Alexandre Dumas: Adventure, Scandal, and 100,000 Pages, Episode 604

Category: French History

This episode features our frequent and very popular guest Elyse Rivin. If you enjoy her episodes, please consider supporting her on Patreon.

If you think Alexandre Dumas just wrote swashbuckling novels, you're missing half the story. My guest Elyse Rivin and I sat down for a full Alexandre Dumas biography, and the man's actual life makes The Count of Monte Cristo look restrained.

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A Family Background Like No Other

Dumas was born in 1802 in a small village in Normandy. His father — Thomas-Alexandre Dumas — was the son of a French marquis and a slave woman in Haiti. Brought to France as a child, he rose through the military to become the first non-white general in the French army.

That father was brilliant and fearless, and he had the bad judgment to disobey Napoleon. Napoleon's revenge was swift: he sent him on a campaign where he was taken prisoner, tortured so badly he never recovered, and then refused his military pension. He died when Alexandre was four years old.

That story of unjust punishment and denied recognition? Elyse and I are pretty sure it never left Dumas. Most historians connect it directly to the themes of vengeance and justice that drive The Count of Monte Cristo.

From Clerk to the Most Famous Man in Paris

Dumas had almost no formal schooling — he left at 13. What he had was beautiful handwriting, a gift for storytelling, and enormous energy. He talked his way into a clerk position with the Duc d'Orléans in Paris, started meeting writers and artists, and decided he wanted to write for the Comédie-Française.

His first big success wasn't a novel. It was a play. By his late 20s, he was producing a play a year, sometimes two running in Paris simultaneously. He was famous, he was making serious money, and he was spending it just as fast — on friends, mistresses, and eventually a château he named after a place he hadn't yet written about.

The Novels That Made Him Immortal

It wasn't until his late 30s that Dumas turned to fiction. He worked with a collaborator named Alfred Maquet, who provided structure and outlines while Dumas supplied the dialogue and the drive. In 1844, at age 42, he published The Three Musketeers, serialized in weekly episodes in the newspaper La Presse. It was a runaway success. La Reine Margot and The Count of Monte Cristo followed in quick succession.

His writing style explains exactly why his books keep getting adapted into films — 29 versions of Monte Cristo alone, and at least 11 of The Three Musketeers. He wrote almost entirely in dialogue, placed famous historical figures (Richelieu, Louis XIII, Buckingham) in situations he completely invented, and kept the action moving at a pace that feels modern. He didn't moralize. He told a good story.

An Italian Adventure No One Asked For

Somewhere in all of this he went broke, rebuilt, went broke again, and kept writing. But the episode of his life that still astonishes me is what he did in 1860. He had met Garibaldi — the man leading the movement to unify Italy — and at age 58, Dumas sold his possessions, gave the money to Garibaldi to buy arms, and went to Italy.

He stayed four years. When Garibaldi entered Naples, he made Dumas head of all the museums and archaeological sites in the region, including Pompeii. Alexandre Dumas, minister of culture of Naples. Living one of his own plots.

The Legacy

He died in 1870 at 68, quietly, in the middle of the Franco-Prussian War with no public funeral. But any Alexandre Dumas biography has to end at the Panthéon: in 2002, President Jacques Chirac had him moved there. He now lies next to Victor Hugo — two sides of the same coin, as Elyse put it. One the political conscience of France, the other its greatest storyteller.

Over 100 novels. Over 100 plays. Travel books. Ten collections of poetry. And a cookbook. The man wrote an estimated 100,000 pages in his lifetime. Not bad for someone who left school at 13.

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Category: French History