Dumas, Alexandre

Dumas, Alexandre (‘Dumas père’) (1802-70). Dramatist, novelist, travel writer. On a world scale Dumas is perhaps the best known of all French novelists. His massive fictional output brought him an enormous readership in his day, and his key novels have continued to attract a large popular audience, being repeatedly adapted for popular serialization, cinema, and television.

His father was a legendary general in Napoleon's army who had distinguished himself by a famous victory over the Piedmontese in the Alps, and whose exploits were recounted by Dumas himself in Mes mémoires (1852-5). His grandfather was a minor aristocrat who had settled in San-Domingo, and his grandmother, Marie-Cessette Dumas, was a black slave-girl.

Dumas's literary career started in the early 1820s when, together with literary collaborators, he began to write melodramas and vaudeville sketches, the earliest example of which was produced at the Ambigu-Comique in 1825. A volume of tales, Nouvelles contemporaines, appeared in 1826. Dumas's first theatrical triumph came with the performance of Henri III et sa cour at the Comédie-Française in 1829, a glamorously produced historical drama, rich in melodramatic incident, which made him a leader of the Romantic revolution in the theatre. Henceforth, Dumas was a celebrated figure in Parisian literary circles. He strongly supported the republican cause in 1830. In the early 1830s he rapidly confirmed his notoriety with the sensational success of the play Antony (1831), which at the time seemed to epitomize all the supposed danger and subversiveness of the new Romantic literature. He maintained his power to enthral and shock with the tragedy La Tour de Nesle (1832), which played a central part in the contemporary obsession with all things medieval. His other outstanding theatrical success was Kean ou Désordre et génie (1836), in which the actor Frédérick Lemaître played the virtuoso role.

Dumas's truly colossal literary and social celebrity, however, came with his career as a writer of romans-feuilletons. In very close collaboration with Auguste Maquet, he contributed serial novels to the press throughout the late 1830s and early 1840s. From 1844 (when he published both Le Comte de Monte-Cristo and Les Trois Mousquetaires) until 1848, he dominated the field of the roman-feuilleton with such titles as Vingt ans après (1845), La Reine Margot (1845), Joseph Balsamo (1846-8), and Le Vicomte de Bragelonne (1848-50). With Les Mohicans de Paris (1854-7) he demonstrated his continuing inventiveness in the field of popular fiction.

[Brian Rigby]

Bibliography

• F. W. J. Hemmings, The King of Romance (1979)