‘Paul Lanzerac,’ the man with the list shouted, and two sailors rushed him to the execution area. He was twenty-four that June evening, recipient of the best education that France provided, and possessor of a mind and character and the kind of precious talent that would have proved invaluable to the nation. Yet here he stood, listening to the charges against him: ‘You have tried to defeat the Revolution by bringing a new and foolish king to the throne. You have mistreated slaves and you have misused public property. You are condemned to death!’ And brutal hands dragged him up onto the platform and fixed the wooden frame about his shoulders.
But before the deadly knife could fall, Solange uttered another scream, broke through the ranks of sailors protecting the execution area, and sped to the guillotine, where she threw her arms about the imprisoned head and showered its lips with the kisses she had been denied during the years she had loved the prisoner. The sailors would have dragged her away contemptuously had not Victor Hugues, executioner extraordinary, held up his hand: ‘Let her say farewell,’ and the hushed crowd heard her cry: ‘Paul, we have always loved you.’ Hugues realized that these were strange words, but he also knew that she spoke for the town and all of Guadeloupe, and that since they loved this brilliant young man, it was even more imperative that he be removed with theatrical effect.
‘Take her away,’ he said without any ugliness in his voice, and when this was done, he gave the signal, the knife fell, and the fairest head in the islands rolled on the cobblestones.
Now came a series of sharp commands, and Eugénie Lanzerac was hauled forth, the list of crimes her dead father was supposed to have committed was read, and she was thrown down upon the boards leading to the neck restraint. But now a real dilemma developed, for Solange, numbed from watching the death of Paul Lanzerac, simply could not allow her dearest and truest friend to be executed, so she broke free, clambered onto the platform, and threw herself upon Eugénie’s prostrate body with the cry: ‘Take me, not her,’ and she clung so tightly that she could not be dislodged and something drastic had to be done.
The mechanics working the guillotine looked at the chief executioner as if to ask: ‘Shall we let the knife fall?’ and Hugues, almost automatically, said: ‘Stay the knife. Release them,’ and the men tending the rope that would free the blade for its terrible descent asked: ‘Free both of them?’ and Hugues said: ‘Yes.’
Before natural darkness possessed the beautiful square, moral darkness obscured the place, for in rapid-fire order the three young horsemen who had accompanied Paul and Solange on their excursions into the countryside were dragged to the execution block and strapped down to greet the fall of the hideous blade. By nightfall, when the five executions of the first round were completed, with the basket of heads left at the foot of the guillotine for the townsmen to see, Hugues complimented the men who had conducted the brief trials and efficient executions, issued orders for the next series on the morrow, and announced quietly, ‘I’ll take that one,’ and he pointed to the House of Lace, from which Eugénie was summarily evicted, while her husband’s executioner moved in with a young white woman who accompanied him in obedience to orders delivered by one of his assistants: ‘Attend Citizen Hugues or you’ll be next on his machine.’
The four years of the Hugues dictatorship, 1794–1798, were marked by extreme brutality, excellent statesmanship, liberal social legislation far ahead of its time, and the dictator’s incessant chasing after women.
He conducted his extirpation of the upper class rapidly and effectively. He hauled his portable guillotine into all corners of the populous eastern wing of the island, erected it at central points to which he summoned anyone with wealth, land, slaves or suspected Royalist tendencies and chopped off their heads in public displays that became something like sporting events or rural celebrations.
A hundred leaders died in this manner in the first weeks, seven hundred by the end of the first year, and finally, more than a thousand of the island’s finest citizens, the ones on whom the future of Guadeloupe would have depended. All vanished, their heads in baskets, and when that mode of execution proved too cumbersome, they were lined up in tens and scores and shot.
Since it was too difficult to lug the guillotine to the western wing of the gold-green butterfly, executions there took not only the form of mass shootings but also public hangings, with the rabble cheering as their so-called betters danced wildly in the air, and there were outbursts of vengeance in which clubs and rakes and pitchforks were utilized. This half of the island also suffered an almost complete depopulation of its leaders, including priests and nuns who had represented and defended the old regime. Never did the killing wane while Hugues was Commissioner.
