Words matter. These are the best Tom Reiss Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
When I was a kid, my mum had a lot of Dumas books in the house, and she’s from France originally. My mother had one particular Dumas book that was a family heirloom – this old, beat-up 1938 edition of ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ in French. She came to America after losing her parents in World War II as a little kid.
In the winter of 1940, ‘The Atlantic Monthly’ invited Peter Viereck, a twenty-three-year-old Harvard graduate who had won the college’s top essay and poetry prizes, to write about ‘the meaning of young liberalism for the present age.’
While writing ‘The Orientalist,’ I played a soundtrack that alternated between ragtime and Azeri mugams, Russian operas and German and Italian pop songs from the 1920s and 30s. When I finally finished, I gorged on all my music from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.
Sugar planting was the oil business of the eighteenth century, and Saint-Domingue was the Ancien Regime’s Wild West frontier, where sons of impoverished noble families could strike it rich.
For fifty years, debates about French anti-Semitism mainly revolved around France’s record during the Second World War, when the Vichy government collaborated with the Germans.
I’ve considered myself a writer since I was 7 years old, but I’ve done a lot of jobs along the way. I enjoyed waiting tables and tending bar during college, especially when it got busy, so I might like managing a big restaurant. In fact, I might like managing many kinds of businesses or organizations.
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.
By comparison, ‘The Secret Agent’ is not especially prescient about terrorism, certainly not technically. The Professor was a stock figure of Edwardian fiction, and his dreams of mass destruction were nothing ahead of their time. Many novels in the late 19th and early 20th centuries involved plots far more deadly.
Conservatism as a formal political doctrine didn’t exist in America in 1940. The word ‘conservative’ was associated primarily with fringe groups – anti-industrial Southern agrarians and the anti-New Deal tycoons who led the Liberty League.
The French Revolution was a kind of 21st-century moment in the heart of the 18th century – and Alex Dumas, outstanding though he was, could never have risen the way he did if not for that. The French Revolution was the American Revolution on steroids.
‘The Battle of Dorking’ was reprinted as a book and became a best-seller.
‘The War in the Air’ describes the destruction of Manhattan by air attack.
In ‘The World Set Free,’ the world’s major superpowers attack each other simultaneously.
Napoleon – the people who were becoming Napoleon’s generals realized that for him, it was not about spreading freedom and revolution; it was about creating a new empire with Napoleon the dictator or the emperor.
Until 2005, France had the only senior Catholic prelate in modern times who was born Jewish and still considered himself culturally Jewish: Cardinal Lustiger.
Prisoners around the world have said that reading ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ helped them get through their ordeal. That’s something to aspire to.
The one thing I’m not tempted to ever do is stop working. Retirement would be too tough for me. As a workaholic and an insomniac, I identified with my subject, General Dumas, who, according to field reports, would ride on patrols without sleep sometimes for two nights on end before going into battle – and winning.
Eighteenth-century doctors prescribed sugar pills for nearly everything: heart problems, headache, consumption, labor pains, insanity, old age, and blindness. Hence, the French expression ‘like an apothecary without sugar’ meant someone in an utterly hopeless situation.
Today, the world is so awash in sugar – it is such a staple of the modern diet, associated with all that is cheap and unhealthy – that it’s hard to believe things were once exactly the opposite. The West Indies were colonized in a world where sugar was seen as a scarce, luxurious, and profoundly health-giving substance.
There’s nothing better than to be rootless cosmopolitans who seamlessly merge into whatever society. That’s the greatest thing human beings can aspire to. Whether forced by duress, Jews became perfect modern human beings. After the Holocaust, one doesn’t really mourn for that – it’s too disturbing, seems like a mistake.
Alexandre Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie – father of the future Alex Dumas – was born on February 26, 1714, in the Norman province of Caux, a region of rolling dairy farms that hung above great chalk cliffs on the northwest coast of France.
Viereck became a historian, specializing in modern Russia, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet.
The French Revolution ends slavery unilaterally. And it does so at this moment when the British, the Spanish, the Portuguese and the Americans – all of the other major powers – keep slavery. And the fact is that it’s almost bankrupting the French Colonial Empire.
The life of General Alex Dumas is so extraordinary on so many levels that it’s easy to forget the most extraordinary fact about it: that it was led by a black man, in a world of whites, at the end of the eighteenth century.
My particular pain is that the world of Jewishness that I identify with – the extremely assimilated, educated European and Russian Jews in the 19th and 20th centuries – is lost, and is not mourned enough.
