Alexandre Dumas

Alexandre Dumas was born on 24 July 1802 in the small town of Villers-Cotterêts. His father, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, was the son of a French nobleman and an enslaved woman in Saint-Domingue; he rose to the rank of general in the armies of the Revolution, fell out with Napoleon, and died in 1806, before his son turned four. The widow was granted no pension and the family sank into poverty. Schooling was scarce, and the boy's only asset was his fine handwriting; at fourteen he became a clerk to the local notary. In 1823 he left for Paris, where that same handwriting won him a place in the offices of the Duke of Orléans, the future king Louis-Philippe. His evenings belonged to the theatre, his nights to Shakespeare and Schiller. In February 1829 Henry III and His Court, staged at the Comédie-Française, caused an uproar by brushing the classical rules aside; coming a year before Hugo's Hernani, it was taken as the first victory of Romantic drama. Two years later Antony settled his name. He found his true vein in the 1840s, when the newspapers opened their columns to the serial novel. Working with Auguste Maquet, in 1844 he ran The Three Musketeers in Le Siècle and The Count of Monte Cristo in the Journal des débats. He spent as fast as he earned: he founded a theatre of his own and had the Château de Monte-Cristo built at Port-Marly. When the theatre went bankrupt in 1850 he fled his creditors to Brussels. Later he travelled across Russia, joined Garibaldi in Italy and lived four years in Naples. He handles history not as an archive but as a stage: dialogue drives the action, and the instalment breaks off exactly where curiosity bites hardest. He took the historical novel out of a narrow circle of readers and handed it to a mass public, setting down patterns of adventure storytelling that still work today. On 5 December 1870, in the middle of the war with Prussia, he died almost penniless at his son's house in Puys, near Dieppe. In 2002 his remains were moved to the Panthéon.