Alexandre Dumas wrote the classic adventure novel The Three Musketeers and some of the most famous and popular stories in French literature. Beginning in 1844 he had a string of brilliantly successful books, publishing The Three Musketeers (1844, first printed in serial form) and following it with The Count of Monte Cristo (1845), Twenty Years After (1845) and The Black Tulip (1850), among many others. A great celebrity writer of the day, he was almost as famous for his reckless spending and lavish lifestyle, and he was frequently in debt. In his last days he was supported by his illegitimate son, the author Alexandre Dumas the Younger.
Dumas and his son are often referred to as Dumas peré (father) and Dumas fils (son)... Alexandre Dumas was one-quarter black; his grandfather had married a slave while serving as a government official in what is now Haiti.
Career Highlights: Robin Hood, The Three Musketeers, Queen Margot
First Major Screen Credit: The Count of Monte Cristo (1912)
Biography
Alexandre Dumas may well have been the most popular novelist of the 19th century; to be sure, along with Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson, he stands among those 19th century novelists who retained their popularity best in the 20th century. His books, including The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, and The Man in the Iron Mask (which comprise only a small fraction of his fiction) continue to sell, well over 100 years after his death. His influence over our popular culture is so widespread and deeply implanted that, five generations after his death, mass audiences throughout the world still understand the meaning of references to the Three Musketeers or the Count of Monte Cristo. If Dumas' work has endured, it's because it was written from truth and from reality, astounding as that may seem on its face. The author's life, and that of his father's even more so, reads like the plot of one (or more) of his novels, and to properly understand the writer and his work, one must first understand his father.
Alexandre Dumas was descended from a noble family: his grandfather, the Marquis Antoine-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie, was a direct descendant of Norman royalty and a one-time colonel and Commissaire General of artillery. Davy de la Pailleterie left France in the 1760s for the West Indies and bought a plantation on the eastern edge of Santo Domingo. There, he fathered a child by an Afro-Caribbean slave, Marie-Céssette Dumas, whom he subsequently married; the child, born on March 27, 1762, was named Thomas-Alexandre. The boy was given the Marquis' family name and was raised in the West Indies until 1780, eight years after the death of his mother, when the Marquis returned to Paris. The son, then 18 years old, was of mixed-race, but this was not a detriment -- by all accounts tall and powerfully built, with a strikingly handsome face, he had no trouble attracting positive attention to himself. He entered the army, which his father considered beneath the dignity of the Davy de la Pailleterie family, and so he enlisted as a private under the name of Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, taking his mother's family name. He became a trooper in the Queen's dragoon regiment and achieved the rank of corporal in 1792, marrying Marie-Louise Elizabeth Labouret that same year. By virtue of his horsemanship, swordsmanship, and bravery in battle, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas overcame the "disability" of his seemingly common origin and was commissioned an officer in 1792 -- his battlefield promotions before the year ended catapulted him from lieutenant to lieutenant colonel in the cavalry. By July of the following year, he'd been elevated to general's rank, and he received the equivalent of two-star rank soon after. He rose from there to Commander-in-Chief of the Army of the Pyrenees, and by the mid-decade was one of the highest ranking and most famous generals in the French army.
Thomas-Alexandre Dumas survived the tumult of Napoleon's ascendancy, mostly by virtue of his genial manner and his extraordinary record of bravery. By all accounts, despite having the responsibility of a wife and family -- a daughter had been born in 1793 -- he thrived on dangerous missions and seemingly impossible military tasks. Indeed, his generalship and his utility in that rank were limited, in that he tended to take the battlefield and the missions himself, rather than delegating those tasks to others or working through intermediaries and lower-ranking officers. The rank did provide him with prestige, respect, and wide renown atop the stories of his exploits, and he had a winning personality as well as a common touch that endeared him to the soldiers and the civilians around him -- even as a military governor, often one of the most thankless jobs an officer can have, he managed to charm the civilian population he was to control. But it was as a swordsman and as a leader in personal combat that he was best known to the French; he was a true fighting general, unable to stay away from the battlefield, which accounted for his being twice wounded. The French sang his praises, while their enemies of the era, the Austrians, called him "the black devil."
