The story was straightforward. A man (protagonist Edmond Dantes) who is on the brink of achieving ultimate happiness—marrying his long-time fiancée, earning enough money to take good care of his ailing father—is cheated by a group of friends and imprisoned with no hopes of seeing the daylight again. He escapes with the help of a fellow prisoner, discovers vast treasures in a deserted island and exacts wrathful vengeance on his enemies under a new persona—The Count of Monte Cristo.
Celebrated author Alexandre Dumas (who would have turned 215 on Monday), who penned literary classics such as The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers, wrote in an essay that he based the story on a gory incident of crime as reported by the Parisian police. The true-crime incident involved revenge for wrongful imprisonment. But he later revealed, “Anybody is free to find another source for The Count of Monte Cristo than I give here, but only a clever man will find it.”
The challenge to his readers was not borne of a Sylvia Plath-esque hubris but an obsessive need to have his readers identify emotionally with the heroes that he etched on paper—all of them different shades of his father, General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, a black man with one of the most distinguished military careers in the French army.
The life of General Dumas was one that would have given the most swashbuckling Shakespearian character the blushes. Born Thomas-Alexandre Davy de la Paillaterie in Saint Domingue (modern-day Haiti), his mother, Marie Cessette Dumas, was a black slave and his father, Alexandre Antoine Davy, was a nobleman.
In 1775, Antoine set off to France to claim a fortune, selling his black son into temporary slavery. He sent for little Dumas after he settled in France. After completing his education, Dumas joined the dragoons at the lowest rank. When the French Revolution sparked up, his tremendous skills and imposing physique made him a name as a feared soldier. He was inducted second-in-command of a band of black soldiers, who called themselves la Légion Noire (Legion of Americans). Around the same time, he met his soulmate, the daughter of an inkeeper, while rescuing a town from brigands.
“He proved himself to be a man of great conviction and moral courage. renowned for his strength, his swordsmanship, his bravery and his knack for pulling victory out of the toughest situations,” writes Reiss.
As The Root chronicled: In November 1796, Dumas traveled to Milan, in Italy, where he formed a bond with a man who would one day control his fate: Napoleon Bonaparte. Dumas served under Napoleon in two major campaigns, Italy in 1796-1797 and Egypt in 1798-1799. "Dumas saw himself as a fighter for world liberation, not world domination." Reiss also believes Napoleon became jealous of Dumas' towering size. You've heard of "the Napoleon complex" — well, this is the guy!
When the general left Egypt later, he was captured by hostile forces in Naples. The French did not intervene on his behalf till two years later. Within a few years of his release, he would pass away. By that time, Napoleon, who has assumed power in France, had reversed almost all progressive policies that were implemented in the country, including reinstating state sponsored racism. His distaste for General Dumas had grown to such an extent that he ordered s massacre of all black military officers from Saint Domingue.
Within a few years of his release, General Dumas would pass away.
Meanwhile, every one of his father's exploit was chronicled in great detail by his adoring son. General Dumas was once said to have finished off three opponents in a duel, even with a gash on his head, a scene that was reenacted almost verbatim in The Three Musketeers.
Dumas wrote, “I worshipped my father. I loved him still with as tender and as deep and true a love as if he had watched over my youth and I had the blessing to go from child to man, leaning on his powerful arm.”
His first novel, Georges, was a direct slap against race and racism; the hero, a Mulatto, leads the blacks in rebellion against the white oppressors in this work. Unlike in Georges, General Dumas is more ubiquitous in The Count of Monte Cristo, written almost in a manic desperation to ensure that the readers identified with his father. A fear of remission, of dissolving into oblivion, was an ailment in the Dumas’ psyche. If the General was abandoned by the French for years after his imprisonment in Naples, Edmond Dantes, when he first confronted his enemies in the garb of the Count of the Monte Cristo, found that he was not even a fleeting flash of memory for the men he obsessed over his entire life.
THE FINAL REVENGE
In a scene in the award-winning movie Django Unchained, Dr King Schultz (played by the inimitable Christoph Waltz) tells the murderous Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) that Dumas would not have approved of the latter’s actions; Candie had earlier fed his black slave, named D’Artagnan after one of the heroes in The Three Musketeers, to his dogs. Schultz explains to Candie that Dumas was not a soft-hearted “Frenchie”, but a black man.
And race was something that stayed with Alexandre Dumas and his works. Though, after Georges, there was no overt representation of racial conflicts in his work and the social undertones in his work were soon lost over the generations, the literary establishment never let him forget his heritage. As Reiss writes in the biography, his fellow novelist Balzac referred to Dumas as “that negro”; critics mocked his African heritage and absurdly racial caricatures of Dumas graced the newspapers in the 1850s.
But the son of the wronged father had his vengeance; paraphrasing Edmond Dantes, “Father, beware, our revenge will be terrible when we take it.”
