Enlistment and service in the Queen's Dragoons In February 1786 his father Davy de la Pailleterie married Françoise Retou, a domestic servant from the Davy de la Pailleterie estate. Dumas did not sign as a witness to the marriage contract. According to his son's memoir, the marriage precipitated a "cooling off" which led the father to tighten Dumas's allowance. Soon after, Dumas decided to join the French Army, a common occupation for gentlemen. Unlike his noble peers, who took arms as commissioned officers, Dumas enlisted as a private. A 1781 rule, the
Ségur Ordinance, enabled men who could show four generations of nobility on their father's side to qualify to be commissioned as officers. Dumas had this, but the French race laws "made it hard for a man of mixed race to claim his rightful title or noble status". According to the novelist Dumas's account, on hearing of Alexandre's plan, his father insisted that his son take a "
nom de guerre" so that he not drag the noble name "through the lowest ranks of the army". He signed up for the
6th Regiment of the Queen's Dragoons as "Alexandre Dumas" on 2 June 1786; Dumas's regiment was in Paris on 17 July 1791, where they served as riot police along with
National Guard units under the
Marquis de Lafayette during the
Champ de Mars Massacre of the
French Revolution. Troops killed between 12 and 50 people when a large crowd gathered to sign a petition calling for the French King's removal. Two years later, when someone denounced Dumas to the
Committee of Public Safety, he claimed that intervention in the conflict saved as many as 2,000 people. A corporal by 1792, Dumas had his first combat experience in a French attack on the
Austrian Netherlands in April of that year. He was one of 10,000 men under the command of the
General Biron. Stationed on the Belgian frontier in the town of
Maulde, on 11 August 1792 Dumas captured 12 enemy soldiers while leading a small scouting party of four to eight horsemen.
Second-in-command of the Black Legion In October 1792, Dumas accepted a commission as a lieutenant colonel in (and second-in-command of) the
Légion franche des Américains et du Midi, founded a month earlier by
Julien Raimond. This was a "free legion" (i.e., formed separately from the regular army) composed of
free men of color (
gens de couleur libres). It was called the "American Legion", "Black Legion", or Saint-Georges Legion, after its commanding officer, the
Chevalier de Saint-Georges. Dumas frequently commanded the legion, as Saint-Georges was often absent. In April 1793,
General Dumouriez attempted a coup d'état; Saint-Georges and Dumas refused to join it and defended the city of Lille from coup supporters. In the summer of 1793, Saint-Georges was accused of misusing government funds, and the Legion disbanded.
Commander-in-chief of the Army of the Western Pyrenees On 30 July 1793, he was promoted to the rank of
brigadier general in the
Army of the North. One month later, he was promoted again, to
general of division. In September, he was made commander-in-chief of the
Army of the Western Pyrenees. In this brief assignment (September–December 1793), Dumas's headquarters were in
Bayonne,
France, where he was nicknamed "Mr. Humanity" (''Monsieur de l'Humanité
) by local sans-culottes;'' they wanted to intimidate him to conform to their political line at a time when French generals were extremely vulnerable to accusations of treason that often led to execution.
Commander-in-chief of the Army of the Alps On 22 December 1793, Dumas was given command of the
Army of the Alps. His campaign in the Alps centred on defeating
Austrian and
Piedmontese troops defending the glacier-covered
Little Saint Bernard Pass at
Mont Cenis, on the French-Piedmont border. After months of planning and reconnaissance from his base in
Grenoble, he had to wait for snow conditions to be favourable to his troops' passage. In April and May 1794, Dumas launched several assaults on Mont Cenis. In the final attack, Dumas's army, equipped with ice
crampons, took the mountain by scaling ice cliffs and captured between 900 and 1,700 prisoners. Though his victory won Dumas praise from political leaders in
Paris, he was called before the
Committee of Public Safety in June 1794, for reasons unspecified but probably to face charges of treason, as this was the period of the "Great Terror", a period of accelerated political executions in the final months of the
Reign of Terror period of the
French Revolution. Dumas delayed his arrival in Paris until mid-July and was not seen by the Committee before the Terror ended with the execution of
Robespierre on 27 July 1794. He was reassigned to lead the
Army of the West from August to October 1794. He was responsible for consolidating the recent government victory over a
massive insurgency in the region of the Vendée against the French revolutionary government. He focused on increasing military discipline and eliminating soldiers' abuses of the local population. One historian, despite or because of his pro-royalist sentiments, characterised Dumas in this command as "fearless and irreproachable", a leader who "deserves to pass into posterity and makes a favourable contrast with the executioners, his contemporaries, whom public indignation will always nail to the pillory of History!"
