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Posts tagged with: Frankrijk

The Third Musketeer

The Black Count by Tom Reiss

 
by Leo Damrosch
In the 1790s, the son of an aristocratic white father and a black slave woman became a charismatic French general who for a time rivaled Napoleon himself, and afterward languished in an Italian dungeon. His story inspired the novel The Count of Monte Cristo, written by his son, Alexandre Dumas, who also drew upon his father’s adventures in The Three Musketeers. Posterity remembers this son as Dumas père, to distinguish him from Alexandre Dumas fils, also a writer, whose novel La Dame aux Camélias was the source for Verdi’s La Traviata. But the general was the first of the three Alexandres (he preferred to be known as Alex), and in The Black Count, Tom ­Reiss, the author of The Orientalist, has recovered this fascinating story with a richly imaginative biography.
 
Despite Reiss’s extensive research, the count remains a somewhat remote figure, since his contemporaries usually described him in conventional superlatives. The chief source of information is a highly romanticized memoir by his son, who was not yet 4 when he died, and who idealized him, in Reiss’s words, as “the purest, noblest man who ever lived.” Still, such language seems deserved. General Dumas was majestically tall (“his proportions were those of a Greek hero”), a crack swordsman and horseman (“looking like a centaur”), utterly fearless, generous to subordinates and a loving husband and father. He was also exceptionally good-looking, though the portraits that survive are less spectacular than the majestic Adonis depicted in the book’s cover illustration.
 
Dumas was born in 1762 at the western end of Saint-Domingue, the colony that is now Haiti. Remarkably, the French Empire guaranteed protection and opportunities to people of mixed race, and when the boy’s father brought him to France at the age of 14 he was able to receive a first-rate education and later to join the army. He never cared much for his feckless father, however, and took the name Dumas from his slave mother, about whom very little is known.
 
Still a young private in the army, Dumas fell in love and proposed marriage to Marie-Louise Labouret, his landlord’s daughter. It was an enduring love match; years later he wrote to her from the wars, “I am and will always be your best friend.” Marie-Louise’s father asked the couple to wait to marry until Dumas was promoted to sergeant. They didn’t have long to wait. The French Revolution had erupted, proclaiming an ideal ofégalité, and he shot up through the ranks.
This was a time of chaos throughout Europe, and Dumas got to experience the upheavals firsthand. Assigned to the Army of the Alps, he fought a series of difficult winter engagements in which his troops sometimes foundered in deep snow and at other times skidded on icy cliffs. In addition to being a gifted organizer and inspired tactician, he was indomitable in hand-to-hand combat.
But back in Paris, his civilian superiors kept complaining that he wasn’t accomplishing enough, and when the infamous Committee of Public Safety launched the Reign of Terror, he was charged with defeatism and incivisme, “lack of civic consciousness.” If anyone should have been safe from such an accusation it was Dumas, whose devotion to the principles of the revolution never wavered. But he was summoned to Paris possibly to face execution. He survived only because ­Robespierre fell and the Terror abruptly ended.
 
Next, Dumas was sent to the Vendée region in western France, where the army had punished peasant resistance to the regime by massacring many thousands of people. Acting decisively, he succeeded in restoring order. Here and throughout his career he flouted military custom by forbidding his men to pillage.
 
And then it was on to Italy. Promoted by now to the rank of general, Dumas battled the Austrians, who called him the Black Devil. On one memorable occasion he defended a mountain bridge against heavy odds, and a companion remembered seeing him “lift his saber, as a thresher lifts his flail, and each time the sword was lowered a man fell.”
 
Meanwhile Napoleon, seven years his junior, was rising rapidly in prestige, and was hostile to potential rivals. Dumas’s gifts as a soldier were obvious, and Napoleon would continue to make use of him, but always with jealousy and suspicion. It didn’t help that Napoleon was skinny in those days and that his nose barely came up to Dumas’s magnificent chest.
 
