The Black Count
Glory, Revolution,
Betrayal, and the Real
Count of Monte Cristo
by Tom Reiss
Crown
A slave rises up the ranks to become one of the most formidable and powerful military leaders in French history. He takes on Napoleon, is exiled to a dungeon and ends his life penniless — in short, a great, tragic legend of history. Or so you’d think.
Instead, Alex Dumas, a man whose foes called “The Black Devil,” has been largely lost in obscurity — though his life story and his last name sound so familiar, you probably think you’ve heard them before.
And if you’ve read “The Count of Monte Cristo” and “The Three Musketeers,” you have. Because Alex’s son, Alexandre Dumas, gave his father uncredited starring roles in some of the most famous swashbuckling adventures in all of literature.
Journalist Tom Reiss was inspired to find the man behind the legend after reading a passage in Alexandre Dumas’ memoirs that spoke about the moment as a 4-year-old boy that he heard his father had died. The passage had stayed with Reiss and reminded him of the time when his own hero, his uncle, a Holocaust survivor, passed away in his own youth.
“It really killed me. It just hit me on some very deep level,” Reiss told The Post. “All my feelings for my uncle came out after reading that scene, and it bonded me to the story of Alex Dumas.”
In reconstructing the life of a forgotten and forsaken war hero during the French Revolution, it was clear that the source material for Dumas’ stories is just as rich as his tall tales.
Alexandre the elder was born on March 25, 1762 out of wedlock between a white aristocrat named Antoine and his slave, a woman named Marie Cesette Dumas. After a feud with his brother over his intimacy with slaves, Antoine and Marie relocated to a French sugar colony called Saint-Domingue, where Alexandre was born.
When his brother died, the family estate fell to Antoine. To fund his reentry to France as rightful heir, he sold his children and their mother, Marie, into slavery.
Once restored to his title, Antoine purchased Alexandre back and introduced him to a life of luxury as a gentleman in Paris, lavishing silk clothes, enrolling him in school and paying for swordsmanship lessons for him.
The former slave was now a count.
France in the mid-to-late 1700s was going through an “orgy of emancipation.” In the 1750s, a group of lawyer lobbied against sugar colonies and won broad rights for people of color. Slaves were able to bring lawsuits against their masters and win freedom, 100 years before the American Civil War.
Even Dumas, a former slave, was admired by high society for his tall frame and dark skin. His curly hair was likened to that of the Greek and Roman ideal.
But shortly after relocating to Paris, he and his father had a falling out. Antoine had married and became stingier with money. Two weeks after the marriage, Alexandre enlisted in the royal army under his mother’s maiden name, Dumas.
Dumas joined the Crown’s dragoon unit that “did the toughest and dirtiest jobs” and immediately earned his stripes as a powerful soldier.
“In riding school, he liked to stand up in the stirrups, take hold of an overhead beam and lift himself and his horse bodily off the ground,” Reiss quotes Alexandre Dumas, the son, writing about his father.
One account reported that he fought — and won — three duels in one day. (Reiss says that this was most certainly an inspiration for a scene in “The Three Musketeers” when d’Artagnan challenges the three musketeers to battle in one afternoon. The scene ends with the phrase, “All for one, and one for all.”)
As the Great Fear spread in 1789, Dumas found himself in a village with his dragoon protecting a local family from rioters. One of the daughters he was sworn to protect, Marie-Louise Labouret, would become his future wife.
The two became engaged — but her father insisted the marriage could happen only after Dumas, a private, became a sergeant. By the time he took Marie-Louise’s hand in marriage in the fall of 1782, he was four ranks higher.
The Revolution turned its eye to Austria and the Austrian Netherlands. As head of the Black Legion of mixed race soldiers, Dumas made a name for himself at Mouvian, near Lille, where he reportedly “swooped down on the post of 40 Dutch soldiers, killing three by his own hand, and taking 16 prisoners” with only 14 men of his own. The opposing forces nicknamed Dumas “The Black Devil.”
The Black Legion was disbanded, but Dumas was steadily promoted. In the space of one year, by 1793, he made brigadier general, moving up from a lowly dragoon corporal to an overseer of 10,000 troops.
But it was in the wintry Alps where Dumas was lifted “to a new place in the pantheon of the heroes of the French Revolutionary War,” Reiss writes.
He led his army up the “seemingly impregnable ice cliffs at night” to surprise an unready band of Austrian troops. Dumas captured their guns and forced a surrender, taking in 1,700 prisoners and 40 artillery pieces. Shortly afterward, he was promoted to commander-in-chief of the entire army.
