Even now, outside of romances such as the historicals by Beverly Jenkins, it is hard to imagine a novel being written about a man of colour leading a slave rebellion and courting a white woman in the nineteenth-century colonies without the author feeling compelled to formulate a tragic or at least cynical ending. But with the publication of Georges in 1843 Alexandre Dumas, whose paternal grandmother had been a plantation slave in Haiti (then Saint Domingue) and whose father had been sold into slavery at the same time but rose to become a Napoleonic general, managed to subvert literary expectations without re-writing history. Despite its less polished technical handling and potential vulnerability to criticism based on modern values, Georges in its own, astonishing way is as rousing a feat as any of Dumas’s best-known works, and deserves the same classic status.
1824. After a fourteen-year absence, Georges Munier returns to the Indian Ocean island he left as a child. Now a wealthy man of the world, the ribbon of the Légion d’honneur pinned to his lapel, he is at first unrecognisable to the islanders, who take him for a British or French aristocrat. But Georges quickly realises that while he has changed, Mauritius has not. Racial prejudice remains the bane of his family and all people of colour. The only difference is that Georges is now equipped to battle it, and he intends to do so with all means at his disposal.
What he had not foreseen is that he falls in love with Sara de Malmédie, a white woman who happens to belong to the family of his greatest enemies.
During the 1840s, Alexandre Dumas “wrote [and collaborated on] forty-one novels, twenty-three plays, seven historical works and half a dozen travel books” (Robin Buss in his introduction to The Count Of Monte Cristo, Penguin Classics, 1996, p. viii). The Three Musketeers was published in 1844 and in the same year The Count of Monte Cristo began appearing in serialised form. Their renown have ensured a regular succession of translations into English, a tribute not afforded every work Dumas produced. Tina A. Kover’s 2007 translation of Georges, a novel that originally came out a year before the two aforementioned books, remedies a particularly glaring omission. My hardcover edition (The Modern Library) contains a foreword by Jamaica Kincaid and an informative introduction and notes by editor Werner Sollors.
Fans of Alexandre Dumas (such as myself) probably need no encouragement to pick up Georges. For others, particularly those unfamiliar with nineteenth-century literature, it is worth bearing in mind that Georges is a historical text that hints at changing perceptions but does not reflect modern western values. In the context of Dumas’s own time, however, Georges remains progressive. Even today, it is fairly easy to recognise that the plot and topic are admirable for their time and in fact still retain a good amount of freshness. Nevertheless, approached with modern, post-colonial sensibilities, the non-egalitarian attitudes and assumptions displayed by the story do have power to offend. For example, Kover’s translation acknowledges that terms which in Dumas’s time were considered standard grate on modern ears: perhaps because the issue of “mixed blood” is crucial in the story – Georges Munier and his family belong to this group – the word “mulatto” (“mulâtre”) has been retained, whereas “nègres” in most instances becomes “blacks”.
Whether one considers the treatment of racial topics in Georges controversial or stimulating, the ambiguous nature of the narrative certainly raises a lot more questions than it answers. The following passage provides a lively starting point: “Fate had reunited the family made up of a man who had spent his entire life suffering from prejudice against color, a man who made his living by exploiting it, and a man who was ready to die fighting it” (125). The men in question are the Munier family: Pierre (father of Georges), a discriminated-against free man of colour who is a wealthy slave owner in his own right; Jacques, (brother of Georges), a corsair turned Indian Ocean slave trader; and Georges, highly educated and well-travelled, a decorated war hero, light-skinned enough to pass for white, and determined to crush prejudice or die in the attempt.
Does not this dynamic seem the perfect set-up for lots of angst-filled family drama? But in fact the opposite is the case: even as the world around them comes crashing down, the Muniers calmly pull together, unfailingly loving and loyal to each other. Jacques, for example, is cast as a humane merchant and loveable rogue, to boot. Throughout the story Dumas throws out similar challenges to modern reader expectations by generally avoiding to politicise and moralise. In presenting his characters he explains their point-of-view and motivations, but beyond that he neither defends nor indicts them, letting the character actions supply the rest. Of Jacques he writes, “As for his view of the trade he practiced, he saw it as a perfectly legal business. He had witnessed blacks being bought and sold all his life; it was, he believed, the natural state of things – what they were made for” (135).
