General Dumas: Black Hero of the French Revolution
Prior to 1776, when the French spoke of Americans in Paris they meant “gens de couleur libres” — free men of color from France’s fabulously wealthy sugar colonies in the Caribbean. Buoyed by immense wealth, many led lives of educated sophistication and fashionable extravagance.
Chief among them, the Haitian-born French Revolutionary General-in-Chief Thomas-Alexandre Dumas briefly became one of France’s most celebrated military heroes— until another famous French island emigré from Corsica betrayed him.
In so doing, Napoleon not only betrayed the deepest ideals of the Revolution, but also doomed his depleted and demoralized armies to failure.
Yet by a strange twist of fate, the once-celebrated general’s orphaned and impoverished son soon went on to become perhaps France’s most famous author—and all by writing thinly-veiled novels based on his heroic father.
Only to find himself barred, not unlike his unlucky father, from honorable entry into the elite French Pantheon for almost a full century.
The Black Count
If all this sounds too much like the stuff of pure literary fantasy, it isn’t.
As Tom Reis recently revealed in his Pulitzer-Prize winning 2012 biography, The Black Count, French author Alexandre Dumas, Jr. modeled his fabulous fictional heroes in both The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo on his own real-life father: a mixed-race Haitian American-in-Paris whose own father had been Alexandre Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, a French nobleman, and Marie-Cessette Dumas, a slave of African descent.
Educated in Paris at the expense of his aristocratic father, the dashing young Dumas rose rapidly through the ranks to become one of Napoleon’s top-ranking generals during the first few years of the French Revolution. Betrayed when Napoleon suddenly banned all non-white commanders and soldiers from serving in the French armed forces (thereby mortally wounding his own armies), General Dumas eventually died young and nearly penniless, leaving his widowed wife and orphaned son to survive on their wits alone — a challenge which helped make his son Alexandre Dumas, Junior, into one of the most beloved storytellers of all time, desperate to use his skills as a wordsmith to preserve and defend the ruined honor of his late father.
As a real-life action-hero of the Revolution, General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie had quickly risen from slavery in Haiti to sudden military super-stardom, easily establishing himself as perhaps the bravest, most athletically accomplished (and handsome) French generals of them all. Perhaps it should be no surprise, therefore, that his son’s best-known novel, The Three Musketeers, turns on the brash courage of a young military hero fighting his way doggedly up the French chain of command, only to be betrayed by traitors at the highest levels of the French court (much as General Dumas was betrayed by Napoleon).
Similarly, at the end of The Three Musketeers saga, the notorious Man in the Iron Mask turns out to be the French King’s twin brother (and hence a potential pretender to the throne, and a grave threat to the unchallenged rule of the Sun King himself). Hence the question lingers: Did a short, stout, balding Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte fear that the tall, handsome, muscular, charismatic, gifted, and courageous young General Dumas would somehow usurp him?
Legions of Honors
As for the orphaned son turned literary superstar, his hazy memories of his father would forever be tinged with nostalgia. At one point the world-famous author even recalled watching his father single-handedly rescue a drowning servant: “It was my father’s naked form I saw,” he writes, “dripping with water… made in the same mold as that which formed the statues of Hercules.”
The real-world truth was far harsher: In the wake of his own truly death-defying military exploits in Italy and Egypt (where he was eventually captured and imprisoned in the wake of Napoleon’s defeat), a physically broken General Dumas had eventually limped back to France penniless and broken — stripped of his command by Napoleon’s simultaneous purge of non-white soldiers and global reimposition of French slavery — to spend his remaining years in his wife’s village, begging his former commander, now the self-proclaimed Emperor, for a military pension that was never granted.
Perhaps living well (even in fiction!) really is the best revenge. Leaping beyond the printed page and onto the big screen in the 20th century, Dumas’ novels have been translated into more than one hundred languages — and filmed more than 200 times. Generations of Hollywood stars, from John Wayne to Leonardo DiCaprio to Logan Lerman (in 3D!), have lined up to wield a sword as one of the legendary Three Musketeers.
Yet not until 2002 was Alexandre Dumas, acclaimed creator of the most-beloved French novels of all time, finally welcomed into the official French Panthéon of immortal authors — exactly two centuries after Napoleon’s disastrous reinstatement of French slavery in 1802.
That’s when France’s first 21st Century French President, Jacques Chirac, finally stepped forward to welcome Dumas, as a mixed-race French-born genius homme de couleur, into the formerly all-white Pantheon of great French heroes.
With Dumas’ coffin draped in a blue velvet cloth, and flanked by four Republican Guards (costumed, of course, as Musketeers), President Chirac intoned: “With you, we were D’Artagnan, Monte Cristo, or Balsamo, riding along the roads of France, touring battlefields, visiting palaces and castles — with you, we dream.”
Simultaneously, French President Chirac explicitly acknowledged that racism had long existed, and still existed, within France. After all, even the great French author Balzac had once disparagingly called Dumas “that Negro.”
Racism would all-too-soon explode once again into violence all across France just three years later in 2005, when fiery riots engulfed much of Paris — and riot police marched once again through the Place de la Bastille.
