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i'm sure you've heard of the frenchnovelist alexandre dumas. he's the author of the count of monte cristo and the three musketeers. well, dumas' father, also named alexanderdumas, was actually the inspiration for thosestories. he was a soldier during the french revolutionary wars and quickly rose through the ranks byhis feats of strength and bravery. as a general, he led fifty thousand menin battle and he was black. born in present-dayhaiti
dumas was the son of a french noblemanand a black slave. as a general he was a celebrated war hero but then hegot on the wrong side of that other french general, napoleon. alexandredumas, the father, was pretty much forgotten tohistory until now. bestselling author tom reiss has writtena biography of general dumas it's called the black count and he joinsme in the studio. tom, welcome to the program. thanks mimi. hi. this is quite a story. how did you find out about this? ah, wellyes, it's a it's an exciting story and i found out about it actually as a
kid; i was a big fan of the writeralexandre dumas and three musketeers and the count of monte cristo was my favorite book and i liked these stories so much that iactually hunted down the memoirs of the author and he wrote them when he was 45, at the height of his fame, after hepublished those novels and he was really the mostpopular writer in the world at the time. and the remarkable thing about thememoirs is that he doesn't talk about himself for thefirst 200 pages; he only talks about this
man, this incredible man, who was his father and to read the life story of his fathertold by the son is like reading the count of montecristo and the three musketeers and all into one? the man in the iron mask all in one, only more outlandish and more excitingbecause the main character is a black man living in a white world--well describe-- rises to the sort of top before falling to theabsolute depths. it's sort of a triumph and tragedy story. well, describe alex dumas physically.
what did he look like? oh, well alex dumas physically hmm, looked kinda of like a movie star. i mean he was incredibly imposing, handsome. he was verytall for this time; he was over six feet tall and i mean just all the descriptions ofhim are of someone who is almostlike a they like to compare him to greekhero to sort of people that were in statues and he definitely looked black though? oh i'm sorry, yes, i mean skin color wise he was
unmistakably black; there was no way thatthis man could have passed i mean he was he was half black, hisfather was white but um--there's a--happened to have dark skin and he just was physically really stood out. imposing.very imposing and as all the descriptions at the time sayincredibly handsome and what's interesting is that these are descriptions written all by white people you know in a slave societyyet they don't find his skin color or thefact that he's obviously of african
descent to be at all a drawback they in fact writeabout..tom. let's talk about your sources because there's little museum in avillage in france. yeah. and you go there and there's a safelocked up with all these great letters inside and nobody's got the combination. yeah, its a kind, kind of research story thatcould only come in an alexandre dumas novel but appropriately enough it happened to mewhen i went looking for this story
in rural france. i, you know, i, it's sort of a strange story for me i, i've usually done more modern, um,kinds of investigations, modern for me meaning sometime in the 20th century where i couldfind at least some living witnesses uh, even if they were ninety or ninety-five years old; in this case the story took place twohundred years ago and it was effectively buried and um.. intentionally buried. intentionally buried and so the records hadn't been destroyed, but most records, the best records had
not been looked at in almost a hundred fifty years and infact um i did what seemed obvious i went to thetown where alex dumas died in 1806 and the woman that i went there to meetwho had been sitting, who was sitting on thisinteresting collection of documents that she had been gathering died two weeks before i arrived and so oh, and as you mentioned she was
a bit paranoid and she put everything ofvalue into this big uh, huge tall safe that she had in this government office that sheworked in, in the back of this little municipal museum and when she died she didn't tellanybody the combination and she wasn't you know she... they actuallysearched the office and everywhere. no one could figure out how to get in the safeso i talked to all the people in the town and the mayor's office and the bureaucracyand they say well there's really nothing we can't blow up the safe so what are wegonna do? and the woman who...
the only person who the combination is dead.so...so you went out drinking with the deputy mayor, got him drunk and then...well don't don't give away everything that happened and then blew open the safe. well, yes, yea, yea otherwise we couldn't have the book so uh,yea, actually not blew blew it open; i, i, we we used a steth...you cracked it? a stethoscope and some drills, yea, yea.. it was very good. the book we're discussing is called the black count glory revolution betrayal and the real count of monte cristo. tomreiss is a best-selling author. he's in the studio with me.
