The Black Count, by Tom Reiss

The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss

There is probably not a student of history alive who hasn’t at some point winced upon reading about a long-cherished hero who turns out to be much less worthy of honor than we’d imagined. Sometimes seeing the real person under our idealized pictures can be downright depressing. But then, every now and then, you run across someone like Thomas-Alexandre Dumas.

Thomas-Alexandre Dumas was the father of the novelist Alexandre Dumas, writer of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. And it becomes clear as Tom Reiss introduces us to the history of his father, that the son based his most heroic, most noble, and most adventurous characters on his father’s very real history. Dumas, a black man from Haiti, served in the French Revolution and under Napoleon.

Reiss goes into detail about Frances’ attitudes and political situation regarding slavery and people of color and mixed race. He describes some of Dumas’ impressive military feats, and because Alexandre Dumas the author wrote extensively about his father, he includes some stories about the father straight from his son’s pen. The thing that most impressed me about Dumas was his character even more than his military brilliance. Even in the excesses of the French Revolution, when men were guillotined for speaking out against the events of the day, Dumas resisted the brutality of his time.

Reiss’ style is sometimes dry but given the outlandish nature of some of Dumas’ exploits, and the man’s own dramatic accounts, I wouldn’t be surprised if Reiss deliberately reined in his own prose to avoid making Dumas look too unbelievable. The Black Count was a fascinating book about race, revolution, and one man’s attempt to live an upright life in the middle of it.