General in the Army of the Rhine (France) In September 1795 Dumas served under General
Jean-Baptiste Kléber in the
Army of the Rhine. He participated in the French attack on Düsseldorf, where he was wounded.
General in the Army of Italy Siege of Mantua General Dumas joined the
Army of Italy in
Milan in November 1796, serving under the orders of commander-in-chief
Napoleon Bonaparte. Tension between the two generals began as Dumas resisted Napoleon's policy of allowing French troops to expropriate local property. In December 1796, Dumas was in charge of a division besieging Austrian troops at the city of
Mantua. By Christmas, he intercepted a spy carrying a message to the Austrian commander with important tactical information. On 16 January 1797, Dumas and his division halted an Austrian attempt to break out of the besieged city and prevented Austrian reinforcements from reaching Mantua. The French were thereby able to maintain the siege until French reinforcements could arrive, leading to the city's capitulation on 2 February 1797.
Campaign in Northern Italy Following the 16 January fighting, Dumas felt insulted by the description of his actions in a battle report by
General Berthier,
Bonaparte's aide-de-camp, and wrote a letter to Napoleon cursing Berthier. Dumas was subsequently omitted from mention in
Napoleon's battle report to the
Directory, France's government at the time. He was then given a command well beneath his rank, leading a subdivision under
General Masséna, despite a petition from Dumas's troops attesting to his valour. Under General Masséna in February 1797, Dumas helped French troops push the Austrians northward, capturing thousands. It was in this period that Austrian troops began calling him the
der schwarze Teufel ("Black Devil", or
Diable Noir in French). In late February 1797, Dumas transferred to a division commanded by
General Joubert, who requested Dumas for his
republicanism. Under Joubert, Dumas led a small force that defeated several enemy positions along the
Adige River. Dumas's achievement in this period came on 23 March, when the general drove back a squadron of Austrian troops at a bridge over the
Eisack River in Clausen (today
Klausen, or Chiusa,
Italy). For this, the French began referring to him as "the
Horatius Cocles of the
Tyrol" (after a hero who saved ancient Rome).
Napoleon called Dumas by this, and rewarded him by making him cavalry commander of French troops in the Tyrol; he also sent Dumas a pair of pistols. Dumas spent much of 1797 as military governor, administering
Treviso province, north of
Venice.
