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

by Tom Reiss

The worst sin anyone can commit is to forget.

This gray little town fifty miles north of Paris acquired an outsized reputation for royal scandal, misbehavior, and debauchery, which in eighteenth-century France was saying something.

one of a series of dynastic conflicts that regularly provided excuses for the gory quaintness of eighteenth-century European combat.

“perfect example of how not to site a fortress. Its location was that of an idiot standing with his nose against the wall.”

SUGAR planting was the oil business of the eighteenth century,

The Greek city-states had created democracy among a small elite by enslaving almost everybody else, in some cases up to a third of the population. Aristotle believed democracy could exist only because of slavery, which gave citizens the leisure for higher pursuits. (Modern versions of this argument held that American democracy was born of the slave society of rural Virginia, because slavery gave men like Washington and Jefferson the free time to better themselves and to participate in representative government.)

In Greece and Rome, slavery was the fate of prisoners of war and barbarians, anyone not lucky enough to have been born Greek or Roman. When ancient slaves managed to buy their freedom or that of their children, they would assimilate into the free population, with no permanent mark on their descendants. Though ubiquitous in the ancient world, slavery was not based on any sense of “race.”

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

Spain laid the foundations of this great wealth and evil in the Americas, then quickly became distracted and forgot about it.

The cheapness of slave life brushed against the exorbitant value of the crop they produced.

Antoine told them he meant to stay temporarily. He would live with them for the next decade.

“A stay in Saint-Domingue is not at all deadly; it is our vices, our devouring vexations that kill us,”

The town had no safe drinking water—a boon for tavern keepers—and drinking from any of the wells in the area was, as the great chronicler of island life Moreau de Saint-Méry observed, “a courageous act.”

“Never has fortune persecuted anyone as cruelly as me.”)

For some years, the French king’s birthday was even celebrated as one of the United States’ first national holidays.

The bitter irony was that the financial crisis had largely been caused by French support of the American patriots; in getting back at the English, Versailles had committed not only ideological but fiscal suicide.

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.

France could not defend its revolution without attacking.

The risk of invasion was seared into British consciousness, part of the heritage of an island nation whose very identity rested on a succession of transformative invasions,

In spite of the order’s vows, including chastity, Malta also became renowned for the beauty and laxity of its prostitutes,

swashbuckling crusaders riding the waves for Jesus;

the Bedouins had killed a handful and left the rest in almost worse condition. Napoleon interrogated one soldier who cried and could not bring himself to outline the treatment he’d received, though it was eventually pried out of him—all the men had been raped,

Rape as worse than death.

They constructed mills and bakeries so Egyptians could learn that most basic culinary glory—how to bake French bread.

the Catholic generalissimo was relying on the help of Protestant, Eastern Orthodox, and Muslim armies to carry on his crusade. But the menace of French ideas made the age-old disputes among religions seem quaint. At a time when all faced the threat of godless liberty, equality, and fraternity, the Holy Faith Army continued to recruit local toughs and brigands as they went.

o noes! Not the athiests. Anything but that!