Alexandre Dumas[a] (born Alexandre Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie,[b] 24 July 1802 – 5 December 1870),[1][2] also known as Alexandre Dumas père,[c] was a French novelist and playwright.
His works have been translated into many languages and he is one of the most widely read French authors. Many of his historical novels of adventure were originally published as serials, including The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After and The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later. Since the early 20th century, his novels have been adapted into nearly 200 films. Prolific in several genres, Dumas began his career by writing plays, which were successfully produced from the first. He wrote numerous magazine articles and travel books; his published works totalled 100,000 pages.[3] In the 1840s, Dumas founded the Thétre Historique in Paris.
His father, General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie, was born in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti) to Alexandre Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, a French nobleman, and Marie-Cessette Dumas, an African slave.[4][5] At age 14, Thomas-Alexandre was taken by his father to France, where he was educated in a military academy and entered the military for what became an illustrious career.
Alexandre acquired work with Louis-Philippe, Duke of Orléans, then as a writer, a career that led to his early success. Decades later, after the election of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte in 1851, Dumas fell from favour and left France for Belgium, where he stayed for several years. He moved to Russia for a few years and then to Italy. In 1861, he founded and published the newspaper L'Indépendent, which supported Italian unification. He returned to Paris in 1864.
English playwright Watts Phillips, who knew Dumas in his later life, described him as "the most generous, large-hearted being in the world. He also was the most delightfully amusing and egotistical creature on the face of the earth. His tongue was like a windmill – once set in motion, you would never know when he would stop, especially if the theme was himself."[6]
General
Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, father of Alexandre Dumas
Alexandre Dumas, engraving by
Antoine Maurin
Alexandre Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie (later known as Alexandre Dumas) was born in 1802 in Villers-Cotterêts in the department of Aisne, in Picardy, France. He had two older sisters, Marie-Alexandrine (born 1794) and Louise-Alexandrine (1796–1797).[7] Their parents were Marie-Louise Élisabeth Labouret, the daughter of an innkeeper, and Thomas-Alexandre Dumas.
Thomas-Alexandre had been born in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), the mixed-race, natural son of the marquis Alexandre Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie (Antoine), a French nobleman and général commissaire in the artillery of the colony, and Marie-Cessette Dumas, an enslaved woman of Afro-Caribbean ancestry. The two extant primary documents that state a racial identity for Marie-Cessette Dumas refer to her as a "négresse" (a black woman) as opposed to a "multresse" (a woman of visible mixed race).[8][9] It is unknown whether Marie-Cessette was born in Saint-Domingue or in Africa, nor is it known from which African people she had ancestry.[10][11][12] What is known is that, sometime after becoming estranged from his brothers, Antoine purchased Marie-Cessette and her daughter from a previous relationship for "an exorbitant amount" and made Marie-Cessette his concubine. Thomas-Alexandre was the only son born to them, but they had two or three daughters.
In 1775, following the death of both his brothers, Antoine left Saint-Domingue for France in order to claim the family estates and the title of Marquis. Shortly before his departure, he sold Marie-Cessette and their two daughters (Adolphe and Jeanette), as well as Marie-Cessette's oldest daughter Marie-Rose (whose father was a different man) to a baron who had recently come from Nantes to settle in Saint Domingue. Antoine however retained ownership of Thomas-Alexandre (his only natural son) and took the boy with him to France. There, Thomas-Alexandre received his freedom and a sparse education at a military school, adequate to enable him to join the French army, there being no question of the mixed-race boy being accepted as his father's heir. Thomas-Alexandre did well in the Army and was promoted to general by the age of 31, the first soldier of Afro-Antilles origin to reach that rank in the French army.[13]
The family surname ("de la Pailleterie") was never bestowed upon Thomas-Alexandre, who therefore used "Dumas" as his surname. This is often assumed to have been his mother's surname, but in fact, the surname "Dumas" occurs only once in connection with Marie-Cessette, and that happens in Europe, when Thomas-Alexandre states, while applying for a marriage licence, that his mother's name was "Marie-Cessette Dumas". Some scholars have suggested that Thomas-Alexandre devised the surname "Dumas" for himself when he felt the need for one, and that he attributed it to his mother when convenient. "Dumas" means "of the farm" (du mas), perhaps signifying only that Marie-Cessette belonged to the farm property.[14]
Alexandre Dumas by
Achille Devéria (1829)
While working for Louis-Philippe, Alexandre Dumas began writing articles for magazines and plays for the theatre. As an adult, he used the surname of Dumas, as his father had done as an adult.[15] His first play, Henry III and His Court, produced in 1829 when he was 27 years old, met with acclaim. His second play, Christine, was equally popular the next year. These successes gave him sufficient income to write full-time.
