tiny Atlantic harbor on the Atlantic between Nantes in the north and Bordeaux to the south, Hugues learned to his disgust that his supposed fleet consisted of two overage frigates, a corvette, two small vessels and two lumbering cargo ships with exactly 1,153 poorly trained farmers as troops. When he complained, the harbormaster assured him: ‘Not to worry. Ship arrived last week from Guadeloupe. Island’s safe in our hands. All you have to do is reinforce our ships and troops already in command.’
The harbormaster was right; so were the officers from the trading ship recently arrived from Guadeloupe, for when they left their island it was still French. What they could not know was that shortly after they sailed, Admiral Oldmixon leading a strong British force had stormed ashore, captured the island, and dug powerful emplacements for his guns and fortifications for his thousands of hardened troops. The St.-Domingue barber and brothelkeeper was heading into a hornet’s nest of which he was totally unaware.
Nevertheless, he was nervous, for a cart which he had dispatched from Paris well before he left had not yet arrived, and it looked as if he might have to sail without this precious cargo. ‘Can we delay two more days?’ he pleaded with the captains of his ships, but they said, properly: ‘Our job is to avoid British warships. We sail as planned.’ To Hugues’ relief, at dawn on the last day the big cart rumbled onto the dock to deliver its seven crudely wrapped packages.
There was much speculation as to what kind of precious cargo might have warranted such concern, and the sailors who struggled to bring the items aboard made many guesses, until one farm boy, more daring than the rest, furtively tore open the end of one package and found himself facing an immense steel blade.
‘Mon Dieu!’ he whispered. ‘A guillotine.’
It would be difficult to guess who was the more astonished that bright June day—Hugues, who found his island occupied by the enemy, or Oldmixon, who saw this ragtag armada heading his way to do battle. The odds in favor of the English were overwhelming: at sea, some twenty battle-tested ships against seven nondescripts; on land, 10,000 men against 1,153, plus control of the civil government thanks to the cooperation of Royalists like Paul Lanzerac. Of course, Oldmixon could not summon all his ships at once and many detachments of his troops were scattered among lesser islands, but the force confronting Hugues was not merely intimidating, it was terrifying.
Too uninformed on warfare to realize that he had no chance of winning, Hugues ordered his little ships to clear the harbor, which amazingly they did, whereupon he led his troops ashore in a charge three times as valiant as Oldmixon had ever seen before, and after unbelievable heroics the Hugues forces had recaptured that half of the island. An English colonel said later: ‘This French barber who had never read a book on tactics was too stupid to know he couldn’t win, so he won.’
The first thing Hugues did on taking possession of Point-à-Pitre was to draft a report to the Convention back in Paris. In it he described himself as ten times braver than he had been, which was brave enough, and the message was so inspiring that the authorities caused it to be published in a Paris broadsheet illustrated with a fine woodcut showing Hugues, saber in hand, leading a charge into the very muzzles of the British guns. It was entitled: SANGFROID INTRÉPIDE DE VICTOR HUGUES, COMMISSAIRE DU GOUVERNEMENT À LA GUADELOUPE.
On 16 Floreal of the year 2 of the Revolution the brave Victor Hugues led his valiant Frenchmen against horrendous odds. Though there was no hope of victory, Hugues and his men fought like lions, but they were overwhelmed. At the moment of maximum peril an English voice was heard to shout: ‘Surrender!’ but the ever-brave Victor Hugues cried back immediately: ‘No! We will defend ourselves to the death!’ It was this admirable response that enabled the French under the gallant leadership of the masterful Victor Hugues to recapture Guadeloupe from the English invaders and return it to the Glory of France. Brave Victor Hugues!
Both English and French reporters testified that Hugues actually did these things; with his few Frenchmen he defeated an enormously superior enemy, but in one statement his admirers were wrong: he did not charge ashore. When the battle was over he walked ashore like some great, detached conqueror humble in victory and weighed down by his responsibilities as Agent Particulier. Retreating quickly to his anonymous look and posture, he represented to the citizens of Point-à-Pitre the picture of an undistinguished Frenchman of thirty-two, slightly overweight, slightly shorter than they might have expected in a conqueror, with a kind of sandy hair, pocked face, very thin legs, long arms and hooded eyes which kept darting about as if to intercept any would-be assassin.
By the time he came ashore, Hugues was overcome by an inner determination of tremendous force to be the revolutionary governor of this precious island that had strayed so far from principles which now governed France. And the citizenry of Point-à-Pitre would have been terrified had they realized what the seven huge packages he had brought with him contained.
His men started unloading the packages at two in the afternoon, lugging each piece to the sunlit square in front of the House of Lace, and while this was being done Hugues was following the routine which had served him so well in the little towns around Paris. Assembling the island’s revolutionary spies, he inspected their lists of Royalist names, flicked them with an official tick of his right forefinger, and said: ‘Arrest them all.’ But before the men could go about their task, aided by armed sailors, he asked: ‘And who is the banker? The richest plantation owner?’ and when they were identified, he said. ‘Be sure to fetch them. And who has been the most outstanding Royalist?’ and when this was agreed upon among the spies, he said: ‘That one we want for sure.’
At about a quarter to five that first afternoon the guillotine was placed at the center of the square, and when practice drops of the great knife proved its good working order, an awful hush fell over the crowd of watchers, for prior to this they had only heard of this monstrous machine as it operated in distant Paris and had never dreamed that it might one day appear on their island.
‘You must hurry,’ a local spy warned Hugues. ‘There’s no twilight here in the tropics. Six o’clock it’s night, just like that.??
?
‘I know, I know,’ Hugues retorted, but added: ‘You’ll see. This will be a twilight to remember. All we need, fifteen, sixteen minutes,’ and he signaled for the first batch of prisoners to be brought forward. When they were, Solange Vauclain, watching from a spot not far from Hugues, uttered such an agonized cry that he had to turn to see where it came from, and he looked into the eyes of the most dazzling woman he had seen in many months: tall, face like a Raphael Madonna, graceful even in the way she brought her two hands to her chin in horror at what she was seeing, and gifted with that rare quality that makes men hesitate and look a second time.
‘Who is that one?’ Hugues asked, and a mulatto, who had participated in the earlier riots but who had now turned spy for the revolutionaries, whispered: ‘Name’s Solange. Daughter of a white planter the rebels killed and that black woman you just released from jail.’
‘And why did this Solange cry out?’ and the spy whispered: ‘Because she grew up with those two,’ and he pointed to where Paul and Eugénie Lanzerac stood among the first group to be executed, and it seems preposterous to say, but in the very instant when this cold, bloodthirsty man saw the Lanzerac woman, more desirable in her peculiar French way than even Solange, his warped mind devised a battle plan: he would have both these women.
A sailor from the ships beat out a drum roll, an assistant to Commissioner Hugues lifted a sheet of paper closer to his eyes and read: ‘Plantation owner Philippe Joubert, you have stolen sugar that belonged to the people, you have mistreated your slaves, and you have declared yourself an enemy of the Revolution. You are condemned to death.’ And the terrified man was dragged to the well-used platform, brought to his knees, and strapped into the neck restraint. The drum sounded, almost softly, the sun sank lower in its own swift descent, and down came the knife in its awful rush, striking the exposed neck with such a powerful slicing force that Joubert’s head rolled into the street, where a sailor lifted it from the paving blocks and tossed it into a basket.