Thomas-Alexandre Dumas facts for kids

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Quick facts for kids Thomas-Alexandre Dumas
Portrait by Guillaume Guillon-Lethière, c. 1797
Birth name	Thomas-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie
Born	(1762-03-25)25 March 1762 Jérémie, Saint-Domingue (today, Haiti)
Died	26 February 1806(1806-02-26) (aged 43) Villers-Cotterêts, France
Allegiance	Kingdom of France French First Republic
Service/branch	French Army French Revolutionary Army
Years of service	1786–1801
Rank	Divisional general
Commands held	Army of the Eastern Pyrenees Army of the Alps Army of the West Commander of Cavalry, Armée d'Orient (1798)
Battles/wars	French Revolutionary Wars War of the First Coalition War in the Vendée Italian campaigns of the French Revolutionary Wars Siege of Mantua (1796–1797) French Campaign in Egypt and Syria Battle of the Pyramids
Relations	Alexandre Dumas (son) Alexandre Dumas fils (grandson) Alexandre Lippmann (great-great-grandson)

Statue of General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, melted down following a 1941 decision [fr] of the German authorities

Thomas-Alexandre Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie (French: [tɔmɑ alɛksɑ̃dʁ dymɑ davi də la pajət(ə)ʁi]; known as Alexandre Dumas; 25 March 1762 – 26 February 1806) was a Creole general, from the French colony of Saint-Domingue, in Revolutionary France. Along with his French contemporary Joseph Serrant, Toussaint Louverture in Saint-Domingue and Abram Petrovich Gannibal in Imperial Russia, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas is notable as a man of African descent (in Dumas's case, through his mother) leading European troops as a general officer. He was the first person of color in the French military to become brigadier general, divisional general, and general-in-chief of a French army.

Born in Saint-Domingue, Thomas-Alexandre was the son of Marquis Alexandre Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, a French nobleman, and of Marie-Cessette Dumas, a slave of African descent. He was born into slavery because of his mother's status, but his father took him to France in 1776 and had him educated. Slavery had been illegal in metropolitan France since 1315 and thus any slave would be freed de facto by being in France. His father helped him enter the French military.

Dumas played a large role in the French Revolutionary Wars. Entering the military in 1786 as a private at age 24, he commanded 53,000 troops as the General-in-Chief of the French Army of the Alps by age 31. Dumas's victory in opening the high Alpine passes in 1794 enabled the French to initiate their Second Italian Campaign against the Austrian Empire. During the battles in Italy, Austrian troops nicknamed Dumas the Schwarzer Teufel ("Black Devil", Diable Noir in French). in 1797. The French—notably Napoleon—nicknamed him "the Horatius Cocles of the Tyrol" (after a hero who had saved ancient Rome) for defeating a squadron of enemy troops at a bridge over the Eisack River in Clausen (today Klausen, or Chiusa, Italy) in March 1797.

Dumas participated in the French attempt to conquer Egypt and the Levant during the Expédition d’Égypte of 1798-1801, when he was a commander of the French cavalry forces. On the march from Alexandria to Cairo, he clashed verbally with the Expedition's supreme commander Napoleon Bonaparte, under whom he had served in the Italian campaigns. In March 1799, Dumas left Egypt on an unsound vessel, which was forced to run aground in the southern Italian Kingdom of Naples, where he was taken prisoner and thrown into a dungeon. He languished there until the spring of 1801.

Returning to France after his release, he and his wife had a son, Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870), who would become one of France's most widely-read authors. The son's most famous literary characters were inspired by his father.

Names

Dumas used several names in his life: Thomas-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie, Thomas Rethoré (or Retoré), Alexandre Dumas, Alex Dumas, and Thomas-Alexandre Dumas-Davy de la Pailleterie. "Davy de la Pailleterie" is his father's family name. He used the name "Retoré" (sometimes spelled Rethoré) during and for some years after the period in which his father sold him and then re-purchased him (1775–1776). According to biographer Tom Reiss, the name Retoré was "picked up from a neighbor in Jérémie (where the name can be found on official records of the period)". "Dumas" is from his mother. The first record of him as "Alexandre Dumas" is in the registry book of the Queen's Dragoons (joined 2 June 1786). (It was known in his platoon that this was "not his real name".) He used the simple form "Alex Dumas" starting in 1794. General Dumas used the full name "Thomas-Alexandre Dumas-Davy de la Pailleterie" on his son's birth certificate.

