Until 2005, France had the only senior Catholic prelate in modern times who was born Jewish and still considered himself culturally Jewish: Cardinal Lustiger. – Tom Reiss
‘The Secret Agent,’ Joseph Conrad’s 1907 novel about an anarchist plot to blow up the Royal Observatory at Greenwich – in fact, a scheme by a secret police agent to stir up a government backlash – has acquired a kind of cult status as the classic novel for the post-9/11 age. – Tom Reiss
In early 1798, the Directory, the oligarchy that was ruling revolutionary France, ordered its top general, Napoleon Bonaparte, to plan the invasion of England. Instead, Napoleon organized and carried out the invasion of Egypt, which became the first modern incursion by the West into the Middle East. – Tom Reiss
Remembering people is the most fundamental gesture of love and respect. For me, there are people in my life who are no longer with me, who have died, who are with me as much as any living person because I remember everything about them. My great-uncle, who I got a lot of guidance in life from, meant so much to me. – Tom Reiss
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. – Tom Reiss
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. – Tom Reiss
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. – Tom Reiss
All anyone agreed on was that Kurban Said was the pen name of a writer who had probably come from Baku, an oil city in the Caucasus, and that he was either a nationalist poet who was killed in the Gulags or the dilettante son of an oil millionaire or a Viennese cafe-society writer who died after stabbing himself in the foot. – Tom Reiss
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. – Tom Reiss
Napoleon’s plan was for his army to arrive in Egypt not as conquerors but liberators. Landing in Aboukir Bay on July 1, 1798, the French captured Alexandria the next day, overcoming the surprised Mamelukes – the despotic local rulers – with a combination of modern artillery and infantry tactics. – Tom Reiss
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. – Tom Reiss
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.’ – Tom Reiss
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. – Tom Reiss
I soon abandoned the question of who Kurban Said or Essad Bey was for the more problematic one – who was Lev Nussimbaum? – Tom Reiss
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. – Tom Reiss
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. – Tom Reiss
‘The Secret Agent’ remains the most brilliant novelistic study of terrorism as viewed from the blood-spattered outside. But ‘Under Western Eyes’ dares to leap inside – not only into the terrorist mind, but also into the troubled zone that divides West from East, ‘the autocracy in mystic vestments.’ – Tom Reiss
The one challenge you have when you’re going back into history is that people, unlike with today’s news – we think we know what’s happened already – we think that it’s history and therefore less interesting. – Tom Reiss
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. – Tom Reiss
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. – Tom Reiss
For me, history is always personal. And it’s how your personal history interacts with the history of your time. I’m very attracted to characters who were cursed, as the Chinese say, to live in interesting times. – Tom Reiss
Since 2002, there has been a wave of attacks against Jewish ‘persons or property’ in France, a great many of them committed by young men living outside Paris, in the vast ghettos called les banlieues. – Tom Reiss
Lev Nussimbaum was born in October 1905, the moment when the tolerant, haute capitaliste culture of Baku began to fall apart. – Tom Reiss
The demons you have are what motivate you to make your art. This is what drives the detective, this is what drives the painter, this is what drives the writer: a conflicting urge to forget pain and at the same time remember it and fight for some kind of justice. I know these powerful things are inside of me and everyone in some way or another. – Tom Reiss
It was nearly midnight on the night of February 26, 1806, and Alexandre Dumas, the future author of ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ and ‘The Three Musketeers,’ was asleep at his uncle’s house. He was not yet four years old. He was staying there because his father was gravely ill, and his mother thought it best for him not to be at home. – Tom Reiss
The revolution breaks out; they form this group of swordsmen called the Black Legion. Alex Dumas is there at every moment, protecting the revolution and protecting France, and he rises to the equivalent of a four-star general. – Tom Reiss
The Jewish exodus from North Africa, in the late nineteen-fifties and the nineteen-sixties, brought hundreds of thousands of Algerian, Moroccan, and Tunisian Jews to France. – Tom Reiss
In 1817, Czar Alexander I personally founded the Society of Israelite Christians but had less luck defeating Judaism than he’d had defeating Napoleon; gentile serfs and merchants in areas bordering the Pale even showed disturbing new signs of ‘Judaizing.’ – Tom Reiss
