Out of the deepest betrayal Alexandre Dumas would weave imagined worlds that resurrected his father’s dreams and the fantastical age of glory, honor, idealism, and emancipation he championed.
“You see, Father,” he writes in his memoir, as if for himself, “I haven’t forgotten any of the memories that you told me to keep. From the time I could think, your memory has lived in me like a sacred lamp, illuminating everything and everyone you ever touched, even though death has taken it away.” (Reiss, 2012, 323)
Go out and get a copy of this book. Immediately. It was a beyond captivating read. I’m going to go pretty in depth in my discussion of this book, but I promise that I’m just gliding over the surface. It will still be well-worth the read, even after going through this review.
I’ve read several books by the novelist known as Alexandre Dumas père (as opposed to his son, Alexandre Dumas fils, also a novelist and playwright). But I’d known very little about the first Alexandre Dumas, father of Dumas père, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie, known (thankfully) simply as Alex Dumas in adulthood. The book The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss brought General Dumas’ vibrant life into complete technicolor.
This is a story of courage. Of bravery and betrayal. Of a France that, for about a decade, was a place where “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” applied to everyone, regardless of skin color. And it’s the story of how one man, Napoleon, set race relations in France back decades. It’s also the story of how France has all but forgotten one of its most glorious sons.
Alexandre Dumas by Olivier Pichat – Musée Alexandre Dumas, Villers-Cotterëts
Alex Dumas was born on Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti), the son of a ne’er do well marquis and his slave concubine. His father eventually sold Alex’s mother and his other siblings because, I don’t know, I guess he was just completely devoid of natural affection. Alex must have been his favorite though, because he pawned him instead of selling him outright, and redeemed him as soon as he could. He brought 14-year-old Alex back with him to France and made him a count. Alex lived the life of a Parisian dandy for a while, but he eventually joined the French army, leaving behind his fancy pants name and title and taking his mother’s last name, Dumas, as his own. He believed strongly in the ideals of the French Revolution, and he would hold fast to those principles throughout his life. He negotiated the shifting sands of Revolutionary France without getting guillotined and fought brilliantly in the military. He rose quickly through the ranks to become a General. Napoleon nicknamed him “the Horatius Cocles of the Tyrol” because Alex had managed to single-handedly hold a bridge against an enemy squadron until reinforcements arrived.
However, spoiler alert (except not really because everyone knows this), Napoleon was a major jerk. At one point, Napoleon and Josephine were supposed to be the godparents to Alex’s firstborn son, but by the time little Alexandre Dumas was born, Napoleon and Alex were on the outs. Basically, Napoleon grew to dislike Alex Dumas because Alex truly believed in the principles of the Revolution and wouldn’t get behind Napoleon’s increasingly blatant attempts to seize power. Alex also insulted one of Napoleon’s friends, and apparently the little man knew how to hold a grudge. Napoleon had a big hand in ruining the Alex’s health, his life, and plunging his family into poverty.
As a lifelong fan of his son’s work, it was fascinating to see how the experiences of Alex Dumas are reflected in his son’s novels. Tom Reiss pays particular attention to the similarities between Alex Dumas and The Count of Monte Cristo‘s Edmond Dantès. Dantès and Dumas were both cast into prison for years without a trial. Both were essentially forgotten by those who could have, and should have, helped them in their plight. In fact, it seems that the image of his father, alone and forgotten by his countrymen, seems to have impacted Alexandre Dumas deeply.
To remember a person is the most important thing in the novels of Alexandre Dumas. The worst sin anyone can commit is to forget. The villains of The Count of Monte Cristo do not murder the hero, Edmond Dantès – they have him thrown into a dungeon where he is forgotten by the world. The heroes of Dumas never forget anything or anyone: Dantès has a perfect memory for the details of every field of human knowledge, for the history of the world and for everyone he has encountered in his life. When he confronts them one by one, he finds that the assassins of his identity have forgotten the very fact that he existed, and thus the fact of their crime. (3)
Tom Reiss also delves into the effect of Revolutionary France on People of Color. I was surprised to discover the French had a proud tradition of not having slaves in France itself, even though they depended on a particularly brutal form of slavery to keep their plantations in the Caribbean running. Things got messy when Frenchmen returned to France from the Caribbean with their slaves in tow. Should the slaves be freed once they set foot on French soil, or did the property rights of the Caribbean extend to France? Apparently there was a wave of lawsuits in which slaves brought to France sued for their freedom – and won.
