February 28, 2019

Happy Black History Month! Today’s book rec is The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. It’s a classic story of revenge: an adorable naive cupcake of a young man gets betrayed by some jealous acquaintances and sent to prison under false charges, he escapes, finds buried treasure, and pretends to be a count while secretly orchestrating the ruin/deaths of those who wronged him. Super satisfying and juicy.

“Wait, what?” I can hear you asking. “Wasn’t that written by some old French white guy?” NO. It was written by some French biracial guy! And the inspiration for it came from today’s surprise double feature book rec, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss. Alexandre Dumas’s grandpa was a white aristocrat who owned slaves on present-day Haiti, who freed his son Alexandre, took him to France, and they both lived large until the money ran out. Alexandre joined the military and quickly rose through the ranks around the same time Napoleon started to distinguish himself, and they actually eventually were paired up together on Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Egypt. Dumas (who took his enslaved mother’s last name, even before the French Revolution made it dangerous to be an aristocrat) was really tall and handsome and an unbelievable fighter and Napoleon was a sullen, short, whiny man, and people generally believed that Dumas was the leader of the campaign when they saw them side by side. But on his way home from Egypt, he and his colleagues were taken prisoner for two years, and it ruined his health, and he died four years later. Alexandre the novelist worshiped his dad, and he did a bunch of research to write a memoir about him, and then this Reiss guy did a bunch more research to see what was real and what was embellished. This book is FASCINATING because the details of the French Revolution are super interesting and Reiss gives a lot of great historical context without dragging down the narrative. And he points out that what often gets lost during discussions of French history is that during the period between the Terror and Napoleon’s rule, the French outlawed slavery in their homeland and in their colonies in 1894. They were the first people in the world to ever do so. (Napoleon reinstated it because he sucked.) It’s interesting to see the differences in French racial dynamics at this point in time, especially compared to Americans’ views of assimilation, and even to the France of today, which is hella racist. A fantastic read.