In 1798 Napoleon started a megalomaniac campaign in the Middle East, intending to conquer Egypt and then to go on to British India. There were never enough supplies, the heat was intolerable and thousands of soldiers were killed or died of disease. In Egypt, Dumas was now supreme cavalry commander of the Army of the Orient, and as usual he distinguished himself in battle. Reiss’s narrative of the campaign is especially spirited, and along the way he treats us to a wealth of incidental information, for instance about the Mameluke warriors who came to Egypt from the Caucasus and bequeathed pale skin and blue eyes to some Egyptian families.
Though the French managed to rule Egypt for several years, there were repeated setbacks, most notably Lord Nelson’s naval victory in the Battle of the Nile in 1798, which put an end to thoughts of conquering India. Napoleon abruptly departed for France, leaving his bedraggled army behind. Dumas then chartered a vessel that proved to be frighteningly leaky. It stayed afloat only after his shipmates threw their cannons overboard, as well as 4,000 pounds of coffee that he had been planning to sell in France, along with nine Arabian horses.
When the men got as far as Italy they put ashore at Taranto on the southern coast, expecting to be welcomed by a recently established republic there. It turned out, however, that Neapolitan monarchists had retaken Taranto, and Dumas was imprisoned in its fortress by a reactionary gang that called itself the Holy Faith Army. He spent two miserable years in the dungeon, unable to get anyone in authority to address his case, and after falling gravely ill he became convinced that the physician attending him was administering poison.
 
Back home, Marie-Louise kept pestering the French authorities to locate her husband, which they finally did, and they negotiated his release. By now he was a broken man, and anyway his military career was over, since Napoleon had become first consul — effectively dictator. Shortly after his release from prison, Dumas wrote a bitter account of his captivity that would later inspire his son’s tale of the ordeal of Edmond Dantès in “The Count of Monte Cristo.” Alex Dumas, who was never officially a count because he didn’t claim his father’s title, died of cancer in 1806 at the age of 43.
In 1802 Marie-Louise gave birth to their third and last child, Alexandre, Dumas père. That Alexandre was a figure of vast appetite and incredible energy, but thanks to Reiss we now know that Dumas grandpère was even more interesting. A statue in the general’s honor once stood in the Place Malesherbes in Paris, but it was destroyed by the Nazis since it celebrated a man of mixed race. Reiss concludes by remarking, “There is still no monument in France commemorating the life of General Alexandre Dumas.”
 
The Black Count; Gloory, Revolution, Betrayal,and the Real Count of Monte Cristo
By Tom Reiss
414 pp. Crown Publishers. $27.
 
Leo Damrosch’s most recent books are Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius and Tocqueville’s Discovery of America.
 
[from The New York Times, September 14, 2012]

Festival Influences Caraïbes 2011

En cette Année des outre-mers, l’association Le Cri du Peuple poursuit le projet Influences Caraïbes qui depuis six ans s’attèle à montrer la richesse de la création artistique contemporaine loin des clichés exotiques et folklorisants. Le Festival Influences Caraïbes remet par conséquent ses plus beaux habits et la Caraïbe s’empare à nouveau de Paris !

read on…

Verhouding met Europa centraal tijdens viering Bastille Dag

Marigot — De Europese visie op de overzeese gebiedsdelen, en vice versa, evenals de vraag in hoeverre deze visies geïntegreerd kunnen worden, kwamen tot uiting tijdens de viering van de Bastille Dag aan de waterkant van Marigot.