There was certainly still racism. Reiss relates one episode in which young Alex Dumas, upon escorting a woman to the theater, was insulted and humiliated by a white man because of his race. However, Dumas’ race was much less of a hindrance in France than it would have been in America at the time. It didn’t stop Dumas from marrying his sweetheart Marie-Louise, the daughter of an innkeeper in Villers-Cotterêts. I had expected her parents to be against the match, but they were thrilled. Her father always proudly referred to Dumas as “the General,” and he enjoyed a warm relationship with his in-laws throughout his life. Neither did Dumas’ race keep him from a meteoric rise through the military. He was the commander-in-chief of several armies throughout his life, led numerous successful campaigns (sometimes against extraordinary odds), and had the respect and loyalty of his soldiers and fellow officers.
The fact that a Black man could rise so high in the 1790’s was astounding to me. Until reading this book, I’d never given much thought to race relations in other countries. I knew that the United States wasn’t the only country stained by the sin of slavery, but other than some general knowledge about William Wilberforce and the movement to end the slave trade in Great Britain, I was pretty ignorant. I’d certainly had no idea that Black and mixed-race people in France enjoyed, for a time, rights that they wouldn’t see in the U.S. for almost another two hundred years. I suppose I assumed that People of Color received the same treatment abroad as they had in the U.S.
This is absolutely not to absolve France from the horrors inflicted upon Black slaves in Saint-Domingue and their other Caribbean colonies. The conditions of slavery on Caribbean sugar plantations remain some of the most barbarous acts of cruelty man has ever inflicted on man. However, before reading this book I was less critical of American slave owners than I should have been.
When I reflected on the hypocrisy of Thomas Jefferson as he penned the words, “all men are created equal,” I think I gave him a bit of a pass because I believed that he was simply a product of his time and that most people in the Western world treated slavery as a matter-of-course. I considered Jefferson, Washington, and other slave-owning Founding Fathers to be “products of their time.” Well, it turns out that people in their time were well-aware that slavery was an abomination, and that the choice to continue the system was a simple matter of putting money over morals. Not only that, but while even free Blacks in America were being trampled on and degraded, a Black man in France could become the commander-in-chief of an army.
But then why did France not remain on that trajectory? Because Napoleon is the worst. That’s why. When he took over, he knew that France couldn’t remain competitive economically if it didn’t have the income generated by slavery in the Caribbean colonies, so he rolled back a ton of the progress that had been made in Saint-Domingue during the Revolution, and he severely restricted the rights of People of Color in France. When General Alex Dumas was released from prison in Italy, he returned home to a country that had largely forgotten him and which, in just a few short years, had decided that he was less than. He had to practically beg his best friend to be the godfather to his son, Alexandre, and even then his friend couldn’t actually be bothered to show up for the ceremony itself. General Dumas was not awarded the Legion of Honor, even though all of his fellow generals got the award. Nor did he receive his military pension, back pay for his time in a foreign prison, or a new commission in the army. France, it seemed, had no further use for the general. He died a broken, impoverished man in 1806.
In the early 1900’s, a statue was finally erected to honor General Dumas. It stood next to the statues of his son and grandson. But even then it remained covered for months because French bureaucrats couldn’t be bothered to figure out how to inaugurate it. The Nazis eventually destroyed it.
Several years ago, France did make an attempt to honor General Dumas. Here’s the result:
While I think we could agree it’s a powerful statue in its own right, I don’t think anyone looking at it would immediately associate it with Dumas. Said Tom Reiss:
In the race politics of twenty-first century France, the statue of General Dumas had morphed into a symbolic monument to all the victims of French colonial slavery, in the form of these mega-shackles. A military marching band played the “Marseillaise” in Alex Dumas’s honor, followed by an Afro-Caribbean drumming group, then by the mayor and the activist, who both made impassioned speeches. Then everyone went home.
There is still no monument in France commemorating the life of General Alexandre Dumas. (330)
Happy Reading!
Reference List
Reiss, T. (2012). The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal and the Real Count of Monte Cristo (1st ed.). New York, NY: Crown.