His lust for savage revenge knew no rational bounds and was sometimes carried to ridiculous extremes, as with the body of General Thomas Dundas. In the months just before Hugues’ arrival, when the English captured the island, the ground troops supporting Admiral Oldmixon had been commanded by a gallant officer of illustrious reputation, Major General Thomas Dundas, scion of a Scottish family whose numerous sons had illuminated the history of both Scotland and Ireland. Among members of the family were: Baron Amesbury, Lord Arniston, Viscount Melville, let alone the many generals, lord chief justices and other honored positions that normally fall to the members of a great and distinguished family.
Major General Dundas was no military flunky, but despite his careful upbringing, or perhaps because of it, he had acquired the harrumphing, no-nonsense, teach-’em-their-place superior attitude of a Scottish country gentleman. At any rate, any human being with a drop of color in his blood or skin which betrayed ‘a touch of the tarbrush’ was both beneath contempt and outside the law so far as Dundas was concerned. How ironic it was, therefore, that a few short months after his triumphal conquest of Guadeloupe he fell victim to a disease and died surrounded by black and mulatto nurses who did their best to cool his fevers.
He was buried in the islands, his grave marked by a small stone bearing an inscription in English which informed the world that here rested a gallant British hero, but when Victor Hugues came upon the stone following his occupation of the island, he flew into a blind fury and issued a proclamation, which said:
Liberté, Égalité, Droit et Fraternité. It is resolved that the body of Thomas Dundas, interred in Guadeloupe, be dug up and given as prey to the birds of the air; and upon that spot shall be erected, at the expense of the Republic, a monument having on the one side this decree and on the other an appropriate inscription.
Forthwith, the corpse of the British hero was disinterred, hung up for the birds to pluck, and then thrown into the public sewer. A stonemason from one of the French ships was brought ashore to incise a monument which contained on one side the above condemnation and on the other these words:
This ground, restored to Liberty by the valour of the Republicans, was polluted by the body of Thomas Dundas, Major General and Governor of Guadeloupe for the Bloody King George the Third of England.
Hugues himself had composed the second inscription, for, as he explained to his citizens: ‘All honest men deplore the cruel acts of the infamous English king.’
His worst actions were incomprehensible, explicable neither as acts of revenge nor of sadism; his was dark behavior dredged up from the hidden abysses of the days when humans were emerging from a brutal animal existence. During one heated action when two hundred and fifty British troops were supported by three hundred French Royalists who despised Hugues, the latter demonstrated once again his military genius, for with an inferior force he attacked from three sides, overwhelming the enemy. To the British soldiers he acted with the formality of a great general, allowing them to retreat in honor, sword in hand, to their main army, but for the French Royalists he had much different plans. After throwing them all into a prison camp, along with wives and children, he trundled up his portable guillotine, erected it personally inside the gate of the camp, and started lopping off heads at a rate which stunned those who
assisted in the grisly rite. Scarcely had the bleeding trunk of one man been tossed off the platform and into a growing pile than the neck of another was thrust beneath the blade.
But even though he was able at this frantic speed to behead fifty in the space of an hour, he was not satisfied, so he ordered the remaining men, women and children to be fettered together in twos and threes and marched to the edge of a pit, where they were shot by untrained woodsmen firing at random. Some of the Royalists were killed outright, some were wounded, and some escaped the chance firing altogether, but at a signal from Hugues all were pitched alike into the pit, where men shoveled earth upon them, burying alive all who had survived the bullets, their screams for mercy going unheeded.
Despite the sadism, he was sincerely desirous of attaining order at home. As any good politician must, he gave the island an excellent administration, doubling its production of sugar and rum, producing food in abundance where there had been shortages before he arrived, eliminating useless and expensive jobs, and introducing an effective creole police force which served well, once most of the French-born whites had been slain.
