Legacy of Dumas family in French history.

As I walked the streets of Paris, I was immediately drawn in by all of the beautiful art and historical buildings. I stood in awe of the statues that I’d read about in my study abroad class.

(Black Paris Tour)

Alexandre Dumas

Dumas fils possessed a good measure of his father’s literary fecundity, but the work of the two men could scarcely be more different. His first success was a novel, La Dame aux camélias (1848), but he found his vocation when he adapted the story into a play, known in English as Camille, first performed in 1852. (Giuseppe Verdi based his opera La Traviata, first performed in 1853, on this play.) Although Dumas père had written colourful historical plays and novels, Dumas fils specialized in drama set in the present. The unhappy witness of the ruin brought on his father by illicit love affairs, Dumas fils—himself the child of one of these affairs—devoted his plays to sermons on the sanctity of the family and of marriage. Le Demi-Monde (performed 1855), for example, dealt with the threat to the institution of marriage posed by prostitutes. Modern audiences usually find Dumas’s drama verbose and sententious, but in the late 19th century eminent critics praised his plays for their moral seriousness. He was admitted to the Académie Française in 1875.

Dumas’s father, Thomas-Alexandre Davy de La Pailleterie—born out of wedlock to the marquis de La Pailleterie and Marie Cessette Dumas, a black slave of Santo Domingo—was a common soldier under the ancien régime who assumed the name Dumas in 1786. He later became a general in Napoleon’s army. The family fell on hard times, however, especially after General Dumas’s death in 1806, and the young Alexandre went to Paris to attempt to make a living as a lawyer.

Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, born Thomas-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie (1762 – 1806), was a French general during the French Revolutionary Wars. Born to a white nobleman and one of his black slaves in Saint-Domingue, Dumas was nevertheless raised in privilege, being brought to France where he received an aristocratic education. Serving in the French Army, Dumas became an ally of the Assassin Brotherhood, helping them foil a Templar plot to overthrow the French Republic in 1793. He also became a subordinate of Napoleon Bonaparte, and a personal associate of the Assassin Arno Dorian. Rising to become the highest-ranking mulatto of all time in a European army, Dumas led the revolutionary army in various military expeditions before falling out with Bonaparte.

In 2009, a sculpture in his honor, made by Driss Sans-Arcidet, was erected in Paris, Place du Général Catroux (formerly Place Malesherbes). Representing broken slave shackles, it was unveiled on April 4, 2009. The critic Jean-Joël Brégeon has claimed that the symbolism of the statue was not appropriate because, apart from his noble upbringing, the general had never been a slave. Documents cited, however, show that his father sold and then re-purchased Alexandre Dumas, disproving this claim. Dumas biographer Tom Reiss has suggested that the monument is inappropriate for other reasons: "In the race politics of twenty-first-century France, the statue of General Dumas had morphed into a symbolic monument to all the victims of French colonial slavery... There is still no monument in France commemorating the life of General Alexandre Dumas."

Source: http://sittingbull1845.blogspot.com/2016/05/black-social-history-afro-french-thomas.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gEgtVg-Qrk