The World Of Alexandre Dumas and
The Three Musketeers
| 16 22 | King Louis XIII of France forms the Musketeers. His personal bodyguards, they number approximately 200 and are armed with the newly developed flintlock, muzzle-loading rifle, or musket. |
| 1642 | M. de Tréville, the Musketeers’ capitaine lieutenant, is involved in an attempt to assassinate the king’s adviser Cardinal Richelieu. The plot fails, and de Tréville is dismissed from the court and the Musketeers. |
| 166 7 | Born in 1632, the real-life D‘Artagnan becomes the capitaine lieutenant of one of the two companies of King Louis XIV’s musketeers. He is later appointed governor of Lille. |
| 1673 | The real-life D’Artagnan dies in the battle of Maestricht, Holland. |
| 1789- 1815 | The years surrounding the French Revolution and the rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte produce upheavals in French society. In literature, classicism, featuring universal themes and pure genres such as tragedy and comedy (the former represented by Corneille and Racine, and the latter by Molière), remains the dominant force. However, a new modernism, fueled by the works of Shakespeare, the German Sturm und Drang movement, and such Romantics as Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott, arises as a competing trend in which genres are often mixed. |
| 1802 | Alexandre Dumas is born on July 24 in Villers-Cotterêts, a village in the department of Aisne to the northeast of Paris. Dumas’s mother is Marie-Louise-Elisabeth Labouret, the |
| daughter of a local innkeeper; his father, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, is the Haitian-born son of the Marquis Antoine-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie, a French nobleman, and Marie-Cessette Dumas, an Afro-Caribbean slave from the French colony of Santo Domingo. | |
| 1806 | Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, a leading general in Napoléon’s army who has fallen into disfavor, dies, leaving his family impoverished. Young Dumas receives a limited education and becomes attracted to the popular literature of the time. |
| 1817-1820 | Dumas takes a job as a solicitor’s clerk in Villers-Cotterêts. At eighteen he meets Adolphe de Leuven, a young exiled Swedish aristocrat through whom Dumas is introduced to the Parisian theater scene. |
| 1822-1823 | Dumas relocates to Paris. With help from his father’s military colleagues and because of his elegant handwriting, he becomes a copyist for the Duke of Orleans, the future King Louis-Philippe of France, whose palace houses the royal Théâtre-Français. Attending a show one evening, Dumas meets writer Charles Nodier, who will later help advance the young playwright’s career. Dumas reads the work of Shakespeare, Scott, Byron, Schiller, and others influential in the development of the French Romantic movement. He meets Giuseppe Garibaldi, an Italian patriot and soldier who will influence Dumas later in his life. |
| 1824 | On July 27, Catherine Labay, a seamstress and neighbor Dumas had begun courting the previous year, bears him a son, Alexandre. (When the son later becomes a respected writer himself, he is known as Alexandre Dumas fils to distinguish him from his father, called Alexandre Dumas père.) |
| 1825-1829 | Dumas begins to write plays, often in collaboration with others such as de Leuven. In 1829 he achieves a resounding success when Henri III et sa cour (Henry III and His Court) is presented at the Comédie-Française. The author becomes an instant celebrity in Paris and wins admiration from the young Romantics. |
| 1830-1836 | During the Revolution of 1830, Dumas supports the liberal campaign of the Marquis de Lafayette. The same year, a riot pits young Romantics against classicists at the opening of Victor Hugo’s play Hernani, signaling the ascendancy of Romanticism in France. Dumas builds on his success as a playwright; his notable achievements include Antony (1831), La Tour de Nesle (The Tower of Nesle, 1832), and Kean (1836). La Tour de Nesle, in particular, is still considered a masterpiece of French melodrama. |
| 1837 | Amid growing fame and popular success, Dumas is honored with the title of chevalier by the king. |
| 1840-1846 | Dumas turns his attention to the novel. Newspaper serialization takes hold as a trend in France, and Dumas quickly proves himself a master of the genre. Les Trois mousquetaires (The Three Musketeers) becomes a popular sensation when installments appear in 1843. Within a decade two sequels follow: Vingt Ans après (Twenty Years After) and Le Vicomte de Bragelonne (The Viscount of Bragelonne). The success of Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (The Count of Monte Cristo), which begins serialization in the Journal des Débats in 1844 and is published in book form in 1846, eclipses even that of The Three Musketeers. Despite his success, Dumas is criticized for his vast production of material and is accused of overusing collaborators. |
| 1847-1850 | Dumas reaches his peak of success. He opens the Theatre Historique in 1847, mainly to present his own plays, including an 1848 production of The Count of Monte Cristo. He spends vast sums to build a grand, hybrid Renaissance-Gothic-style country house, named Monte Cristo, near Saint-Germain; some 600 people are invited to a lavish house-warming party in July 1848. With the Revolution of 1848, however, theater attendance plummets. In 1850 the Theatre Historique closes its doors, causing financial disaster for Dumas. His house, Monte Cristo, is sold at auction. |
| 1851- | After fleeing to Brussels to escape his creditors, |
| 1852 | Dumas is forced into bankruptcy. He never regains the prosperity of the preceding decade. |
| 1853- 1870 | Dumas travels extensively and produces travel books. From 1853 to 1857 he publishes a newspaper, Le Mousquetaire, and from 1857 to 1862 he produces a literary journal, Le Monte Cristo. While in Italy in the early 1860s he is an active participant in Garibaldi’s struggle for Italian independence. |
| 1870 | Alexandre Dumas dies on December 5, at Puys, near Dieppe. |