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.

[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.

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.

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.

In 1732, Antoine's younger brother Charles had been given a military posting in Saint-Domingue, a French colony in the Caribbean that generated high revenues from its sugarcane plantations, worked by African slave labour.

In 1738, Charles left the military to become a sugar planter in that colony; he married Anne-Marie Tuffé, a rich local French Creole widow, and took over her estate.

[18] At some point during these years, Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie purchased the slave woman Marie-Cessette "for an exorbitant price" and made her his concubine.

The British blockade of French shipping during the Seven Years' War reduced Charles' income from sugar exports, so he tried to smuggle the commodity out of Saint-Domingue from his plantation.

Marie-Cessette Dumas, described as a "great matriarch to a saga of distinguished men",[22] was an enslaved woman and concubine of African descent owned by the Marquis Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie.

[17] They resided together at a plantation called La Guinaudée[17] (Guinodée[23]), near Jérémie (formerly in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, now Haiti) until shortly before Antoine's departure in 1775.

[23] Based on this date, Victor Emmanuel Roberto Wilson speculates that she may have died in the mass outbreak of dysentery following a hurricane that struck the Grand Anse region of Saint-Domingue.

[47] The enlistment roll-book for the 6th Regiment of the Queen's Dragoons, which Dumas joined in 1786, described him as "6 feet tall, with frizzy black hair and eyebrows... oval face, and brown skinned, small mouth, thick lips".

[51] From his arrival in France until Autumn 1778, Alexandre (named Thomas Retoré) first lived with his father at the Davy de la Pailleterie family estate in Belleville-en-Caux, Normandy.

In September 1784, while seated at Nicolet's Theater in the company of "a beautiful Creole" woman, he and his companion were harassed by a white colonial naval officer, Jean-Pierre Titon de Saint-Lamain, and one or two others.

[57] According to the novelist Dumas's account, on hearing of Alexandre's plan, his father insisted that his son take a "nom de guerre" so that he not drag the noble name "through the lowest ranks of the army".

The town's newly formed National Guard leader, innkeeper Claude Labouret, had called for them to come in response to a wave of rural violence known as the Great Fear.

Stationed on the Belgian frontier in the town of Maulde, on 11 August 1792 Dumas captured 12 enemy soldiers while leading a small scouting party of four to eight horsemen.

[62] In October 1792, Dumas accepted a commission as a lieutenant colonel in (and second-in-command of) the Légion franche des Américains et du Midi, founded a month earlier by Julien Raimond.

Humanity" (Monsieur de l'Humanité) by local sans-culottes; they wanted to intimidate him to conform to their political line at a time when French generals were extremely vulnerable to accusations of treason that often led to execution.

[66] His campaign in the Alps centred on defeating Austrian and Piedmontese troops defending the glacier-covered Little Saint Bernard Pass at Mont Cenis, on the French-Piedmont border.

[69] One historian, despite or because of his pro-royalist sentiments, characterised Dumas in this command as "fearless and irreproachable", a leader who "deserves to pass into posterity and makes a favourable contrast with the executioners, his contemporaries, whom public indignation will always nail to the pillory of History!

Dumas's achievement in this period came on 23 March, when the general drove back a squadron of Austrian troops at a bridge over the Eisack River in Clausen (today Klausen, or Chiusa, Italy).

The armada arrived in the port of Alexandria at the end of June, and on 3 July Dumas led the Fourth Light Grenadiers over the walls as the French conquered the city.

[78] On 7 March 1799, Dumas boarded a small ship called the Belle Maltaise in the company of his fellow General Jean-Baptiste Manscourt du Rozoy, the geologist Déodat Gratet de Dolomieu, forty wounded French soldiers, and several Maltese and Genoan civilians.

Dumas had sold the furnishings of his quarters in Cairo, and purchased 4,000 pounds of moka coffee; eleven Arabian horses (two stallions and nine mares) to establish breeding stock in France; and hired the ship.

But that short-lived republic had succumbed to an internal uprising by a local force known as the Holy Faith Army, led by Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo, in alliance with King Ferdinand IV of the Kingdom of Naples, who was at war with France.

Early on in the captivity, Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo tried to trade Dumas for a Corsican adventurer named Boccheciampe, an imposter posing as Prince Francis, son of Ferdinand IV, to aid the Holy Faith movement.

One month after the French National Convention abolished slavery (4 February 1794), Dumas sent a message to troops under his command in the Army of the Alps: Your comrade, a soldier and General-in-Chief ... was born in a climate and among men for whom liberty also had charms, and who fought for it first.

[83] According to his French biographer Claude Ribbe, it is in the courtyard of Château de Villers-Cotterêts that the young soldier Dumas met his future wife on 15 August 1789, almost 250 years to the day after the famous Ordinance was firmed by king Francis I in that same place.

After he gained release in 1801, Dumas was not awarded "the pension normally allocated to the widows of generals" by the French government[85] and he struggled to support his family after his return to France.