Geographies of Vengeance: Orientalism in Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo

This paper examines the use of Orientalism in the history, plot, and reception one of the most successful French novels of all time: Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo (1845). Dubbed 'a 19th-century version of "The Arabian Nights"', this fictional tale is also a historical text linking East and West within the moral universe of post-Napoleonic Europe. Wrongfully accused of state treason, a Marseilles sailor, Dantès, transforms into the mysterious and foreign Count of Monte Cristo through an Orientalising metamorphosis that begins in an island prison and unfolds through a revenge plan after a miraculous escape. Details of the vengeance plots carried out by means of multiple disguises, customized for each of the characters reveal the metageography of an imperial Mediterranean. The traffic in goods, people, technologies, and ideas; the web of symbolic interaction measured in imperial conquest; relations of trade and finance with the Orient, hitherto treated as background, are central to the moral universe of righteous retribution in the tale. The story's immediate and stunning popularity indicates how audiences understood their world at a precise post-Napoleonic moment when France was constructing itself by projecting its power into the Ottoman Empire's North African domains. Embedded within the frame of the story, the racial politics of the Other extend beyond the Orient into the French Atlantic touching Dumas, the author, directly: his half-Haitian father fought as a free officer in Napoleon's Egyptian campaign. Within this autobiographical 19th century milieu, the paper further explores an imperial cosmopolitanism impacting the collective memory struggles and the racial politics of contemporary France.