Alexandre Dumas: author of The Three Musketeers

27:14No, that's really... There were no phones back there. That's it, right? He's just not on Instagram. The rest of us are just scrolling. Yeah, I could have an 800-day run of my beautiful play. I'm too busy watching recipes. So he has to run away. He has to flee. He gets in trouble with the king. What happened? Olivet, why is the king annoyed at this sort of young upstart writer? Well, for some reason, he decided to officiate the funeral of a Bonipartist general. Something you shouldn't just do. We don't know why. Anyway, the king considered his arrest. We've all done corporates, all right?

27:55Tax bills in January. Do you know what I mean? Check the date. But that was November, December. The problem is that he had to leave, though. He had to leave Paris. And so he went to the south of France and then to... Sounds nice. Switzerland. Yeah, sure. So it wasn't too bad. In wintertime, 1832-33, he published the accounts of his Swiss travels, so monetising the thing. Oh, OK, so he's a travel writer now. Exactly. First person in the world to publish their Swiss accounts. Hello. He travelled to Italy as well? Yes. He meets the Pope? I mean, he allegedly met the Pope. Allegedly? Yeah, because, I mean, he was arrested by papal police.

28:39So thanks to his revolutionary kind of reputation, so we're not quite sure he meant... The Swiss guards in their silly pyjamas arrested him. Yeah, absolutely. But he had to leave eventually. I mean, after his mother's death in 1836, he went on another journey, but this time through Brussels in Germany. Right. I mean, Celia, you're a touring comedian. Does travel inspire or does it tire? I think it's nice for your eyes to see different things. sorry i'm a poet write this down um so i think it is i feel like monotony of like saying staying in the same city can kind of get your brain stuck yeah in the same patterns i think it inspires um i think yeah definitely i think it's also quite stressful because like you do need like something to anchor yourself but it sounds like even looking back at his childhood it feels like he's had to run away from different places and bumping into more and more impressive people.

29:39Yeah, I mean, he knows the Duke d 'Orléans, he's met the king, he's now hanging out with the Pope, being arrested by the Pope. This is a quite well-connected guy. Very well-connected. I mean, again, his father was a general and he's coming from la pailleterie, I mean, aristocracy. But we should say again, he's mixed race, right? He is. He's moving through Europe, through France, but he's a mixed race man with a slightly competitive, difficult relationship with his father, who was a Napoleonist general. So these countries have been invaded by Napoleon. Napoleon is not necessarily everyone's best favourite friend.

30:13So it's kind of interesting being the son of a guy who invaded Italy and then going, hello. Yeah. I mean, that's why he chose Dumas to kind of perhaps be a bit further away from that as well. Right. OK. OK. That makes sense. pop quiz what's in your kids lunchbox at whole foods market they've already done the studying over 300 food ingredients are banned from their shelves no hydronated fats in the peanut butter and no high fructose corn syrup in the cookies and for sandwiches there are no synthetic nitrates or nitrites in any of their deli meat so you can pack lunch boxes with peace of mind get back to School ready at Whole Foods Market.

30:54Hi, I'm Dan Snow, historian and host of Dan Snow's History at Podcast. I want to tell you about a brand new series I don't want you to miss about the real history behind the Odyssey. With a major new Hollywood adaptation arriving this month, we'll trace Odysseus' epic journey across the Mediterranean, uncover the world of Mycenaean Greece and investigate the mysteries of Homer and what draws us back to this timeless masterpiece again and again. For everything you need to know about the Odyssey, check out Dan Snow's history hit wherever you get your podcasts.

31:26Well, let's break from politics and plays. Let's talk about the other big P. Let's talk about his big P. His passion. His passion. His passion for the ladies. Alexandre Dumas was a player. I mean, actually, I mean, Alexandre's love life. Was it as saucy as Monsieur Lasagne's reading list? even more even more saucy the sauce was bechamel that was so stupid okay he married right Exander he found a wife he settled down he married her and that was the love of his life yes no not right 1840 he married his mistress Ida Ferrier who is an actress they soon separated she moved to Florence in 1844 they never saw each other again great okay but he didn't stop there though he had oh well allegedly he had 40 mistresses throughout his life.

