The Black Count (2012)

The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo is a 2012 biography of General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas written by Tom Reiss. The book presents 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 and later in Egypt under Napoleon. Reiss offers insight into slavery and the life of a man of mixed race during the French Colonial Empire. He also reveals how Dumas's son – author Alexandre Dumas – viewed his father, who served as the inspiration for some of his novels, including The Count of Monte Cristo (1844) and The Three Musketeers (1844).

The Black Count won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography and the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award, among other awards and honors.

Summary

The Black Count presents the life of the French General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, who served as the inspiration for the 1844 book The Count of Monte Cristo written by his son Alexandre Dumas. Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, also known as Thomas-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie, was born in Jérémie, Saint-Domingue (Haiti) in 1762, the son of the Marquis Alexandre Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie and Marie-Cessette Dumas, his Haitian slave. In addition to being the father of French novelist Alexandre Dumas, he was the grandfather of playwright Alexandre Dumas fils, known for La Dame aux Camélias, the source for Giuseppe Verdi's La traviata.

Dumas was born the son of a renegade French nobleman and his black slave in 1762 in the French sugar colony of Saint Domingue (the future Haiti); at the time of his birth, his father was living on the run from the royal authorities and from the boy's uncle, a rich planter who shipped sugar and slaves out of a Haitian area called "Monte Cristo". When Dumas was 14, his father sold him and his three siblings into slavery in Port-au-Prince, in order to raise funds to return to France and reclaim his inheritance and estate. Some months later, the father repurchased his son and had him sent to France, leaving the siblings in Haiti, where they remained slaves.

As a teenager in Paris, Thomas-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie was recognized as a member of the French aristocracy. He attended school and received an education in literature, sword fighting, military arts, and the fundamentals of 18th-century French aristocracy. When he was 24 he lost his income because of his father's lavishing funds on a new wife. He enlisted in the French military as a dragoon, taking his mother's surname Dumas and shortening his forename to Alex, and rose quickly in the ranks. During the French Revolution, he led a group of mixed-race swordsmen called the "Free Legion of Americans," nicknamed the "Black Legion," and he received citations from the new French Republic for various daring, risky operations.

As he was given command of more troops, Dumas's military actions and victories included opening the glacier passes of the high Alps, which provided access for the military in their ongoing battle with the Austrian Empire. When he was 32, he was promoted to the rank of General-in-Chief of the French Army of the Alps, responsible for commanding 53,000 troops. Dumas is the highest-ranking person of color to have served in a continental European army, and the first to become divisional general and General-in-Chief of the French army. He was the highest-ranking black commander ever in any white military until 1989, when American Colin Powell became a four-star general, the closest United States equivalent of Général d'Armée, Dumas's highest rank. In 1798 General Dumas went to Egypt as the Cavalry Commander of the French Expeditionary Army of the Orient; on the march from Alexandria to Cairo, Dumas publicly confronted Napoleon about the motives of the expedition. Dumas departed for France shortly thereafter but was caught in a sinking vessel in the Mediterranean and forced to put ashore in hostile territory, where he was taken hostage and kept in a dungeon for over two years without clearly understanding the motives or identity of his captors.

Released from the dungeon in 1802, he returned to France. Napoleon had seized power and passed the Law of 20 May 1802 – which effectively restored slavery, which had been abolished in 1794 in all the French colonies following the Revolution. And within France, Napoleon's series of harsh racial laws meant black and mixed-race officers were effectively demoted to chain-gang labor, the integrated schools of Paris were closed, and even General Dumas's marriage to a white Frenchwoman was made illegal. General Dumas raised his son, the future novelist Alexandre Dumas, in a house that was officially too close to Paris for a black-skinned person to live in; the general was forced to write a humiliating letter asking for a dispensation of this housing law. Dumas never received another military command, despite repeated requests for one. The debilitation from his previous two-year dungeon imprisonment in Italy led to his early death in 1806, at the age of 43.

Research

In preparation 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 also visited the dungeon in Taranto, where Dumas was held from 1799 through 1801 by allies of King Ferdinand IV of Naples during his war with France. Reiss spent two years in search of a publicly commissioned statue of Dumas that was erected in 1913 at the Place Malesherbes (now known as the Place du Général-Catroux) in Paris. While the statue had been displayed for over 30 years, alongside statues of his son and grandson, research revealed that it was melted down by German military forces during World War II.