Thomas-Alexandre Dumas was an inspiring figure: in modern American terms, he was like George Patton, Davy Crockett and, most tellingly, one of his own future son's literary creations all rolled into one. His luck finally ended after a falling-out with the emperor while serving in Egypt; ironically, the elder Dumas was taken prisoner not in a battle but, rather, after being reassigned back to France when the ship that he was aboard was caught in a storm and forced to land in an enemy port. The resulting imprisonment, which included an extended attempt at poisoning him, broke his health. Once released, he found himself out of favor with Napoleon, bankrupt, and without a commission in the army; however, he was able, on his return home, to father a second child by his still-vibrant wife. A son, Alexandre Dumas, was born on July 24, 1802. The general died in 1806 at the age of 44, leaving behind an impoverished wife and two children.
By every account, Alexandre Dumas was as physically stunning as his father -- though his skin was lighter than Thomas-Alexandre's, he had hair that marked him as being of mixed-race heritage and an impressive physique that was thought of as "African." He was bigger and stronger than most of the boys of his age and had a dashing, outgoing personality even as a child, as well as a keen sense of adventure -- he loved tramping through forests, playing soldier, and imagining himself in the kinds of exploits that he'd heard about concerning his father. He was also very sensitive to the treatment that his father had received at the hands of his captors and also from the emperor after his release; from the time Dumas was old enough to think, he not only had a passionate yearning for justice, but a keen sense of the importance of righting the wrongs around him. His best known books would deal with these themes, and also with disloyalty and abandonment, soldierly comradery, and personal honor and its redemption.
The family's situation improved somewhat as those still loyal to the late general or to his wife's family quietly interceded on their behalf. When he grew a little older, Dumas turned down the chance to take his grandfather's royal name and some part of his property, believing that it would be the height of disloyalty to his father and everything that Thomas-Alexandre had stood, lived, and worked for, were he to become a Davy de la Pailleterie rather than a Dumas. They survived, in part, with help from his mother's acquisition of a license to sell tobacco, and one of their customers was Auguste Lafarge, who was to befriend Dumas and introduce him to the world of poetry, theater, literature, and Parisian society. Dumas worked as a clerk as an older teenager and young man, but his heart lay with equestrian skills, with which he was prodigiously blessed, and with fantasies of adventure and acts of derring-do. He learned through his grandfather's legacy something about royal life in the decades before the revolution; from teachers, friends and acquaintances, he became skilled in poetry and writing, and from the young men and women drawn by his startlingly exotic good looks, he acquired the social skills that the family's reduced circumstances had denied him the opportunity to learn earlier in life. The women couldn't resist his charm, and Dumas supposedly left a string of would-be (and consummated) conquests behind him before his mid-twenties; he could charm the younger nobles whom he occasionally encountered socially, yet he had a wild, free spirit that almost made him seem even more the rustic that his upbringing and woodland trampings suggested.
Dumas' first theatrical works, written in conjunction with Adolphe de Leuven, dated from 1820 and 1821. With his first success on stage in 1829, the historical drama Henri III et sa cour, he started becoming widely known. He was involved with the Revolution of 1830, but it was primarily as an author that Dumas was recognized, through works such as Anthony (1831) and La Tour de Nesle (1832). As a novelist, Dumas didn't come fully into his own until 1844, with the publication of The Three Musketeers. One can safely say that the character of D'Artagnan was loosely based on his own background and family history, and perhaps his father's exploits as well, while his perceptions of friendship and loyalty as expressed in that book and its sequels, Twenty Years After (1845) and The Vicomte de Bragelonne (1848-1850), seemed to stem from the loyalties that people felt toward his father. The elder Dumas was clearly one of the key models for the character of Edmond Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo (1845), which was not only successful as a book (with an English translation following a year later), but also as a play, adapted by Charles Fechter in 1848, with James O'Neill famously playing the lead. Those became Dumas' most popular works and they made him a wealthy man, though they were strongly disliked by literary critics of the day who, in their turn, loved his plays. He, thus, had a two-tiered career, loved by the public on several continents for one body of work and adored by the critics and intelligentsia at home for another.