32:21Four zero? Four zero and claimed... 40 mistresses. 40 mistresses. Yeah, but that's not it. Juma himself said, I don't want to exaggerate, but I really believe that up and down the world, I have more than 500 children. How do you even... What's the math? I mean... Can anyone do quick maths? No. It's 500 divided by 40. I mean, yeah. Can we get... oh no but you can you can say anything can't you I mean sure no one's going to be like alright bring them producer Steve tells me that's 12 and a half kids per mistress so wow so that's oh my god which statistically means that some of those probably had 20 kids because you know law of averages bell curves I find it so funny like the idea of a man bragging about how many kids they've got like now they try and hide them yes it's the opposite Boris Johnson effect isn't it yes But he's going around going 500 kids.

33:18Why is he going for 50 ,000? He's building his own army. Like Daddy. I should have my own Dumat army. 40 mistresses. Okay, Olivette, from a legal point of view, in terms of inheritance law, how many of those 500 kids does he actually recognise legally and say, this is my son, this is my daughter? Well, he recognised five of them. Oh, my God. So 99 % of his kids, he's like, you're dead to me. Or maybe four, four or five. Ah, wow. Okay, who are the kids he recognises? Do we have a kind of roll call of official Dumas heirs? Yes, we do. I mean, we have Alexandre Dumas' Fils. Yes. With a dressmaker, Catherine Labey.

34:03And Dumas' Fils went on to become famous because he wrote the novel La Dame aux Camellias. Yeah, The Ladies and the Camellias. And then you have Marie-Alexandrine Dumas with Belle Krell-Samer, Henry Bauer with Anna Bauer, who was the wife of an Austrian merchant in Paris. Great. So his wives, his mistresses are cheating on their husbands. Great. That's also lovely. Michaela, Clely, Josepha, Elisabeth Cordier with Emily Cordier, who was 19 at the time when Dumas was 57. When they were in a relationship. What did they talk about? Yeah. You pulled the face there, Celia, that could best be described as smell the fart.

34:45Yes. It was an absolute... She was 19. He was 57. Yeah. They probably didn't talk, right? No, OK. Whatever did they get up to? I think we know. Yeah. We found the 12 and a half kids. Even worse than that, in his later years, his son and him would sometimes have the same mistresses. Sorry, say that again. His son. They would share mistresses. Yeah. So Alexandre Fies, junior. all for one and one for all right that's uh that's what the musketeers would say it's like i know so much about it's like i mean i know so much about him now so like i get it like i think like he sounds really charming he's had a lot of stuff interesting things happened to him in his life at the start of the episode all of it i listed some of the novels that have been turned into movies and tv shows we haven't talked about novels yet so we've talked about plays so far.

35:37He writes a lot of novels, but we will know some of the big ones. Can you talk us through the novels? Is he pivoting to novel because it's a new genre? Is it just that he wants to tell longer stories? What he does is writing things that can be serialised and that can be put into magazines. Just to give you an example, Le Capitaine Paul earned the magazine's siècle 5 ,000 subscribers in just three weeks. When you say serialised, this is what Dickens was doing too. He's writing chapters per week, like a new chapter each week in the magazine. So you have to subscribe to the magazine to read the novel.

36:09Yes. So it's like a sort of serialised story. It's like a soap opera. And he got in 5 ,000 subscribers. Yes. So amazingly, he's doing amazingly. So he carries on, he writes a novel called Georges about a biracial dual heritage son of a planter, possibly drawing on his own life. But his greatest success is, of course, with the D 'Artagnan romances. Yeah. So including the three musketeers serialised for six years and the Count of Monte Cristo serialized for two years in 1844-46. So it's working. It's a type that is working. He also wrote popular series about the Valois monarchs and including the very famous La Reine Margot.

36:53Yeah. If you remember the movie. Yeah, yeah, it's a wonderful movie. Elisabelle Adjani. Yeah, I mean, that's Queen Margarita, I suppose. And for listeners, we've done an episode on Catherine de Medici. She is the baddie in that novel. She is the villain, right? She's kind of conspiring and poisonous and sinister. I mean, the Three Musketeers stories are so famous now from Hollywood. We all know All for One and One for All and Men in Floppy Hats. But they're set in the 17th century, so they're set in the time of Louis XIV and Charles II. And they're really popular, aren't they? He's writing about a kind of romantic past.

