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

by Tom Reiss

Until the mid-1400s, nearly all slaves imported into Europe were ethnic Slavs. The very word “slave” derives from this connection. “Slav markets” were found across Europe, from Dublin to Marseille, where the people being bought and sold were as fair-skinned as those buying and selling them. By the 1400s, white slaves were being used in the Mediterranean to harvest cane as part of the late-medieval sugar industry.

The brutality of the American Cotton Kingdom a century later could not compare to that of Saint-Domingue in the 1700s. There would be no shortage of cruel overseers in the United States, but North American slavery was not based on a business model of systematically working slaves to death in order to replace them with newly bought captives. The French sugar plantations were a charnel house.

the first existing sample of his handwriting—as “Thomas Retoré, the natural son of Monsieur le Marquis de la Pailleterie who had been living in Saint-Domingue.”

fencing teacher, Nicolas Texier de La Boëssière, where Antoine enrolled his son in his first formal lessons.

Edict of October 1716, intended to allow French subjects to bring their slaves into the country without risk of forfeiting them to lawsuits. But like the Code Noir in the colonies, the Edict of October 1716 provided opportunities for slaves by codifying their condition.