Appearance

The enlistment roll-book for the 6th Regiment of the Queen's Dragoons, which Dumas joined in 1786, described him as "6 feet tall, with frizzy black hair and eyebrows... oval face, and brown skinned, small mouth, thick lips". According to his earliest-known description (1797), he was "one of the handsomest men you could ever meet. [...] His frizzy hair recalls the curls of the Greeks and Romans." It described his face as 'something closer to ebony' than to 'bronze.'" General Dumas was described as 'dark—very dark.'

Early life

Thomas-Alexandre had two siblings by his parents: Adolphe and Jeannette. They also had an older half-sister, Marie-Rose, born to Marie-Cessette before Davy de la Pailleterie purchased her and began a relationship. His father sold Marie-Cessette and her other three children before taking Thomas-Alexandre to France.

In 1776, when Alexandre was 14, his father sold the boy for 800 French livres in Port-au-Prince, officially to a Lieutenant Jacques-Louis Roussel (but unofficially to a Captain Langlois). This sale (with right of redemption) provided both a legal way to have Alexandre taken to France with Langlois and a temporary loan to pay for his father's passage. The boy accompanied Captain Langlois to Le Havre, France, arriving on 30 August 1776, where his father bought him back and freed him.

From his arrival in France until Autumn 1778, Alexandre (named Thomas Retoré) first lived with his father at the Davy de la Pailleterie family estate in Belleville-en-Caux, Normandy. After his father sold that estate in 1777, they moved to a townhouse on the rue de l'Aigle d'Or in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. There, Alexandre studied at the academy of Nicolas Texier de la Boëssière [fr], where he was given a young nobleman's higher education. He learned swordsmanship from the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, another mixed-race man from the French Caribbean.

Flush with cash from the sale of his family estate, Davy de la Pailleterie for many years spent lavishly on Dumas. His notary said that the boy "cost him enormously". From 1777 to 1786, from age 15 to 24, thanks to his father's wealth and generosity, Dumas lived a life of considerable leisure.

In 1784, at age 22, Alexandre moved to an apartment on Rue Etienne, near the Louvre Palace in Paris, socializing at venues such as the Palais-Royal and Nicolet's Theater. In September 1784, while seated at Nicolet's Theater in the company of "a beautiful Creole" woman, he and his companion were harassed by a white colonial naval officer, Jean-Pierre Titon de Saint-Lamain, and one or two others. Following Dumas's verbal protests, the men "tried to force him to kneel before his attacker and beg for his freedom". The police report on the incident shows that Titon chose not to press charges as he might have, and all participants were released.

Military career

Enlistment and service in the Queen's Dragoons

In February 1786 his father Davy de la Pailleterie married Françoise Retou, a domestic servant from the Davy de la Pailleterie estate. Dumas did not sign as witness to the marriage contract. According to his son's memoir, the marriage precipitated a "cooling off" which led the father to tighten Dumas's allowance.

Soon after, Dumas decided to join the French Army, a common occupation for gentlemen. Unlike his noble peers, who took arms as commissioned officers, Dumas enlisted as a private. A 1781 rule enabled men who could show four generations of nobility on their father's side to qualify to be commissioned as officers. Dumas had this, but the French race laws "made it hard for a man of mixed race to claim his rightful title or noble status".) According to the novelist Dumas's account, on hearing of Alexandre's plan, his father insisted that his son take a "nom de guerre" in order that he not drag the noble name "through the lowest ranks of the army". He signed up for the 6th Regiment of the Queen's Dragoons as "Alexandre Dumas" on 2 June 1786; thirteen days later, his father died.

Dumas spent his first years in the Queen's Dragoons in the provincial town of Laon, Picardy, close to the border with the Austrian Netherlands. On 15 August 1789, following the beginning of the French Revolution, his unit was sent to the small town of Villers-Cotterêts. The town's newly formed National Guard leader, innkeeper Claude Labouret, had called for them to come in response to a wave of rural violence known as the Great Fear. Dumas lodged at the Labourets' Hôtel de l'Ecu for four months, during which time he became engaged to Claude Labouret's daughter Marie-Louise.

Dumas's regiment was in Paris on 17 July 1791, where they served as riot police along with National Guard units under the Marquis de Lafayette during the Champ de Mars Massacre of the French Revolution. Troops killed between 12 and 50 people when a large crowd gathered to sign a petition calling for the French King's removal. Two years later, when someone denounced Dumas to the Committee of Public Safety, he claimed that intervention in the conflict saved as many as 2,000 people.