37:26Yes, a romantic past. At a time where people wanted to dream about an imagined past. So it's working well for him, probably making him a lot of money and the way in more popularity as well. Was that a big blockbuster, would you say? Yes, absolutely. At the time it was. And yes. Monte Cristo is probably his biggest hit, do you think? I mean, that's the one that Hollywood keeps remaking. Have you read Count of Monte Cristo? I did at school. And actually, the more I'm here, the more I remember that I have read all of these things in school. But yeah, it keeps being remade. There's an amazing one with Pianiné that's gone massive now.

38:07Yeah, a big French one, isn't it? It's kind of amazing at putting his life experience into different voices. Do you know what I mean? Like everything kind of is the same thread, but like in different, you know. You're right, because Georges is about, as you said, a biracial son of a planter. So that's about his family story. The Musketeers is sort of about his dad as a sort of great soldier. And then the Valois Monique is about kind of the political intrigues that he's sort of been involved with, all the revolutions happening around him. La Reine Margot. So he's drawing on his own life, but he's kind of putting it behind a veil so that he doesn't get in trouble.

38:39Yes, absolutely. And you have the women's stories and characters, La Reine Margot. I mean, with all the nuances that you can have in a character like that. I'm just thinking about something. You know, I sent you a picture. I was in Marseille and I sent you a picture of Chateau d 'If. because I kept thinking about this place, this tiny place that is really almost oppressive in the south of France and to think that he based his novel on this place. I was just, I mean, I've been there many times but I was just moved and excited. A lot of his stories are based on real historical events. D 'Artagnan was a real guy.

39:15Was he? Yeah, and the Musketeers were real and D 'Artagnan was real. That's so cool. We should mention, however, the ghost writer, Well, August Macquet, who no one, we're not doing a podcast about this guy. He had a kind of secret co-writer. He did. He was really criticised about that. Macquet helped him with development and ideas, but Juma wrote the novels. He was accused. So he was like a director. That's interesting. So as a stand-up, you write your own shows, but you have a director who... Sometimes, yeah, you can, I think some stand-up will have directors. but directors take on different roles.

39:57So the way I've used them is more like architectural just because I'm too much of a silly billy for structure. And that's medical. You have a diagnosis of whimsical. Yeah, exactly. So Olivette, Mackey is the ideas guy, but Dumas doing the typing. He's actually there with Quill in hand writing these serialised novels, these huge... I mean, Monte Cristo is a massive novel. It seems to me that it was a collaboration between the two. Development ideas, it's a bit like they're brainstorming. And then Dumas is the one writing the novel. The problem is that not everyone liked that. For example, in 1845, there's a journalist who accused him of running a, quote, novel factory.

40:42And yeah, because he's producing so much, people are starting to say that can't be him and it can't be possible. The journalist also used the term, he's using a negre, which has a double meaning. It means a black enslaved person from the colonies and a ghost writer in mainland France. Oh, really? Yeah. Right. So there's a sort of allusion there to his mixed race heritage, do you think? Yeah, definitely. And the fact that he's not doing the work himself. But you might answer it quite rightly by saying that he had research assistants in the same way Napoleon had generals. Right. That sued the journalist and he won.

41:20That's quite a comeback, isn't it? Yeah. The more popular he got, it probably had more and more people trying to be contrarian as well. I imagine journalists wanting to... Yeah, take sort of shots at him. Yeah, which is often the thing with mixed-race people. There's often accusations of like... You can't do it yourself. You can't do it yourself. Who's really doing this? Yeah. Yeah. And it's interesting because they even accuse them of plagiarism. It can't come from your brain. so you're using young writers to do the work again. But the thing is, he never covered up the names of the collaborations.

