Gen. Thomas-Alexandre Dumas was one of the heroes of the French Revolution — but you won’t find a statue of him in Paris today.
He led armies of thousands in triumph through treacherous territory, from the snows of the Alps to the sands of Egypt.
How did the son of a Haitian slave and a French nobleman become Napoleon’s leading swordsman of the Revolution, then a prisoner, and finally almost forgotten?
“I like to think of him as history’s ultimate underdog,” says Tom Reiss, author of a new book, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal and the Real Count of Monte Cristo
(READ the story in NPR)