Dumas' total output included hundreds of plays, novels, and stories, including rewrites of other authors' works (copyright was a very different matter in those days), among them The Nutcracker, based on a story by E.T.A. Hoffman, which he turned into a fairy tale that Tchaikovsky subsequently used as the source for his ballet of the same name. Outside of France, however, it was as an author of adventure stories that Dumas became one of the best known writers in the world after 1844. He never made any claims for the accuracy of the historical details in his stories, but they have become so well-known through retellings and screen adaptations over the ensuing 160 years, that most people's perceptions of such a genuine historical figure as Cardinal Richelieu are rooted in Dumas' The Three Musketeers, rather than in any actual biography of the 17th century nobleman and cleric. Richelieu has, thus, been consigned to that same odd corner of popular culture "villainy" occupied by such figures as England's Prince John and the composer Antonio Salieri, as represented, respectively, in the Robin Hood legends and the film Amadeus.
Dumas' books were also an influence on countless authors around the world, including Mark Twain, who emulated Dumas' brand of fiction in The Prince and the Pauper and japed at it in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. More than 130 years after the author's death, phrases such as "One for all and all for one" are still almost universally understood and recognized from his stories of the Musketeers, thanks to numerous screen adaptations of their exploits. In the 1890s, more than 20 years after his death, Dumas' only real rival appeared on the literary scene in the guise of Anthony Hope, another author of adventure novels and plays, but this only served to extend the Dumas legacy.
Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870), the prolific French author of plays, popular romances, and historical novels, wrote "The Three Musketeers" and "The Count of Monte Cristo."
Alexandre Dumas is generally called Dumas père to distinguish him from his illustrious son Alexandre (known as Dumas fils), who was also a dramatist and novelist. The son of a Creole general of the French Revolutionary armies, Dumas was brought up by his mother in straitened circumstances after his father's death. While still young, he began to write "vaudeville" plays (light musical comedies) and then historical plays in collaboration with a friend, Adolphe de Leuven. Historical themes, as well as the use of a collaborator, were to be permanent aspects of Dumas's style throughout his career.
After reading William Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, Friedrich von Schiller, and Lord Byron, and while employed as a secretary to the Duke of Orléans (later King Louis Philippe), Dumas wrote his first plays in 1825 and 1826. Others followed, with Henri III et sa cour (1829) bringing him great success and recognition. It seemed to the theatergoers of Dumas's time that here at last was serious theater which presented an alternative to effete neoclassical drama.
The Revolution of 1830 temporarily diverted Dumas from his writing, and he became an ardent supporter of the Marquis de Lafayette. His liberal activities were viewed unfavorably by the new king, his former employer, and he traveled for a time outside France. A series of amusing travel books resulted from this period of exile.
His Fiction
When Dumas returned to Paris, a new series of historical plays flowed from his pen. By 1851 he had written alone or in collaboration more than 20 plays, among the most outstanding of which are Richard Darlington (1831), La Tour de Nesle (1832), Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle (1839), and La Reine Margot (1845). He also began writing fiction at this time, first composing short stories and then novels. In collaboration with Auguste Maquet he wrote the trilogy: Les Trois Mousquetaires (1844; The Three Musketeers), Vingt Ans après (1845; Twenty Years After), and Le Vicomte de Bragelonne (1850). Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (1846; The Count of Monte Cristo) was also a product of this period.
Dumas had many collaborators (Auguste Maquet, Paul Lacroix, Paul Bocage, and P.A. Fiorentino, to name only a few), but it was undoubtedly with Maquet that he produced his best novels. He had assistants who supplied him with the outlines of romances whose original form he had already drawn up; then he wrote the work himself. The scale of his "fiction factory" has often been exaggerated. Although at least a thousand works were published under his own name, most were due to his own industry and the amazing fertility of his imagination. Dumas grasped at any possible subject; he borrowed plots and material from all periods and all countries, then transformed them with ingenuity. The historian Jules Michelet once wrote admiringly to him, "You are like a force of elemental nature."