going back to alex dumas' origins, hisfather was essentially a loser from france. he was a nobleman that's uh...the first time i've heard anybodydescribe him so candidly and correctly, yea and he went to the french colony whichis now haiti what happened there? yes. yeah he was the--alex's father antoine was really a renegade nobleman. kind of a ne'er-do-wellwho had gone to this colony that later is called haitiat the time was called saint domingue and this was at the time when this wasthe most valuable piece of real estate in the world--it was thecenter of the french colonial empire--it was
really where all of the money that built royalfrance came from, versaille. because of the sugar. because of the sugar. it was the center ofthe world sugar trade it had the most and the best sugar in the world at a timewhen sugar was both a medicine as well asjust this incredibly sought out commodityso sugar was sort of the oil of the 18th century and thiscolony was the saudi arabia of the 18th century. and so all ofthese um basically young men of fortune, youngnobles who didn't know what else to do
it themselves would go. it was like the wildwest, the gold rush. they would all go there to try to make their fortune. but this guy, antoine, he was really goingthere to sponge off of his younger brother who was a... who was reallyworking. who was really working and who was also, among other things, a big slavetrader then and traded slaves and sugar out ofa little piece of land in the north of haiti called montecristo and so that is uh, as you might imaginerelated to what later happens. so then, antoine has arelationship with his slave; he has
several children and the youngest isalex. exactly, the the youngest and the boythat he is most attached to is his son alex and but as you sayantoine is really not a very good guy and he essentially...well, among other thingshe has, i mean well, there are amazing stories, familystories, i discovered in all these documents but one of them is that he has a fight withhis younger brother and the younger brother almost kills him andantoine
takes three of his brothers' slaves,including one that after thirty years he gets wind...he decides its time to go back to france well, he gets he gets wind of an inheritance a massive inheritance for himself plusthe title that he could get but he's going to have to come out of hiding he decides to risk it. he goes down to port-au-prince. but... but he can't afford a ship ticket back tofrance. so he sells his own children. absolutely. he sells his own children and heis such a bastard but he has thisrelationship
with his son, alex, so i found actually the piece of paper he wrote selling his son and he didn't sell alex, he pawned him what it was was a pawn ticketthat said he had a right to buy him back and the father goes to franceinherits the fortune and sure enough within a year he buys alex out and brings him and um and spend lavishly on him. well, first ishould say are the first record i have of our heroin really in arriving in history
is in the year 1776. it's very important cause its this revolutionary period; he arrives at the moment of our revolution in france listed in the ship's manifestas the slave alexandre the slave of this other guy on theship but shortly afterwards he gets off theship and as you say his father brings him suddenly into thislife of luxury in the shadow of the court of versailles. so what would you say is the relationship between father and son? tense. um, i mean the father was a veryweird and capricious man
i mean. selfish. oh incredibly selfish. he shortly after coming back and, you knowhe's, when he was in hiding for thirty years and during alex's first 15 years, hisfather's just known as antoine of the islands. antoine de because he's going under the pseudonym and then soon as he gets back to france he'ssuddenly inherited the title that he's now the marquee antoine alexandre david de les (inaudible) and his son. i love those long french names. yea, yea, well it's beautifulwell suddenly alex who's listed
in as the slave alexandre a yearlater his name is count thomas alexandre david de les (inaudible).....the relationship between alex and his father is tense and hisfather decides to marry their servant who'sfifty years younger than he is or about give or take a few and um alex has seen his own mother being soldand this is sort of, probably his father's fourth mistress that he's taking on and uh, alex is only able to take it for a fewyears and then he has a huge break with
his father. and that break really is him joining the army as a private. it's him joiningthe army at the lowest rank and it is also, for history and for ourstory, an amazing moment because it is when he decides to throw off his noble name and throw off allconnection to this noble family and he invents, when he signs up for theenlistment, he invents a new name. he takes his realname, his first name, alexandre but, for his second name he writes downhis, what we believe, is his mother's name
