I very much enjoyed this book. To begin with it’s the story of an interesting figure who is largely overlooked by history but is nevertheless a fascinating and impressive character. More than that, it’s the story of perhaps the first civil rights movement in Western European history, which is again a forgotten subject. It’s an up-close look at the French revolution, which is a subject I never really learned about in depth in school - and such a shame, because it’s such a fascinating template for many of the political upheavals that followed it. Finally, of course, it’s great background reading for anyone who enjoyed the books of Alex Dumas, as Dumas apparently took a good deal of inspiration for The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo from the life of his father.

While the book is full of wonderful exposition of many sorts - ranging from quotidian details about life in the colonies to developments in 18th-century miltiary science - there is one bit that stood out to me as both intriguing, pivotal, and maddeningly opaque:

“One fundamental development that made the storming of the Bastille … possible was, with a mysterious alchemy, the advance revolutionizing of the French military.”

That’s toward the end of Chapter 7, and it left me with a distinct curiosity about what on earth this “advance revolutionizing” was all about - but alas, the author leaves us with just that one rather vague sentence.

In any case, for anyone with an interest in Dumas, his books, or a very detailed look at the French revolution and Napoleonic wars, this is an excellent read!