Thomas Alexandre Dumas

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Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, posthumous portrait of Olivier Pichat (image detail)
Dumas on the battlefield

Thomas-Alexandre Dumas (also Thomas-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie ; born March 25, 1762 in Jérémie , Saint-Domingue (today's Haiti); †  February 26, 1806 in Villers-Cotterêts ) was a French Général de division . He was the father Alexandre Dumas the Elder and the grandfather Alexandre Dumas the Younger .

Life

Early years

Thomas-Alexandre was born in 1762 as the youngest of four illegitimate children of his father with the slave Marie-Cessette Dumas and spent the first 12 years of his life on a farm in Jérémie . His father, the Marquis Antoine-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie, settled in the area around Jérémie, which was difficult to access at the time, after falling out with his younger brother Charles and planting his sugar with three black slaves in 1748 , where he had previously had lived, had fled. After this escape he acquired Marie-Cessette. Despite slave hunters his brother had sent after the fugitives, and despite official investigations by French officials into an inheritance (he came from the Norman aristocracy), his father lived in Jérémie under the name Antoine de'Isle, and it was widely believed that he was dead. In December 1775, when Thomas-Alexandre was 14 years old, his father went back to France. According to a later report, he had sold three of his children and Marie-Cessette, although the later marriage certificate of Thomas-Alexandre states, in contradiction to this, that his mother Marie-Cessette had died in 1772. His fourth child, Thomas-Alexandre, had pledged Antoine in Port au Prince for 800 livre with the right to later redemption, which he used to pay for his voyage to France. A little later Thomas-Alexandre was released by his father and brought to France in August 1776.

Upon entering French soil, Thomas-Alexander was free; Philosophers of the Enlightenment and some lawyers had previously taken against slavery position in the decades and through some test cases (about: v. Jean Boucaux Verdelin , 1738) achieved that slaves entered the French soil, according to the principle of freedom apart from a few exceptions were automatically released . Thomas-Alexander was thus able to develop quite freely and received an aristocratic upbringing. In Paris he made friends with the Chevalier de Saint-Georges , a famous musician and fencing master whose mother was from Africa.

Military career

After falling out with his father in 1786 shortly before his death, he joined the French army as a dragoon under his mother's name . The friendship with three of his comrades, who, like him, rose to become generals, later inspired his son to write the novel The Three Musketeers .

When unrest flared up in the country in the course of the revolution of 1789, he was transferred with part of his regiment to Villers-Cotterêts. Here he met Marie Labouret, the daughter of the innkeeper with whom he stayed and whom he married in 1792.

He quickly made a career in the almost non-stop wars that began in 1793. In 1793 he was promoted to division general. In 1794 he took command of the Alpine Army , with which he advanced to Mont Cenis . In October of the same year he had to take over the supreme command in the Vendée , where his moderation towards the insurgents brought him out of favor with the terror regiment of the welfare committee and almost cost his head. From 1795 he fought in Italy , then went to Tyrol under General Joubert and took part in the expedition to Egypt in 1798 .

captivity

On the way back from Egypt in March 1799, his ship Belle Maltaise got into stormy weather and threatened to overturn. In addition, the food reserves were running low and the decision was made to dock in Taranto in southern Italy to ask for help there. At that time, however, the city was no longer ruled by revolutionary pro-French forces, as assumed, but by the Esercito della Santa Fede in Nostro Signore Gesù Cristo (German for "Army of the Holy Faith in our Lord Jesus Christ"), a reactionary coalition of clerics, aristocrats, peasants and bandits under the leadership of the Catholic Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo, which emerged from southern Italian militias and rejects all ideas of the French Revolution . The French, along with Dumas and the geologist Déodat Gratet de Dolomieu , were captured. Dumas became seriously ill while in captivity. He suffered from depression and severe abdominal pain, went blind in one eye and became deaf in one ear. He noted in his diary the suspicion that he was deliberately poisoned and after his release wanted to publicize the scandalous conditions of his imprisonment. In this state Dumas was released in March 1801 after the release of all French prisoners was a condition of the surrender negotiations between the French general Murat , who led an army towards Naples , and Ferdinand I , King of Naples .

Late years in France

In 1802 his son Alexandre Dumas , who later became a writer, was born. In February 1806 Thomas-Alexandre Dumas died of stomach cancer .

Reception after death

In 1906, on the 100th anniversary of his death, a memorial was erected on Place Malherbes, now Place du Général-Catroux, but it was removed by French collaborators in 1940 during the German occupation. Since 2009 there has been a new memorial at the same place that depicts the broken slave chains. His son has processed numerous adventurous episodes from his life in literary terms.

On the triumphal arch the name "Dumas" is in the 23rd column in the 6th position

Honors

His name is entered on the triumphal arch in Paris in the 23rd column.

literature

  • Biographical novel:
    • Tom Reiss : The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo. Crown Publishers, New York 2012, ISBN 978-0-307-38246-7 .
      • German edition: Tom Reiss: The black general: The life of the true Count of Monte Christo. From the English by Thomas Pfeiffer and Karin Schuler. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 2013, ISBN 3-423-28017-4 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Tom Reiss: The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo. Crown Publishers, New York 2012, ISBN 978-0-307-38246-7 .
  2. ↑ https://www.zeit.de/zeit-magazin/2020/33/thomas-alexandre-dumas-erster-schwarzer-general-frankreich
  3. ↑ Tom Reiss 2012, pp. 24-46.
  4. ↑ Tom Reiss 2012, pp. 54–56.
  5. ↑ Tom Reiss 2012, pp. 60–70.
  6. ↑ Tom Reiss 2012, pp. 271-272, 292-293, 301.
personal data
SURNAME Dumas, Thomas Alexandre
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sequin, Thomas-Alexandre Davy de la
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French general
DATE OF BIRTH March 25, 1762
PLACE OF BIRTH Jérémie (Haiti)
DATE OF DEATH February 26, 1806
Place of death Villers-Cotterêts