The Real Story Behind ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ and Thomas-Alexandre Dumas

No one could have foreseen the rise of Thomas-Alexandre Dumas.

Born enslaved, he became France’s first Black general—a war hero, a champion of liberty and a pioneer of equality during the French Revolutionary Wars.

Dumas’s fall from grace, however, was swift. Fellow general Napoleon Bonaparte envied and feared him. His nation betrayed him. And more than a century after his death in 1806, the Nazis melted down his bronze statue to make materials for the war effort.

The general died when his son, the future novelist Alexandre Dumas, was only 3 years old. But the elder Dumas’s astonishing life formed the emotional core of his child’s most successful novel, The Count of Monte Cristo.

On March 22, a new television adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo will debut on Masterpiece on PBS. Ahead of the premiere of the eight-episode limited series, which stars Sam Claflin, Jeremy Irons and Ana Girardot, revisit the history behind the book—a record that illuminates the novel’s deepest themes of loss, revenge, love and memory.

Who was Thomas-Alexandre Dumas?

First published in serial form between 1844 and 1846, The Count of Monte Cristo tells the story of a young sailor, Edmond Dantès, who seems destined for happiness. Just returned from a successful voyage, Dantès has been promoted to ship’s captain and is about to marry the woman he loves. But jealous enemies denounce him as a Bonapartist (a supporter of Napoleon after the military leader’s downfall), and he’s thrown into prison without a trial.

Dantès endures solitary confinement in the forbidding Château d’If until a neighboring prisoner—the preternaturally intelligent Abbé Faria—tunnels into his cell. Over time, Faria helps Dantès deduce how and by whom he was betrayed. Faria also shares his wealth of knowledge in mathematics, physics, history and foreign languages. Most important, he reveals to Dantès the location of an incredible hidden treasure on the Italian island of Monte Cristo (also styled more generally as Montecristo).

After a daring prison escape, Dantès—reborn as the fabulously wealthy Count of Monte Cristo—recovers the treasure and uses his newfound power to exact vengeance on his enemies.

Dantès faced seemingly insurmountable odds, but the real story that inspired the novel was even more unlikely. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning 2012 book, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal and the Real Count of Monte Cristo, historian Tom Reiss pieced together the life of the elder Dumas based on a decade of research.

“Monte Cristo is so much about the kind of corruption at the heart of French society,” Reiss tells Smithsonian magazine. “Money and power is something that the novelist Alexandre Dumas learned about, really, through the life of his father and his grandfather.”

Thomas-Alexandre was born in 1762 in Saint-Domingue, a French colony in modern-day Haiti, to disgraced nobleman Alexandre-Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie and Marie-Cessette Dumas, an enslaved woman. In December 1775, Antoine returned to France to claim the title of Marquis de la Pailleterie following the deaths of his father and brother. He’d sold three of his children and pawned Thomas-Alexandre, his favorite, to pay for his passage home. The following year, Antoine used his newly acquired wealth to purchase Thomas-Alexandre’s freedom, bringing the teenager to live with him in Normandy.

“There is no evidence that Antoine ever thought again about his other children, but he now seemed determined to give his remaining son every advantage, to turn him into a fashionable young count,” Reiss wrote in The Black Count.

The status of Black people in pre-revolutionary France was contested. Enlightenment philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau condemned slavery even as the practice remained legal in France’s overseas colonies. A 1691 assertion by France’s then-king had established a legal precedent that declared enslaved people free from the moment they arrived on French soil. By the late 18th century, however, racist backlash sought to limit the rights of France’s Black residents.

As the son of a marquis, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas moved in elite circles and was accepted by many of his peers. “The Old Regime was not his friend,” wrote historian John G. Gallaher in his 1997 biography of the general, “and although he was not legally discriminated against, he was always a mulatto, a free man of color, the illegitimate son of a lesser nobleman.”