41:52He was really open about it. And when other writers' names were not included, it wasn't his decision, it was the publisher's decision. Now, we can argue that he could have fought it, but we don't know what actually happened. And it's probably like, there were probably a lot of writers doing that, like using ghostwriters and stuff at the time. And that's why, like, that's where these accusations came from, and Meditris couldn't believe that he didn't. But it's funny to think of journalism being kind of the same as it is now. Do you know what I mean? Some things never change. Welcome to history, Celia.

42:27First day. First day. So Dumas is an incredible superstar of writing. He's doing a play every year for those 30 years. He's writing these vast novels, co-creating them with Mackey. And, of course, he's incredibly rich now. He's laughing all the way to La Bonque. and he builds himself a fancy little chateau. Celia, what do you think he calls it? What would you call it? Where is the chateau, please? Where is the chateau? It's in northern France, isn't it? Yes, it's in the Altscourt. Yeah, so outside Paris. D-Town. D-Town. Bring all the ladies to D-Town. Okay, for his 500 kids. He calls it the Chateau de Monte Cristo.

43:11that's sweet is it sweet or is it cringe I can't tell no that's his inner child work as you think I don't know it's a bit like Shakespeare having a house called like Hamlet House hello welcome to Hamlet House I don't know I feel like it's slightly bordering on fan fiction something made you have so much money you want to celebrate it I'll let you off it cost him an absolute fortune but he had to be big for all of the absence yeah exactly but he didn't relax long, Olivette. He was off travelling again. He's already toured Europe or whatever but off he went again in 1846. He did. He was offered 10 ,000 francs by the Minister for Public Information to travel to Algeria.

43:52Ah. Represent. Was it to write that you had to go to Algeria? Yeah, to observe, write, represent, as you said. Yeah. To tell the French people about Algeria or to tell the Algerian people about Algeria? Like, who's it for? What's the... I think given the colonial context, to try and tell them how it was and how it should be. What year was this? 1846. 1846. And Macquet, his co-writer, went with him. And so did his son, Alessandro Fis, Jr. I'm going to call him Jr. Sorry. They went as well. And they went to a royal wedding on the way in Spain. Which shows that he had his connections to the elite of the country.

44:37And not just the country, actually, across Europe, to be invited to those places. He's properly connected. But the following year, Celia, uh-oh, the creditors came in and turned out Alexandre Dumas did not have as much money as he thought he had. And he had to pay an awful lot of money to his ex-wife. Which one? The one that lasted like four years and then was gone. Ida, was it? Ida Ferrier. Yeah. So he's in trouble financially. He has to sell his chateau, doesn't he, for a pittance of what he'd spent building it. That's a shame. That's a real shame. Yeah. I saw some name. Yeah, the name would feel so sad.

45:12Yeah, exactly. That's devastating. You're right, actually. I take it back. It's not cringe. It's sad. He had to sell the chateau that was... It's like if you had a house called Chateau de Greg Genel. So he has to sell his house. Yeah. And then there's a coup in France, another revolution, the coup of Louis-Napoleon, 1851. Absolutely. Where the president of France says, actually, I'm basically emperor now. Yes. Yes. Obey me from now on. French history is fun, isn't it? Just about who's the most confident. But, you know, he used that as an excuse to kind of evade his creditors. Oh, good. So he's on the run.

45:47Okay. He's on the run. Where did he go? He went to Belgium. Excellent. Tax exile. Stayed there for two years. But he didn't stop his lifestyle because he was living in a luxurious lifestyle on credit over there. Yes. Good. So he's got his credit card. Amazing. I mean, you know, extraordinary guy. He wouldn't have made a great sort of financial columnist or even a dating guru, but he is a great writer. 1858, he travels to Russia. He did. He even, he traveled to Russia. He made another investment. He bought a small boat that he called Emma. He landed in Genoa. He learned that Garibaldi was trying to unite Italy.

46:26So he's involved in politics again. So this is Risorgimento, this is the unification of Italy. Absolutely. He's getting involved in other people's politics. He's getting involved. He's saying, oh, let me help. It's so funny. Let me stay and help. Because he's on the run, but he can't stay away from the action. He cannot. I've never seen someone on the run just meeting different leaders. Yeah, just showing up to royal weddings and just going, oh, there's an Italian civil war, so I'm just going to help out. Yeah, he did. So he's got 5 ,000 francs being given to him by Garibaldi to carry soldiers on his new yacht that he's just built.

