Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, Haitian-French general (b. 1762)
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 Saint Dominican Creole general in Revolutionary France. Along with 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 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 as a private at age 24, Dumas 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 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 defeating a squadron of enemy troops at a bridge over the Eisack River in Clausen (today Klausen, or Chiusa, Italy).
Dumas failed an attempt to conquer Egypt and the Levant on the Expédition d’Égypte 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 put aground in the southern Italian Kingdom of Naples, where he was taken prisoner and thrown into a dungeon. He languished there until 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. Alexandre Dumas Junior's most famous characters were inspired by his father. The general's grandson, Alexandre Dumas fils, became a celebrated French playwright in the second half of the nineteenth century. Another grandson, Henry Bauër, never recognized by the novelist Dumas, was a left-leaning theater critic in the same period. The General's great-grandson, Gérard Bauër, son of Henry Bauër, was a 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, winning silver in 1920.