dumas, meaning of the plantation and hewrites alexandre dumas and that's the firstrecord record we have of that name and that's the name he goes by for the restof his life, although he prefers to be called alex. the book we're discussing is called theblack count. its about the father of the novelist alexandre dumas tom reiss is a best-selling author-- he'sin the studio with me. so why did he join as a private not asan officer cause he had the right to join as an officer
yes, indeed this was a strange thing andthis is part of his break with his father. he's deliberately throwing offall of his noble right. at the time even a...at the time the french armywas very corrupt and even a twelve or fourteen year old boy if they were theson of a noble, as i found out, they could get anofficer's commission in the army they could, there even, there were 13 year old colonels. and alex joins at the lowest rank and hejust joins this very rough and tumble kind ofgroup of queen's dragoons. it's still the lastcouple years of royal france before the
revolution and these guys are stationed on france'sborders both to protect the borders but also to kind of chase down high women and um essentially combat robbery in the countryside and..did he face racism though in france during that time?this is the remarkable thing i found out even before the revolution, there is this incredible space that has opened up inthe 1770s, even a little before, evenbefore that
in france as a result of what is i would say the world's first civilrights movement and this is an incredible there so many incredible forgottenthings in this story and aside from the life of alex dumas whichhas been suppressed, i would say that the civilrights movement has in a way been deliberatelysuppressed by by the french uh, by the powers that be infrance, for various reasons we get into but
it's a bizarre thing that they suppressit because they had the world's first civil rightsmovement and even though they were paradoxically the empire and the countrythat benefited the most from slavery and they had the cruelest conditions forslaves at the same time, there were thesecrusading lawyers and um, people in paris who won incrediblerights for black people, decades before these rights were wonin any other country. so within a year, dumas goes from beinga corporal to a brigadier general and yeah, and he's leading you know ten thousand men. and this is just the beginning, yeah..
how do you account for that rapidrise? well i mean alex dumas is just an amazing soldier and in fact um, i mean they're so many examples but i liketo quote one from... i like to quote a summary from a memoir that i found of another officer from the, of thetime and i think it's an interesting quotebecause this other officer from reading his memoirs is clear thathe is a thoroughgoing racist
he hates blacks he hates anybody-he actually says that he can't stand to be in the sameroom as a negro and you know he's, gives you all thereasons why, but he says right there in his memoirs, nomatter how i may feel about negroes, yet i must confess there's this manalexandre dumas and he may be the finest soldier in theworld. anyway, alex, at the time, was ridingaround with these guys on the border and he just did these incredible things. basically, hewould ride in
and you know there's the firsttime he comes in the records is when he, unfairly small-scale, he takes 13prisoners almost single-handedly without firing a shot, gets all of their weapons, marches all theprisoners back and then donates the weapons to the french senate.so i mean enormous feats of strength bravery but how is his leadership skills? audacity, audacity in leadership i think this is it. it's not just bravelike the way that he takes prisoners without firing a shot is that he just knows how to psych peopleout and he has an incredible
sense of when to, uh, when and how to attack. um and he just and how to leadmen i mean he just, ver, very soon... a natural leader he's a natural leader. very soon it's not13 men or even 500 men as you started to mention, i mean he is, he findshimself within two years leading 53,000 white french soldiers in some of the mostrugged terrain in europe. they're actually on a glacierin the alps and here's a guy who grew up in haiti, you know and has never seensnow till you know just
that you know a few years before. ishould also say this is a time when the french armies are very dangerous forofficers; dozens of generals are being murderedby their own troops alex dumas only inspires the absoluteopposite he inspires adulation and love from everybody. youknow there, men are willing to follow him almostanywhere. and you said here was this black man that was leading white troops and this wouldn't happen again until twohundred years later with colin powell.
yeah, its its remarkable. i mean there areother um, officers in of color and then there area few generals in the 20th century but nobody would rise as high in a white army or in a white majoritysociety as alex dumas in some ways until our own time. and in some ways he is really like a precursor for colin powell andeven for president obama i mean he's in many ways, he lived a life in the 18thcentury a kind of post-racial, a life of..
