He received one of the most comprehensive educations possible at the time, learning about classical literature, aristocratic history, military strategy, and combat. Dumas thereafter spent his teenage years in Paris, where he enjoyed the privilege conveyed by his father, who was considered a French aristocrat. The plan worked, and Alexandre bought his son back, leaving his other children in slavery. The intent was to get enough money to come out from hiding by paying off his debts, thereby regaining his estate and a large inheritance sum.
When the little Dumas turned fourteen, Alexandre sold him, along with his three siblings, to work as slaves in Haiti’s Port-au-Prince. When he was born, Alexandre was in hiding from the French government, as well as from his brother, a wealthy man in the sugar and slave trades who worked mainly out of Monte Cristo, Haiti. His father was the Marquis Alexandre Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, and his mother a Haitian slave, Marie-Cessette Dumas. Born under the name Thomas-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie, he came into the world in a French colony of Haiti in 1762. The Black Count begins with a profile of Dumas’s childhood. The acclaimed biography won a 2013 Pulitzer Prize, for its nuanced reading of a complex revolutionary figure and his transformation into the fictional literature of his following generation.
Reiss also touches on Dumas’s influence on his son, who refigured him in some of his writings, most notably The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. Reiss chronicles Dumas’s early life as a slave sold by his father, and moves through his initiation into the French Army and later tenure under Napoleon. The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo (2012), a biography by Tom Reiss, surveys the life of General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, a Haitian French Revolutionary soldier (later general) who went on to father the famous writer Alexandre Dumas.
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