SYMHC Classics: Thomas-Alexandre Dumas

This 2019 episode is about general Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, who sounds like a character out of one of his son’s books. His life was a series of dramatic and daring adventures, including his rise up through the ranks of the French military.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Our next couple of Saturday classics are inspired
by both recent and upcoming episodes of the show. So
coming up next week we have an episode related to
the French Revolution that has a connection to Toma Alexander Duma,
and then our previous October episode on the Ludon Possessions

(00:23):
referenced work by his son Alexander Duma peer So over
the next two Saturdays, we are re releasing our two
episodes on them. They are different episodes, not a two parter,
but I just kind of I like having them somewhat together.
Today's classic on Toma Alexandre Duma originally came out on
February twenty fifth, twenty nineteen. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You

(00:47):
Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and
welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracey V. Wilson and I'm
Holly Frye. If you've listened to the show for a while,
you've heard us periodically talk about the accidental two parters
where we got into an episode that we did not

(01:09):
intend to stretch into two parts, but it was so
fascinating or so involved that it did. In today's show
is not exactly an accidental two parter. It's more like
an accidental duology. Because Alexandra Dumat is probably a familiar
name to most of our listeners. There are actually two
of those. There's Alexander Duma Pere, the father who wrote

(01:31):
things like The Three Musketeers and the Count of Monte Cristo,
and then his son Alexander Duma Fieu. People call him
that to try to differentiate between the two of them.
He wrote the play that became the basis for Verdi's
opera La Traviata. So Alexandra Duma Pere had been on
my list for a really long time, and I had
toyed with the idea of doing kind of a father

(01:54):
son duo package, especially when we started to plan our
upcoming trip to France this June. It seemed particularly appropriate
to get into their stories when we have that on
the horizon. But as I got into this research, I
started to realize that I did not really so much
want to talk about the father son pair of Alexandra's Duma.

(02:14):
I wanted to talk about the elder Alexander and his father,
General Tooma Alexander Duma. Both of their stories are fascinating
and incredibly dramatic and basically the general sounds like a
character out of one of his son's books, because he
pretty much was. And he's even more appropriate to talk
about in connection to this trip that we're taking to Paris,

(02:36):
because a lot of that trip is based around the
French Revolution, which took place while the general was in
the French Army. This episode and the forthcoming one on
his son are there really standalone episodes. You don't need
to listen to one to be able to understand the other,
but there will be some points of interconnectivity between them.
Toma Alexandre Duma was born to Toma Alexandro Davis de

(02:58):
la Payetrie. His father was Antoine Alexandle de vill Marquis
de la Pietrie, who went by Antoine. Antoine had moved
from France to the French colony of San Damongue which
is now Haiti in the late seventeen thirties. After moving
to the island, Antoine had spent the next decade more
or less freeloading off of his younger brother, who had

(03:21):
married into a family of wealthy sugar planters. That in
seventeen forty eight there was some kind of argument between
the two of them. That prompted Antoine to take three
of his brothers, enslaved laborers, one of whom was a
young woman, and leave that plantation in the middle of
the night. The details are a mystery, but it seems
like there was some sort of family rift of a

(03:42):
major nature at work here or else. Antoine was just
trying to shirk his responsibilities. He did not tell anyone
where he was going, and when his mother and father
died in seventeen fifty seven. In seventeen fifty eight, no
one could find any trace of him. He was the eldest,
so they were looking for him pretty hard. It was
later determined that he had moved to the parish of

(04:04):
Jeremie in the southwestern part of the island and had
started going by the name Antoine Delille or Antoine of
the Island. He also had four children there with a
woman named Marie Cassette Duma. One of them was Toma Alexander,
who went by alex and was born on March twenty fifth,
seventeen sixty two. It's clear from the colonial record that

(04:27):
Marie Cassette was enslaved, and that other people thought the
amount of money that Antoine paid for her was excessive.
What isn't clear is whether she and Antoine were later married.
To discourage the births of biracial children, colonial law imposed
fines on white men who fathered children with enslaved women,
regardless of who was enslaving them at the time, but

