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

by Tom Reiss

In this sense, the rule of kings offered a kind of humanity in inefficiency.

His “dark—very dark” looks and non-European features were taken not as signs of primitive inferiority—as they would be in nearly every time and place over the next two hundred years—but rather as echoes of antiquity, when the great civilizations had been the melting pots of the ancient world.

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.”

France did not have a normal government: it had a collection of caffeinated intellectuals conducting passionate nonstop shouting matches

But his main character flaw was that of so many French revolutionaries: a zeal for human rights so self-righteous that it translated into intolerance for the actual human beings around him.

Robespierre, a mastermind of mob mentality, in a chilling foreshadowing of the course he was to follow, congratulated the troops who had murdered their commander.

The Austrians, perhaps stunned at the mere sight of a six-foot-one black man riding full tilt out of a Belgian bean field, quickly surrendered to him en masse.

The government had taken every reversal on the battlefield as an excuse to arrest and purge more internal counterrevolutionaries, finding them especially in the officer corps. The truth was that revolutionary France had simply attacked or antagonized too many countries.

If the Ancien Régime had not fallen, the energetic young cadet from Corsica might well have ended up as a highly decorated junior officer, well respected in the War Ministry but nothing more.

The new calendar was only one of countless utopian measures the ruling Jacobins initiated in 1793–94, but it is notable because, apparently, not a single person had to be murdered to carry it out.

By now, thousands of independent Jacobin clubs existed in municipalities throughout France—a bit like local franchises of the Terror business, getting guillotine kits and denunciation guidelines from the central office in Paris.

As if to reasonable men, he explained

Many locals remained fiercely loyal to monarchism, for territorial as much as political reasons: first of all, they did not like being invaded, and, second, many were religiously conservative. The nobility and priests here were some of the fiercest critics of the French Revolution, and counterrevolutionary feeling pervaded the upper classes, who had welcomed King Louis’s brother and many aristocratic French émigrés.

Finally on October 19, 1795, the floor literally fell out from under the assignats: in Paris, at the printing house that manufactured them, someone simply piled too much worthless paper currency in one spot and the wood floor collapsed under the weight.

From the beginning of their relationship, Dumas failed to recognize the special reverence in which Napoleon expected to be held.

But calculated lunacy—the defying of conventional wisdom and prudence in order to gain advantage—was one of Napoleon’s favorite tactics.

I had to go to such trouble to find traces of the statue because it was destroyed by the Nazis in the winter of 1941–42.† The German occupiers melted down hundreds of French statues, paying more attention to the subjects than to the amounts of metal involved: to melt down the likeness of a mixed-race fighter for liberty, equality, and fraternity was an easy decision for them to make.