The black count

Glory, revolution, betrayal and the real Count of Monte Cristo

Tom Reiss, Harvill Secker, 432 pages, hardback, £20

This is the amazing story of general Alexandre Dumas, father of the world-famous novelist Alexandre Dumas.

Born in 1762, the son of a French nobleman and a sugar plantation slave, general Dumas did not have an auspicious start in life. Things got worse when his father sold him into slavery to pay his passage back to Normandy.

But six months later, Dumas’ fortunes changed. His father bought him out of slavery and raised him in France, where Dumas went to the nation’s finest schools.

In Dumas we have all the explosive social, racial and political contradictions of an age combined in one person.

He serves in the King’s Guard just before 1789 but quickly joins the French Revolution.

His outstanding abilities see him move from corporal to general in two years, commanding 53,000 men. The survival of the French Republic owed much to his military and organisational genius.

However, Napoleon’s rise heralded his downfall. After falling out with Napoleon, who was threatened by his popularity, Dumas found himself imprisoned in Italy, later returning to an entirely changed France.

Whereas revolutionary France once abolished slavery, Napoleonic France now tried to re-establish it in Haiti, a project eventually defeated by the other geniuses of the age, Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Haitian people.

Reviews contributed by the Bookmarks socialist bookshop. Order online at www.bookmarksbookshop.co.uk