He also had what might be called a foreign policy, for, having put his own island in order, he decided to export his revolution to others, and his small, swift boats sneaked past big British warships to invade and capture All Saints, Grenada and Tobago, in each of which he inspired slaves to take arms against their masters. Having accomplished this, he sent his secret agents throughout the Caribbean, fomenting slave rebellions against French, English and Spanish plantation owners.
His most extraordinary international adventure was a kind of declaration of war against the newly born United States, for which he had generated a savage contempt: ‘Look at them. Ten years ago they were fighting the English, and if it hadn’t been for French help, they’d have been crushed. Now they sell supplies to those same British who try to defeat us.’ He ordered his small but capable navy to capture any American vessel that came into the Caribbean, and succeeded in taking nearly a hundred prizes. One American admiral said of him: ‘He’s a pest, but have you ever tried to rid yourself of those invisible gnats that attack you on warm summer nights?’ and he added ruefully: ‘The dirty bastard knows how to use what he’s got.’
One of the international moves he made that produced excellent results was his encouragement of Dutch contraband shipping, for, as in centuries past, the Dutch were the imaginative operators in the Caribbean. Having only the smallest islands of their own, they insinuated their ships into the major ones, scorning local laws against them and bringing to places like Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad and Cartagena the trade goods so badly needed. ‘An honest Dutch pirate,’ Hugues said, ‘is a man of endless value.’
One night while he was haranguing a group of junior administrators, mulatto and black, he cried with great enthusiasm: ‘I dream not of victory here in Guadeloupe or in British Barbados, but of the day when the kind of benevolent French rule we have introduced here will extend to all islands in the Caribbean. Not only in St.-Domingue and on Martinique, which we already have, but on Jamaica too, and Trinidad and all the Virgins. Above all, Cuba. One government, one language, all guided spiritually by our Cult of Reason.’
He returned often to explain this vision to others: ‘This glorious sea—you know I’ve been in all parts of it—it must be ruled by one power. Spain had her opportunity and threw it away. England might have succeeded but she lost energy. Those American colonies, they’ll try someday. But the people who have the best claim, the most appropriate concepts are we French. This ought to be a French sea, and it shall be.’
Basic to this idea of a French hegemony was his conviction that the French understood better than any other European nation the fundamental strength of the black man in the Caribbean: ‘Look what we’ve accomplished already in Guadeloupe. First thing I did on landing was abolish slavery. It’s a dead idea. It wastes human energy. And I’ve also put an end to social systems which held back mulattoes. If white men are extra intelligent and black men are extra strong, why not unite them? Raise a new race of gods. There’ll be no white owner, no black slave on an island I govern.’
And he did exactly what he preached, for he told the blacks: ‘You’re no longer slaves. That’s ended forever. But you’re not wastrels either. You work or you go to jail. And I warn you, there’s damned little food to spare for prisoners.’ Through this enlightened leadership he coaxed the blacks into producing more than they ever had before and without constant exhortation or beatings.
He attended also to lesser problems, erasing those petty restrictions on mulattoes and blacks which were so galling and productive of animosities. He wanted all children to enjoy a free education and he emptied the jails of prisoners who were not white. Eager to prove that former slaves could hold positions formerly held by whites only, he was constantly on the search for capable blacks, and when Solange’s mother came out of jail during the dispensation, he spotted her as one with governing ability and installed her as a kind of aide, and from this position she was able to save from the guillotine several Frenchmen who had behaved themselves respectably in the treatment of their slaves.
He was a brilliant politician, no doubt about that, but midway in his commissionership certain of his acts caused observers to ask: ‘How sincere are the man’s beliefs?’ When he learned almost a year late that his friend and sponsor Robespierre had himself been guillotined, he immediately softened his revolutionary rantings, and after something called the Directory assumed control in Paris, he, without understanding a word of what it stood for, proclaimed himself a loud supporter. Watchers said: ‘Look how he’s stopped appointing blacks to high positions. Mark my words, any day now, he’ll bring slavery back.’