Dumas does not penetrate deeply into the psychology of his characters; he is content to identify them by characteristic tags (the lean acerbity of Athos, the spunk of D'Artagnan) and hurl them into a thicket of wild and improbable adventures where, after heroic efforts, they will at last succumb to noble and romantic deaths. His heroes and heroines, strong-willed and courageous beings with sonorous names, are carried along in the rapid movement of the dramas, in the flow of adventure and suspenseful plots. Dumas adhered to no literary theory, except to write as the spirit moved him, which it did often.
Dumas's works were received with enthusiasm by his loyal readers, and he amassed a considerable fortune. It was not sufficient, however, to meet the demands of his extravagant way of life. Among his follies was his estate of Monte-Cristo in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a Renaissance house with a Gothic pavilion, situated in an English garden. This estate housed a horde of parasitical guests and lady admirers who lived at the author's expense.
Later Life
Dumas, who had never changed his republican opinions, greeted the Revolution of 1848 with enthusiasm and even ran as a candidate for the Assembly. In 1850 the Theâtre-Historique, which he had founded to present his plays, failed. After the coup d'état in 1851 and the seizure of power by Napoleon III, Dumas went to Brussels, where his secretary managed to restore some semblance of order to his affairs; here he continued to write prodigiously.
In 1853 Dumas returned to Paris and began the daily paper Le Mousquetaire. It was devoted to art and literature, and in it he first published his Mémoires. The paper survived until 1857, and Dumas then published the weekly paper Monte-Cristo. This in turn folded after 3 years.
In 1858 Dumas traveled to Russia. He then joined Giuseppe Garibaldi in Sicily, and in 1860 Garibaldi named him keeper of museums in Naples. After remaining there for 4 years, he returned to Paris, where he found himself deep in debt and at the mercy of a host of creditors. His affairs were not helped by a succession of parasitical mistresses who expected - and received - lavish gifts from Dumas.
Working compulsively to pay his debts, Dumas produced a number of rather contrived works, among them Madame de Chamblay (1863) and Les Mohicans de Paris (1864), which were not received with great enthusiasm. His last years were softened by the presence of his son, Alexandre, and his devoted daughter, Madame Petel. He died in comparative poverty and obscurity on Dec. 5, 1870.
Further Reading
A good introduction to the Dumas dynasty is André Maurois, The Titans: A Three Generation Biography of the Dumas, translated by Gerard Hopkins (1957). A. Craig Bell, Alexandre Dumas: A Biography and Study (1950), is a more serious and complete work. In a lighter vein is Herbert S. Gorman, The Incredible Marquis: Alexandre Dumas (1929). For a direct look at the source material, Jules E. Goodman, ed., The Road to Monte-Cristo: A Condensation from the Memoirs of Alexandre Dumas (1956), is recommended.
Additional Sources
Dumas, Alexandre, My memoirs, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1975, 1961.
Hemmings, F. W. J. (Frederick William John), 1920-, Alexandre Dumas, the king of romance, New York: Scribner, 1979.
Ross, Michael, Alexandre Dumas, Newton Abbot, Devon; North Pomfret, Vt.: David & Charles, 1981. Schopp, Claude, Alexandre Dumas: genius of life, New York: Franklin Watts, 1988.
(click to enlarge) Alexandre Dumas. (credit: Gramstorff Bros.)
(born July 24, 1802, Villers-Cotterêts, Aisne, France — died Dec. 5, 1870, Puys, near Dieppe) French playwright and novelist. Dumas's first success was as a writer of melodramatic plays, including Napoléon Bonaparte (1831) and Antony (1831). His immensely popular novels, set in colourful historical backgrounds, include The Three Musketeers (1844), a romance about four swashbuckling heroes in the age of Cardinal Richelieu, and its sequel Twenty Years After (1845); The Count of Monte Cristo (1844 – 45); and The Black Tulip (1850). His illegitimate son Alexandre Dumas (1824 – 95), called Dumas fils, is best known for his play La Dame aux camélias (1848), the basis of Giuseppe Verdi's opera La Traviata and later of several films titled Camille.
