This paper examines current debates on multiculturalism and the Arab Orient present in France by looking back at the history, plot, and reception of one of the most successful French novels of all time: Alexandre Dumas' Count of Monte Cristo. Dubbed “a 19th-century version of The Arabian Nights,” this fictional story is also historical text binding East and West in the identity of 19th century Europe. Unfolding between 1815-1839 (serialized between 1844-45), the immensely popular tale of retribution for inflicted wrongs includes an Orientalizing metamorphosis that begins in an island prison. The Marseille sailor Dantes who transforms into the mysterious and foreign Count of Monte Cristo uses the entire Ottoman Mediterranean as both a distinct geographical yet fluid cultural-moral space to wreak vengeance. Details of the revenge plots carried out by means of multiple disguises customized for each of the characters constitute an aspect of the intertwined island social world of the 1830s Mediterranean. The traffic in goods, people, technologies, and ideas; the web of symbolic interaction through imperial conquest; relations of trade and finance with the Orient, usually treated as background, are indeed central to the moral universe of righteous retribution in the tale. The story’s immediate and stunning popularity--translated into over 100 languages-- reveals how audiences understood their world at a precise post-Napoleonic moment when Europe was constructing itself as a community of nation-states. Racial politics of the Other frame the work, 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 explores distinctions between multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism that illuminate the politics of contemporary France.