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

by Tom Reiss

To remember a person is the most important thing in the novels of Alexandre Dumas. The worst sin anyone can commit is to forget.

“His plantations could produce 600 metric tons of white sugar, [but] he’s found the secret to making only 200.

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. A generation of crusading lawyers put Enlightenment principles into action by helping slaves sue for the right to be treated as ordinary French subjects.

It was all made possible by the concept, going back to the misty foundations of the nation, that France was the land of the free—that no one should be kept in unwilling servitude on its soil.

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

Jean’s trial would be a linchpin for defining blacks’ rights in France during the fifty years before the Revolution, as his lawyers set out to prove, once and for all, that slavery was illegal, immoral, and, worst of all, anti-French.

Part of the problem was that the concept of race itself was still quite new:

Beyond his looks, his grace, and his charm, what may have made him most attractive in this rarefied world was that he was “an American.” In late-eighteenth-century France, the term “American” was usually used synonymously with “man of color.” He was from the American sugar islands, and was thus a former slave or the son of a slave.

both would always be “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.”

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.‡

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

As would soon become clear in his letters and his conduct, Thomas-Alexandre did not believe in race as a determinant of character.