"The Black Devil"

I'm not sure how I stumbled onto this fellow but he is pretty damn impressive!
Most probably, you've never heard of him either, although you may know some of his stories which were the inspiration for his son to write, amongst many other books, The Three Musketeers.

General Alexandre ("Alex") Dumas 

(25 March 1762 – 26 February 1806) was the first black general in French history and remains the highest-ranking person of color of all time in a continental European army.[1] He was the first person of color in the French military to become brigadier general, the first to become divisional general, and the first to become general-in-chief of a French army.[2] Dumas shared the status of the highest-ranking black officer in the Western world only with Toussaint Louverture (who in May 1797 became the second black general-in-chief in the French military[3]) until 1989, when the American Colin Powell became a four-star general, the closest United States equivalent of General of the Army, Dumas's highest rank.
Born in Saint-Domingue, Alex Dumas was of mixed race, the son of a white French nobleman and a black slave mother. He was born into slavery because of his mother's status, but his father took the boy with him to France in 1776 and had him educated. He helped him enter the French military.
Dumas played a pivotal role in the French Revolutionary Wars. Entering the military as a private at age 24, Dumas rose by age 31 to command 53,000 troops as the General-in-Chief of the French Army of the Alps. Dumas's strategic victory in opening the high Alps passes enabled the French to initiate their Second Italian Campaign against the Austro-Hungarian Empire. During the battles in Italy, Austrian troops nicknamed Dumas as the Schwarze Teufel ("Black Devil," Diable Noir in French).[4] The French – notably Napoleon – nicknamed him "the Horatius Cocles of the Tyrol"[5] (after a hero who had saved ancient Rome[6]) for single-handedly defeating a squadron of enemy troops at a bridge over the Eisack River in Clausen (today Klausen, or Chiusa, Italy).
Dumas served as commander of the French cavalry forces on the Expédition d'Égypte, a failed French attempt to conquer Egypt and the Levant. On the march from Alexandria to Cairo, he clashed verbally with the Expedition's supreme commander Napoleon Bonaparte, under whom he had served in the Italian campaigns. In March 1799, Dumas left Egypt on an unsound vessel, which was forced to put aground in the southern Italian Kingdom of Naples, where he was taken prisoner and thrown into a dungeon. He languished there until the spring of 1801.
Returning to France after his release, he had a son with his wife: Alexandre Dumas, who became one of France's most widely-read authors of all time. (The general's grandson, Alexandre Dumas, fils, would become a notable playwright in the Victorian era.) The novelist Dumas' most famous characters were inspired by the life of General Dumas.[7]


Much more here:   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas-Alexandre_Dumas