47:00You gave Garibaldi power. Oh, he gave money. Okay, he gave money. In exchange, kind of return, they give him the King's Summer residence in Naples. Lovely. He spent a few years there. Yeah. And he returned to Paris in 1864. Great. I'm fascinated by this guy. Yeah. I don't know if I like him. I can't figure it out. Yeah, I can't figure out if I like the guy. There's a roguish charm. Yeah. But yes, on the run from his creditors, that's one thing. I just feel so funny how many times he's been on the run. And it's just like every few minutes, that's like the chorus in all of this. And now he's on the run again.

47:35It's a callback. I mean, we need to talk very quickly, Olivet, about the end of his life. I mean, we could do so many podcasts on his writing career. But the end of his life, ill health caught up with him, didn't it? Yes. I mean, he had an illness, possibly dropsy. He ran into financial difficulties. And eventually he died on the 5th of December, 1870, in his son's home. It would take the French state over 100 years to recognise him as a literary figure, but almost as a state person, because his remains were transferred to the Panthéon in 2002. His popularity grew, but his importance as a national figure came much later.

48:19Gotcha. And Dropsy, we should say, I think is an illness where you have swelling of the body. It's not very nice. So he was quite poorly in his life. He just missed the Franco-Prussian War, I think. He just missed the invasion of France by the Prussian army. So he's so nearly got another bit of history in there, but he just missed it, I think. So it's quite the life, Celia. How old was he when he died? He died in 1870, so he'd have been about 67, give or take. That's quite a long life. Yeah, he saw some stuff. Do you know what the problem is? Is that you've now started a thing where I feel like I just don't know enough, so I'm going to go home and just read his whole Wikipedia page.

48:57Does it resonate with you? I mean, his life, are there things that resonate with you? Yeah, I think there's quite a few things in it. You're flicking through your notebook. You've got quite a lot of notes there. I've got so many notes. From the street of the boy I fancy. There we go. To an entire man. The nuance window!

49:21It's time now for the Nuance Window. This is where Celia and I sit quietly for two minutes and make a start on reading The Count of Monte Cristo while Professor Olivet steps into the literary salon to tell us something we need to know about Alexandre Dumas. So my stopwatch is ready, Olivet. Take it away. I'd like to talk about Dumas and prejudice against people of African descent in the 19th century, and in particular how life was like for Dumas. He was the son of a minor aristocrat and the descendant of an enslaved person. The first point is that it wasn't unusual at all throughout the 18th and 19th century.

49:54You have a number of people of African descent from aristocratic families across Europe. However, the way they were treated depended on whether they were wealthy and protected by the country's leaders or not. Alexandre was attacked because of his ethnic background. but in many ways he was also protected by his class and his father's reputation as a respected general. He was not wealthy enough to just be a man of leisure as we have seen but he made a very decent life with his writings and could afford to live in very bourgeois houses in and outside Paris. However racism against him was evident in many ways.

50:30His popularity with readers and theatre Gours made him very well known as a literary figure. In other words, he was a celeb in the 19th century. He was the symbol of what white, middle and upper class France dreaded, a racially ambiguous man whose identity crossed several boundaries, especially at the time when so-called racial purity was advocated by the fathers of eugenics and race science. It was also the time when French Parliament voted for an act abolishing slavery, and that was in 1848. We have the government expecting and demanding actually former enslaved people forget about centuries of discrimination as they had officially been granted citizenship and that was very important.

51:11They were expected to get on with the order of things, for example the white men on top of the social and cultural ladder and them at the bottom, in other words, accept to be officially accept to be second-class citizens and forget about the past almost overnight. So behind the prolific author and love interest, we should also bear in mind that Alexandre Dumas was a dual heritage man who had to navigate a cruel and profoundly racist society. He did it with panache and charm. Amazing, Olivier. Thank you so much. Celia, any thoughts? No. What if it said at all? Yeah, I could have listened to you talk for like an hour.

