His sheer popularity may have militated against the consolidation of Alexandre Dumas's literary reputation. Now, in the bicentenary of his birth, he is getting the ultimate recognition of burial in the Panthéon. Lara Marlowe reports from Paris.
It is a historical and literary revenge worthy of his best known character, the Count of Monte Cristo. Two hundred years after his birth, 132 years after he died, Alexandre Dumas père has received the veneration of the French establishment. By decree of President Jacques Chirac, his remains will be transferred from the small town where he was born in Picardy on July 24th, 1802 to the Panthéon, burial place of great Frenchmen.
Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers are probably the best known French novels in the world. Lenin said the tale of Edmond Dantès was his favourite book. The Chinese president, Jiang Zemin, has called the story of a man imprisoned in the Château d'If on false charges of conspiracy, who escapes, finds hidden treasure and devotes years to the pursuit of revenge, "the absolute novel".
Douglas Fairbanks, Jean Marais, Michael York, Gérard Philippe and Jean-Paul Belmondo are a few of the 65 actors who have played D'Artagnan, the nobleman who sets off for Paris in the early 17th century, joins King Louis XIII's musketeers and forges a virile friendship with Athos, Portos and Aramis after duelling with them. Brandishing toy swords, children all over the world have cried "One for all, all for one", without knowing that the motto was devised by Alexandre Dumas.
The Sorbonne professor, Claude Aziza, counts 312 feature films adapted from Dumas novels, including 85 silent movies. These include 33 Musketeers and 21 Monte Cristos. In recent years, Patrice Chéreau directed Isabelle Adjani in Dumas's La Reine Margot and Leonardo DiCaprio starred in The Man in the Iron Mask, which Dumas based on the mystery of a man held prisoner for more than 40 years by Louis XIV. Another US version of Monte Cristo was released this year, and Michael Jackson is producing and acting in Wolfed, also based on a Dumas novel.
But Dumas was snubbed in his lifetime; in the 19th century, mixed race was a social handicap. Critics mocked his curly hair and prolific output - 1,200 books by his count, between 600 and 700 according to experts, often written with the help of ghost writers called nègres. Dumas's biographer, Daniel Zimmermann, credits him with creating 37,267 human characters.
As the tabloid, France-Soir, puts it, Dumas's blood was "black and blue": black through his grandmother, a slave on the Caribbean island of Santo Domingo; blue through his father's noble family, the Davy de la Pailleteries. The name Dumas is an allusion to his grandmother's origin, a contraction of the words "du mas", or "from the farmhouse". As the writer, Gonzague Saint Bris, says, Dumas "carried in his veins all the contradictions of society, black blood and white blood, aristocratic and servile origins".
Dumas was "a bankrupt millionaire, in love with women and unfaithful to them all, a friend of princes and workers, immensely hard-working and lazy . . ."
In our time, Dumas's sin is being a "popular" writer. He appears in few literary anthologies, and is not taught in French lycées. "People admitted that his books made enjoyable reading," says Alain Decaux of the Académie Française, who is the honorary president of the Association of Friends of Dumas. "But then they put their noses up: he has been read by too many people".
On the 200th anniversary of Dumas's birth, writing in Le Figaro, François Taillandier called him "the French people's first history professor". Dumas's father, a Napoleonic general, fought in the Egyptian and Italian campaigns. Gen Thomas-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie was imprisoned by the Bourbon King Ferdinand in Naples in 1799. The king's agents destroyed his stomach by trying to kill him with rat poison. The general died when Alexandre was only four years old. Some 60 years later, the writer took revenge against the Bourbons by buying rifles for Giuseppe Garibaldi's forces and joining in their invasion of Sicily and Naples.
The orphaned Dumas became a notary's clerk at the age of 14, then went to Paris at 21, to work as a secretary to the Duc d'Orléans, the future King Louis-Philippe. His son, Alexandre, the first of many illegitimate Dumas children and the future author of the tear-jerking classic, La Dame Aux Camélias, was born when Alexandre père was 22; it would take him seven years to acknowledge paternity. Of his vast consumption of women, Dumas père said, "It is out of humanity that I have mistresses. If I had but one, she would die in eight days".
Dumas père's first huge success was also the first play of the romantic period, Henri III and his Court, first staged in 1829. Dumas invited Victor Hugo to the première, and the two became lifelong friends. The following year, Dumas's Antony consolidated his fame. Its last line - "She resisted me, so I killed her" - was the most famous sentence of the 1830s. In his memoirs, Dumas recounted how 25 dinner guests complained that another play, Christine, fell flat. After midnight, Victor Hugo and poet Alfred de Vigny told Dumas to go to bed, then rewrote the manuscript while he slept, slipping the polished work under his pillow in the early hours of the morning.
Dumas shifted from theatre to novels with The Three Musketeers in 1844. In the burst of energy sparked by its triumph, he produced 13 books over the following year. Dumas' swashbuckling adventures familiarised generations of French people with factually flawed versions of 17th- and 18th-century France. "Historical truth is a girl you can rape, as long as you give her beautiful children," Dumas said.
Like other 19th-century greats - Dickens, Balzac, Hugo - the sheer volume of Dumas's writing was astounding. Dumas was also a journalist, founding eight publications in the course of his lifetime. He often worked on three or four manuscripts at a time, and, like Balzac, staved off creditors. Both men wrote serialised fiction for newspapers; in 1844, Balzac - the better writer - underwent the humiliation of seeing his series cancelled so that he could be replaced by Dumas.
Long before cinema or television, Dumas knew how to hold the reader's attention with dialogue, action, brief descriptions and un-nuanced characters. Every chapter ended in suspense, with the words, "to be continued".
Dumas enjoyed a reputation as a generous man who loved animals, women and food. He gave up trying to stay slim from the age of 40, and his last book, Dictionary of Cuisine, includes descriptions of the dishes he sampled in travels to North Africa and Central Asia.
Dumas's death from a type of anthrax went almost unnoticed because it coincided with the Prussian invasion of France in 1870. "Deep down in your heart, do you believe that anything will remain of me?" he asked his adored son, Alexandre, on his deathbed.
Victor Hugo paid a moving tribute to Dumas, calling him "the most popular man of the century" and praising him as "more than French . . . European; more than European . . . universal". Dumas "sowed civilisation" and was "a great, good soul", Hugo said.
Celebrations of Hugo's bicentennial have overshadowed commemorations of Dumas, which began with his birthday on July 24th and will culminate in the Panthéon on October 3rd. But at least Dumas's wish will finally be fulfilled when his remains are placed alongside Hugo's in the Panthéon.
Information on the Dumas bicentennial can be found at www.acamedia.fr/dumas/