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

by Tom Reiss

“Adam and Eve nights,”

Kinky orgies, FUR,

“Among the Muslims, men from every class who were able to catch sight of General Bonaparte were struck by how short and skinny he was,” wrote the chief medical officer of the expedition. “The one, among our generals, whose appearance struck them more was … the General-in-Chief of the cavalry, Dumas. Man of color, and by his figure looking like a centaur, when they saw him ride his horse over the trenches, going to ransom prisoners, all of them believed that he was the leader of the expedition.”

Napoleon’s hate for Dumas,

Dumas—the son of a marquis and of a slave—had the unique perspective of being from the highest and lowest ranks of society at once.

bois d’ébène—“ebony wood,” as the French called their cargo.

Voyage à Saint-Domingue, the itinerant German Baron de Wimpffen describes interracial relationships as being visible everywhere,

Primary source, interracial relations, FUR,

all the skills he would ever want to shine both à la ville et à la cour—“in town and at court,” as the expression went.

Phrase describing a gentleman’s education,

fencing in the academy’s salle d’armes, the “hall of arms” decorated with antique weapons and heraldic insignia.

Saint-Georges was born Joseph Boulogne on the small sugar island of Guadeloupe, in 1745, to a wealthy white father, likely a royal finance officer, and a free black mother named Nanon. Like Antoine, Joseph’s father became a fugitive, in his case after he was accused of murder. He fled the island for France and was condemned to death in absentia. Less than two years later, however, he received a royal pardon, and he returned to Guadeloupe to collect his son. When Joseph was thirteen, his father enrolled him at La Boëssière’s, where his fencing skill immediately announced a prodigy.

Biography of St-Georges

The chevalier’s multiple talents were well summed up by John Adams, visiting Paris in 1779: The “mulatto man,” wrote the future American president, “is the most accomplished man in Europe in riding, shooting, fencing, dancing, music. He will hit a button on the coat or waistcoat of the masters. He will hit a crown piece in the air with a pistoll [sic] ball.”

Louis XIV, the Sun King, personally acknowledged a black slave’s undeniable right to freedom once he landed on French soil.

In late-eighteenth-century France, the term “American” was usually used synonymously with “man of color.”

“Americans” in Paris. The term was laden with implications, of adulation or contempt, but always denoted much more than a birthplace. From 1778 onward, it had a new meaning: “comrade-in-arms.”

The Duke de la Rochefoucauld-d’Enville, a cofounder of the Society of the Friends of the Blacks—the powerful French abolitionist society whose members included the cream of patriot nobility—rose with his fellow “friend of the Blacks,” the Marquis de Lafayette, to call for the Assembly to consider abolishing slavery before the night was through.†

Banners from National Guard regiments around France colored the field, and amid them all flew the first American flag ever displayed outside the United States—carried by a U.S. delegation led by John Paul Jones and Tom Paine.

Dumas had thrown his life and soul fully behind the Revolution, even though he was not inherently a political man. For him, there was no going back. Unlike many others, he couldn’t emigrate if pushed too far—where would he go? In a world where men of his color were slaves, revolutionary France was his promised land, even if he had to share it with some unsavory characters.

The hundreds of pages of field reports, memos, and orders Dumas wrote just in January and February of 1794 reveal that, remarkably, the natural fighter had a gift for logistics and planning.

incivisme—“lack of civic consciousness,” the Revolution’s version of treason—or for defeatism,

Although generals didn’t usually do their own reconnaissance, Dumas led forty-five men out on a multiday mission to gain intelligence on the enemy positions on Mont Cenis.

He was always hardest on fellow officers: “The officer must provide an example to the soldier … and sleep like him in a tent.”

The chaos of battle was his home.