Alexandre Dumas

Alexandre Dumas, born Alexandre Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie on 24 July 1802 in Villers-Cotterêts, France, was a French novelist and playwright, often known as Alexandre Dumas père. He became one of the most widely read French authors, with works translated into many languages and published in a range so vast that his output totalled about 100,000 pages. His age was one of political change, serial newspapers, popular theatre, and growing public appetite for stories of action, history, danger, and feeling.

Dumas first made his name on the stage. While working for Louis-Philippe, Duke of Orléans, he began writing magazine articles and plays. His first play, Henry III and His Court, was produced in 1829, when he was 27, and met with acclaim. His second play, Christine, was also popular the following year. These successes gave him enough income to write full-time. In 1830, he participated in the Revolution that ousted Charles X and brought his former employer to power as Louis-Philippe, the Citizen King.

After further success in theatre, Dumas turned to novels, especially historical adventures published in serial form. Among his best-known works are The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After, and The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later. His first serial novel was La Comtesse de Salisbury; Édouard III, published from July to September 1836. In 1838, he rewrote one of his plays as the successful serial historical novel Le Capitaine Paul, partly based on the life of John Paul Jones. Since the early 20th century, his novels have been adapted into nearly 200 films.

The forces that shaped Dumas were personal as well as public. His father, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, was born in Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, the son of a French nobleman and Marie-Cessette Dumas, an enslaved woman of Afro-Caribbean ancestry. Taken to France at age 14, Thomas-Alexandre was freed, educated at a military academy, and entered the army, rising to the rank of general by age 31. Alexandre Dumas grew up with that family history behind him, and came of age in a France marked by revolution, unrest, industrialization, and the end of press censorship.

Dumas was also a sharp organizer of literary production. He founded a production studio staffed with writers whose stories were subject to his direction, editing, and additions. From 1839 to 1841, with help from friends, he compiled Celebrated Crimes, an eight-volume collection on notable criminals and crimes from European history. In the 1840s, he founded the Théâtre Historique in Paris. Later, after the election of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte in 1851, he fell from favour and left France for Belgium, then spent years in Russia and Italy. In 1861, he founded and published L'Indépendant, a newspaper that supported Italian unification, before returning to Paris in 1864.

Those who knew Dumas remembered his scale of life as much as his scale of work. The English playwright Watts Phillips called him generous, large-hearted, delightfully amusing, and egotistical, with a tongue “like a windmill” once set in motion. His stories still draw readers because they move quickly, feel crowded with life, and understand the swing between despair and joy. As one of his quoted lines puts it, “There is neither happiness nor unhappiness in this world; there is merely the comparison of one state to the other.”