In 1830, Dumas participated in the Revolution that ousted Charles X and replaced him with Dumas's former employer, the Duke of Orléans, who ruled 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. An improving economy combined with the end of press censorship made the times rewarding for Alexandre Dumas's literary skills.
After writing additional successful plays, Dumas switched to writing novels. Although attracted to an extravagant lifestyle and always spending more than he earned, Dumas proved to be an astute marketing strategist and writer. As newspapers were publishing many serial novels, he began producing these. His first serial novel was La Comtesse de Salisbury; Édouard III (July-September 1836). In 1838, Dumas rewrote one of his plays as a successful serial historical novel, Le Capitaine Paul ('Captain Paul'), partly based on the life of the Scottish-American naval officer John Paul Jones.
He founded a production studio, staffed with writers who turned out hundreds of stories, all subject to his personal direction, editing, and additions. 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. He featured Beatrice Cenci, Martin Guerre, Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia, as well as more recent events and criminals, including the cases of the alleged murderers Karl Ludwig Sand and Antoine François Desrues, who were executed. Dumas collaborated with Augustin Grisier, his fencing master, in his 1840 novel, The Fencing Master. The story is written as Grisier's account of how he came to witness the events of the Decembrist revolt in Russia. The novel was eventually banned in Russia by Czar Nicholas I, and Dumas was prohibited from visiting the country until after the Czar's death. Dumas refers to Grisier with great respect in The Count of Monte Cristo, The Corsican Brothers, and in his memoirs.
Dumas depended on numerous assistants and collaborators, of whom Auguste Maquet was the best known. It was not until the late twentieth century that his role was fully understood.[16] Dumas wrote the short novel Georges (1843), which uses ideas and plots later repeated in The Count of Monte Cristo. Maquet took Dumas to court to get authorial recognition and a higher payment rate for his work. He was successful in getting more money, but not a by-line.[16][17]
Chteau de Monte-Cristo
Dumas's novels were so popular that they were soon translated into English and other languages. His writing earned him a great deal of money, but he was frequently insolvent, as he spent lavishly on women and sumptuous living. (Scholars have found that he had a total of 40 mistresses.[18]) In 1846, he had built a country house outside Paris at Le Port-Marly, the large Chteau de Monte-Cristo, with an additional building for his writing studio. It often was filled with strangers and acquaintances who stayed for lengthy visits and took advantage of his generosity. Two years later, faced with financial difficulties, he sold the entire property.
Dumas wrote in a wide variety of genres and published a total of 100,000 pages in his lifetime.[3] He made use of his experience, writing travel books after taking journeys, including those motivated by reasons other than pleasure. Dumas travelled to Spain, Italy, Germany, England and French Algeria. After King Louis-Philippe was ousted in a revolt, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte was elected president. As Bonaparte disapproved of the author, Dumas fled in 1851 to Brussels, Belgium, which was also an effort to escape his creditors. In about 1859, he moved to Russia, where French was the second language of the elite and his writings were enormously popular. Dumas spent two years in Russia and visited St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kazan, Astrakhan, Baku, and Tbilisi. He published travel books about Russia.
In March 1861, the kingdom of Italy was proclaimed, with Victor Emmanuel II as its king. Dumas travelled there and for the next three years participated in the movement for Italian unification. He founded and led a newspaper, Indipendente. While there, he befriended Giuseppe Garibaldi, whom he had long admired and with whom he shared a commitment to liberal republican principles as well as membership within Freemasonry.[19][20] Returning to Paris in 1864, he published travel books about Italy.
Despite Dumas's aristocratic background and personal success, he had to deal with discrimination related to his mixed-race ancestry. In 1843, he wrote the short novel Georges, which addressed some of the issues of race and the effects of colonialism. His response to a man who insulted him about his partial African ancestry has become famous. Dumas said:
My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends.[21][22]
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