A corporal by 1792, Dumas had his first combat experience in a French attack on the Austrian Netherlands in April of that year. He was one of 10,000 men under the command of the General Biron. Stationed on the Belgian frontier in the town of Maulde, on 11 August 1792 Dumas captured 12 enemy soldiers while leading a small scouting party of four to eight horsemen.

Second-in-command of the Black Legion

In October 1792, Dumas accepted a commission as lieutenant colonel in (and second-in-command of) the Légion franche des Américains et du Midi, founded a month earlier by Julien Raimond. This was a "free legion" (i.e., formed separately from the regular army) composed of free men of color (gens de couleur libres). It was called the "American Legion", "Black Legion", or Saint-Georges Legion, after its commanding officer, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges. Dumas frequently commanded the legion, as Saint-Georges was often absent. In April 1793, General Dumouriez attempted a coup d'état; Saint-Georges and Dumas refused to join it and defended the city of Lille from coup supporters. In the summer of 1793, Saint-Georges was accused of misusing government funds, and the Legion disbanded.

Commander-in-chief of the Army of the Western Pyrenees

On 30 July 1793, he was promoted to the rank of brigadier general in the Army of the North. One month later, he was promoted again, to general of division. In September, he was made commander-in-chief of the Army of the Western Pyrenees. In this brief assignment (September–December 1793), Dumas's headquarters were in Bayonne, France, where he was apparently nicknamed "Mr. Humanity" (Monsieur de l'Humanité) by local sans-culottes; they wanted to intimidate him to conform to their political line at a time when French generals were extremely vulnerable to accusations of treason that often led to execution.

Commander-in-chief of the Army of the Alps

On 22 December 1793, Dumas was given command of the Army of the Alps. His campaign in the Alps centered on defeating Austrian and Piedmontese troops defending the glacier-covered Little Saint Bernard Pass at Mont Cenis, on the French-Piedmont border. After months of planning and reconnaissance from his base in Grenoble, he had to wait for snow conditions to be favorable to his troops' passage. In April and May 1794, Dumas launched several assaults on Mont Cenis. In the final attack, Dumas's army, equipped with ice crampons, took the mountain by scaling ice cliffs and captured between 900 and 1,700 prisoners.

Though his victory won Dumas praise from political leaders in Paris, he was called before the Committee of Public Safety in June 1794, for reasons unspecified but probably to face charges of treason, as this was the period of the "Great Terror", a period of accelerated political executions in the final months of the Reign of Terror period of the French Revolution. Dumas delayed his arrival in Paris until mid-July, and was not seen by the Committee before the Terror ended with the execution of Robespierre on 27 July 1794.

Portrait du Général Dumas, painting by Olivier Pichat (1825–1912) in the Alexandre Dumas Museum

Commander-in-chief of the Army of the West (1793) in the Vendée

In early August 1794 Dumas was briefly assigned to command the École de Mars military school at Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris. He was reassigned to lead the Army of the West from August to October 1794. He was responsible for consolidating the recent government victory over a massive insurgency in the region of the Vendée against the French revolutionary government. He focused on increasing military discipline. One historian, despite or because of his pro-royalist sentiments, characterised Dumas in this command as "fearless and irreproachable", a leader who "deserves to pass into posterity and makes a favorable contrast with the executioners, his contemporaries, whom public indignation will always nail to the pillory of History!"

General in the Army of the Rhine (France)

In September 1795 Dumas served under General Jean-Baptiste Kléber in the Army of the Rhine. He participated in the French attack on Düsseldorf, where he was wounded.

General in the Army of Italy

Siege of Mantua

General Dumas joined the Army of Italy in Milan in November 1796, serving under the orders of commander-in-chief Napoleon Bonaparte. Tension between the two generals began as Dumas resisted Napoleon's policy of allowing French troops to expropriate local property. In December 1796, Dumas was in charge of a division besieging Austrian troops at the city of Mantua. By Christmas he intercepted a spy carrying a message to the Austrian commander with important tactical information. On 16 January 1797, Dumas and his division halted an Austrian attempt to break out of the besieged city and prevented Austrian reinforcements from reaching Mantua. The French were thereby able to maintain the siege until French reinforcements could arrive, leading to the city's capitulation on 2 February 1797.