Dumas grew into an imposing young man, standing more than six feet tall in an era when the average height was only about 5-foot-6. He joined the army but rejected the conventional path for men of his status, enlisting in the ranks instead of becoming an officer. During the French Revolutionary Wars, Dumas distinguished himself with feats of courage and strength, rising to command thousands of troops as a general. But his hot temper and idealism also sowed the seeds of conflict with a famously combustible rival: Napoleon.

After one of Napoleon’s aides-de-camp downplayed Dumas’s role in the Siege of Mantua in 1797, the novelist’s father fired off his own letter to the general, saltily accusing the man of cowardice.

“I have learned that the jackass whose business it is to report to you upon the battle … stated that I stayed in observation throughout that battle,” Dumas wrote. “I don’t wish any such observation on him, since he would have s— in his pants.”

Napoleon was not amused. When he reported on the battle, Reiss wrote, Napoleon “praised every other officer involved in ending the Siege of Mantua. General Dumas’s name was not mentioned once.”

Dumas also served during Napoleon’s 1798-1801 Egyptian campaign, enduring brutal conditions and catastrophic failures of military planning. With insufficient water and horses, soldiers died of heat, exhaustion and despair.

Under these conditions, men began to grumble—and Dumas openly questioned Napoleon’s leadership. Over a shared meal of watermelons in his tent, he voiced his doubts to two fellow generals and a cavalry officer. The conversation turned political as Dumas and his guests questioned whether their presence in Egypt served little more than Napoleon’s political ambitions.

When word of the meeting reached Napoleon, he was furious, threatening to shoot Dumas for sedition. Dumas’s reply highlighted his idealism and the threat he posed to Napoleon’s ambition.

“I think that the interests of France ought to come before those of an individual, no matter how great that man may be,” Dumas said, according to an account later shared by his son. “I do not think that the fortunes of any nation should be subordinated to those of an individual.”

Dumas sought permission to return to France at the first opportunity—a request that Napoleon was apparently glad to grant.

An unpublished volume by the expedition’s chief medical officer quotes Napoleon as follows: “Let him carry elsewhere both the delirium of his republicanism and his passing furies.”

Napoleon’s coup and Dumas’s imprisonment

Dumas departed from Alexandria on March 7, 1799, aboard the Belle Maltaise, a ship that turned out to be in dangerously poor condition. As storms battered the vessel, passengers and crew survived only by making emergency repairs and throwing most of their possessions overboard, including 4,000 pounds of Arabian coffee that Dumas had planned to sell in France and, heartbreakingly, 9 of the 11 Arabian horses he had set sail with. Despite these efforts, the ship continued to take on water, and the crew determined that it would sink within days. Their only option was to head for the nearest port in the Gulf of Taranto, at the southern tip of the Italian Peninsula.

Dumas and his companions believed that the seaport city of Taranto was friendly territory. Earlier that year, local pro-French forces had overthrown the government of Ferdinand IV of Naples and proclaimed the Parthenopean Republic. But shortly before the Belle Maltaise landed in Taranto, a counterrevolution had reclaimed the city. Dumas and his fellow travelers found themselves in the hands of an anti-French militia. At first, officials held the French on the pretext of plague quarantine, but a delegation from the Kingdom of Naples soon informed Dumas that he and a fellow general would be detained as prisoners of war.

After prisoner exchange negotiations failed, Dumas’s captors moved him to the fortress of Taranto, where his health deteriorated sharply. For months, his wife, Marie-Louise Labouret, tried desperately to learn what had happened to him, but French officials were distracted with war on their frontiers. By the time Dumas was released, in 1801, the world had changed. While he was imprisoned, Napoleon had abandoned the Egyptian campaign, returned to France and overthrown the revolutionary government.

“He must have felt like Rip Van Winkle returning from the hills—only Rip Van Winkle had found a king replaced by a revolution, while Dumas found a revolution replaced by a king, of sorts,” Reiss wrote. “And it was the same king he had left Egypt to escape.”