Commander of Cavalry in the French Campaign in Egypt Dumas was ordered to report to
Toulon, France, in March 1798 for an unspecified assignment. He joined an enormous French armada in preparation for departure to a secret destination. The armada departed on 10 May 1798, destination still unannounced. It was only on 23 June, after the fleet had conquered
Malta, that
Napoleon announced the mission's main purpose: to conquer Egypt. Aboard the
Guillaume Tell, in the middle of the
Mediterranean Sea, Dumas learned that he had been appointed as commander of all cavalry in the
Army of the Orient. The armada arrived in the port of
Alexandria at the end of June, and on 3 July Dumas led the Fourth Light Grenadiers over the walls as the French conquered the city. After fighting, Napoleon sent Dumas to pay ransom to some local Egyptians who had kidnapped French soldiers. The expedition's chief medical officer recounted in a memoir that local Egyptians, judging Dumas's height and build versus Napoleon's, believed Dumas to be in command. Seeing "him ride his horse over the trenches, going to ransom the prisoners, all of them believed that he was the leader of the Expedition." From 7 to 21 July, Dumas commanded the invading army's cavalry as it marched south from Alexandria to
Cairo. Conditions of heat, thirst, fatigue, and lack of supplies for the troops on the desert march were harsh; there were several suicides. While camped in
Damanhour, General Dumas met with several other generals (
Lannes,
Desaix, and
Murat). They vented criticisms of Napoleon's leadership and discussed the possibility of refusing to march beyond Cairo. Dumas soon participated in the
Battle of the Pyramids (following which he chased retreating
Mameluke horsemen) and the occupation of Cairo. At some point during the occupation, Napoleon learned of the earlier mutinous talk and confronted Dumas. In his memoirs, Napoleon remembered threatening to shoot Dumas for sedition. Dumas requested leave to return to France, and Napoleon did not oppose it. Napoleon was reported to have said: "I can easily replace him with a brigadier." Following the
destruction of the French armada by a British fleet led by
Horatio Nelson, however, Dumas was unable to get out of Egypt until March 1799. In August 1798, Dumas discovered a large cache of gold and jewels beneath a house in French-occupied Cairo, which he turned over to Napoleon. In October, he was important in putting down an anti-French
revolt in Cairo by charging into the
Al-Azhar Mosque on horseback. Afterwards (according to his son, drawn largely from the memories of Dumas's aide-de-camp Dermoncourt), Napoleon told him: "I shall have a painting made of the taking of the Grand Mosque. Dumas, you have already posed as the central figure." The Girodet painting, however, which Napoleon commissioned eleven years later, shows a white man charging into the mosque. On 7 March 1799, Dumas boarded a small ship called the
Belle Maltaise in the company of his fellow General Jean-Baptiste Manscourt du Rozoy, the geologist
Déodat Gratet de Dolomieu, forty wounded French soldiers, and several Maltese and Genoan civilians. Dumas had sold the furnishings of his quarters in Cairo, and purchased 4,000 pounds of
moka coffee; eleven Arabian horses (two stallions and nine mares) to establish breeding stock in France; and hired the ship. While returning to France, the ship began to sink, and Dumas had to jettison much of his cargo. The ship was forced by storms to land at
Taranto, in the
Kingdom of Naples. Dumas and his companions expected to get a friendly reception, having heard that the Kingdom had been overthrown by the
Parthenopean Republic. But that short-lived republic had succumbed to an internal uprising by a local force known as the
Holy Faith Army, led by
Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo, in alliance with
King Ferdinand IV of the Kingdom of Naples, who was at war with France.
Imprisonment in the Kingdom of Naples The Holy Faith Army imprisoned Dumas and the rest of the passengers and confiscated most of their belongings. Early on in the captivity, Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo tried to trade Dumas for a Corsican adventurer named Boccheciampe, an imposter posing as Prince Francis, son of Ferdinand IV, to aid the Holy Faith movement. Boccheciampe had been captured by French forces north of the Neapolitan kingdom, shortly after he had visited the prisoners, who were held inside
Taranto's
Aragonese Castle, but Ruffo lost interest in a trade when he learned Boccheciampe had been killed by the French. Dumas was malnourished and kept incommunicado for two years. By the time of his release, he was partially paralyzed, almost blind in one eye, had been deaf in one ear but recovered; his physique was broken. He believed his illnesses were caused by poisoning. During his imprisonment, he was aided by a secret local pro-French group, which brought him medicine and a book of remedies. In November 1799, Napoleon returned to Paris and
seized power. Dumas's wife lobbied his government for assistance in finding and rescuing her husband, to little result. Napoleon's forces, under the command of Dumas's fellow general
Joachim Murat, eventually defeated Ferdinand IV's army and secured Dumas's release in March 1801. ==Political views==