Thomas Alexandre Dumas

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Divisional-General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas (known before as Thomas-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie, pronounced in French: [tɔmɑ alɛksɑ̃dʁ davi də la pajət(ə)ʁi]; 25 March 1762 – 26 February 1806) was a French Army officer who served in the French Revolutionary Wars. Along with fellow French officers Joseph Serrant and Toussaint Louverture, Abram Petrovich Gannibal from Imperial Russia and Władysław Franciszek Jabłonowski from Poland, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas was noted as a man of African descent (in Dumas's case, through his mother) leading European troops as a general officer. 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 Black man in the French military to become brigade 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, 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. 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....