The Whites and the Blues
A boy's coming of age, under the shadow of the guillotine.
Strasbourg, December 1793. A young man named Charles arrives in a city gripped by the Terror, hoping to study under the radical revolutionary Euloge Schneider — and finds himself instead swept into the machinery of denunciation, arrest, and execution that ruled Alsace under the Convention's harshest representatives. Over four parts and more than a hundred chapters, Dumas follows Charles from the Terror's darkest years through the rise of a young general named Bonaparte and into the Egyptian campaign that would make his name — one of the last great novels Dumas completed, closing out his lifelong fascination with the French Revolution.
One of Dumas's Final Novels
Serialized in 1867 and 1868, just two years before Dumas's death, The Whites and the Blues was among the last major novels he completed. Its title refers to the two rival colors of the French Revolution and its aftermath — white for the Royalists, blue for the Republicans — and the novel takes its young hero across the fault line between them, from the height of Jacobin extremism in Alsace to service under a revolutionary army led by an ambitious young Corsican officer.
The novel's opening chapters are set during one of the Terror's most severe local regimes: the real Euloge Schneider, a former monk turned public prosecutor, terrorized Strasbourg and the surrounding Alsace region with a mobile guillotine and a reputation for arbitrary cruelty that shocked even hardened revolutionaries in Paris. Dumas builds his fictional hero's education directly out of this documented reign of local terror, before following him toward the real historical events — and the real historical Bonaparte — that dominate the novel's later chapters.
A Loose Connection to Maison-Rouge
Though not a direct sequel, The Whites and the Blues shares its historical territory with The Chevalier de Maison-Rouge, also on this site — both novels are set amid the Terror's machinery of denunciation and execution, and together they give a fuller picture of how differently Dumas treated the same turbulent years depending on where in France, and through whose eyes, he chose to tell the story.
From the Terror to Bonaparte's Egypt
As the novel progresses, Dumas follows the Revolution's own trajectory: from the guillotine's local terror in the provinces, through the political violence at the heart of Paris, and finally into the ambitious military campaigns of a young general who would soon remake France entirely. The novel's final chapters, covering Bonaparte's Egyptian campaign and the Battle of the Pyramids, place Dumas's fictional hero at the edge of history's stage just as Napoleon steps onto it.
A Novel in Four Parts
Dumas structured the novel across four distinct parts, this site presents them as one continuously numbered sequence, with each chapter marked to show which part it belongs to — the same approach used for the other multi-volume Dumas novels on this site.
First Published
Serialized 1867–1868, among the last novels Dumas completed.
Setting
Strasbourg, Paris, and Egypt, 1793–1799, from the Terror to Bonaparte's rise.
Genre
Historical adventure and coming-of-age story, spanning the French Revolution's most turbulent years.
Related Work
The Chevalier de Maison-Rouge, set in the same Revolutionary period.