Thomas-Alexandre Dumas | |
|---|---|
 Portrait by Guillaume Guillon-Lethière, c. 1797 | |
| Birth name | Thomas-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie |
| Born | 25 March 1762 Jérémie, Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti) |
| Died | 26 February 1806 (aged 43) Villers-Cotterêts, France |
| Allegiance |  Kingdom of France French First Republic |
| Service | Army |
| Years of service | 1786–1801 |
| Rank | General-in-chief |
| Commands | Army of the Western Pyrenees Army of the Alps Army of the West Commander of Cavalry, Army of the Orient |
| Battles / wars | |
| Relations | Alexandre Dumas (son) Alexandre Dumas fils (grandson) Alexandre Lippmann (great-great-grandson) |
Thomas-Alexandre Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie (French: [tɔmɑ alɛksɑ̃dʁ dymɑ davi də la pajət(ə)ʁi]; known as Thomas-Alexandre Dumas; 25 March 1762 – 26 February 1806) was a French general, from the French colony of Saint-Domingue, in Revolutionary France.
Along with his French contemporary Joseph Serrant and other notable brothers in arms in the French Army Toussaint Louverture from Saint-Domingue, Abram Petrovich Gannibal from Imperial Russia and Władysław Franciszek Jabłonowski from Poland, 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.[2] All four commanded as officers in the French Army and apart from Gannibal, who was only captain and engineer-sapper in the Army of Louis XV during his formative years, they all gained their general ranks in the French Army, about four decades after Gannibal had done the same in Russia. Yet Dumas was the first person of color in the French military to become brigadier general, divisional general, and general-in-chief of a French army.[3]
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, an enslaved woman 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.[4] His father helped him enter the French military.
Dumas played a large role in the French Revolutionary Wars. Having entered the military in 1786 at age 24 as a private, by age 31 he commanded 53,000 troops as the General-in-Chief of the French Army of the Alps. 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)[5] in 1797. The French—notably Napoleon—nicknamed him "the Horatius Cocles of the Tyrol"[6] (after a hero who had saved ancient Rome[7]) 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.[8]
- ^
Volper, Julien; Rykner, Didier (12 May 2021). "La Case du siècle : la propagande En Marche" [The Case of the century: propaganda On the Move]. latribunedelart (in French). Retrieved 21 May 2022.
Durant l'occupation allemande, le gouvernement de Vichy, faisant suite au décret du 11 décembre 1941, avait effacé la mémoire d'un officier supérieur d'origine africaine, le général Dumas [...], en faisant mettre à bas sa statue.
- ^ Toussaint Louverture was commissioned as "general-in-chief" of the army in French Saint-Domingue during the Haitian Revolution. Alfred-Amédée Dodds, who was of one-eighth African descent, became a general of division in 1898 and general-in-chief in 1900, but commanded only colonial troops. La Revue hebdomadaire, 2nd series, 4th year, v. 9, 4 August 1900, n.p., and in Mariani, Angelo and Uzanne, Joseph, eds., Figures contemporaines: Tirées de l'album Mariani v. 6 (Paris: H. Floury, 1901), n.p."Le Général Dodds". Abram Petrovich Gannibal had achieved major-general rank in the Imperial Russian Army by 1752. In continental Europe, however, Alexandre Dumas is the first general of division until the advent of Jean-Marc Vigilant another Black French general of division in the French Air and Space Force in the 2000s and the sole (nominated) general-in-chief in modern history.
- ^ Alexandre Dumas was made brigadier general (the entry-level rank for generals in the French military hierarchy) of the French Army of the West on 30 July 1793, general of division one month later, and general-in-chief of the Army of the Western Pyrenees. Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo (New York: Crown Publishers, 2012), 145 and 147. The next black people to make brigadier general in the French military were Toussaint Louverture, André Rigaud, and Louis-Jacques Beauvais, all promoted to that rank on 23 July 1795. Madison Smartt Bell, Toussaint L'Ouverture: A Biography (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), 119. Note: Alexandre Dumas was the first French general of African descent, and was of mixed race; Louverture was the first French general of purely African descent. The assertion that Louverture was "the first black general in French history" is true if mixed-race men are not considered in this category, or if Dumas is overlooked. The claim has been made by Pierre Pluchon, Toussaint Louverture: Un révolutionnaire d'Ancien Régime (Paris: Fayard, 1989), 554, quoted in Daniel Desormeaux, Deborah Jenson and Molly Krueger Enz, "The First of the (Black) Memorialists: Toussaint Louverture", Yale French Studies no: 107 (2005), 138.
- ^ Compare: Christopher L. Miller, The French Atlantic triangle: literature and culture of the slave trade. Duke University Press, 2008. p.20 ISBN 978-0-8223-8883-8- "But the moral and legal context in France was complex. Conditions of slavery and servitude were offset by what Sue Peabody calls the Freedom Principle: the notion, supported by a decree of Louis X in 1315, that 'France' signifies freedom and that any slave setting foot on what we now call the hexagon should be freed. There was a tradition of freeing slaves, and it remained influential, if often undercut, during the time of the Atlantic slave trade."
- ^ Report by Dumas's aide-de-camp Dermoncourt, quoted in Alexandre Dumas, père, Mes mémoires, v. 1 (Paris, 1881), 110
- ^ Alexandre Dumas, père, Mes mémoires, v. 1 (Paris, 1881), 127.
- ^ Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo (New York: Crown Publishers, 2012), 213.
- ^ Reiss (2012), The Black Count, pp. 12–14. See also Gilles Henry, Les Dumas: Le secret de Monte Cristo (Paris: France-Empire, 1999). A. Craig Bell argues for Porthos in Alexandre Dumas: A Biography and Study (London: Cassell and Co., 1950), 7.