(04:49):
this fee was waived and the mother and her children
were freed if the father married her. Alex's son, Alexandre Duma,
would later write that his grandparents had been married, but
there is no written documentation of that marriage ever happening.
After Antoine absconded to Jeremi, his younger brother, Charles, went
back to France. He maintained that he was the oldest

(05:12):
of his late parents surviving children, and he took control
of the family's estates, and he started a smuggling operation
back on the island of Espaniola, moving sugar and enslaved
people through a port that was known as Monte Cristo
on the border between Spanish and French territory. In seventeen
seventy five, after both of Antoine's brothers had ruined most

(05:33):
of their own investments and died, Antoine returned to France
with his birth certificate as proof of who he was
ready to take control of his family estates and start
up a series of legal fights with his surviving family members.
To finance the trip, he had sold his children and
their mother when it came to Tolmin Alexandle, though he

(05:54):
made the sale conditional so that he could buy him
back once he had access to his money in France.
He never saw his other children again. So Alex was
fourteen when this happened, and he arrived in France on
August thirtieth, seventeen seventy six. He was listed on the
ship's manifest as the slave Alexandra, but once he was

(06:15):
reunited with his father, he was treated more like the
teenage son of an aristocrat. His father legally recognized him
as his own and started giving him the kind of
education that was expected of somebody of his station. Alex
hadn't had much formal education at all in Santa Manga,
so he was way behind his peers. He started spending
his days with tutors and fencing instructors in the like,

(06:38):
learning everything from classical languages to European style hunting. They
learned very quickly, though, and he seemed to become quite
skilled at whatever he put his mind to. He also
started adjusting to French society. Back in Santamang, they had
been in a community in which a lot of the
people around them were black or multiracial, but in France,
most of the people around them were white. Was not

(07:00):
the only free person of color in France's more affluent society,
though many had come to France in much the same
way that Alex had. They were the children of affluent
frenchmen who had spent time in the Caribbean colonies and
fathered children with enslaved or free women of color. This
was in spite of the sorts of laws that we
mentioned before, which attempted to discourage into racial marriages and

(07:24):
the births of multi racial children, either in or out
of wedlock. Some of these people of color had also
become quite prominent. For example, Joseph Boulong, the Chevalier de
Saint George, had been born in Guadalupe to a white
father and a free black woman in seventeen forty five.
The Chevalier was reportedly the best swordsman in all of France,

(07:44):
and he was also a composer who was nicknamed Black Mozart.
He would also play a part in Alex's military life
later on, which we will get to. Alex and his
father had an extravagant and lavish lifestyle, and as he
got older, Alex increasingly traveled to pay, which was about
a three hour trip from their estate. He moved there
in the spring of seventeen eighty four at the age

(08:06):
of twenty two. The free black community in Paris was
often viewed with this combination of derision and curiosity. They
simultaneously faced discrimination and also were almost admired as kind
of exotic and unique. In Alex's case in particular, he
was frequently described as having an extremely handsome face, an

(08:28):
excellent build, and a lovely skin color. But he was also,
as one example, arrested at a theater in September of
seventeen eighty four after a naval officer and his companions
started harassing the woman that Alex was escorting. When Alex
tried to warn them off, they called him her lackey
and then started hurling racist taunts at him. On February thirteenth,

(08:51):
seventeen eighty six, Alex's father, who was in his seventies,
married his thirty three year old housekeeper, Marie Francois Friteu,
the marquis started focusing his money on his new wife
rather than on his son. Alex had no way to
support himself, so about two weeks after the wedding, which
he appears not to have attended, he decided to join

(09:12):
the army. We'll talk about that more after a sponsor break.
Becoming an army officer was a very common employment for
young men in the French nobility in the eighteenth century.

