General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas

Thomas-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie was born on 25 March 1762 in Jérémie, in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, now Haiti. His father was Alexandre-Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, a French nobleman, and his mother was Marie-Cessette Dumas, an enslaved Black woman. He was raised on his father's plantation, then taken to France as a child and educated as a nobleman's son despite his illegitimacy.

In 1786, at 24, he joined the French army as a private, enlisting under his mother's surname, Dumas, because his father disapproved of him using the family name at such a low rank. When the Revolution came he became a devoted republican and served in the Légion Américaine, also known as the Légion Saint-Georges, an all-Black unit commanded by the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, his former fencing instructor.

His rise was extraordinary. He was promoted to lieutenant, lieutenant colonel and in July 1793 général de brigade, and within two years he became a general of division, the first soldier of Afro-Antillean origin to reach that rank in the French army. In 1797 he single-handedly held a bridge over the Eisack River at Clausen against a squadron of Austrian troops, a feat that earned him the nickname the Horatius Cocles of the Tyrol.

In 1798 he joined Napoleon's expedition to Egypt as cavalry commander, but he openly questioned the purpose of the campaign and clashed with Bonaparte, and he left Egypt in February 1799 disillusioned and in poor health. Napoleon never restored him to active duty, and his relationship with the future emperor ended in bitter hostility.

Dumas died of stomach cancer on 26 February 1806 in Villers-Cotterêts, leaving his widow and young son, the future novelist Alexandre Dumas, in poverty. His son's novels, especially The Count of Monte Cristo, drew heavily on his father's life. Tom Reiss's 2012 biography The Black Count brought his story to a wide audience, and his name is inscribed on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.