Regardless of his successes or failures, Hugues would always be remembered in Guadeloupe for his traveling guillotine and wandering eye, and in the closing months of his regime the entire island watched in amusement as he became even more deeply entangled with the two young creoles, Eugénie Lanzerac and Solange Vauclain. What made his frenzied courtship diverting in a gruesome way was that everyone knew that since these two creoles had been in love with the murdered Paul Lanzerac, they must loathe Hugues and even pose a threat to him in their hunger for revenge.
He, too, was aware of this, but he savored the challenge of bringing them to his bed despite their bitterness, imagining himself to be like the hunch-backed Richard III of England, who found sexual delight in wooing the widow of the young king whom he had just caused to be slain.
His pursuit of the two women could have been played out as one of those delightful European comedies in which a pompous official from the capital swaggers into some Italian or Spanish or French country town, casts his lecherous eye on two comely housewives, and is made a laughingstock by their superior wit. But this master plot could not play in Pointe-à-Pitre because the scrawny Hugues was no fat Falstaff; he was an ogre with his own guillotine.
Finding Eugénie unapproachable, since she was preoccupied with mourning her dead husband and caring for her son, he turned to Solange, who, since the destruction of her family’s plantation, lived in town with her freed mother, and the more often he saw her moving about the square, the more desirable she became in his fantasies. She was the epitome of those black and mulatto people he had rescued from oblivion; she represented his vision of the future when all the Caribbean islands would exist under what he interpreted as a benevolent French leadership, the tyrannical whites having been exterminated. Thus she became not only an extremely attractive young woman of beautiful face and exquisite movement, but she was also a kind of spiritual symbol of the new world that he was creating.
Of course, coincident with this growing infatuation with Solange, he was bringing to his bed at night an endless chain of whatever women he could inflict his hungry body upon, and some of the stratagems he devised to accomplish this were so wretched that they seemed antithetical to any normal concept of sexual passion. How could a man who spoke of lovi
ng a woman cause her husband to be guillotined on Tuesday and derive pleasure from forcing her into his bed at the House of Lace on Thursday? Hugues found no contradiction in such behavior, and he also applied pressure against children to bring their mothers to him and separated girls of fifteen from boys of sixteen who were striving to protect them. One observant Frenchman, an advocate of the revolution in France insofar as he understood it, wrote in a secret letter to Paris: ‘In your city they speak of a Reign of Terror. Here we whisper about a Reign of Horror, for all decency seems to have fled.’
The recipient of this letter read it, snorted his disgust, and sent it back to Hugues with the notation: ‘Now you have a spy in your midst,’ and on the evening of its arrival in Guadeloupe, when the drumbeats rolled, the sender of the complaints was guillotined.
Hugues started his assault on Solange by promoting her black mother from a position as his aide to one which required her to work in his office, and when she was comfortably established, he made it plain that she would retain his favor only if she made it possible for him to see her daughter frequently. ‘You might invite her to help you here,’ he suggested, and she replied: ‘Solange is no longer under my control,’ and he said in tones that could not be misinterpreted: ‘She’d better be.’
When Mme. Vauclain alerted her daughter, Solange said nothing; because of the barbarous conditions in Guadeloupe she was afraid to confide anything to her. Since her mother had been the recipient of the murderer’s favor, she could very well have been enrolled as one of his spies, so she kept her counsel, but sometimes late at night she would slip into Eugénie’s house to resume plotting with her only confidante.
‘I had the strangest feeling yesterday, Eugénie. I was talking with my mother and she asked me a question … can’t remember what it was … probing, though. And I warned myself: “Better not tell her anything. She may be one of his spies.” ’ She looked down at the floor, then looked furtively about, for Hugues’ spies were everywhere, but she had to share her bitterness with someone, so she continued: ‘That horrible man. We must go ahead.’