Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

    

Thomas-Alexandre Dumas

French general

Date of Birth: 25-Mar-1762

Place of Birth: Jérémie, Grand'Anse, Haiti

Date of Death: 26-Feb-1806

Profession: diplomat

Nationality: France, Haiti

Zodiac Sign: Aries


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About Thomas-Alexandre Dumas

  • Thomas-Alexandre Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie (French: [t?ma al?ks?~d? dyma davi d? la paj?t?i]; also known as Alexandre Dumas; 25 March 1762 – 26 February 1806) was a French general in Revolutionary France.
  • With Toussaint Louverture and later Abram Petrovich Gannibal in Imperial Russia, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas stands as one of the highest-ranking men of African descent (his father being white, and his mother black) ever to lead a European army.
  • He was the first person of color in the French military to become brigadier general, the first to become divisional general, and the first to become general-in-chief of a French army.
  • Dumas and Toussaint Louverture (appointed a general-in-chief in 1797) were the two highest-ranking officers of sub-Saharan African descent in the Western world until 1975, when "Chappie" James achieved the equivalent rank of four-star general in the United States Air Force. Born in Saint-Domingue, Thomas-Alexandre was the son of the Marquis Alexandre Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, a white French nobleman and Marie-Cessette Dumas, an enslaved woman of African descent.
  • He was born into slavery because of his mother's status but was also born into nobility because of his father's.
  • His father took the boy with 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 the country.
  • His father helped Thomas-Alexandre enter the French military. Dumas played a pivotal role in the French Revolutionary Wars.
  • Entering the military as a private at age 24, Dumas rose by age 31 to command 53,000 troops as the General-in-Chief of the French Army of the Alps.
  • Dumas's strategic victory in opening the high Alps passes 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).
  • The French—notably Napoleon—nicknamed him "the Horatius Cocles of the Tyrol" (after a hero who had saved ancient Rome) for single-handedly defeating a squadron of enemy troops at a bridge over the Eisack River in Clausen (today Klausen, or Chiusa, Italy). Dumas served as commander of the French cavalry forces on the Expédition d’Égypte, a failed French attempt to conquer Egypt and the Levant.
  • 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 put 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, who became one of France's most widely read authors of all time.
  • Alexandre Dumas Junior's most famous characters were inspired by his father's life.
  • The general's grandson, Alexandre Dumas, fils, would become one of France's most celebrated playwrights of the second half of the nineteenth century.
  • Another grandson, Henry Bauër, who was never recognized by the novelist Dumas, was a prominent left-leaning theater critic in the same period.
  • The General's great-grandson, Gérard Bauër, son of Henry Bauër, was also an accomplished writer in the twentieth century.
  • A great-great-grandson, Alexandre Lippmann (grandson of the playwright Dumas fils), was a two-time gold medalist in fencing at the 1908 and 1924 Olympic games (he won silver in 1920).

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