I am writing this book review having just watched the riveting The Count of Monte Cristo on SBS, it’s a deep dive into the remarkable true story of the real count – a stunning feat of historical sleuthing that brings to life the forgotten hero who inspired such classics as The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo.
The real-life protagonist is General Alex Dumas, a man unknown today yet with a story strikingly familiar, because his son, the novelist Alexandre Dumas, used it to create some of literature’s best loved heroes. Yet hidden behind these swashbuckling adventures was an even more incredible secret : the real hero was the son of a black slave, who rose higher in the white world than any man of his race could before our own time.
Born in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), Alex Dumas, was sold into bondage but managed to make his return to Paris where he was schooled as a sword-fighting member of the French aristocracy, enlisting as a private, to rise to a position where he was commanding armies at the height of the Revolution in an audacious campaign across Europe and the Middle East– until he met an implacable enemy he could not defeat.
Its no wonder that this novel by Tom Reiss won the Pulitzer Prize for biography. THE BLACK COUNT is simultaneously a riveting adventure story replete with glory, revolution, betrayal and the real Count of Monte Cristo – in a lushly textured evocation of Eighteenth century France, and a window into the modern world’s first multi-racial society. But it’s also a heartbreaking story of the enduring bonds of love between father and son.
This 2012 book presents a biography of the life and career of Dumas as a soldier and officer during the French Revolution, as well as his military service in Italy during the French revolutionary Wars, culminating in Egypt under Napoleon. Reiss offers insights into slavery and the life of a man of mixed race during the French Colonial Empire. He also reveals how Dumas’s son, the author Alexandre Dumas viewed his father, who served as inspiration for some of his novels. This book also won the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award amongst other honours.
Thomas Alexandre Dumas was also known as Thomas-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie, son of the Marquise Alexander Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie and Marie Cessette Dumas, his Haitian slave. In addition to being the father of the novelist Alexandre Dumas, he was the grandfather of playwright Alexandre Dumas fils, known for La Dame Aux Camilias, the source for Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata. Fun fact: the term Monte Cristo refers to a Haitian area where sugar and slaves were shipped out.
After his teenage education, his father cut him off his stipend and he enlisted in the French military as a dragoon, rising quickly in the ranks commanding a group of mix-race swordsmen called the ” Free Legion of Americans,” nicknamed “The Black Legion,” receiving citations and a larger command of troops. Rising in the ranks swiftly, he was promoted to General-in-Chief of the French Army of the Alps. Dumas was the highest ranking black commander in any white military until 1988 when Colin Powell became a four-star General.
A stint in Egypt as a cavalry commander of the French Expeditionary Army of the Orient led to a disagreement with Napoleon who could not abide by his popularity, decommissioned Dumas, who set sail for France, but his vessel sank and with him being in hostile territory, was taken hostage and kept in a dungeon for over two years without understanding the motives or identity of his captor. Upon his return to France in 1802, under the new Napoleonic laws, mixed-raced officers were demoted to chain-gang labour, effectively ending civil rights protection
In preparation for for the writing and publication of THE BLACK COUNT, Reiss undertook a comprehensive study of Colonial Haiti, Revolutionary France, Medieval Egypt and political and social unrest in Italy. He visited the dungeon in Taranta, where Dumas was held. The author reveals details about Dumas and Eighteenth century racial policies which used the revolutions in France and Haiti, along with Napoleon’s rise, as a backdrop to the biography . His best-seller is a richly imagined biography told by the blade and boldness in the face of overwhelming odds, yet because of Dumas’s unwavering principles, he ultimately became a threat to Napoleon, contradicting a direct order.
THE BLACK COUNT is quintessentially a human story of immense strength and courage that sheds light on the historical moments that made it possible. Tom Reiss is also the author of the celebrated best-selling The Orientalist.
