Comte de Monte-Cristo, Le. Novel by Alexandre Dumas père. Serialized in Le Journal des débats (August 1844-January 1846), Le Comte de Monte-Cristo had an immense success and marked a high point of the fashion for the roman-feuilleton. As with many of his other novels, it was written in collaboration with Auguste Maquet, who provided Dumas with chapter plans and historical and factual material. It offers a thrilling and sensational narrative of escape, social triumph, and revenge, which has retained a profound and lasting appeal in modern mass culture. Dumas drew on his own previous revenge novel Georges (1843) and on the cause célèbre of François Picaud, who, wrongfully imprisoned under the Empire, returned after 1814 to exact violent retribution on his accusers. In Le Comte de Monte-Cristo the imprisoned Bonapartist conspirator Edmond Dantès escapes, discovers the treasure of Monte-Cristo, and returns to Paris to settle scores with Restoration society. His campaign of revenge becomes an epic conflict between good and evil, as Dantès, the agent of Providence, destroys high-society schemers and crooks. But the text is not underpinned by the social humanitarianism of an Eugène Sue. Dantès is a Byronic hero and sweet revenge is complicated by a gnawing sense of guilt.
[Brian Rigby]
