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

by Tom Reiss

In the 1750s, during the reign of Louis XV, a generation of crusading lawyers went up against one of the most powerful interests in France—the colonial sugar lobby—and won shockingly broad rights for people of color.

This revolutionary age of racial emancipation introduced much of the world to modern ideas of human freedom—the idea that all men, regardless of religion or race, deserve equal rights, opportunities, respect—but it also spurred the backlash of modern racism and modern anti-Semitism, which fused older prejudices with the new political and scientific ideologies.

In fiction, his father most directly inspired Dumas’s novel Georges, where a young man of mixed race from a French sugar colony makes his way to Paris, becomes a great swordsman, and returns to the island to avenge a long-ago racial insult (itself an almost exact retelling of a searing incident from his father’s youth).

Eighteenth-century doctors prescribed sugar pills for nearly everything: heart problems, headache, consumption, labor pains, insanity, old age, and blindness.‡ Hence, the French expression “like an apothecary without sugar” meant someone in an utterly hopeless situation.

Until the mid-1400s, nearly all slaves imported into Europe were ethnic Slavs. The very word “slave” derives from this connection.

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.

In doing so, King Louis XIV passed a law, in 1685, that changed the history of both slavery and race relations. Le Code Noir—the Black Code. Its very name left no doubt about who were to be the slaves.

Largely as a result of this kind of aspirational mixed-race society, Saint-Domingue and the other French colonies became cultural capitals of the New World, excelling in the performing arts.

The word “buccaneer” originated in a native people’s term for smokehouse, which the French pronounced boucan. The original boucaniers didn’t board ships and steal treasure; they were the jerky kings of the Western Hemisphere.

French Enlightenment philosophers liked to use slavery as a symbol of human oppression, and particularly political oppression. “Man is born free but is everywhere in chains,” wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau in The Social Contract in 1762.

While Americans view the Revolutionary War as a conflict fought from Maine to Florida, France actually forced Britain to fight the Revolution as a world war, defending its outposts in India, Jamaica, and Africa. The British had to divert most of their celebrated navy from the American coast to defend against French attacks elsewhere.

Dragoons were light cavalry, used mostly for reconnaissance, skirmishing, and raiding. They got their name from their short carbine muskets, which were known as dragons because they spat fire.

The Estates-General got its name from the traditional division of France into three “estates”: clergy, nobility, and commoners. The way it had originally worked was that each of the three estates got an equal say: each had an equal number of “deputies” to represent it.

in practice, feudalism had long been on its way out in most parts of the kingdom. By voluntarily casting off their rights and taking on the mantle of commoners and freedmen, these nobles grabbed the reins of the Revolution and took control of its direction—for the moment.

The hall’s strange, narrow design, with tiered seating on both sides, caused the deputies to divide themselves according to their political opinions: radicals to the left of the Assembly’s president, conservatives to his right, the origin of the political terms “left” and “right.”

any normal eighteenth-century government would have realized that and ignored it. But France did not have a normal government: it had a collection of caffeinated intellectuals conducting passionate nonstop shouting matches in the former royal riding school of the Tuileries Palace.

Ironically, less destructive wars could be fought more often—could in fact be fought more or less constantly, with short breaks for minor changes in coalitions. Europe thus remained in a near-constant state of low-level conflict between 1700 and 1790;

The most prestigious French commissions sold for what it would cost to build a great château and required even more funds, because a commission came with a regiment of soldiers, which the purchaser had to equip and pay.

Italy had not been a united nation since the fall of Rome. Since then, Italians had experienced independence only in the form of self-governing city-states,

Napoleon requested that the government send him experts qualified to judge which paintings his men should steal; priceless canvases by Titian, Raphael, Rubens, and Leonardo da Vinci were shipped to Paris.

The fearsome slave-soldiers had been imported by Egypt’s rulers in the thirteenth century from the lands around the Black Sea and the Caucasus Mountains to enhance their power. But the Mamelukes had then overcome their masters and seized control, until forced in turn by conquering Ottoman armies a few hundred years later to share power in a kind of uneasy partnership.

the legacy of the savants’ cultural and scientific mission was still oddly alive, carrying on quixotically in the heart of modern Cairo. Behind the high iron gates of the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology,

December 17, 2011. On that day, as Arab Spring fighting between protesters and police spilled over from nearby Tahrir Square, the Institute caught fire, the flames fed by thousands of priceless books, manuscripts, and maps. By the end of the day, the most significant legacy of the French expedition in Egypt had been destroyed.