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

by Tom Reiss

everyone referred to George Washington as Cincinnatus.)

A Prussian-raised French officer who openly proclaimed a “horror of negroes” (not to mention an “invincible antipathy for Jews”) nevertheless wrote that General Dumas “might be called the best soldier in the world.”

This revolutionary age of racial emancipation introduced much of the world to modern ideas of human freedom—the idea that all men, regardless of religion or race, deserve equal rights, opportunities, respect—but it also spurred the backlash of modern racism and modern anti-Semitism, which fused older prejudices with the new political and scientific ideologies.

Marie-Louise’s father’s only condition for his daughter’s marriage was that Dumas, then still a private in the Queen’s Dragoons, receive his first promotion and attain the rank of sergeant. When Dumas returned for his fiancée’s hand, he was four ranks higher.

Dumasians. It was not a big group—mainly a core of a dozen old-timers who considered themselves devotees of courage, camaraderie, and the Dumas spirit.

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.”

The Portuguese had first taken blacks to Madeira to cut sugarcane because the island was off the coast of North Africa and the Muslim traders there happened to deal in African slaves. When they sailed down the Guinea Coast, the Portuguese found the black African

kingdoms were willing to supply them with slaves directly: the Africans did not consider they were selling their racial brothers to the whites. They did not think in racial terms at all but only of different tribes and kingdoms.

The brutality of the American Cotton Kingdom a century later could not compare to that of Saint-Domingue in the 1700s. There would be no shortage of cruel overseers in the United States, but North American slavery was not based on a business model of systematically working slaves to death in order to replace them with newly bought captives. The French sugar plantations were a charnel house.

(The word marron derived from the Spanish cimarrón—“wild, untamed”—first used to describe cattle that turned feral after getting away from Columbus’s men shortly after they landed.)

but his style was more muscular and aggressive, using his full height, speed, and power. He was a saber man. This would prove a fateful proclivity; while the shorter épée was polite society’s favored dueling sword, the longer, heavier saber was the consummate blade for battle.

“No one has ever deployed more grace,” the younger La Boëssière wrote of his friend. “Such dexterity must seem incredible to those who have not seen it with their own eyes.” When another fencing master sneeringly referred to Joseph as “La Boëssière’s mulatto,” Joseph’s white father encouraged him to stand up to the insult and actually promised him a new horse and carriage if he won the duel.