(älĕksäN'drə dümä') , known as Dumas père (pĕr) , 1802–70, French novelist and dramatist. His father (an illegitimate son of the marquis de la Pailleterie and a black woman, Louise Cosette Dumas), was a general in the Revolution. Dumas delighted many generations of readers with his highly romantic novels immortalizing the adventures of the Three Musketeers and the Count of Monte Cristo. Largely self-educated, Dumas was a flamboyant youth with a gift for storytelling and a penchant for love affairs. At the age of 20 he obtained a minor post with the duc d'Orléans in Paris, and later he was active in the Revolution of 1830. His first successes were the historical dramas Henri III et sa cour (1829), Christine (1830), Antony (1831), and La Tour de Nesle (1832), notable for its evocation of the Middle Ages. After a number of novels, written independently or in collaboration, he produced his great triumphs, The Three Musketeers (1844, tr. 1846) and its sequels—Twenty Years After (1845, tr. 1846) and The Vicomte de Bragelonne (1848–50, tr. 1850?)—and The Count of Monte Cristo (1845, tr. 1846), which in its dramatic version was made famous by James O'Neill. Although these historical novels and their successors, written with the aid of numerous collaborators, especially Auguste Maquet, are scorned by critics, who find them lacking in style and characterization, they have had enormous popularity and have been translated into nearly every language. Among his other works are Queen Margot (1845, tr. 1845), The Lady of Monsoreau (1846, tr. 1847), The Forty-Five (1848), The Black Tulip (1850), and The Journal of Madame Giovanni (tr. 1944). Dumas père's incredible output of novels, travel works, memoirs, and historical studies made him wealthy, but he spent more than he earned on a horde of pensioners at his home, “Monte-Cristo,” near Saint-Germain. His memoirs (1852–54) end with the year 1832. He was interested in Italian unification, and among his activities was a part in Garibaldi's expedition in 1860.
Bibliography
See studies by F. W. Hemmings (1980) and C. Schopp (1988).
"A person who doubts himself is like a man who would enlist in the ranks of his enemies and bear arms against himself. He makes his failure certain by himself being the first person to be convinced of it."
"Infatuated, half through conceit, half through love of my art, I achieve the impossible working as no one else ever works."
"Oh! The good times when we were so unhappy."
"Happiness is like those palaces in fairy tales whose gates are guarded by dragons: we must fight in order to conquer it."
"The chain of wedlock is so heavy that it takes two to carry it -- and sometimes three."
"Business, that's easily defined; it's other people's money."
Alexandre Dumas was born on July 24, 1802, in the town of
Villers-Cotterêts in France. He was the son of
Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, a French General, and of Marie-Louise Élisabeth Labouret,
the daughter of an innkeeper. His father was himself the son of the Marquis Alexandre-Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, who served
the government of France as Général commissaire in the Artillery in the colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), and his black slave Marie-Césette Dumas.
General Dumas died in 1806 when Alexandre was not yet four years old, leaving a nearly
impoverished mother to raise him under difficult conditions. Although Marie-Louise was unable to
provide her son with much in the way of education, it 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 acts during the glory years of Napoleon I of France 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 monarchy, twenty-year-old Alexandre Dumas moved to Paris where he obtained employment at the Palais Royal in the
office of the powerful duc d'Orléans.
Literary career
While working in Paris, Dumas began to write articles for magazines as well as plays for the theatre. In 1829 his first solo play, Henry III and his Court, was produced, meeting with great public acclaim. The
following year his second play, Christine, proved equally popular, and as a result, he was financially able to work full
time at writing. In 1830, he participated in the revolution that ousted King Charles X and replaced him on the throne with Dumas's former employer, the duc d'Orléans, who
would rule as Louis-Philippe, the Citizen King.
Until the mid-1830s, life in France remained unsettled with sporadic riots by disgruntled
Republicans and impoverished urban workers seeking change. As life slowly returned to normal, the nation began to industrialize
and, with an improving economy combined with the end of presscensorship, the times turned out to be very rewarding for the skills of Alexandre Dumas.