(09:32):
As long as they could prove that they had four
generations of nobility on their father's side, they were entitled
to become commissioned officers, and Alex had that, but France
also had discriminatory race laws that made it a lot
harder for him to actually claim it. So he told
his father that he was just going to enlist as
a private, and it did not even matter to him

(09:52):
which unit he enlisted in. He was just going to
go join whichever one he found first. According to his
son's memoirs, the marquis told him quote, that is all
very fine, but as I am the Marquis de la Pietrie,
a colonel and Commissary General of Artillery, I will not
allow you to drag my name in the mire of
the lowest ranks of the army. His father was kind

(10:13):
of a jerk, that was not clear. So Alex joined
the army under his mother's name, describing himself as quote
son of Antoine and Sissette Duma, which is just the
shadiest way to do that in terms of the way
he was talking about his father. And from that point

(10:34):
on he was just known as Alexandra Duma, also dropping
the Toma part of his name for the most part.
He joined the Queen's Dragoons on June second, seventeen eighty six,
and this was not at all a prestigious unit. They
were often on the front lines and the dirtiest and
most dangerous parts of battle, basically treated as cannon fodder.
So not only had he become a private, he had

(10:55):
become a private in a unit that his father would
not have approved of at all. Then just a couple
of weeks later, on June fifteenth, his father died. It
does not appear that Alex was there, and he wasn't
one of the signatures on the death certificate. I find
it like I have this little bit of gleefulness about

(11:17):
the fact that his father was so concerned about the
family name and then almost immediately died, had not really
needing to have worried about it. Soon though, Alex was
developing quite the reputation as a soldier, and he was
also reportedly very strong and very fond of doing strongman
style stunts, like hopping across a room while carrying two

(11:38):
other men, or grabbing an overhead bar while he was
on horseback and then lifting the horse up with his legs,
or do not do this ever, please, putting each of
his fingers into the mouth of a musket and then
lifting them all up by flattening out his hand. And
he was also extremely fond of dueling, which was illegal
among civilians in France at this point, but tolerated within

(12:01):
the army. At one point he reportedly fought three duels
in one day while injured from the first of them.
Unsurprisingly given his fondness for dueling, he was also known
for having a very hot temper and for speaking very
freely when he was angry. This is the kind of
thing where I read this list of crazy things he

(12:21):
did and I just want to go, what is wrong
with you? Well, especially the horse thing that was probably
some kind of a stunt. But yeah, especially the musket thing.
Why would you do that? What is wrong with you?
What is wrong with you? Like I suddenly become I

(12:43):
don't know somebody's mom. What is wrong with you? Has
has your brain been damaged? Why would you do this?
But anyway, Duma joined the army during the prelude to
the French Revolution so quick recamp in the late eighteenth century.
Among France's three estates, which were the clergy, the nobility,

(13:03):
and the commoners, the clergy and nobility held all the power,
even though the commoners vastly outnumbered them. The nation was
nearly bankrupt and the common people were facing food shortages,
and the food that was available was astronomically expensive. Violence
and unrest grew during this time as the commoners pushed
back against poverty and oppression. The sixth Dragoons spent most

(13:26):
of this time stationed in the countryside north of Paris,
fairly removed from all of the things that were happening
just to the south. Yeah, this was definitely not confined
only to Paris, but they just were in a place
that was a little bit off the beaten path from
what was happening. The revolution really got going in seventeen
eighty nine, and the face of ongoing unrest, King Louis

(13:49):
the sixteenth summoned the Estates in General, which represented all
three Estates, for a meeting that was to be held
on May fifth, seventeen eighty nine, and then that June,
after negotiations failed to get anywhere, the Third Estate, which
represented the commoners, formed the National Assembly. They avowed to
work on constitutional reforms. Revolutionaries stormed the Bastille on July

(14:10):
fourteenth and October fifth, women march on Versailles to demand
relief for the ongoing food shortages and to demand that
the King and the Queen returned to Paris. We have
an episode on that in the archive. In the weeks
between the storming of the Bastille and the women's march
on Versailles, alex Duma was finally called into action. In
August seventeen eighty nine, a detachment from the six Dragoons

(14:32):
were summoned to the defense of the town of Ville
Cotre in northern France, which was being threatened by rioters.
The person who called for this aid was Claude Laboret,
who was the innkeeper of Lutel de le Queue in
Ville Cottre. He had just been elected the head of
the town's national guard, and since the town had no barracks,

(14:53):
the dragoons who came to help had to be billeted
in the homes of various people around the town. La
Beret was so impressed with Duma that he invited him
to stay at the inn, and that first night Dumat
met Labrey's daughter, Marie Louise. She described him as quote
a fine figure of a man, and they were engaged
on December sixth, seventeen eighty nine, with her father giving