Het thema van de dag, gewijd aan de viering van de Franse Revolutie, was dit jaar ‘De plaats van de overzeese gebiedsdelen in Europa’.
De voorzitter van de Collectivité Frantz Gumbs bracht in herinnering dat president Nicolas Sakozy 2011 als het Jaar van de Overzeese Gebiedsdelen had uitgeroepen. om tot een betere verstandhouding te komen en cliché’s over de overzeese gebiedsdelen, zoals hun bestempeling als ‘belastingparadijzen’, weg te nemen.
Gumbs bracht naar voren dat de Bastille Dag-vieringen in Parijs werden beïnvloed door het nieuws van woensdag omtrent de dood van zeven Franse militairen, die in Afghanistan dienst deden.
“De overzeese gebiedsdelen worden gekarakteriseerd door hun verscheidenheid en zijn over de vier uithoeken van de wereld verspreid”, bracht Gumbs naar voren in zijn toespreek. Hij ging in op de diversiteit van etnische en culturele afkomst en de biodiversiteit van de natuur. De vraag is of de overzeese gebiedsdelen van belang zijn voor Europa. Volgens Gumbs is het antwoord op deze vraag positief, omdat politieke, administratieve en economische structuren grotendeels goed onderhouden zijn. Europa kan echter niet voldoende waardering opbrengen voor alle voordelen van de overzeese gebiedsdelen op zeven geografische locaties.
Gumbs is ook van mening dat Europa van belang is voor de overzeese gebiedsdelen, omdat Europa een belangrijke economische partner is. Europa is ook een bakermat van de beschaving en een belangrijke militaire partner.
Voorzitter Gumbs citeerde de predikant, die de in de ochtenduren gehouden religieuze dienst leidde. Hij vergeleek de relatie tussen de overzeese gebiedsdelen en Europa met drie zusters: Frankrijk, Engeland en Nederland.
Zij kregen kinderen overzee en deze kinderen werden nichten, St. Martin, St. Maarten en Anguilla. De familieband eist van nichten dat zij een vorm vinden om in alles samen te werken.
Préfect Jacques Simmonet was de enige andere spreker en haalde Europa aan als thema. Eerder deed zich een protocollair incident voor, toen de parade begon voor Simmonet aanwezig was. Hij werd opgehouden na de kranslegging. Toen Gumbs met zijn toespraak begon, sprak hij hiervoor zijn verontschuldigingen uit. Simmonet beschuldigde zijn eigen staf. Ambtsbekleders van St. Maarten en Anguilla waren aanwezig tijdens de ceremonies.

[uit Amigoe, 15 juli 2011]

Toni Morrison onthulde slavernijgedenkteken

 

Nobelprijswinnares Toni Morrison (prof. Chloe Anthony Wofford) onthulde op 5 november j.l. in Parijs een bank met een plaquette ter herinnering aan de afschaffing van de slavernij. Het was het eerste monument buiten de VS van de Toni Morrison Society. De Amerikaanse auteur van onder meer Song of Solomon, Beloved en Jazz, winnaar van de Pulitzerprijs in 1988 en de Nobelprijs in 1993, ontving een medaille van de stad Parijs, nadat ze een dag eerder al Frankrijks hoogste onderscheiding had gekregen, de Légion d’Honneur.

Nederland en Frankrijk in de Atlantische ruimte

Op woensdag 19 mei 2010 wordt er in het Maison Descartes in Amsterdam om 20.00 uur een lezing gegeven over Nederland en Frankrijk in de Atlantische ruimte

De Atlantische geschiedenis biedt een uitstekende invalshoek om de ontwikkeling van de westkust van Europa en hun interactie met andere continenten, met name Afrika en Amerika, te bestuderen en te begrijpen. Ze maakt het mogelijk verschijnselen als migratie, handelsverkeer, slavernij, oorlogen, de groei van havensteden enz, grondig te analyseren.

Tijdens deze lezing zullen twee boeken worden gepresenteerd: Les Pays-Bas et l’Atlantique (Rennes 2009), dat vragen behandelt met betrekking tot commerciële expansie en de culturele invloed van de Verenigde Provincieën in de Atlantische wateren van Nieuw- Amsterdam tot de Kaap, en Les Huguenots et l’Atlantique (Parijs 2009), dat ingaat op de Franse protestantse geschiedenis vanuit het perspectief van de interactie van deze religieuze minderheid met de Atlantische ruimte. De sprekers, auteurs en coördinatoren van deze twee boeken zijn allemaal Franse en Nederlandse specialisten, erkend voor hun werk op het gebied van deze nieuwe geschiedenis

Toegangsprijs: € 3,50
Informatie en reserveringen: bertrand.van-ruymbeke@diplomatie.gouv.fr / 020 531 95 43

Op woensdag 19 mei 2010 (aanvang 13.30) en donderdag 20 mei 2010 (aanvang 9.30) vindt er in het Maison Descartes een conferentie plaats: La France et les Pays-Bas dans l’espace Atlantique. De voertaal is Frans.

Plaats: Institut français des Pays-Bas – Maison Descartes
Vijzelgracht 2a, Amsterdam

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