{"id":497,"date":"2018-08-20T10:32:23","date_gmt":"2018-08-20T14:32:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/borderblog\/?p=497"},"modified":"2023-12-15T12:42:20","modified_gmt":"2023-12-15T17:42:20","slug":"visiting-the-village-of-alexandre-dumas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/borderblog\/visiting-the-village-of-alexandre-dumas\/","title":{"rendered":"Visiting the Village of Alexandre Dumas"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"I’m writing this post in Villers-Cotter\u00eats, a small town about an hour outside Paris on the road to Laon. Like most tourists I came here because of Alexandre Dumas, France\u2019s most famous writer, thanks to The Three Musketeers<\/em>, The Count of Monte Cristo<\/em>, and dozens of other books. The walk from the center to the hotel where I\u2019m staying led past the royal palace that inspired young Alexandre with dreams of derring-do, then down a wide and grassy lane bordered with towering trees to narrower path along an ancient, moss-covered stone wall. It felt like Dumas scenery, except on the other side of the wall was a modern low-income housing estate.\"\" The streets and buildings in it are named for places and characters in Dumas\u2019s novels, the people are the mix typical of modern France: some look like native Picards, some look West African, some wear Muslim headscarves.<\/p>\n

The connection between that mix and Dumas is what brought me here. I\u2019ve been reading his novel Georges<\/em>, published in 1843, about a heroic young man who is, in the terms of the time, a Mulatto (mul\u00e2tre), of mixed \"\"European and African ancestry. He is from the Island of Mauritius and the action involves his romance with a lady from the island\u2019s ruling class of French plantation owners. It\u2019s an interesting book in a lot of ways, and one is Dumas\u2019s insistence that the prejudice Georges faces from the wealthy French planters is a quirk of the colonial slave system. At the governor\u2019s ball, his lady love is pleased to see him seated between two recently-arrived English ladies, since \u201cshe knew that the prejudice which pursued Georges in his native land possessed no influence on the minds of foreigners, and that it required a long residence in the island to cause an inhabitant of Europe to adopt it.\u201d<\/p>\n

I was struck by the claim that nineteenth-century Europeans had no race prejudice until they acquired it in the colonies, and would likely have dismissed this passage as naive if Dumas had been a white European\u2014but it is harder to discount the observation coming from someone who had experienced the situation firsthand. Dumas\u2019s mother was the daughter of a prosperous French innkeeper here in Villers-Cotter\u00eats; his father was born a slave in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti).<\/p>\n

\"\"This is a complicated story, with plenty of contradictions. Dumas occasionally described himself as Mulatto, but more often was cagey and at times misleading. He always referred with great pride to his father, a general in the French army and hero of the Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, but tended to gloss over the details of his father\u2019s youth and wrote in his memoirs that his father was known to the Austrians as \u201cthe Black Devil,\u201d and owed \u201chis brown complexion\u2026to the mix of Indian and Caucasian races.\u201d (That is \u201cCaucasian\u201d as in from the Caucasus, and a print in the Dumas museum here shows Dumas himself in traditional Caucasian garb.)<\/p>\n

As to his father, Thomas-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie, that story is crazy and far too long to tell here, but to give an example: Thomas-Alexandre\u2019s father was a French aristocrat and slave owner in Saint-Domingue, who fell on hard times and paid his way back to France by selling off his slaves, including his own children\u2014except that the \"\"sales contract for Thomas-Alexandre included a clause allowing his father to buy him back within five years. His father exercised the clause, brought him to France as his legitimate son, sent him to the best schools, and raised him as a French aristocrat. His siblings were never heard from again.<\/p>\n

Thomas-Alexandre changed his name when he entered the army, choosing the surname of his African-born mother, Marie-Cessette Dumas. One of the pleasures of the museum is its multiple portraits of General Dumas, all showing him in heroic situations and none in any way concealing or downplaying his African ancestry. Notably, none of the documents preserved from his military and civilian life make any mention of his race.<\/p>\n

The general\u2019s biography is a complicated and interesting story, well told in Tom Reiss\u2019s The Black Count<\/em>, and it brought me to Villers-Cotter\u00eats because one of the things I\u2019m exploring in my current project is shifting views of nationality and immigration. I was curious to see who is living here today, how the town recalls Dumas, and if people here connect his ancestry with the increasingly heterogeneous ancestral mix of modern France.<\/p>\n

\"\"The answer turns out to be exquisitely complicated, and it\u2019s going to take more than this visit to make any sense of it. On the one hand the town has a grand statue of Alexandre Dumas on the main square, and a Dumas museum with rooms dedicated to the general, the novelist, and Alexandre Dumas, fils (junior), who was likewise a famous writer. The stone plaque on the house where General Dumas died notes his African ancestry and his birth in Haiti, and the street in front of it has been the site of an annual celebration on May 10, the anniversary of France\u2019s passage of a law abolishing slavery.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, since 2014 the town has elected its mayor from the Front National, the far-right, anti-immigrant party, and the first FN mayor quickly made national news by denouncing the annual celebration of abolition as a display of permanent \u201cauto-culpabilisation,\u201d intended to make French people feel guilty and hence \"\"sympathetic to newcomers from its ex-colonies, and declaring that the town government would no longer take part. All the news stories about this incident noted the irony of anti-immigrant activists standing under the statue of Alexandre Dumas and lamenting the demise of an ethnically homogeneous France.<\/p>\n