(15:16):
his approval as long as they waited until Duma was
promoted to sergeant to actually marry, and that promotion happened
in seventeen ninety two, and they married on November twenty
eighth of that year. In the intervening years, Duma remained
stationed in northern France or across the border in what
was then the Austrian Empire after France declared war on

(15:36):
Austria in April of seventeen ninety two. During those years,
Duma really made a name for himself through dramatic and
daring exploits, including, for example, cutting off a group of
Austrian soldiers that were on horseback and taking them prisoner
without firing a single shot, and then donating his share
of the prize from that capture to the Nation of France.

(15:58):
He had a reputation for being a really exceptional soldier
and leader, always on the side of justice and freedom.
His upbringing in Sandomange probably served him really well in
all of this. He had become quite the stereotypical aristocrat
after moving to France with his father, but as French
society reformed itself during the Revolution, he was able to

(16:19):
drop a lot of those more aristocratic traits, draw on
his more humble upbringing, and keep the respect of the
soldiers from the lower and middle classes. Starting in late
seventeen ninety two, Dumal was promoted up through the ranks
incredibly quickly, being commissioned as a second lieutenant, then promoted
to first lieutenant, then brigadier, all in a matter of months.

(16:41):
And as that was happening, France was also expanding its
military might. The Republic of France had been conquering neighboring
territory and had also offered its support to other nations
that wanted to fight for their own freedom, but the
existing French military and the mercenaries that had been hired
to supplement it weren't big enough to support all of this,

(17:01):
so the nation had allowed the establishment of free legions,
which were separate from the regular French army. One of
these was the Free Legion of Americans and of the South,
which was made up entirely of freemen of color. At
this point in French history, people of color in France
were generally referred to as Americans, whether they were from

(17:21):
the Americas or not, and then often American colonists, regardless
of their race, were also called Americans. It was a
little confusing. This would later be nicknamed La le jon
noir or the Black Legion. La le Genoir was started
by Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier de Saint George, who naturally wanted

(17:41):
Dumas as one of his officers. However, Dumas was already
spoken for. He had joined another free legion, the Hussars
of Liberty and Equality, started by Colonel Joseph Boyer, and
the colonel and the Chevalier basically had a bidding war
as each of them tried to lure Dumas away from
the other. Dumas finally joined the lesson Noir after the

(18:01):
chevalier promised him the rank of lieutenant colonel. He was
commissioned in that legion on January tenth, seventeen ninety three,
and even though Duma was technically second in command, the
Chevalier wasn't all that interested in actually running things, so
he mostly just left Duma to it. This legion didn't
last very long, though, it was chronically underfunded, really short

(18:23):
on supplies, and the Chevalier was suspected of some criminal activity.
The legion was disbanded just a few months after Dumad
joined it, But on July thirtieth, seventeen ninety three, he
was made brigadier general of the French Army of the North,
and then five days after that he was made the
general commander in chief of the Army of the Western Pyrenees.
This made him the highest ranking black man in the

(18:45):
French Army, with tens of thousands of mostly white soldiers
under his command, something that would not happen again for
hundreds of years afterward. But in seventeen ninety four, Duma's
fortunes started to shift. And we'll get to that after
we first have a sponsor break in the seventeen nineties,

(19:12):
alex Dema was described as the finest soldier in the
world as the French Revolution morphed into the reign of Terror.
He was also nicknamed Mister Humanity for pushing back against
senseless violence and slaughter, and for ordering his men not
to take unfair advantage of the people in the towns
that they captured. He had a reputation for integrity and

(19:32):
for making wise decisions rather than rash ones, and for
being merciful as much as possible in the role of
a military commander. But he was also still very stubborn.
He still had a hot headed streak, and he was
still pretty vocal about his opinions. In seventeen ninety four,
these traits were nearly his undoing. While fighting in the
Alps that January, he was ordered to capture two mountain passes,

(19:54):
which were at that time totally impassable due to heavy
snow and ice. Oh I thought this was a foolish
and probably fatal course of action, so he refused to
do it until the weather improved. There were also reports
that he destroyed a guillotine and used it as firewood
for his men, who had no other way to keep warm,
and all of this raised suspicion that he was a

