Yet, hidden behind these swashbuckling adventures was an even more incredible secret: the real hero was the son of a black slave - who rose higher in the white world than any man of his race would before our own time.īorn in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), Alex Dumas was briefly sold into bondage but made his way to Paris where he was schooled as a sword-fighting member of the French aristocracy. The real-life protagonist of The Black Count, General Alex Dumas, is a man almost unknown today yet with a story that is strikingly familiar, because his son, the novelist Alexandre Dumas, used it to create some of the best loved heroes of literature. The result is an enthralling book that entertains, astounds and triumphantly resurrects a lost hero from the world's first multiracial society.Here is the remarkable true story of the real Count of Monte Cristo a stunning feat of historical sleuthing that brings to life the forgotten hero who inspired such classics as The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. He has walked the streets of Cairo where Dumas' intrepid cavalry charge is still remembered. He has journeyed through the Alps where Dumas scaled unscalable ice cliffs. Long years of research have led him across Europe, the Caribbean and the Middle East in search of forgotten documents. Reiss tells this tale with magisterial authority.

A brief flowering of freedom and equality was over and forgotten, but Dumas' legacy would live on in the novels of the son who adored him. He engineered his disgrace and imprisonment, and to please the sugar growers reintroduced slavery. By the time Napoleon invaded Egypt, Dumas was his top cavalry commander.īut Napoleon was threatened by the physical prowess and popularity of this black nobleman. His father bought him out of slavery and raised him in France, where Dumas went to the nation's finest schools and fencing academies, and having enrolled in the army became known as France's most handsome and strongest soldier. But six months later, Dumas' fortunes changed. Things got worse when his father sold him into slavery to pay his passage back to Normandy.

Who was the real Count of Monte Cristo? In this extraordinary biography, Tom Reiss traces the almost unbelievable life of the man who inspired not only Monte Cristo, but all three of the Musketeers: the novelist's own father.īorn in St Dominigue in 1762, the son of a French nobleman and a sugar plantation slave, General Alexandre Dumas did not have an auspicious start in life.

Winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.

The Black Count by Tom Reiss