The Black Count

"The life of General Alex Dumas is so extraordinary on so many levels that it's easy to forget the most extraordinary fact about it: that it was led by a black man, in a world of whites, at the end of the eighteenth century...He rose to command entire divisions and armies. It would be 150 years before another black officer in the West would rise so high."

So writes Tom Reiss in his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo. Dumas, son of a wayward French nobleman and a Haitian slave, was a real-life action hero who is best known today for being the father of novelist Alexander Dumas, author of celebrated novels like The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, but his own life seemed like the stuff of fiction.

Reiss spins a compelling tale of Dumas' unlikely rise. After his birth on Haiti, then known as Saint-Domingue, a French colony, he was brought to France by his father as a teen. He spent his young adulthood as a person of privilege, despite his skin color: "At twenty-four, Thomas-Alexandre was conversant with Caesar and Plutarch, well versed in contemporary theater and in Palais Royal gossip, and, of course, an expert horseman and fencer. But he had not worked a day since stepping off the ship." Dumas goes on to enlist in the military, where he will have a meteoric rise to general.

How was this possible? Reiss explains that though France had a large slave empire, it's national identity, with an emphasis on liberty, equality, and fraternity, made it the first nation in the world to outlaw slavery. Then, with the revolution, came a remarkable disregard of skin color when it came to advancement in society.

Dumas believed in the revolution, which occurred in 1789, and fought for the revolutionary army, which battled several European nations. As the commander of the Army of the Alps, he won a great victory against the Austrians at Mont Cenis, and distinguished himself at the siege of Mantua (one of the book's strengths is the coverage of the ever-shifting geopolitical state of Italy).

Of course, when writing about France at this time period, the name of Napoleon Bonaparte pops up, and here is where the book gets really interesting. Napoleon will praise Dumas for his victories, but the two will get on each other's wrong side. Dumas accompanies Napoleon on his Egyptian campaign, which was really a major bust (the fleet was destroyed by Admiral Nelson in the Battle of Alexandria) but somehow Napoleon returned a hero. Dumas, who perhaps had been seen as a rival by the future emperor, left Egypt in disgust to go home, but got captured after coming to port in what was then the Kingdom of Naples, where he was imprisoned.

Reiss, who wrote the book based on his childhood fascination with the memoir by the Alexandre Dumas the writer, of course points out the parallels with the general's life and the novels of the son. The most obvious is Dumas' imprisonment, and its similarities to Edmond Dantes' in The Count of Monte Cristo. He is imprisoned for no stated reason, and treated abysmally. He will get sick (going deaf in one ear and blind in one eye) and will never fully recover. But eventually he is released and sires the boy who will tell his story.

This is a great read, greatly enhanced by its style, which is decidedly unstuffy. Not only does Reiss boil down some big subjects in edible portions, but he has some great asides. The footnotes are some of the best reading--there are some great tidbits in them, on topics as varied as the Maltese falcon, the decapitating qualities of the Mameluke sword, the history of the enema, and the doctor who theorized that masturbation caused blindness.

Reiss also enables us to get invested in Dumas, so that when we read about how the strides the revolution made in equality (he spends equal time on the Terror, when you could lose your head quite easily) were undone after the rise of Napoleon: "There were many things wrong with the French Republic at the time of Napoleon's coup, but there was one thing most modern people would see as marvelously right: it offered basic rights and opportunities to people regardless of the color of their skin."  But under Napoleon's reign these rights slowly eroded, until they were but a memory.