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

The Black Count is a biography of General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, father of the novelist Alexandre Dumas. Born in Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, in 1762, he was the son of a French marquis and Marie-Cessette Dumas, an enslaved woman. Tom Reiss follows his career as a soldier and officer during the French Revolution, in Italy during the Revolutionary Wars and in Egypt under Napoleon. The book also looks at slavery and at the life of a man of mixed race in the French colonial empire, and shows how the general inspired some of his son’s novels, including The Count of Monte Cristo.