The town\u2019s population is clearly changing, and some previous residents are clearly upset. Picardy is a famously poor region, and it\u2019s easy to stir up anger against newcomers for taking the few existing jobs. But the obvious newcomers\u2014the people clearly of African ancestry or speaking to one another in Maghrebi Arabic\u2014are going about their lives here, and I saw about as much social mixing as I\u2019m used to seeing in Boston or Philadelphia, and less apparent residential segregation. At the fire station, the three uniformed firefighters sitting outside were a woman who looked French, a man who looked West African, and a man who could have been from anywhere on the shores of the Mediterranean.<\/p>\n

Obviously this is a very cursory view and I don\u2019t have any idea what\u2019s going on here. But it was interesting to sit at a table in the Brasserie Alexandre Dumas, looking across the square at the large building that used to be the inn where Dumas\u2019s parents met\u2026 and to think that a marriage between the daughter of the Brasserie\u2019s owners and a Haitian immigrant army officer would almost certainly be more controversial here now than it was in 1792\u2026 and also a lot more likely.
\n\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m writing this post in Villers-Cotter\u00eats, a small town about an hour outside Paris on the road to Laon. Like most tourists I came here because of Alexandre Dumas, France\u2019s most famous writer, thanks to The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, and dozens of other books. The walk from the center to the … Continue reading Visiting the Village of Alexandre Dumas<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-identities","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nVisiting the Village of Alexandre Dumas - 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All of which is true, but also beside the point\u2014which is that it will not have much effect on\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "travels in Israel\/Palestine"","block_context":{"text":"travels in Israel\/Palestine","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/borderblog\/category\/travels-in-israel-palestine\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/borderblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/anata-wall-copy.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/borderblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/anata-wall-copy.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/borderblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/anata-wall-copy.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/borderblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/anata-wall-copy.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":105,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/borderblog\/welcome-to-normalization\/","url_meta":{"origin":497,"position":1},"title":"Welcome to Normalization","author":"adminborderblog","date":"April 24, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"In February, I spent ten days in the West Bank, the region of Israel\/Palestine that is officially off-limits to Israelis and -- theoretically, maybe, roughly -- intended to become an independent Palestinian state if some version of the \u201ctwo-state solution\u201d becomes a reality. When I mentioned to friends in the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "travels in Israel\/Palestine"","block_context":{"text":"travels in Israel\/Palestine","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/borderblog\/category\/travels-in-israel-palestine\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/borderblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/Arafat-mural-at-Qalandia-checkpoint-1.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":450,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/borderblog\/look-for-the-names\/","url_meta":{"origin":497,"position":2},"title":"Look for the names\u2026","author":"adminborderblog","date":"July 29, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"I recently spent a day at the Ninth Fort in Kaunas, Lithuania, where my mother\u2019s favorite cousin, Jutte, was shot at age 16, along with her mother and 996 other Viennese Jews, on November 29, 1941. I wasn\u2019t sure why I wanted to go there, but now I know \u2013\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "travels in Poland"","block_context":{"text":"travels in Poland","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/borderblog\/category\/travels-in-poland\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/borderblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/Arab-expulsion.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":418,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/borderblog\/tatars-and-jews\/","url_meta":{"origin":497,"position":3},"title":"Tatars, Jews, and so forth… some thoughts in northeastern Poland","author":"adminborderblog","date":"July 25, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"I recently spent a quiet couple of days in Kruszyniany, a tiny town in northeastern Poland that is notable for having the country\u2019s oldest functioning mosque\u2026 and thereby hangs a tale. Indeed, several tales. This particular mosque apparently dates from the 18th century, but the community that built it has\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "identities"","block_context":{"text":"identities","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/borderblog\/category\/identities\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/borderblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/Tatar-mosque-Kruszyniany-e1532517015730.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":277,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/borderblog\/an-incident-in-hebron\/","url_meta":{"origin":497,"position":4},"title":"An Incident in Hebron","author":"adminborderblog","date":"April 16, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"I spent my second day in Hebron walking around, taking pictures, getting a better sense of where everything was. I went through a couple of full-scale checkpoints with turnstiles and metal detectors, and others with just a couple of soldiers with automatic rifles, and wherever I went they waved me\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "travels in Israel\/Palestine"","block_context":{"text":"travels in Israel\/Palestine","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/borderblog\/category\/travels-in-israel-palestine\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/borderblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/hebron-checkpoint-to-ibrahimi-mosque.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":194,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/borderblog\/celebrating-illegal-immigration\/","url_meta":{"origin":497,"position":5},"title":"Celebrating Illegal Immigration","author":"adminborderblog","date":"April 12, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"\"Every time you see a cop on the beat, ask yourself what he is protecting, and from who.\" -- Malcolm X Traveling in Israel, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Haifa's tourist sites include a museum celebrating illegal immigration. It's actually called the Clandestine Immigration and Naval Museum, but\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "borders and crossers"","block_context":{"text":"borders and crossers","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/borderblog\/category\/bordercrossers\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/borderblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/malcolm-x-e1523467615152.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/borderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/borderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/borderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/borderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/borderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=497"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/borderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":535,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/borderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497\/revisions\/535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/borderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/borderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/borderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}