As an 18th-century Black man in the highest echelons of military leadership, Dumas had enjoyed a “charmed life,” Reiss tells Smithsonian. His life had threaded the needle between the French Revolution and the first abolition of slavery in France’s colonies, in 1794.

“It was amazing that he was in the right place at the right time, with all these talents, to become this beloved hero for this incredibly brief period of time when that was possible,” Reiss says. “And then the curtain came slamming down.”

Napoleon’s rise changed everything. In return for the support of sugar industry interests, the self-proclaimed first consul reinstated slavery and rolled back the rights of France’s Black citizens. Napoleon even issued a law barring Black officers and soldiers who had retired or been discharged from the army from living in Paris and its environs.

His health shattered by imprisonment, Dumas died nearly five years after his return from Taranto. The French government denied Dumas’s widow the pension it owed her, and she was eventually forced to find work in a tobacco shop.

After his father’s death, the younger Dumas “grew up in real destitution,” Reiss says. “He was denied an education because his family was persecuted deliberately by Napoleon. And so he was this incredibly bright kid who had all the disadvantages possible in the first 20 years of his life. And somehow, in the way that makes some people tough as nails, I think it made him just incredibly resilient. It also probably helped him in his drive to become this literary god of France.”

The novelist was just a young child when his father died, but he never forgot the elder Dumas, nor the injustice he’d suffered.

These experiences are reflected in The Count of Monte Cristo. As Reiss says, “It’s all about betrayal and revenge, and the wages of revenge, and how you deal with it.”

The legacy of The Count of Monte Cristo

The futility of revenge is the central premise of The Count of Monte Cristo’s latest adaptation.

“What’s so great about this novel is that it’s universal and, in a way, also very contemporary,” says Bille August, the Academy Award-winning director of the new series.

“Because hatred is such a big part of [the count], it also eats him up from the inside,” August tells Smithsonian. “In the very end, he finds the woman he loved when he was young … but he’s not able to love anymore, because he’s destroyed from the inside by revenge.”

This insight guided August’s approach to the show.

“While working on the script, we always had that in mind,” he says. “What is the story in the story? What do we really want to tell? Once we had that premise, we excluded everything that had nothing to do with that premise.”

In the original novel, the character of the count drew inspiration from multiple sources. As literary scholar Amelita Marinetti argued in a 1976 journal article, his power, quest for vengeance and subsequent corruption were “surely related to a common contemporary view of Napoleon’s evolution.”

The novel’s plot was also inspired by a French true crime story. François Picaud (also known as Pierre) was a French shoemaker who was falsely accused of being a spy in 1807 and imprisoned for seven years. After his escape, Picaud exacted systematic revenge on his enemies, killing those he believed had wronged him. An editorial note in an 1888 edition of The Count of Monte Cristo called Picaud’s crimes “the story on which Dumas’s admirable romance was founded.”

The book’s plot clearly draws on accounts of Picaud, but Reiss believes that the eponymous count owes more to the author’s family history.

Picaud was “a sociopath and a very dark serial killer,” Reiss says. “I don’t see any of that in the count. I view the inner moral and psychological turmoil within the count as being something more between Dumas’s view of his father’s position and, maybe, his own fantasies of revenge on people.”

The historian hopes that the true story of the elder Dumas will one day become as well known as the fictional characters created by his son.

Learning about the novelist’s father has made Reiss “love The Count of Monte Cristo much, much more,” he says.

When Reiss published The Black Count, no statue of General Dumas stood in Paris. Although one had been erected in 1913, it was destroyed by Nazi troops during the winter of 1941-42.

Today, however, a French nonprofit, the Société des Amis d’Alexandre Dumas, is raising funds to reconstruct the statue in its original location.

Jocelyn Fiorina, the organization’s president, says the proposed statue represents not just a hero of the French Republic but also the hero who inspired his son to write The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo.

“It’s the reparation of injustice,” Fiorina says. “And also it’s putting, again, in the center of Paris, the symbol of human values.”