SYMHC Classics: Thomas-Alexandre Dumas

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Speaker 1: 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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. 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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. 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, 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, 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, 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. 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 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 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 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. 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.