Campaign in Northern Italy

Following the 16 January fighting, Dumas felt insulted by the description of his actions in a battle report by General Berthier, Bonaparte's aide-de-camp, and wrote a letter to Napoleon cursing Berthier. Dumas was subsequently omitted from mention in Napoleon's battle report to the Directory, France's government at the time. He was then given a command well beneath his rank, leading a subdivision under General Masséna, despite a petition from Dumas's troops attesting to his valor. Under General Masséna in February 1797, Dumas helped French troops push the Austrians northward, capturing thousands. It was in this period that Austrian troops began calling him the der schwarze Teufel ("Black Devil", or Diable Noir in French).

In late February 1797, Dumas transferred to a division commanded by General Joubert, who requested Dumas for his republicanism. Under Joubert, Dumas led a small force that defeated several enemy positions along the Adige River. Dumas's achievement in this period came on 23 March, when the general drove back a squadron of Austrian troops at a bridge over the Eisack River in Clausen (today Klausen, or Chiusa, Italy). For this the French began referring to him as "the Horatius Cocles of the Tyrol" (after a hero who saved ancient Rome). Napoleon called Dumas by this, and rewarded him by making him cavalry commander of French troops in the Tyrol; he also sent Dumas a pair of pistols. Dumas spent much of 1797 as military governor, administering Treviso province, north of Venice.

Commander of Cavalry in the French Campaign in Egypt

Dumas was ordered to report to Toulon, France, in March 1798 for an unspecified assignment. He joined an enormous French armada in preparation for departure to a secret destination. The armada departed on 10 May 1798, destination still unannounced. It was only on 23 June, after the fleet had conquered Malta, that Napoleon announced that the mission's main purpose: to conquer Egypt. Aboard the Guillaume Tell, in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, Dumas learned that he had been appointed as commander of all cavalry in the Army of the Orient. The armada arrived in the port of Alexandria at the end of June, and on 3 July Dumas led the Fourth Light Grenadiers over the walls as the French conquered the city. After fighting, Napoleon sent Dumas to pay ransom to some Bedouins who had kidnapped French soldiers. The expedition's chief medical officer recounted in a memoir that local Egyptians, judging Dumas's height and build versus Napoleon's, believed Dumas to be in command. Seeing "him ride his horse over the trenches, going to ransom the prisoners, all of them believed that he was the leader of the Expedition."

From 7 to 21 July, Dumas commanded the invading army's cavalry as it marched south from Alexandria to Cairo. Conditions of heat, thirst, fatigue, and lack of supplies for the troops on the desert march were harsh. While camped in Damanhour, General Dumas met with several other generals (Lannes, Desaix, and Murat). They vented criticisms of Napoleon's leadership and discussed the possibility of refusing to march beyond Cairo. Dumas soon participated in the Battle of the Pyramids (following which he chased retreating Mameluke horsemen) and the occupation of Cairo. At some point during the occupation, Napoleon learned of the earlier mutinous talk, and confronted Dumas. In his memoirs, Napoleon remembered threatening to shoot Dumas for sedition. Dumas requested leave to return to France, and Napoleon did not oppose it. Napoleon was reported to have said: "I can easily replace him with a brigadier."

Following the destruction of the French armada by a British fleet led by Horatio Nelson, however, Dumas was unable to get out of Egypt until March 1799. In August 1798, Dumas discovered a large cache of gold and jewels beneath a house in French-occupied Cairo, which he turned over to Napoleon. In October, he was important in putting down an anti-French revolt in Cairo by charging into the Al-Azhar Mosque on horseback. Afterward (according to his son, drawn largely from the memories of Dumas's aide-de-camp Dermoncourt), Napoleon told him: "I shall have a painting made of the taking of the Grand Mosque. Dumas, you have already posed as the central figure." The Girodet painting, however, which Napoleon commissioned eleven years later, shows a white man charging into the mosque.

On 7 March 1799, Dumas boarded a small ship called the Belle Maltaise in the company of his fellow General Jean-Baptiste Manscourt du Rozoy, the geologist Déodat Gratet de Dolomieu, forty wounded French soldiers, and a number of Maltese and Genoan civilians. Dumas had sold the furnishings of his quarters in Cairo, and purchased 4,000 pounds of moka coffee; eleven Arabian horses (two stallions and nine mares) to establish breeding stock in France; and hired the ship.

