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

by Tom Reiss

France was the first country to codify colonial slavery. In doing so, King Louis XIV passed a law, in 1685, that changed the history of both slavery and race relations. Le Code Noir—the Black Code.

Decades before the 1772 Somerset decision in London sparked the British abolitionist movement, French lawyers arguing before the parlements started, with their pens, a fight that Thomas-Alexandre and Saint-Georges would eventually take up with their swords. 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.

In the event, the Parlement of Paris, offended by the mere use of the word “slave” in a law governing actions within the kingdom, refused to register the law. A lawyer consulting for the high court used the occasion to produce an elaborate condemnation of the institution of slavery itself, on the grounds that it conflicted with, among other things, French legal tradition, French history, and Christianity. France had long been known as the first Christian country in Europe, the lawyer wrote, and “the God of the Christians is the God of liberty.”

Among the French forces fighting for American independence at the Siege of Savannah, Georgia, in 1779: a batallion of free blacks and men of color from Saint-Domingue that included future French legislator and ex-slave Jean-Baptiste Belley, and future king of Haiti, Henri Christophe.

“Unhappiness cannot but draw tighter the bonds which hold us fast to one another,” General Dumas had written to Marie-Louise as he made his way home. His son has Edmond Dantès express the same sentiment in a letter to his friend at the close of The Count of Monte Cristo: “He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness.… Live then and never forget that until the day when God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these two words—‘Wait and hope.’