51:54It resonates with French society, though. Yeah. That way you have to, as a dual heritage, you have to be always charming. Otherwise, it just doesn't work. One thing that I was thinking about, sorry to interrupt you, is the report to class. Because in my experience in France, obviously there's quite a lot of racism in France. But we'll talk about racism, but not classism in France. That's my experience. And I think that the position that he was in where he could be in with the higher societies because of his dad. but like still be a biracial man and suffering from that. Do you know what I mean?

52:29It must have been quite a confusing place to be in for him and quite like heartbreaking at times to kind of like be sitting at the top of all of these generals but still being made to feel small because of the rampant racism if that makes sense. Absolutely. That must have been really difficult. You know, you said that you don't know if you like him. You see? There's something there. Yeah. You're coming around to him. Amazing. So what do you know now?

52:57Great, it's time now for the So What Do You Know Now. This is our quickfire quiz for Celia to see how much she has learned. Celia, are you feeling confident? You've taken many notes. I've taken so many notes, but most of them are little drawings. Oh. And for some reason, 2002 has been written a million times. So we'll see. I'm excited. OK, OK. I'm excited. Lovely. OK, well, we've got ten questions. We'll start question one. Here we go. Question one. What was Dumas' father's occupation? He was a general. He was. He was a general in Napoleon's army. Question two. How did a young Alexandre Dumas avoid becoming a priest?

53:31He ran away and took a sausage and ran into the woods. He did. Very good. Question three. What did the king tell Dumas to do after the July 1830 revolution? That's when he was sassy, right? Yeah. I think he said, like, give up. Don't do this, Queen. He was very sassy. He told him to give up. He said, yeah, stick to poetry, don't do the army stuff. Yeah, that's right. So question four, in what literary medium did Dumas first make his name? Oh, that was plays. It was, theatre. But he was working with another guy at first and then he was bad when he started working by himself. Well done, well remembered.

54:05Question five, can you name two of the countries that Alexandre Dumas travelled to on his many adventures? Belgium and Russia. Very good, yeah, you could have Algeria, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, yeah, you got around. Question six, how many children did Alexandre Dumas claim to have? 500 children, 40 mistresses. One guy. Question seven. Who was Dumas' most famous son, who he apparently shared mistresses with? Oh, that's the fils. And he wrote a book and he was also a writer. He was, yeah, La Dame de Camille. La Dame de Camille. Yeah, that's a lovely one. That's good, you're doing very well. Question eight.

54:46Can you name two of Dumas' novels? Conte de Monte Cristo. Beautiful. And of course, how could I forget about la Reine Magot? Excellent. Well done. You could have had Le Capitain Paul, Georges and Three Musketeers' Romances, which are sort of several novels. They're very big. Question nine. What was the name of the opulent chateau Dumas built for himself using his writing income? Chateau de Monte Cristo. That was the bell when you got in. Oh, we should have a Dumas musical. That would be great, wouldn't it? And this for a perfect 10 out of 10. and I feel like you might get this one right because you wrote it several times.

55:21In what year was Dumas reburied in the Pantheon in Paris? 2002. 10 out of 10, Celia A.B. Well done. Thank you, everyone. You are the Dumas experts. Thank you, Olivette, for a wonderful history lesson. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much, Olivette. Thank you so much, Celia. And if you want more, Professor Olivette listener, check out our episode on the Chevalier de Saint-Georges. We've also got episodes on the Haitian Revolution, Napoleon, Catherine de Medici. And of course, episodes on Josephine Baker, who's also buried in the Pantheon. And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast, please share the show with friends.

55:55I'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests. In History Corner, we have the outstanding Professor Olivet Odele from SOAS, University of London. Thank you, Olivet. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure. And in Comedy Corner, we have the superb Celia AB. Thank you, Celia. Thank you so much for having me. That was so fun. It was fun. And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we turn the pages of another forgotten historical epic. But for now, I'm off to go and rename my daughter Greg Jenner Fee and encourage her to write history books for kids so I get to be rich and build a castle called the Chateau de Greg Jenner.

56:24Bye!

56:29You're Dead to Me is a BBC Studios audio production for BBC Radio 4.

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