(20:16):
counter revolutionary. This was in spite of the fact that
his very vocal opinions had been the opposite of that
the entire time. But soon he had been denounced by
the local Jacobin Club, which was one of the French
revolutions more radical organizations. The Committee of Public Safety, which
acted as France's executive government during the Reign of Terror,

(20:37):
summoned Dumat back to Paris, and he probably would have
faced execution if he had gotten there. But before he
could go, Maximilian Robespierre, who was the head of the committee,
was himself beheaded. Eventually, Duma was cleared of all the
charges against him, in part because he did go capture
those passes once he thought it was prudent to do so.

(20:58):
But he was moved to a lesser prestigious posting, given
command of the Army of the West, where he was
sent to fight against a royalist uprising. When he got there, though,
he was horrified to discover that the Army of the
West had shifted from fighting and uprising to terrorizing ordinary
people for its own gain. It was also full of

(21:18):
new recruits who had no military training at all and
seemed to be fighting just for sport. So Duma fired
the chief of staff and started reorganizing the army, training
all the new recruits and trying to shape the Army
of the West into an organized and efficient unit and,
in his words quote remind the rank and file of
a love of justice and upstanding comportment. In seventeen ninety six,

(21:42):
Duma met Napoleon Bonaparte and his wife Josephine. Napoleon had
taken command of the Army of Italy, and Duma served
under him during Napoleon's Italian campaign, and although there are
documents in which Napoleon described Duma with respect and admiration,
almost immediately, the two two men did not get along.
The central issue was one of the things that had

(22:04):
gotten Duma into trouble during the Reign of Terror. Duma
believed in fighting for liberty, not for conquest, and thought
that civilians should be actively protected during warfare, but Napoleon's
outlook was increasingly focused on conquest and dominance. During the
Italian campaign, Duma was part of the successful siege of Mantua,

(22:24):
but when Napoleon rode up his report after it was
all over, he praised every other officer involved except for Duma.
Duma was really angry about this, and angry that instead
of being given a division of his own to command,
he was placed under another officer that he didn't get
along with. In spite of all of that, as the
French army tried to drive the Austrians out of Italy

(22:45):
in the early months of seventeen ninety seven, Dumat was
so persistent and so effective that the Austrians nicknamed him
the Black Devil. In March of that year, he was
injured in battle after his horse was shot out from
under him. He was given leave to go home and recover,
and he stayed at Ville Cotree with his wife and
their daughter. He'd been able to make trips home over

(23:07):
the years, and they had had two children by this point,
but one had died of an illness or accident. While
Duma was fighting in the Italian campaign. In seventeen ninety eight,
Duma once again joined Napoleon's army, this time to fight
in Napoleon's Egyptian campaign. This was Napoleon's attempt to cut
off Britain from its colonies in India during the Napoleonic Wars,

(23:28):
by taking control of Egypt, and during this campaign, Napoleon
found another reason to dislike Duma. We mentioned earlier in
the show about how Duma was very tall and was
considered to be extremely well built and attractive, and when
Duma and Napoleon rode in together, people assumed that Duma
was the one in command. Napoleon took this very personally.

(23:53):
I know it caused all sorts of legitimate trouble, but
I have to laugh at the hubris involved uh Duma's
opinions and temper continued to get him in trouble in Egypt.
In addition to the issues of integrity and rules of
warfare that Duma had carried all through his time in
the military, he was frustrated that Napoleon apparently had no
plan to abolish slavery in Egypt. As always, Duma was

(24:17):
vocal about this frustration, and on July ninth, seventeen ninety eight,
Napoleon sent someone to spy on a meeting among Duma
and other officers. After getting a report back that Duma
was bad mouthing him at this meeting, Napoleon threatened to
shoot him. On August first, seventeen ninety eight, Napoleon suffered
a major defeat at the Battle of the Nile, also

(24:39):
known as the Battle of abukir Bay. Admiral Horatio Nelson
and the British Navy destroyed nearly all of the French fleet,
and that cut off Napoleon's army in Egypt. The French
military and Egypt started to crumble and withdraw Duma fought
off an uprising in Cairo before trying to return home
to France, but he was shipwrecked on the way off
the coast of Taranto and Aples, which had fallen to insurgents.

