The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo Paperback – May 14, 2013

This historical biography is based on the life of the famous author, Alexandre Dumas’s father, Thomas-Alexandre, known as Alex Dumas.After time spent in the War of the Polish Succession that ended in 1738, Frenchman Alexandre (Antoine) Davy de la Pailleterie, a future marquis, left France to seek his fortune in Saint-Domingue, the island of Hispaniola. At that time, the Spaniards owned, Santo Domingo, the east side of the island, and the French owned the west, Saint-Domingue (Haiti). Because of sugar planting, Saint-Domingue was one of the wealthiest islands in the world.Antoine moved in with his younger brother, Charles, who had married well and became a well-known sugar planter. Antoine scrounged off his brother for a decade, kept several slave mistresses, and refused to work. Charles and Antoine’s relationship ended violently. Antoine fled with three of his brothers’ slaves, one of which was his latest mistress. To probably resist arrest, Antoine moved up into the highlands, a densely wooded mountains, eventually settling in Jérémie, an isolated area of Haiti. There, he changed his name to Antoine de l’Isle—Antoine of the island.Antoine purchased a mistress for a very high price, Marie Cessette Dumas. Marie Cessette bore him four children. The eldest child was Antoine’s favorite, Thomas-Alexandre, born in 1762. When Antoine returned to France, he would eventually send for fifteen year old Thomas-Alexandre. Antoine sold Marie Cessette and their other three children.In France, Antoine made sure his son was well educated. Thomas-Alexandre became an excellent swordsman. As a young man, Thomas-Alexandre, enlisted in the dragoons, and rejected his father’s surname, Davy de la Pailleterie, and took his mother’s surname, Dumas. He would never again be known as Thomas. Instead, he used Alexandre (Alex) Dumas. He even listed his father as Antoine Dumas.As a Lieutenant Colonel, Alex, who was later commissioned as a General, married Marie-Louise Labouret of Villers-Cotterets, France. They would have three children: two daughters and Alexandre Dumas, Jr. their last child, the future author, was born 10 years later.The book is filled with an enormous amount of French history, some of which includes the shrewd General Bonaparte. At one point, General Dumas and Bonaparte fought together. General Dumas sailed to Egypt with Bonaparte.General Dumas appeared to be a loving husband and good father. On the front, he was a courageous, strong-minded, intuitive leader, unbiased toward his troops. From his men he received much devotion and admiration. His flaw was sometimes not using tact and being too critical. He had high expectations of a soldier’s performance. Yet his bold criticism toward inept superiors or those favored by superiors cost him promotions or unkindness later in life.General Napoleon showed farsightedness concerning his own future ambitions. However, he appeared to be intolerant of criticism expressed by General Dumas, and inflated his own self-importance when he and Dumas were generals.Napoleon was willing to cruelly exploit others for his own gain, especially concerning the Rights of Man decree. When Napoleon became emperor, the law, previously decreed by former King Louis XVI of France, April 4, 1792, which provided citizenship for all property owning free men of color on the islands, became invalid in 1800. In France, interracial marriages as well as interracial education were outlawed. People of color who had lived free in France were to be rounded up and sent back to the colonies. They could no longer live in Paris or the surrounding suburbs. This appears like history repeating itself. German citizens had experienced this during the Second World War, and currently Dominicans of Haitian descent are being denied citizenship because of their place of birth.Without giving too much away, this is a superb historical biography, well written, full of information, and a pleasure to read. The history in France and on the island, Saint-Domingue, will amaze you. I took my time reading this book. Surprisingly, Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers, incorporated some of his father’s famous expeditions when writing his book. The author, Alexandre Dumas, expresses a genuine, tender love and admiration for his father, General Dumas. This book deserves five stars.

Alexandre Dumas, author of the Count of Monte Cristo and assorted other 19th century best-sellers, was the son of a half-white / half-black former Haitian slave, named Alex Dumas. Alexandre's father's father was a French count, a ne'er-do-well who went to Haiti to sponge off of his sugar plantation-owning brother. Eventually the French count returned to France, some years before the French Revolution, paying for his passage by selling the black mother of his children and his children themselves into slavery. Eventually, he bought back his eldest son Alex, and brought him to France. There, the teenage boy was sent off to a famous French school outside of Paris where he received an upper-class education and became an accomplished swordsman. Astoundingly, mixed-race Frenchmen seemed to have been reasonably well-accepted in France of that period, in a way that would have been inconceivable in the United States of the same era. This is perhaps because there was no slavery in France itself and because so many of these mixed-race people were the offspring of well-off and even aristocratic Frenchmen.Alex Dumas thrived in his education and became an accomplished rider and swordsman. Falling out with his father the count, he joined a regiment of French dragoons and became a cavalryman, with the rank of private. Soon, the French Revolution broke out, creating immense opportunities for men of ambition and modest birth. His military exploits against the invading armies of other European countries in the early months after the Revolution earned him quick promotion, and when he transferred to a regiment led by another Haitian mulatto, he was catapulted to the rank of lieutenant colonel and not long after that became a general -- all in the space of a single year.The rest of the book consists of more extraordinary exploits of this man, who became a military hero because of his exploits but had the misfortune of running afoul of the "Corsican upstart", Napoleon, and then of being captured by the enemy and languishing in prison for years.All this makes for a great page-turner of narrative history, but equally interesting is what the reader will learn of the French Revolution itself, and how Dumas negotiated its treacherous and lethal politics. It did not take long before the Revolution was taken over by radical Jacobins, who soon took the helm of the government and began to devour not just the old aristocracy but the Revolution's own children. The guillotines set up in towns all across France were kept very busy. In the western part of France, in the region known as La Vendee, a widespread revolt against the mass conscription, taxation and anti-clericalism of the government resulted in brutal repression reminiscent of Stalin in the 1930's. Much of the region became a smoking ruin and 250,000 people were left dead. During his brief two-month service in the Vendee, Dumas was appalled.Being a general was no guarantee of safety, and in fact hundreds of French generals went to the guillotine, accused of being insufficiently revolutionary or insufficiently zealous in combating France's enemies. Somehow, Dumas survived, partly through luck and partly because he was a very competent officer who won his battles.All in all, the book is a good read, and you will learn much about the colonial era in Haiti, French society just before and during the Revolution, the savage politics of the Revolution itself, and the Napoleonic wars.