he lived a kind of 21st century life in the 18th century as a post-racialleader in a white society even though he was black. we're discussing the book called the black count; it's about the father of the novelist alexandre dumas. tom reissis a best-selling author and he's in the studio with me. what happens when he meets napoleon? what are the circumstances and how do they not get along? well here, this is it it becomes almostlike a greek
tragedy, a conflict between these two great warriors who are absolutely the opposite in every way. dumas this incredible physical leader who leads out in frontof his men with courage, audacity and who inspires his men on this emotionallevel and napoleon this kind of calculating um, you know quite scheming, but brilliantstrategist. and in fact the first time they meet, um dumas outranks napoleon and napoleonasks him for guns
um because he, uh, needs some and uh, dumas is at the time, as i said, he's in thealps fighting very treacherous conditionsand uh, he actually has a three-month deadlineto take the alps from france and he basically sends napoleon back a note saying i'msorry i can't spare any guns uh, my friend so uh, that may, sets the first, i found i meanthese are, you know, i had to sift through hundreds and actually thousands of thesemilitary letters that no one had gone through andso you know when i mention some
incident like that i should say it'sbecause i'm searching through hundreds of letters and then i suddenly i'm like, whoa, wait, does this saynapoleon here and it's in actually spelled in this kind offunny way and is dumas talking to him as though he isthis underling and it's quite it's quite exciting when you found when i found thatletter and i realized that's uh, the first contact. but was the animosity from napoleon because dumas was so much bigger andbetter than him or was it racism? well it's a combinationand it certainly i wouldn't say that he
was better than him. i mean they werejust very very different kinds of leaders obviously but what and any way the animositydidn't come from that one incident that small incident wherethey first crossed paths. they actually next really got involvedwith each other during the campaign um, to um, liberate italy fromthe austrians which was a very very big part of these french revolutionary wars; essentiallyit's when this mmm first
essentially this is the beginning ofmodern italy. the french sweep into italy and with the help of italianpatriots, they throw out these enemy forces but then there's fiercefighting and alex dumas becomes instrumental to driving the germans and austrians up north, back intothe mountains, and out of italy. in fact, um dumas does much of this old, even though he's a general, he doesmuch of this sorta old-style dragoon style warfare where he'll take small bands-- he's almost like a special forces general
and he he loves to fight with small groupsof men that can use stealth and lots of secret, he likes to use spiesand a lot of secret kind of stuff and he actually gets theaustrians in the hills and there's a certain point where he has all of them on this bridge andthe austrians outnumber the french so much that the men that dumas isleading, even though they're very brave, they all freak out and they run away anddumas left alone on this bridge and you know the records from that daydescribe him being shot, horses are shot out from under him, he'sbeing slashed with sabres
any other man would have fallen. alexdumas not only doesn't fall he fights so hard that by the timereinforcements arrive, the austrians are just routed and they run and instead ofaccepting medical care dumas leaps on a horse and with a coupleof guys he chases the austrians up towards the brenner pass and out ofitaly and at this point, in this campaign, napoleon even though he's taken a dislike to dumas has to give him, acknowledge what afabulous soldier he is and so he celebrates him
as the reincarnation of the herowho saved rome from the barbarians by keeping thesegermanic forces out. but the reason that napoleon doesn'tlike dumas from the beginning is that dumas his fatal flaw, alex dumas' fatal flaw isreally that he can't keep his mouth shut or that he alex dumas' fatal flaw is that hespeaks his mind, no matter what and he's just, he will not be kept down and so, first this happens in italy where he sees
napoleon taking the revolution in adifferent direction. basically napoleon sees the revolution has a chance toestablish his own power and dumas is a he's a red white and blue revolutionary.he staked his life on genuine um fight for liberty equalityand fraternity especially because he has seen what this can do for people of color. hethis is in his letters, this is everywhere that he writes. but napoleon was kinda more in it for himself. napolean is entirely in it for himselfand then, the next year, the two of them
go to egypt and napoleon is commanding an expedition to invadeegypt supposedly to liberate the egyptians. but dumas who goes along as his cavalrycommander is instantly very suspicious of whythey're there and he brings up a kind of insurrection among the troops andthe generals. i mean doesn't cause an insurrection but he publicly questions napoleon as thefrench
