Tom Reiss

Having just finished The Count of Monte Cristo, I really wanted to like this book. But I just couldn't. The author has some very thin material as sources for his main subject, so fills out the rest of the book with information about the time in which Alex Dumas lived. Unfortunately, I can't trust the author due to a combination of inaccuracies, unsupported opinions expressed as facts, and incomplete readings of contemporary authors.

One example: he states without any supporting evidence that, "France had long been known as the first Christian country in Europe." I can only ask, by whom? By people who don't consider Armenia, the first officially Christian country in the world in 301CE, a European country? (Geographically, this is an arguable point.) Or maybe by people who don't consider the Roman Empire, which converted to Christianity shortly after Constantine converted in 312 CE, a European country? If he's referring to the Merovingians in Gaul, they didn't appear as a major factor until the 5th century CE, and weren't Christian until after the conversion of Clovis I in 496 CE, over 150 years after the Roman Empire was officially Christian.

He also tries to support his thesis that post-Revolutionary France was widely anti-slavery by quoting the first line from Rousseau's The Social Contract: “Man is born free but is everywhere in chains.” I think perhaps he didn't read much past the first sentence, as this quote has nothing whatsoever to do with literal racial slavery. Rousseau was talking about all people, who are born as free individuals in a natural state of freedom, but become subject to laws they had no part in creating or agreeing to. It speaks to the condition of all humanity, not just literally enslaved people.

There are many more of these examples, but I won't go on. Between historical inaccuracies and incomplete readings of the material he quotes, this just isn't a history that should be trusted.… (meer)

Alexandre Dumas (of "The Three Musketeers" and "The Count of Monte Cristo" fame) had a Black father whose real life adventures were far more interesting than the plots of any of the son's novels -- including arriving in France in the eve of the French Revolution, going from private to general in the army in record time, outshining Napoleon wherever he went (in Egypt, everyone assumed he was Napoleon, not that short, thin, sickly fellow standing next to him) and having enough swashbuckling adventures to outshine previous and subsequent generations.

A great biography that put into context much of the French Revolution, its idealism, its excesses, the institutions that it started, and its betrayal at the hands of Napoleon.… (meer)