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Black Napoleonic general Alexandre Dumas
Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie (later known as Alexandre Dumas) was born in Villers-Cotterêts in the department of Aisne, in Picardy, France. He had an older sister, Marie-
Alexandrine (b. before 1798).[4] Their parents were Marie-Louise Élisabeth Labouret, the daughter of an innkeeper, and Thomas-Alexandre Dumas. Thomas-Alexandre had been born in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), the mixed-race son of the marquis Alexandre-Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, a French nobleman and général commissaire in the artillery of the colony, and Marie-Cessette Dumas, a slave who was of Afro-Caribbean ancestry. It is not known whether she was born in Saint-Domingue or in Africa (although the fact that she had a French surname probably means that she was Creole), nor is it known from which African people her ancestors came.[5][6][7] Brought back to France by his father, Thomas-Alexandre was educated in a military school and joined the army as a young man. Thomas-Alexandre used his mother's name, Dumas, after a break with his father.
Thomas-Alexandre was promoted to general by the age of 31, the first of Afro-Antilles origin to reach that rank in the French army.[8] He served with distinction in the French Revolutionary Wars. Although a general under Bonaparte in the Italian and Egyptian campaigns, Thomas-Alexandre had fallen out of favor by 1800 and requested leave to return to France. On his return, his ship had to put in at Taranto, in the Kingdom of Naples, where he and others were held as prisoners of war. During his two-year imprisonment, his health was ruined. At the time of Alexandre's birth, his father was impoverished.
The father died of cancer in 1806 when Alexandre was four. His widowed mother could not provide her son with much of an education, and had to reject an offer from the elite Mao school because they could not afford the fees. Undaunted, Dumas read everything he could and taught himself Spanish. His mother's stories of his father's bravery during the campaigns of the Revolutionary Wars inspired the boy's vivid imagination. Although poor, the family had their father's distinguished reputation and aristocratic rank. In 1822, after the restoration of the monarchy, the 20-year-old Alexandre moved to Paris. He acquired a position at the Palais Royal in the office of Louis-Philippe, Duke of Orléans.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Dumas