Thus, while the reader may ask how Georges can lead a slave rebellion without choosing to interfere with his father’s slave ownership and in actual fact going as far as assisting him in illegally purchasing more slaves to improve plantation efficiency, the omniscient narrator praises slave owners who treat their human property with kindness and fairness. Georges vows to take revenge on the whites who perpetuate an oppressive system but while he grieves about his brother’s slave trading, is never shown to try to steer him away from it. The racial injustices and prejudice against mulattoes are eloquently denounced while at the same time blacks, with the exception of Arabs, are spoken of by Georges and the narrator as being hard-working and excelling at “savage” pursuits such as tracking but nonetheless possessing limited capabilities and intelligence. The narrative implies, for example, that black slaves are constitutionally unable to choose liberty over alcohol when offered the choice. The obvious but uncomfortable follow-up question, whether it is education or blood that makes this supposed difference in the world of Georges, is not aired.
And yet where Alexandre Dumas is concerned it would be foolish to jump to conclusions too swiftly. Born in France in 1802, the same year that Napoleon Bonaparte reinstated slavery after The First Republic had terminated it in 1794, he presumably encountered racial prejudice in everyday life, but at least outwardly and in his writings handled it with aplomb. An episode described in Alexandre Dumas Ou Les Aventures d'Un Romancier (by Christian Biet, Jean-Paul Brighelli, and Jean-Luc Rispail, Gallimard, 1986) has the author being accosted by a hostile person in a salon. This man challenges him to a debate about “negroes” and persons of colour, saying Dumas must know the subject intimately because of “all that black blood flowing in your veins”. Dumas replies: “But of course. My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a negro [actually, his grandmother], and my great-grandfather an ape. You see, Monsieur, my family tree commences at the point where yours ends.” In Georges he writes, “The same sort of thing happens every day in the colonies. Brought up from infancy to regard white men as a superior breed, Pierre Munier had allowed his proud spirit to be crushed without even attempting to resist. He was fearless under a hail of musket shot, but cowered when faced with the prejudice of the whites” (29).
Nor was Georges the first literary instance of Dumas raising the subject of the slave trade (Although France banned the slave trade in 1815, it was not until 1848 that all slavery was finally abolished from France and its colonies). Nelly Schmidt notes that already four years prior he had written about it in Le Capitaine Pamphile, serialised in Le Siècle (see Abolitionnistes De l'Esclavage Et Réformateurs Des Colonies: 1820-1851 : Analyse Et Documents, Karthala, 2000, p. 111 n. 51). Also, according to Lawrence C. Jennings, Dumas expressed his support for La Revue Des Colonies, an abolitionist journal owned and run by blacks. However, although throughout his life he seems to have advocated justice and various social reforms, my personal impression is that after the revolutionary fervour of his youth – he participated in the July Revolution of 1830 – he sought to balance change with peace and order. His contemporaries, at least in the colonies, seem to have been impressed by his reputation and intellect as well as his moderate republicanism: in 1849/50, two electoral committees in the French colony of Guadeloupe proposed naming Dumas as a candidate for the “party of order”, represented by the colonists, against the forces of “anarchy” (Schmidt, 112).
Interestingly, despite his family connection with Haiti Dumas chose not to set his story in the location of the one successful revolt that led to the establishment of a state governed by former slaves. (The rebels in Georges reference the Haitian success more than once.) I can only speculate about the reasons. Perhaps it was to keep readers in anxious suspense about the hero’s ultimate fate, since the fact that Mauritius in 1824 remained in the hands of slave-owning colonials would seem to pre-ordain that even a fictional slave rebellion must be doomed? (Britain, which had seized Mauritius – then Île de France – from the French in 1810 (an event described in Georges), formally ended slavery on the island in 1835.) Perhaps Haiti was still a sensitive issue in Dumas’s France despite the Franco-Haitian accord of 1825, yet he perceived both the necessity and breathing room for racial discourse? (By comparison, Dumas’s compatriot Victor Hugo set his early novel Bug-Jargal during the Haitian revolution; to this day, reviewers continue to disagree over whether it incites racial hatred or is a paean to liberty.) Perhaps Dumas wished to avert the risk that his contribution to the debate about abolition would be hijacked by charges of bias due to his Haitian heritage?
