Tom Reiss > Quotes

“-I'm going to heaven! I replied.

-What do you mean, you're going to heaven?

-Let me pass.

-And what will you do in heaven, my poor child?

-I'm going there to kill God, who killed Daddy.”
― Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

“GENERAL,
I have learned that the jack ass whose business it is to report to you upon the battle of the 27th [the 27 Nivôse, i.e., January 16] stated that I was only in observation throughout the battle. I don't wish any such observation on him, for he would have shit in his pants.
Salute and Brotherhood!
ALEX. DUMAS”
― Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

“The novelist Dumas would one day borrow features from both of his uncles, not to mention his grandfather, the acknowledged scoundrel, in fashioning the central villains of The Count of Monte Cristo. Reading court documents detailing the sordid unraveling of Charles's sham fortune, which would have devastating effects on his daughter and her unsuspecting husband, I couldn't help thinking that one of the interesting things about Dumas's villains is that, while greedy and unprincipled themselves, they produce children who can be innocent and decent. This was something that the writer understood very well from his own family.”
― Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

“Unhappiness cannot but draw tighter the bonds which hold us fast to one another," General Dumas had written to Marie-Louise as he made his way home.”
― Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

“Indeed, who has a greater right to public respect than the man of color fighting for freedom after having experienced all the horrors of slavery? To equal the most celebrated warriors he need only keep in mind all the evils he has suffered.”
― Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

“Unhappiness cannot but draw tighter the bonds which hold us fast to one another,” General Dumas had written to Marie-Louise as he made his way home. His son has Edmond Dantès express the same sentiment in a letter to his friend at the close of The Count of Monte Cristo: “He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness.… Live then and never forget that until the day when God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these two words—‘Wait and hope.’ ”
― Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

“While Americans view the Revolutionary War as a conflict fought from Maine to Florida, France actually forced Britain to fight the Revolution as a world war, defending its outposts in India, Jamaica, and Africa. The British had to divert most of their celebrated navy from the American coast to defend against French attacks elsewhere.‡”
― Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

“But after taking command of the Army of Italy in 1796, Napoleon took organized theft to a new level. ... The French also stole art at a new level: Napoleon requested that the government send him experts qualified to judge which paintings his men should steal; priceless canvases by Titian, Raphael, Rubens, and Leonardo da Vinci were shipped to Paris.”
― Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

“But his main character flaw was that of so many French revolutionaries: a zeal for human rights so self-righteous that it translated into intolerance for the actual human beings around him. Brissot”
― Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

“The chevalier’s multiple talents were well summed up by John Adams, visiting Paris in 1779: The “mulatto man,” wrote the future American president, “is the most accomplished man in Europe in riding, shooting, fencing, dancing, music. He will hit a button on the coat or waistcoat of the masters. He will hit a crown piece in the air with a pistoll [sic] ball.”
― Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

“The Republic can count on me to battle its enemies... Offensive war suits the passionate character of the French, but it is the responsibility of the man in charge of leading them to prepare with caution and wisdom everything that leads to victory.”
― Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

“The past is not alive to them the way it is to Georges; they do not remember—and thus do not see the reality of things. That reality is the dream Georges has come to embody: that a black man can become a nobleman and be better educated and more talented and powerful than the white plantation owners.”
― Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

“Suddenly Paris fashion-that bellwether for the French mind-had to be à l'Amérique: tailors manufactured "insurgent coats" and "lightning-conductor dresses" (in honor of Ben Franklin, with two wires hanging to the ground).”
― Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

“...the former King Louis XVI, who, after titles were abolished, was now simply called "Louis Capet" - a mocking reference to his distant ancestor Hugh Capet, who had assumed the throne in the year 987.”
― Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

“But France did not have a normal government: it had a collection of caffeinated intellectuals”
― Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

“Man is born free but is everywhere in chains,” wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau in The Social Contract in 1762. A generation of crusading lawyers put Enlightenment principles into action by helping slaves sue for the right to be treated as ordinary French subjects. They took the issue of human bondage to the sovereign parlement courts of France—and won, in nearly every case, liberty for their black and mixed-race clients. The infuriated Louis XV found his hands tied. The phrase “absolute monarchy” is misleading: Ancien Régime France was a state of laws, of ancient precedents, where the spark of enlightened reason could and occasionally did ignite great things.”
― Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