are losing thousands of men to diseaseand he says, you know, i don't think we'rereally here for the reasons we say we're here. we're here so that you can build up an empirein the desert and napoleon cannot tolerate it. doesn't like that. yeah he doesn't like it and he can't pay-- its its napoleon is building up this myth ofhimself and here's this big you know uh, glamorous man, dumas. andnapoleon only comes up to his chest. the memoirs of napoleon's doctor on theegyptian expedition described what the egyptians thoughtwhen they first saw the french troops
marching across the desert to alexandria and they saw first, this, they described this incredible tall black man on his horsewho was so at one with the horse that helooked like a centaur and he looked like a great hero and they were sure that thisman was the leader of the french expedition. not that little guy. yes and they say the egyptians described seeingthis scrawny little man following him who is napoleon and they were sure wellhe has to be some underling so they just, theyclashed from the beginning because of
this great discrepancy between them butthen there was also the racial issue. and youknow a lot happens, um, alex dumas is captured after he leavesegypt and spends time in prison but napoleon really essentially takespower in france, becomes a dictator, and then completely rolls back all ofthese racial equality laws. yes and well, i should just say that alex dumas doesn'tonly spend time in prison it's really a dungeon, and in fact, inthat safe that we spoke about at the beginning that i found
so many important records to um write this book, probably the mostimportant record in the safe was a description written in dumas' ownhand, in alex dumas' own hand, of his imprisonment in this dungeon and it was thatdescription that his son the novelist would use as an inspiration to write thebeginning of the count of monte cristo so um, its kind of, for somebody who's a dumas fan that's a, was a remarkable document to be holdingin my hand. but you know you you alluded to this earlier where he kindarose to the top and then
you know fell really to the bottom. when he-absolutely--went back to france. you know there's all these racial lawsnow that were uh, you know, um, black and white peoplecan't get married, all that kind of stuff yea, yea, that is i didn't mean to deflect from that withthe dungeon. the dungeon is really the personal tragedy thathappens to dumas where he's being poisoned and he's sort of out of the picturefor two years and as you say, when he comes back to francea mere two years later napoleon has imposed this dictatorshipand what people don't know is that
napoleon's dictatorship was largelyfinanced by the sugar and slave traders andthere's incredible money poured in, essentially, it's like a political pac,that and and one of the deals they uh, are trying to get and clearly get is, the reimposition of slavery and theend of this post racial society which has been you know costing them money uh, and the, when when dumas gets back to francehe suddenly finds this country that had a mere couple of years before had hadintegrated, the world's first integrated
school system in in paris and had had they wereso the head of the french senate was black and there were a lot of mixed race andblack legislators napoleon is kicked all of them out andthere were a lot of blacks in the, officers in the army, dumas was by far the highest, but there were others.and napoleon actually passes laws kicking them out of the army essentially putting anybody who has blackor african heritage into the equivalent of chaingangs. they're
they set up deportation camps. they createa zone around paris that no person of color isallowed to live in of course alex dumas' house, in thatlittle village, happens to be within that zone ,so i found this very, you knowheart-rending letter that he had to write, essentiallyasking for a dispensation from the racial law even though he was one of france's greatheroes one of the great heroes of the he has to get a special permission tolive in his own house, uh,
they've banned mixed marriages and ofcourse dumas' sweetheart and his love of his life, mary louise is white is sohe's living almost illegally for that reason. and you knowin every way, it's just this tragic tragic reversal. what's your next book gonna be about? um, well um i think i've gotten kind of addictedto heroes and i can't say what it is but i'm lookinginto another kind of great unsung hero and i go for stories that have a certainkinda bittersweet
quality about them and that expose uh, the kind of underbelly of history buti always have to find some kind of inspiration in it so like in this story no matter how bad things got at the end,i am so deeply inspired by the fact that out of all this, even in this tragicperiod we're talking about alex dumas had a son and that son seeing his father wronged, pushed out ofhistory, decided i'm gonna write him back in as these great heroes that we know todayas the count of montecristo and the three
musketeers so i'm always looking for the combinationof the two things. tom reiss is a best-selling author. thebook is the black count: glory revolutionbetrayal and the real count of monte cristo. it's published by crown books. tom thanksso much for being on the program. hey thanks, great questions mimi.