But the Austrians were nothing compared to an enemy in his own ranks — then-Gen. Napoleon Bonaparte.
“It’s a Greek tragedy between two great warriors,” Reiss says. “One of them is this classical Greek hero of virtue. He leads people. He is self-sacrificing. The other is Napoleon, a calculating modern strategist. Their styles are so clashing, it’s no wonder that Napoleon hated Dumas.”
Unfortunately for Dumas, it was Napoleon’s star that was rising.
“Napoleon would tolerate [Dumas’] troublesome manner and annoying egalitarian values — up to a point,” writes Reiss, mainly because Dumas’ victories were hard to ignore. But ignore he tried.
Another victory for Dumas in 1797 — which forced the Austrians to give up an important stronghold in Italy — brought him no adulation. Even though he was shot off his horse — twice — and still managed to win the fight, his role was diminished in the official account (written by a Napoleon aide) as a mere observer.
Dumas, who had a famous temper, couldn’t hold back, sending Napoleon a terse and angry note: “I have learned that the jackass whose business it is to report to you . . . stated that I stayed in observation throughout the battle. I don’t wish any observation on him, since he would have s – – – his pants.”
The two men came together briefly in Egypt, where Napoleon claimed to want to liberate the Egyptians from the Mamelukes.
One officer at the time noticed how “short and skinny” Napoleon appeared next to Dumas, who looked like a “centaur.” “All of them believed that he was the leader of the expedition,” the officer wrote of Dumas.
But his temper and inability to control his tongue got Dumas in hot water with Napoleon. The tour was far from productive, and Dumas said as much to his troops. In 1798, Napoleon accused Dumas of sedition and threatened his life: “I will shoot a general as soon as a drummer-boy,” he told him.
Instead of executing him, however, Napoleon sent him back to France.
In 1799, on the trip back, Dumas’ ship malfunctioned, forcing him to stop in an unknown part of Italy in the Gulf of Taranto. They discovered too late that a fleur-de-lis, a symbol of the merger of the Church and the Crown, hung around the city. They were in enemy territory.
Searched and questioned, each man was thrown into a fortress, left to rot with only a short period of day out of a cell for exercise. This would be the basis for Edmond Dantès’ unearned plight in “The Count of Monte Cristo.”
The stories are strikingly similar. The fictional count Edmond Dantès is also exiled and betrayed without good reason — but Dantès gets away and is rewarded with buried treasure, enabling him to buy the island that enslaved him and exact revenge on the people who did him wrong.
This was a bit of wish fulfillment on the part of Dumas, the son. In reality, Dumas the elder was routinely poisoned in prison. He developed a paralysis in his face and began vomiting.
The whole ordeal lasted for two years. He was released in 1801, now a partially deaf and blind 39-year-old man with a limp.
France, too, had changed. Napoleon had successfully orchestrated a coup in 1799 and, among other changes, had made it a harder place for a person of mixed race to live. He outlawed marriage between people of different skin colors; he refused their right to train as officers; and ejected all non-whites from Paris and nearby suburbs. Dumas, once the commander-in-chief of the French army, had to file a special dispensation to live in his own home.
He was also broke. The 500,000 francs promised to him after his war service were never delivered. Napoleon excluded Dumas from the Legion of Honor, a system for rewarding outstanding war service.
Dumas wrote a letter to Napoleon urging him for fair treatment but never heard back: “I hope . . . that you will not allow the man who shared your work and your dangers to languish like a beggar.”
One good thing that came out of his return home: On July 24, 1802, his third and last child, a boy named Alexandre, was born.
Four years later, Dumas died. There was no pomp and circumstance surrounding his death — the only people that spoke of his exploits during the war was his wife and his fellow soldiers.
“I worshipped my father,” Dumas the novelist wrote in his memoir. “I love him still with as tender and as deep and as true of a love as if he had watched over my youth, and I’d had the blessing to go from child to man leaning on his powerful arm.”
However, he remained quiet, almost cheeky, about his father’s influence on his work.
In essay written after publication of “The Count of Monte Cristo” he spoke about his influences, such as a true-crime story of murder and revenge, that inspire d him to write the tale. But in the end of the essay, he admitted that his explanations might be deceptive.
“And now, everyone is free to find another source for ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ than the one I give here,” he wrote, “but only a clever man will find it.”
Reiss might finally be that man.