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

Tom Reiss follows Thomas Alexandre Dumas from his 1762 birth in the French colony of Saint Domingue, now Haiti, the son of a French nobleman and Marie Cessette Dumas, an enslaved woman, through the voyage that took him to France at fourteen and the education in swordsmanship and letters that came with it. The book follows Dumas into the French Revolutionary army, which he entered as a private under the name Alexandre Dumas and left, within a few astonishing years, as General in Chief of the Army of the Alps, commanding fifty three thousand troops by the age of thirty one, the first Black officer to reach general in chief of a French army.

Reiss gives real weight to the Egyptian campaign under Napoleon, where Dumas clashed openly with his own commander over the treatment of troops, and to the disaster that followed his attempt to sail home in 1799, when his ship began to sink and put in at Taranto in the Kingdom of Naples, where hostile forces held him in the Aragonese Castle for two years, conditions so brutal he emerged in 1801 partially paralyzed and nearly blind. The book follows him home to a France where Napoleon had begun reinstating racial laws that stripped rank and standing from officers like Dumas, leaving a genuine military hero to die in 1806, at forty three, in poverty, the same year his own son and namesake, the future novelist, was not yet four years old.

Reiss built the book from a decade of archival research across Haiti, France, Egypt and Italy, tracking down documents in a small museum in Villers Cotterets that historians had overlooked for generations, and reading it means following what one reviewer called a literary gumshoe as much as a conventional biographer. It suits a reader who already loves The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers and wants to see exactly how much of their author's imagination came from his own father's actual life.