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The Black Count
Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo
Tom Reiss reconstructs the life of Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, the father of novelist Alexandre Dumas and one of the most remarkable military figures of Revolutionary France. Born in colonial Saint-Domingue to an enslaved Black woman and a French nobleman, Dumas traveled to France, enlisted as an ordinary cavalryman, and rose to the rank of general during a brief revolutionary period of expanded opportunity for men of color. His campaigns in the Alps, Italy, and Egypt established his reputation for courage, physical power, and independence. Those same qualities eventually brought him into conflict with Napoleon Bonaparte. Capture, imprisonment, political abandonment, and the restoration of racial discrimination transformed his final years. Reiss connects this history to the fiction of Dumas’s celebrated son, showing how the general’s heroism, captivity, betrayal, and longing for justice helped shape works including The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. The result is simultan…
