Tom Reiss the BLACK COUNT

A Conversation with Tom Reiss Author of THE BLACK COUNT Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo Crown; September 18, 2012 Q. Who was Alex Dumas? What makes him relevant today? A. Alex Dumas was one of history’s most odds-defying figures, and his story is an inspiration to anyone. Born the son of a slave and briefly sold into slavery himself, he made it to Paris before the Revolution, and though he inherited a noble name from his white father, he threw it off, took his mother’s slave name “Dumas,” and volunteered for the army at the lowest rank. During the Revolution, Alex first rode with the Queen’s dragoons—protecting people from revolutionary mobs—and then he helped form a group of revolutionary mixed-race horsemen called the Black Legion that rode to defend France’s frontiers from invasion. In solo combat, Alex Dumas could fight off a dozen men (there are many eyewitness accounts of those exploits). But he also showed incredible leadership and was raised, by age thirty-one, to the rank of general. As commander-in-chief of the French army in the Alps, roughly the equivalent of a four-star-general today, this young man from the tropics, who had barely seen snow before, led 53,000 poorly supplied men in fierce glacier fighting against the best alpine troops in the world. He could be celebrated as the patron saint of all U.S. Special Forces today. But even as he gave all for his side, his real character was shown in how he treated the enemy or those under his command. Here Alex Dumas was equally uncompromising, and he constantly clashed with his superiors. He was promoted to general at the height of the Terror when Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety assigned commissars to accompany the generals in the field with portable guillotines—dozens of generals and other officers were decapitated for supposed political offenses or for showing too much leniency. Dumas stood up to any intimidation (it was said he even burned one of the portable guillotines for firewood). I found many letters written years later by Dumas’s former enemies thanking him for protecting their rights and defending them from his own army’s abuses. Dumas’s jaw-dropping ascendancy as a black man through the white ranks of the French Army also represents a key turning point in the history of slavery and race relations—one that, incredibly, has been overlooked until now. General Dumas was a pioneering black leader in a modern white society—the precursor to Colin Powell and President Obama—but nearly two hundred years before them. His career realigns our understanding of racial politics in the era of slavery. It is also drenched with irony: at the same time that he led more than 50,000 white soldiers to honor and glory, a black man like him in the United States—which presented itself as the font of liberty—would be relegated to shining a general’s shoes. Finally, beyond his importance as a historical figure, Alex Dumas influenced literature and popular culture in ways that would have been unimaginable to him—not only books but movies and even comics. He was the red, white, and- blue–wearing superhero of the Revolution, and his exploits inspired his son to create the Three Musketeers, who were among the main prototypes for the modern action hero. (Alex’s son basically divided up his exploits and gave them to the individual characters, because if all these feats had been credited to one man, it would have seemed too unbelievable.) And as the inspiration for The Count of Monte Cristo , which became a template for the modern thriller protagonist—the wronged man in search of justice—the ghost of Alex Dumas lives in everything from Batman to The Bourne Identity . Q. How did you find this story? A. It began in my parents’ basement when I came across the memoirs of Alexandre Dumas, the novelist. Dumas is one of the most famous writers in the world, having published The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo , but the first two hundred pages of his memoir are all about his father. You can imagine it: Dumas had grown up in terrible poverty, hearing the stories of his father’s fame and bravery at the height of the Revolution—and he knew that Napoleon was somehow behind his father’s fall from grace but never knew the full story. While General Dumas died when his son was not yet four years old, young Alexandre deeply loved his father, and heard the tales of his exploits from his mother and from old soldiers who would stop by to pay their respects and reminisce about the incredible general, who had been unlike anyone they had ever known, in talents and courage but also in his humanity and invincible spirit. Dumas’s memoir is impossible to read without being deeply moved by the loss of this towering man, but what really stuck with me is the love that shows through from the son, the writer, for his father, the soldier. The first part of the memoir ends with the writer describing the day his father died. His mother met him on the stairs in their house, lugging his father’s gun over his shoulders, and asked him what he was doing. Alexandre replied: “I’m going to heaven to kill God—for killing daddy.” I couldn’t get this out of my mind. It conveys so powerfully the rage we feel when the most important person in life is taken from us. Q. In your previous book, the international bestseller The Orientalist , you revealed the surreal secret life of Lev Nussimbaum, a Jewish man who transformed himself into a Muslim prince and became a bestselling author in Nazi Germany. Now, in THE BLACK COUNT , you tell the little-known story of General Alex Dumas, a real-life epic hero, forgotten by history. How do you come to write about people few others even know existed? A. I believe the past really is undiscovered country—that we’ve barely begun to chart it. I’ve always been drawn to unjustly forgotten people, those who’ve been marginalized for one reason or another. Alex Dumas is someone who was forgotten utterly because he did not fit the conventional narrative. The reason his life was forgotten was no accident—it was deliberate. On one level because he crossed a powerful and ruthless man, Napoleon, but on another level because he crossed history. Alex Dumas came of age during a unique and forgotten moment when France was forging the modern world’s first post-racial society. The French Revolution was doing what the American Revolution had not done. Napoleon destroyed that moment and buried it—and he did the same thing to its shining human example: General Dumas. Napoleon even had Dumas’s image removed from a famous painting of the Egyptian Expedition and replaced by a blond, blue-eyed officer. Q. It took you seven years to research the life of General Dumas, traveling all over the world tracking down source material. What was that process like? A. Tracking down the life of a man who died more than two hundred years ago was a new experience for me. I had to rely entirely on old documents—letters, diaries, memoirs, newspaper cuttings, and battlefield reports—to get at the truth. I went all around the world—I went to Egypt to follow Alex’s campaigns there, and in the south of Italy I found the fortress cell where he’d been imprisoned for three years. But the place I returned to again and again, was a little gray cobblestoned town fifty miles northeast of Paris called Villers-Cotterêts. I found an old man in the town who had grown up in the house where General Dumas had died, and who had lived his life devoted to what he called “the Dumasian spirit.” He had lost the use of his leg in a traffic accident, decades before, and took inspiration from the story of General Dumas to persevere. He and a few others supported me in my quest to resurrect the general—they felt the injustice of his disappearance. In fact, these “Dumasians” actually helped me to achieve my greatest research coup—the thing that made this book possible—which was access to the most personal and valuable papers in existence about General Dumas, including the handwritten memoir of his captivity in the dungeon that was the basis for The Count of Monte Cristo as well as personal letters from Marie-Louise and many others. These papers were in a locked safe, to which no living person had the combination. The Dumasians helped me get access to the safe, which was in a government building, but I hired a professional to actually drill into the safe to get it open. Q. How could a man of this stature and importance remain unknown for so long? Aside from his importance as a military figure and, through his son’s stories, to world literature and culture, General Dumas led a career as a black leader in a white society that remained unequaled until our own time, when Colin Powell and Barack Obama have finally followed in his footsteps. A. I think the answers go back to the Revolution—to its fundamental rejection of racial and religious categories, which has characterized the French republic ever since. But maybe more important, they go back to the forgotten road of racial emancipation and modernization that France alone took in the eighteenth century before reversing direction under Napoleon.

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