After writing more successful plays, he turned his efforts to novels. Although attracted to an extravagant lifestyle, and
always spending more than he earned, Dumas proved to be a very astute business marketer. With high demand from newspapers for
serial novels, in 1838, he simply rewrote one of his plays to create his first serial novel. Titled
Le Capitaine Paul, it led to his forming a production studio that turned out hundreds of stories, all subject to his
personal input and direction.
From 1839 to 1841, Dumas, with the assistance of several friends, compiled Celebrated Crimes, an eight-volume
collection of essays on famous criminals and crimes from European history, including essays on Beatrice Cenci, Martin Guerre, Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia and more recent incidents including
the cases of executed alleged murderers Karl Ludwig Sand and Antoine François Desrues.
Dumas also collaborated with his fencing master Augustin Grisier in his 1840 novel The
Fencing Master. The story is written to be Grisier's narrated account of how he came to be witness to events in the
Decembrist revolt in Russia. This novel was eventually banned in Russia by Tsar
Nicholas I of Russia, causing Dumas to be forbidden to visit Russia until the
Tsar's death. Grisier is also mentioned with great respect in both The Count of
Monte Cristo and The Corsican Brothers as well as Dumas's memoirs.
In 1840, he married an actress, Ida Ferrier, but continued with his numerous liaisons with other
women, fathering at least three illegitimate children. One of those children, a son named after him, would follow in his
footsteps, also becoming a successful novelist and playwright. Because of their same name and occupation, to distinguish them,
one is referred to as Alexandre Dumas, père, the other as Alexandre Dumas,
fils.
Dumas made extensive use of the aid of numerous assistants and collaborators, of which Auguste Maquet was the best known. It was Maquet who outlined the plot of The Count of Monte Cristo and made substantial contributions to The Three Musketeers and its sequels, as well as several of Dumas's other novels. When working
together, Maquet proposed plots and wrote drafts, while Dumas added the details, dialogues, and the final chapters.
His writing earned him a great deal of money, but Dumas was frequently broke or in debt as a result of spending lavishly on
women and high living. The large and costly Château de Monte-Cristo that he
built was often filled with strangers and acquaintances who took advantage of his generosity.
When King Louis-Philippe was ousted in a revolt, Dumas was not looked upon favorably by the newly elected President,
Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1851 Dumas
fled to Brussels, Belgium, to escape his creditors, and from there he traveled to
Russia where French was the second language and his writings were enormously popular. Dumas spent
two years in Russia before moving on to seek adventure and fodder for more stories. In March of 1861, the kingdom of Italy was proclaimed, with Victor Emmanuel II as its king. For the next three years, Alexandre Dumas would be involved
in the fight for a united Italy, founding and leading a newspaper named Indipendente and returning to Paris in
1864.
Despite Alexandre Dumas' success and aristocratic connections, his being of mixed-race would affect him all his life. In
1843, he wrote a short novel, Georges, that
addressed some of the issues of race and the effects of colonialism. Nevertheless, racist attitudes affected his rightful
position in France's history long after his death on December 5, 1870, at the age of 68.
In June 2005, Dumas's recently-discovered last novel The Knight of
Sainte-Hermine went on sale in France. Within the story, Dumas describes the Battle of Trafalgar in which the death of Lord
Nelson is explained. The novel was being published serially and was almost complete by the time of his death. A final
two-and-a-half chapters were written by modern-day Dumas scholar Claude Schopp who based himself on Dumas' pre-writing notes.
Works
Fiction
Alexandre Dumas, père wrote stories and historical chronicles of high adventure that captured the imagination of the French
public who eagerly waited to purchase the continuing sagas. A few of these works are:
The Women's War
When Pierrot Was Young by Alexandre Dumas-French 1975
Charles VII at the Homes of His Great Vassals (Charles VII chez ses grands vassaux), drama, adapted for the
opera The Saracen by Russian composer César
Cui
The Vicomte de Bragelonne (Le Vicomte de Bragelonne, ou Dix ans
plus tard, 1847): When published in English it was usually split into three parts: The
Vicomte de Bragelonne, Louise de la Valliere, and The Man in the Iron Mask, of which the last part is the best
known.