(25:03):
He was taken prisoner and kept in a dungeon for
almost two years. While he was imprisoned, Duma's wife had
no idea where he was or if he was even alive.
She wrote numerous letters to everyone she could think of
in the government, trying to get someone to find him and,
if he was alive, to bring him home, but she
had trouble getting anyone's attention. This wasn't just because of

(25:26):
Napoleon's ongoing animosity against her husband. France was at war
and had other issues to deal with. The first diplomatic
efforts to track down Duma finally started just days before
the Coup of eighteen Blumiere, which began on November ninth,
seventeen ninety nine. This coup effectively ended the French Revolution
and established Napoleon Bonaparte as the government's first consul. It

(25:51):
also meant that nearly everyone Marie Luise had contacted to
try to find her husband was removed from the government
during the coup. As his wife was trying to find
help for him, Duma was also trying to negotiate for
his own release from prison, but without any success. Once
he finally was released at the end of eighteen oh one,
it was part of an armistice between France and Naples,

(26:12):
which included a deal for all French prisoners of war
to be repatriated to France. By this point, those twenty
months in a dungeon had taken an enormous toll. Duma
was in very poor health. He was partially paralyzed and
deaf in one ear, and extremely sick. He was also
denied his pension and back pay for his time in
the service, and was only able to get home to

(26:35):
Ville Cotterret because another officer gave him money out of
his own pocket. The Duma family fell into extreme poverty.
But on July twenty fourth, eighteen oh two, Alex Dumont
and Marie Luise Elizabeth le Bret welcome to son Alexandre,
who Alex absolutely doted on for the rest of his life.

(26:55):
Along with doting on his wife. They really seemed to
love each other very intensely out their marriage. Their personal
poverty was not the only issue affecting the Duma family.
Slavery had been abolished in French territory during the French Revolution,
and people of color had also been granted full citizenship
rights in seventeen ninety four, but in eighteen oh two,

(27:17):
Napoleon reinstated slavery, and after naming himself Emperor of France
two years later, he started rolling back those other racial reforms.
He started ejecting black members of the military and enforcing
segregation and banning inter racial marriages. Retired military officers of
color were prohibited from living in Paris or the surrounding area,

(27:38):
and there was a white's only zone that was created
around Paris. All of us included the Duma Home, which
forced the family to have to seek special permission to
continue living there. For the next few years, the Duma
family struggled, Alex at least somewhat recovered his health, although
he never regained the kind of vigor that he had
had before his imprisonment. He died on February twenty seventh,

(28:02):
eighteen oh six, at the age of forty four. The
likely cause of death was stomach cancer, possibly from being
poisoned while he was imprisoned, but Napoleon's attitude towards Duma
didn't really change after his death. Marie Luise was denied
a widow's pension, and the young Alexandra later wrote that
he was barred from attending French military school or civil college.

(28:25):
Long after the general's death, a statue was put up
in his honor, but it was later destroyed by the Nazis.
As we said at the top of the show, Alex's
life sounds like it could have been one of his
son's books. Specifically, alexand Le Duma cited a number of
inspirations for his famous work The Count of Monte Cristo,
but the character of Edmund Dante was undoubtedly influenced by

(28:48):
his father, particularly in his wrongful imprisonment. That work has
similarities to an earlier, shorter work called Simply George, whose
main character is described as Mulato. More on Duma's work
next time, and if you want more about the general,
Tom Rice's The Black Count, which came out in twenty

(29:09):
twelve and won the twenty thirteen Pulitzer Prize for Biography
or Autobiography along with other awards, is a great read.
It has so much more detail about all the particulars
of Duma's upbringing and military service, plus a lot more
details on all the many, many things that were going
on in French history and the French Revolution and the
rise of Napoleon during all of this. An announcement also

(29:31):
came out in twenty fourteen that John Legend's production company
bought the film rights to this book, So maybe there
will be a movie I would watch that I would too,
especially because I think the clothes would be fantastic that
they would. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday.

(29:55):
If you'd like to send us a note, our email
addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can
subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.