Whatever the answer, he evidently deemed it prudent to ensure that Georges Munier, his slave-rebellion-leader hero, is one of the least flawed protagonists imaginable. Indeed, if he has a genuine flaw it is that his near-inhuman perfection leads him into haughtiness that to me seemed rather self-congratulatory and at times quite belligerent. Possessed of a thirst for justice and driven to overcome his childhood weakness of body he unceasingly tests his will and courage until, finally, he begins to think he has bested even God. The way the character is written makes him somewhat impenetrable and wooden, and despite the love he professes for his family and Sara I saw less than I hoped of the generosity and frank kindness that are so typical of Dumas’s characters. Georges is not nearly as diabolical in his need for revenge as the scheming Monte Cristo, but neither is his characterisation half as complex. The plot, however, bestows on him a role more revolutionary than almost anything I have read in nineteenth-century literature, and that assures both the highest interest in him and heartfelt cheers. A European-educated free man of colour in the colonies, Georges, like Claire de Duras's Ourika, finds that he no longer fits into any society he knows. What makes him and this novel so spectacular is that (unlike Ourika) Georges rejects victimhood and takes action to create a society that fits him.
Any lingering problems I experienced with the novel have mainly to do with the circumstance that it is less technically polished than some of Dumas’s more famous works. The structure is disjointed, the pacing all over the place, tutor-like commentary sometimes overwhelms the relatively brief story like an ill-fitting frame, and some key characters are types that exhibit more drama than depth. At times my emotional engagement foundered on flat characters and episodes that felt like theatrical set-pieces, and then the main things that kept me going were a sense of loyalty to the author and intellectual curiosity about his intentions. Only in the last third of the book did everything begin to flow for me, the narrative tautening into a heart-pounding, action-filled, cohesive adventure that reminded me vividly of why Dumas père is one of my favourite authors. The ending, alas, can only be described as abrupt, of the type that makes a reader turn a page, confused, thinking a page or two must have gone missing.
Even so, the novel packs a tremendous amount of entertainment into its 290 pages. Not only does it combine social drama with swashbuckling adventure; it is also a love story. Granted, the mutual attraction between Georges and the Creole Sara de Malmédie, rich orphan niece of an enemy of the Munier family, is of the take-the-author’s-word-for-it, love-at-first-glance sort. But in view of the history of multi-cultural love relations the outcome of theirs seems hopelessly bleak, for have not we readers also been trained to expect a wholesome measure of tragedy in “good” literature? Nicknamed the Rose of the rivière Noire (Black river), Sara as a character is too ideally conceived to be much more than a symbol, but with what little she is given she manages to show a gratifyingly steely spine and a sense of justice that matches that of Georges.
Dumas brings together a vast, international cast of ethnic groups that reflect the island’s trade ties with Asia and geographical position near Africa’s eastern coast as well as the colonial rivalry between France and Great Britain. Again, many characters are mere types, such as Miko-Miko, the Chinese peddler who facilitates messages between the lovers. Some manage to transcend the stereotyping, like the noble Laïza, a slave from Anjouan (now part of The Comoros), without whom the story would lose much of its emotional poignancy. The character who to me seems most severely short-changed, however, is Lord Murray. The (fictional) British governor, a consummate gentleman, it is through his friendship that Georges gains entry into and – during some of the most intense moments in the book – at least temporary acceptance in the highest echelon of Mauritian society. On one hand, the storyline leads Lord Murray in the only logical direction, and I do understand the point of Dumas’s very deliberate plot resolution; on the other, the treatment he undergoes is brusque and feels like an emotionally unfair let-down (insert selfish grumble) when compared to how some of the villains of the story fare.
Finally, Dumas excels at scenic description. The opening sequence expertly transported me to his imaginary Mauritius and I remained absolutely enchanted by the sights and smells. The landscape, people, and customs of Dumas’s island setting owe their sumptuous detail to careful research, including (according to Sollors) help from a Mauritian friend. It is a tropically lush paradise, perfumed and mythically bountiful in all seasons. Yet it also holds violent dangers, man-made as well as natural: sharks swim upriver, hurricanes tear up crops and demolish homes, and racial oppression breeds betrayal and deadly conflict. In this untamed Eden the system of slavery is the serpent that tempts and traps everyone, friends and foes alike. When Lord Murray says to Georges, “I hope that for you, as for me, there can be no strangers in this world except brigands, thieves, and drunks; all men of worth are relatives of a sort, and we recognize one another wherever we may meet” (36), I held my breath and prayed.
This is my second entry in the Historical Fiction Challenge.
