Although he barely knew him in life, Alexandre Dumas dedicated the first two hundred pages of his memoirs to talking about his father. When the body of Thomas Alexandre Dumas was resting in the room, his son went up the stairs of the house and met his mother, who asked him why he was carrying a shotgun.
The four-year-old boy responded: “I'm going to kill God, who killed dad.” That episode, which occurred in February 1806, marked the end of a heroic career, while at the same time it had a decisive influence on the life of the future writer.
Thomas Alexandre, the Black Devil, was a French army general of slave descent whose exploits earned him endless praise. The mountain of exploits, provided verbally by friends of the soldier, by the writer's mother or by documents from the Ministry of War, served Dumas to delve into the qualities of his father and pour it into The Count of Monte Cristo, whose first installments are fulfilled 180 years this 2024.
The heroic soldier was born in 1762 in Santo Domingo, today Haiti, an old French colony in the Caribbean. His father, the Marquis Alexandre Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, had conceived him with a slave, and his relationship with his mulatto son, who was first sold and then renounced his surname, adopting his mother's (Dumas), provides insight. of its eventful future.
Repurchased by Davy, he moved to Paris and received an exquisite education befitting family status. The young Thomas Alexandre enlisted in the army, and in just seven years he became a general. He was the first mulatto in Europe to achieve it.
After the campaign in Egypt as a cavalry commander under Napoleon, the general sent a letter to his wife saying that he wanted to return to France. “My only wish is not to fall into the hands of the English,” she wrote, “to embrace the one who will never cease to be what I love most in the world.”
But on the return trip the ship was captured and he ended up imprisoned in a fortress in Naples for two years. It is precisely events like the confinement, which in fiction lasted until the age of fourteen, that Dumas used to nourish the most emblematic scenes of the novel.
The writer had already expressed his father's traits in George, which he published a year before beginning to publish, in August 1844 and until January 1846, the chapters of The Count of Monte Cristo in the Journal des débats.
Dumas, who had also infiltrated his father's skill with the sword in scenes from The Three Musketeers, once again recovered his biography to configure the misadventures of Edmond Dantès, that man who arrived in love at the port of Marseille and, falsely denounced, was locked in the dungeons of the Château d'If on their wedding day. The beginning of his most acclaimed work began, thus, with the penultimate chapter of his father's life.
Alexandre Dumas was born in Villers-Cotterêts in 1802, where his father had been sent, and there he met the woman who would become his wife, Marie-Louise Labouret. Upon the death of Thomas Alexandre, and despite the glory of a general who managed fifty thousand soldiers, the Dumas were left unprotected.
These economic problems soon led the young man to teach himself and work in Paris as a clerk for the Duke of Orleans. They were the first steps of a prolific writer who gave birth to more than three hundred works.
His entry into the universal history of literature was due to his novels. The editors of the Journal des débats had entrusted him with texts about some trips he had made during the 1930s, trips through several European countries that he called “impressions.” But those responsible for the publication, who wanted to maintain the great popularity achieved by the installments of The Mysteries of Paris, by Eugène Sue, encouraged him to change his literary register.
He, then, began to mix in The Count of Monte Cristo some select ingredients of love, struggle, loyalty or betrayal while simultaneously continuing to write works such as The Three Musketeers in other newspapers.
His production was enormous. Episode by episode, the adventures of a Dantès shaken by circumstances were compulsively consumed by readers. If they bought the newspaper and did not find among its pages the doses of intrigue or adventure around Edmond Dantès, many demanded the money for the copy.
Dantès contained traits of his father, yes, but Dumas had also used the story of a shoemaker to weave the plot of The Count of Monte Cristo. Pierre Picaud had gone to a tavern to order his wedding banquet, but the innkeeper and three customers ambushed him out of jealousy and accused him of supporting the monarchical regime at a time when Napoleon controlled the destiny of the French. .
The shoemaker was sent to a prison where he met a priest, who was serving his sentence in an adjoining cell and who left him his will with a mysterious treasure. After leaving prison and taking the loot, Picaud took revenge on his informers. The innkeeper survived and detailed the events to a priest, and that real report saw the light of day in the vast memoirs that Jacques Peuchet compiled from Paris police archives.
