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

by Tom Reiss

Brissot met with General Washington and tried to convince him to start a new revolution for racial emancipation; Washington demurred, telling his French visitor that Virginia was not yet ready for such a thing. But Brissot insisted that racial liberation must respect no borders. Now he applied the same logic to the French Revolution.

The “Marseillaise” was originally titled “The War Song for the Army of the Rhine” and was penned in these fevered months to inspire Frenchmen to fight off the royalist armies massing on France’s eastern borders.

“It is because I want peace that I am calling for war!”

Throughout the seventeenth century, European soldiers were still only slightly removed from thugs; they raped, robbed, and pillaged civilians as assiduously as they fought the enemy.

After the horrors of the wars of religion, during which nearly a third of central Europe’s population was wiped out, various innovations were introduced to make armies less randomly destructive. Discipline was introduced in the form of drills, regimentation, uniforms. Most important, armies began clothing and feeding soldiers, so they’d have no need to pillage, and paying them in lieu of booty. As a result, European armies became less destructive.

“Blind is he who does not believe in my fortune.”

“Unhappiness cannot but draw tighter the bonds which hold us fast to one another,”