The Gold Thieves (after 1857): a play that was lost but rediscovered by the Canadian
Reginald Hamel researcher in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in
2004
The Knight of Sainte-Hermine (Le Chevalier de
Sainte-Hermine, 1869): The novel was his last major work and was lost until its rediscovery by
Claude Schopp was announced in 2005.
Drama
Though best known now as a novelist, Dumas earned his first fame as a dramatist. His Henri III et sa cour
(1829) was the first of the great Romantic historical dramas
produced on the Paris stage, preceding Victor Hugo's more famous Hernani (1830). Produced at the Comédie-Française and
starring the famous Mademoiselle Mars, Dumas's play was an enormous success, launching
him on his career. It had fifty performances over the next year, extraordinary at the time.
Other hits followed. For example, Antony (1831), a drama with a contemporary Byronic hero, is considered the first non-historical Romantic drama. It starred Mars's great rival
Marie Dorval. There were also La Tour de Nesle (1832), another historical
melodrama; and Kean (1836), based on the life of the great, and recently deceased,
English actor Edmund Kean, played in turn by the great French actor Frédérick Lemaître. Dumas wrote many more plays and dramatized several of his own novels.
Non-fiction
Dumas was also a prolific writer of non-fiction. He wrote journal articles on politics and culture, and books on French
history.
His massive Grand dictionnaire de cuisine (Great Dictionary of Cuisine) was published posthumously in 1873. It
is a combination of encyclopedia and cookbook. Dumas was both a gourmet and an expert cook. An abridged version, the Petit
dictionnaire de cuisine (Small Dictionary of Cuisine), was published in 1882.
He was also a well-known travel writer, writing such books as
Impressions de voyage: En Suisse (Travel Impressions: In Switzerland ,
1834)
Impressions de voyage: En Russie (Travel Impressions: In Russia ,
1860).
Posthumous recognition
Buried in the place where he had been born, Alexandre Dumas remained in the cemetery at Villers-Cotterêts until November 30, 2002. Under orders of the French President,
Jacques Chirac, his body was exhumed, and in a televised ceremony, his new coffin, draped
in a blue-velvet cloth and flanked by four Republican Guards costumed as the Musketeers -
Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and D'Artagnan - was transported in a solemn procession to the
Panthéon of Paris, the great mausoleum where French
luminaries are interred.
In his speech, President Chirac said: "With you, we were D'Artagnan, Monte Cristo, or Balsamo, riding along the roads of
France, touring battlefields, visiting palaces and castles—with you, we dream." In an interview following the ceremony, President
Chirac acknowledged the racism that had existed, saying that a wrong had now been righted with
Alexandre Dumas enshrined alongside fellow authors Victor Hugo and Voltaire.
The honor recognized that although France has produced many great writers, none have been as widely read as Alexandre Dumas.
His stories have been translated into almost a hundred languages, and have inspired more than 200 motion
pictures.
Alexandre Dumas's home outside of Paris, the Château Monte Cristo, has been restored and is open to the public.
Gorman, Herbert (1929). The Incredible Marquis,
Alexandre Dumas. New York: Farrar & Rinehart. OCLC1370481.
Hemmings, F.W.J. (1979). Alexandre Dumas, the
king of romance. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. ISBN 0684163918.
Lucas-Dubreton, Jean (1928). The Fourth Musketeer
(html), trans. by Maida Castelhun Darnton, New York: Coward-McCann. OCLC230139.
Maurois,
André (1957). The Titans, a three-generation biography of the Dumas, trans. by Gerard Hopkins, New York: Harper
& Brothers Publishers. OCLC260126.
Reed, F.W. (Frank Wild) (1933). A Bibliography of
Alexandre Dumas père. Pinner Hill, Middlesex: J.A. Neuhuys. OCLC1420223.
Ross, Michael (1981). Alexandre Dumas. Newton
Abbot, London, North Pomfret (Vt): David & Charles. ISBN 0715377582.
Schopp, Claude (1988). Alexandre Dumas, Genius of
Life, trans. by A. J. Koch, New York, Toronto: Franklin Watts. ISBN 0531150933.
Spurr, H.A. (1929, 1973). The Life and
Writings of Alexandre Dumas. New York: Haskell House Publishers. ISBN 0838315496.
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