In the novel, the priest reveals to him the existence of the treasure on the island of Monte Cristo, located between Tuscany and Corsica, although Monte Cristo was also a Caribbean island where his paternal uncle traded sugar and slaves.
In addition to being based on the plot of The Diamond and Revenge, by Peuchet, Dumas left the doors of the enigma open by writing that the “intelligent reader” could find other sources of inspiration apart from the one mentioned. That comment was used by Tom Reiss in his biography The Black Count to delve deeper into it and demonstrate that Dumas's father is behind Edmond Dantès.
After fourteen years locked up, that simple man imprisoned for an injustice comes out transformed. The Count of Monte Cristo, under the spiritual conception, tried to push human beings towards their own realization in a time crossed by the end of the Ancien Regime and the rise of a rationalism that eclipsed disciplines such as occultism.
There are theses that maintain that Dumas's work is based on the novel Zanoni, which appeared two years before the first of the installments and where Edward Bulwer-Lytton urges the reader to undertake their own internal change. In addition, they wanted to see certain Masonic codes throughout some pages that, in principle, only tried to entertain the masses.
In The Hidden Treasure of the Count of Monte Cristo, Fabio García analyzes certain episodes of the narrative and compares them with the rites of two Masonic degrees, such as the way in which Dantès escapes from prison, which would be similar to the third Masonic degree, in addition of other events that the author believes correspond to the 18th degree, a degree reinforced by the red cross on the shield of The Count of Monte Cristo.
Dumas's literary success was always accompanied by excess and waste. In 1844, while the publication of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo made him rich, the writer bought land in Le Port-Marly, west of Paris, and commissioned the construction of a Renaissance-style palace.
The architect budgeted the mansion at fifty thousand francs, although unstable land and the extravagances of the future guest finally multiplied the cost by six. The castle was called Montecristo, the same name with which he would baptize the weekly magazine of history, travel and poetry novels that he founded in 1857.
But these initiatives were not the only ones that arose from his passions, since a decade earlier he had opened the Théâtre Historique, a stage in which he could refine his literary resources and give free rein to characters that he would later display in Le Siècle, La Presse , Le Constitutionnel or the Journal des débats. The project bankrupted him a few years later and he found himself plagued by debt.
The success and fame that elevated the novelist does not hide the quarrels that always surrounded him. Mockery because of the color of his skin, insults, caricatures exaggerating his features or contempt for writers like Balzac were common. His black ancestry, which in his father's time had been a source of struggle and pride, turned against the writer decades later.
They were turbulent times. The French Revolution was followed by the glory of Emperor Napoleon and a monarchical restoration finally abolished by the Revolution of 1848. The same desires for equality, liberty and fraternity that had led General Dumas to commit himself at the end of the 18th century were not in sight for half a century. after. To disdain for his dark tone, the writer used to respond sardonically that his race began where everyone else's ended.
His country never gave him respite. He was accused of plagiarism and historical inaccuracy, and was branded a “novel factory” due to his feverish production. The hefty writing pace is largely due to Auguste Maquet, to whom the judge granted a payment in recognition of his co-authorship of many of his works on the condition of erasing his name from the covers.
Dumas achieved literary glory, but was never accepted into the French Academy, as if the institutional contempt his father suffered were a cursed inheritance. Despite the unanimous praise for the general, he never received a pension for his services nor was he decorated with the National Order of the Legion of Honor, at a time when all revolutionary generals had achieved it.
Alexandre Dumas ended his days ruined and living in the home of his son and namesake, also a writer. After his death, at the age of sixty-eight, Victor Hugo wrote to him, recording many of the virtues that criticism had denied Dumas. And among dazzling praise such as “universal” or “sower of civilization,” Hugo chose the one that, perhaps, would have fulfilled the deceased the most: “It fertilizes the souls, the brains, the intelligences; creates a thirst for reading; deepens human ingenuity.” It was the first step to place Alexandre Dumas in the place where history awaited him.