While returning to France, the ship began to sink, and Dumas had to jettison much of his cargo. The ship was forced by storms to land at Taranto, in the Kingdom of Naples. Dumas and his companions expected to get a friendly reception, having heard that the Kingdom had been overthrown by the Parthenopean Republic. But that short-lived republic had succumbed to an internal uprising by a local force known as the Holy Faith Army, led by Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo, in alliance with King Ferdinand IV of the Kingdom of Naples, who was at war with France.

Imprisonment in the Kingdom of Naples

The Holy Faith Army imprisoned Dumas and the rest of the passengers and confiscated most of their belongings. Early on in the captivity, Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo tried to trade Dumas for a Corsican adventurer named Boccheciampe, an imposter posing as Prince Francis, son of Ferdinand IV, in order to aid the Holy Faith movement. Boccheciampe had been captured by French forces north of the Neapolitan kingdom, shortly after he had visited the prisoners, who were held inside Taranto's Aragonese Castle, but Ruffo lost interest in a trade when he learned Boccheciampe had been killed by the French.

Dumas was malnourished and kept incommunicado for two years. By the time of his release, he was partially paralyzed, almost blind in one eye, had been deaf in one ear but recovered; his physique was broken. He believed his illnesses were caused by poisoning. During his imprisonment, he was aided by a secret local pro-French group, which brought him medicine and a book of remedies. In November 1799, Napoleon had returned to Paris and seized power. Dumas's wife lobbied his government for assistance in finding and rescuing her husband, to little result. Napoleon's forces, under the command of Dumas's fellow general Joachim Murat, eventually defeated Ferdinand IV's army and secured Dumas's release in March 1801.

Political views

Dumas made few political statements, but those he made suggest deeply felt republican beliefs.

Marriage and family

On 28 November 1792, stationed with the Black Legion in Amiens, Dumas married Marie-Louise Élisabeth Labouret in Villers-Cotterêts. She stayed in Villers-Cotterêts with her family during his military campaigns. Dumas bought a farm of 30 acres there. They had daughters Marie-Alexandrine (b. September 1794), Louise-Alexandrine (b. January/February 1796, d. 1797), and a son, Alexandre Dumas, who became a notable author, with success in plays and adventure novels.

Later years and death

After he gained release in 1801, Dumas was not awarded "the pension normally allocated to the widows of generals" by the French government and he struggled to support his family after his return to France. He repeatedly wrote to Napoleon Bonaparte, seeking back-pay for his time lost in Taranto and a new commission in the military. He died of stomach cancer on 26 February 1806 in Villers-Cotterêts, when his son Alexandre was three years and seven months old. The boy, his sister, and his widowed mother were plunged into deeper poverty. Marie-Louise Labouret Dumas worked in a tobacconist's shop to make ends meet. For lack of funds, the young Alexandre Dumas was unable to get even a basic secondary education. Marie-Louise lobbied the French government to pay her military widow's pension. Marie-Louise and the young Alexandre blamed Napoleon Bonaparte's "implacable hatred" for their poverty.

Legacy and honors

The general's grandson, Alexandre Dumas fils (1824-1895), became a celebrated French playwright in the second half of the nineteenth century. Another grandson, Henry Bauër [fr] (1851-1915), never recognized by the novelist Dumas, was a left-leaning theater-critic in the same period.
Dumas's name is inscribed on the south wall of the Arc de Triomphe.
In 1913, a statue of General Dumas was erected in Place Malesherbes (now Place du Général Catroux) in Paris in Autumn 1912 after a long fundraising campaign spearheaded by Anatole France and Sarah Bernhardt. From the moment of its installation until some time after July 1913 the statue was covered by a shroud due to the difficulty of the numerous governmental agencies involved to reach agreement on the modalities of its official inauguration. It stood in Place Malesherbes for thirty years, alongside statues of Alexandre Dumas's descendants Alexandre Dumas, père (erected 1883) and Alexandre Dumas fils (erected 1906), as well as of Sarah Bernhardt. Germans destroyed it in the winter of 1941–1942.
In 2009, a sculpture in his honor, made by Driss Sans-Arcidet, was erected in Paris, Place du Général Catroux (formerly Place Malesherbes). Representing broken slave shackles, it was unveiled on 4 April 2009.
In April 2009, writer Claude Ribbe started an internet petition, asking French President Nicolas Sarkozy to award General Dumas the Légion d'honneur. As of February 2014, the petition has gathered over 7,100 signatories.