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Alexandre Dumas, père ( July 24, 1802 - December 5, 1870) was a French novelist.
Alexandre Dumas was born Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie in Villers-Cotterêts, Aisne, near Paris, France, the grandson of the Marquis Antoine-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie.
While his grandfather served the government of France as General Commissaire in the Artillery in the colony of Santo Domingo, (today's Dominican Republic but at the time a part of Haiti), he married Marie-Céssette Dumas , a black slave. In 1762, she gave birth to a son, Thomas-Alexandre, and she died soon thereafter.
When the Marquis and his young son returned to Normandy, it was at a time when slavery still existed, and the boy suffered as a result of being half black. In 1786, Thomas-Alexandre joined the French army, but to protect the aristocratic family's reputation, he enlisted using his mother's maiden name. Following the RevolutionThe period of the French Revolution in the history of France covers the years between 1789 and 1799, in which democrats and republicans overthrew the absolute monarchy and the Roman Catholic Church perforce underwent radical restructuring. While France wo in France, the Marquis lost his estates but his mulattoMulatto (also Mulato is a term of Spanish and/or Portuguese origin describing the first generation offspring of a Negro and a Caucasian. The feminine form is mulattress (or mulata in Spanish and Portuguese). In colonial Latin America, the term originally son, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, distinguished himself as a capable and daring soldier in Napoleon Bonaparte's army, rising through the ranks to become a General by the age of 31.
General Dumas married Marie-Louise Elizabeth Labouret and in 1802 she gave birth to their son, Alexandre Dumas, who would become France's most commercially successful author. General Dumas died in 1806 when Alexandre was only four, leaving a nearly impoverished mother to raise him under difficult conditions. Unable to provide her son with much in the way of education, it nonetheless did not hinder young Alexandre's love of books and he read everything he could get his hands on. Growing up, his mother's stories of his father's brave military deeds during the glory years of Napoleon, spawned Alexandre's vivid imagination for adventure and heroes. Although poor, the family still had the father's distinguished reputation and aristocratic connections and after the restoration of the monarchyFollowing the ouster of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1814, the Allies restored the Bourbon Dynasty to the French throne. The ensuing period is called in French the Restauration characterized by a sharp conservative reaction and the re-establishment of the Roman, twenty-year-old Alexandre Dumas moved to Paris where he obtained employment at the Palais RoyalThe Palais Royal is a palace and garden north of the Louvre in Paris. The Palais Royal was originally built as a theater (then known as Palais Cardinal for Cardinal Richelieu in 1629. After Richelieu's death, possession of the palace passed to the French in the office of the powerful duc d'OrléansLouis-Philippe of France ( October 6, 1773 August 26, 1850), served as the " Orleanist" king of the French from 1830 to 1848. Born in Paris, Louis-Philippe, as the son of Louis Philippe Joseph, duc d'Orleans (known as "Philippe Egalite"), descended direct.