“To remember a person is the most important thing”
― Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

“Many of the Founding Fathers themselves foresaw that their compromise with southern states was a poison pill that would eventually lead to tragedy. But the French stalwarts of the new America found every way of glossing over the problem. Paris theaters staged plays about the idyllic life in Virginia, where black slaves and their masters sang songs of liberty as they worked together side by side.”
― Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

“The new calendar was only one of countless utopian measures the ruling Jacobins initiated in 1793–94, but it is notable because, apparently, not a single person had to be murdered to carry it out.”
― Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

“THE original Alexandre Dumas was born in 1762, the son of “Antoine Alexandre de l’Isle,” in the French sugar colony of Saint-Domingue. Antoine was a nobleman in hiding from his family and from the law, and he fathered the boy with a black slave. Later Antoine would discard his alias and reclaim his real name and title—Alexandre Antoine Davy, the Marquis de la Pailleterie—and bring his black son across the ocean to live in pomp and luxury near Paris.”
― Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

“While Americans view the Revolutionary War as a conflict fought from Maine to Florida, France actually forced Britain to fight the Revolution as a world war, defending its outposts in India, Jamaica, and Africa. The British had to divert most of their celebrated navy from the American coast to defend against French attacks elsewhere.”
― Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

“He also gives a good picture of the profound chaos unleashed in Muslim countries in 1924 by Ataturk’s sudden abolition of the caliphate, an institution they had superficially not taken much notice of but which was central to a Muslim’s whole identity.”
― Tom Reiss, The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life

“The word “buccaneer” originated in a native people’s term for smokehouse, which the French pronounced boucan. The original boucaniers didn’t board ships and steal treasure; they were the jerky kings of the Western Hemisphere.”
― Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

“Aristotle believed democracy could exist only because of slavery, which gave citizens the leisure for higher pursuits. (Modern versions of this argument held that American democracy was born of the slave society of rural Virginia, because slavery gave men like Washington and Jefferson the free time to better themselves and to participate in representative government.)”
― Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

“Where streetlights failed, there were lanternmen. The lanternmen—numbered, so the police could keep track of them—waited around the doors of townhouses in Paris whenever an entertainment was going on inside, and, for a few coins, one of them would accompany a reveler home, lighting his way even up the stairs and into his room.”
― Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

“Meanwhile, Napoleon’s younger brother, Lucien Bonaparte, had managed to get himself elected to the Council of Five Hundred—and was even made its president. The maneuver required Lucien to lie about his age—he was only twenty-four, when the official minimum age was thirty—but this paled in comparison with his larger deviousness: he was getting himself elected president of the country’s main legislative body and at the same time he was about to help his big brother stage a coup d’état to eliminate it.”
― Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

“French Enlightenment philosophers liked to use slavery as a symbol of human oppression, and particularly political oppression. “Man is born free but is everywhere in chains,” wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau in The Social Contract in 1762. A generation of crusading lawyers put Enlightenment principles into action by helping slaves sue for the right to be treated as ordinary French subjects.”
― Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

“In all his adventures, the main thing that set Dumas apart was his refusal to countenance the bullying of the weak by the strong. This meant that whenever a unit he commanded seized a thousand prisoners or the wealth of a town, he told his fellow officers and his men, perhaps too often for their taste, that they must restrain themselves from taking the slightest advantage. Dumas was unrestrained when outnumbered and outgunned, just as he was unrestrained when he disagreed with his superiors. But toward anyone less powerful than he was, Alex Dumas showed nothing but self-restraint, and a kind of violent love.”
― Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

“Three months earlier, in that first riot, the French Guards had followed orders and fired on the rioters. Yet on July 14, instead of doing their job and defending the Bastille, the French Guards joined the rioters, and would soon declare themselves the National Guard. The war minister informed the king that he could no longer guarantee the loyalty of any French soldier or junior officer. Without its army, the royal government collapsed.”
― Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

“Servitude, like a destructive volcano, desiccates, burns, engulfs everything it surrounds: liberty, on the contrary, always brings in its wake happiness, abundance, and the arts.… Everything is free in a Kingdom where liberty is seated at the foot of the throne, where the least subject finds in the heart of his king the feelings of a father.… No one is [a] slave in France.”
― Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo