Alexandre Dumas

Alexandre Dumas
	;
Real Name	Alexandre Dumas
Born	July 24, 1802
Died	December 5, 1870

Origin[]

Alexandre Dumas (born Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie), also known as Alexandre Dumas père, was a French novelist and playwright.

Many of his historical novels of adventure were originally published as serials, including The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, etc. Prolific in several genres, Dumas began his career by writing plays, which were successfully produced from the first.

Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie (later known as Alexandre Dumas) was born in 1802 in Picardy, France. He had two older sisters, Marie-Alexandrine and Louise-Alexandrine. Their parents were Marie-Louise Élisabeth Labouret and Thomas-Alexandre Dumas.

While working for Louis-Philippe, Dumas began writing articles for the theatre. As an adult, he used the surname of Dumas. His first play, Henry III and His Court, produced in 1829, met with acclaim. The next year, his second play, Christine, was equally popular. 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. Until the mid-1830s, life in France remained unsettled. As life slowly returned to normal, the nation began to industrialise. 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. Dumas proved to be an astute marketing strategist as well as a writer. As newspapers were publishing many serial novels, he began producing these. He founded a production studio, staffed with writers who turned out hundreds of stories. 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. Dumas collaborated with Augustin Grisier, his fencing master, in his 1840 novel, The Fencing Master. 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. 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 try to get authorial recognition and a higher rate of payment for his work. He was successful in getting more money, but not a by-line.

Dumas's novels were so popular. His writing earned him a great deal of money, but he was frequently insolvent, as he spent lavishly on women and sumptuous living. In 1846, he had built a country house outside París, Château de Monte-Cristo. 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.

He made use of his experience, writing travel books after taking journeys. Dumas travelled to Spain, Italy, Germany, England and French Algeria. After Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte was elected president. As Bonaparte disapproved of the author, Dumas fled in 1851 to 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. He published travel books about Russia.

In March 1861, the kingdom of Italy was proclaimed. Dumas travelled there and for the next three years participated in the movement for Italian unification. While there, he befriended Giuseppe Garibaldi. 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.

On 1 February 1840, Dumas married actress Ida Ferrier. They did not have any children together. Dumas had numerous liaisons with other women. He is known to have fathered at least four children by them: Alexandre Dumas, fils; Marie-Alexandrine Dumas, Henry Bauër And Micaëlla-Clélie-Josepha-Élisabeth Cordier. About 1866, Dumas had an affair with Adah Isaacs Menken, an American actress who was less than half his age and at the height of her career. With Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, Gérard de Nerval, Eugène Delacroix and Honoré de Balzac, Dumas was a member of the Club des Hashischins, which met monthly to take hashish at a hotel in Paris.

On 5 December 1870, Dumas died at the age of 68 of natural causes, possibly a heart attack. He was buried at his birthplace of Picardy, France. His death was overshadowed by the Franco-Prussian War. Changing literary fashions decreased his popularity.

Public Domain Works[]

Public Domain Literary Works[]

Fiction[]

Acté of Corinth; or, The convert of St. Paul. a tale of Greece and Rome. (1839)
Isaac Laquedem (1852–53, incomplete)
The Countess of Salisbury (La Comtesse de Salisbury; Édouard III, 1836)
Captain Paul (Le Capitaine Paul, 1838)
Othon the Archer (Othon l'archer 1840), Captain Pamphile (Le Capitaine Pamphile, 1839)
The Fencing Master (Le Maître d'armes, 1840)
Castle Eppstein; The Spectre Mother (Chateau d'Eppstein; Albine, 1843)
Amaury (1843)
The Corsican Brothers (Les Frères Corses, 1844)
The Black Tulip (La Tulipe noire, 1850)
Olympe de Cleves (1851–52)
Catherine Blum (1853–54)
The Mohicans of Paris (Les Mohicans de Paris, 1854)
Salvator (Salvator. Suite et fin des Mohicans de Paris, 1855–1859)
The Last Vendee, or the She-Wolves of Machecoul (Les louves de Machecoul, 1859)
La Sanfelice (1864)
Pietro Monaco, sua moglie Maria Oliverio ed i loro complici (1864)
The Prussian Terror (La Terreur Prussienne, 1867)
The Nutcracker (Histoire d'un casse-noisette, 1844): a revision of Hoffmann's story The Nutcracker and the Mouse King
The Wolf Leader (Le Meneur de loups, 1857)
Georges (1843)
The Count of Monte Cristo (Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, 1844–46)
The Conspirators (Le chevalier d'Harmental, 1843)
The Three Musketeers (Les Trois Mousquetaires, 1844)
Twenty Years After (Vingt ans après, 1845)
The Vicomte de Bragelonne, sometimes called Ten Years Later (Le Vicomte de Bragelonne, ou Dix ans plus tard, 1847)
Louis XIV and His Century (Louis XIV et son siècle, 1844)
The Women's War (La Guerre des Femmes, 1845)
The Count of Moret; The Red Sphinx; or, Richelieu and His Rivals (Le Comte de Moret; Le Sphinx Rouge, 1865–66)
The Dove - the sequel to Richelieu and His Rivals
La Reine Margot, also published as Marguerite de Valois (1845)
La Dame de Monsoreau (1846) (later adapted as a short story titled "Chicot the Jester")
The Forty-Five Guardsmen (1847) (Les Quarante-cinq)
Ascanio (1843). Written in collaboration with Paul Meurice
The Two Dianas (Les Deux Diane, 1846)
The Page of the Duke of Savoy, (1855) is a sequel to The Two Dianas (1846)
The Horoscope: a romance of the reign of François II (1858)
Joseph Balsamo (Mémoires d'un médecin: Joseph Balsamo, 1846–48) (a.k.a. Memoirs of a Physician, Cagliostro, Madame Dubarry, The Countess Dubarry, or The Elixir of Life)
Andrée de Taverney, or The Mesmerist's Victim, The Queen's Necklace (Le Collier de la Reine, (1849−1850)
Ange Pitou (1853) (a.k.a. Storming the Bastille or Six Years Later)
The Hero of the People
The Royal Life Guard or The Flight of the Royal Family, The Countess de Charny (La Comtesse de Charny, 1853–1855)
Le Chevalier de Maison-Rouge (1845) (a.k.a. The Knight of the Red House, or The Knight of Maison-Rouge)
The Companions of Jehu (Les Compagnons de Jehu, 1857)
The Whites and the Blues (Les Blancs et les Bleus, 1867)

Non-fiction[]

Impressions de voyage: En Suisse (Travel Impressions: In Switzerland, 1834)
Une Année à Florence (A Year in Florence, 1841)
De Paris à Cadix (From Paris to Cadiz, 1846)
Le Véloce: Tangier a Tunis (Tangier to Tunis, 1846-47), 1848-1851
Montevideo, ou une nouvelle Troie, 1850 (The New Troy), inspired by the Great Siege of Montevideo, Le Journal de Madame Giovanni (The Journal of Madame Giovanni, 1856)
Impressions of Travel in Sicily (Le Speronare (Sicily – 1835), 1842.
Captain Arena (Le Capitaine Arena (Italy – Aeolian Islands and Calabria – 1835), 1842.
Impressions of Travel in Naples (Le Corricolo (Rome – Naples – 1833), 1843
Travel Impressions in Russia – Le Caucase Original edition: Paris 1859, Adventures in Czarist Russia, or From Paris to Astrakhan (Impressions de voyage: En Russie; De Paris à Astrakan: Nouvelles impressions de voyage (1858), 1859–1862
Voyage to the Caucasus (Le Caucase: Impressions de voyage; suite de En Russie (1859), 1858–1859
The Bourbons of Naples (Italian: I Borboni di Napoli, 1862) (7 volumes published by Italian newspaper L'Indipendente, whose director was Dumas himself).

Public Domain Theatrical and musical Works[]

The Hunter and the Lover (1825)
The Wedding and the Funeral (1826)
Henry III and His Court (1829)
Christine – Stockholm, Fontainebleau, and Rome (1830)
Napoleon Bonaparte or Thirty Years of the History of France (1831)
Antony (1831)
Charles VII at the Homes of His Great Vassals (Charles VII chez ses grands vassaux, 1831). This drama was adapted by the Russian composer César Cui for his opera The Saracen.
Teresa (1831)
La Tour de Nesle (1832)
The Memories of Anthony (1835)
The Chronicles of France: Isabel of Bavaria (1835)
Kean (1836)
Caligula (1837)
Miss Belle-Isle (1837)
The Young Ladies of Saint-Cyr (1843)
The Youth of Louis XIV (1854)
The Son of the Night – The Pirate (1856) (with Gérard de Nerval, Bernard Lopez, and Victor Sejour).

Public Domain Appearances[]

Public Domain Literary Appearances[]

"Dumas, Alexandre, the Elder," in Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition (1875–1889)
"Portraits of Celebrities" in The Strand Magazine, 4 (19) (1892)
"Dumas, Alexandre (père)," in The New International Encyclopædia, New York: Dodd, Mead and Co. (1905)
"Dumas, Alexandre, the Elder," in The Nuttall Encyclopædia, (ed.) by James Wood, London: Frederick Warne and Co., Ltd. (1907)
"Dumas, Alexandre," in Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed., 1911)
The Life and Writings of Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870) by Harry A. Spurr (1902)
"Alexandre Dumas and His Son", a poem by Dorothy Parker (1928)

Public Domain Comic Appearances[]

It Really Happened #9: The feature titled Like Father, Like Son focused on the lives of the father Alexandre Dumas and his son Alexandre Dumas.

Notes[]

A list of public domain character created by Alexandre Dumas can be found here.
French historian Alain Decaux founded the "Société des Amis d'Alexandre Dumas" (The Society of Friends of Alexandre Dumas) in 1971, The purpose in creating this society was to preserve the Château de Monte-Cristo, where the society is currently located. The other objectives of the Society are to bring together fans of Dumas, to develop cultural activities of the Château de Monte-Cristo, and to collect books, manuscripts, autographs and other materials on Dumas.