Alexandre Dumas (Radio Edit)

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1:28And to help complete our trio of musketeers, we have two very special guests. In History Corner, she's Distinguished Research Professor of the Legacies and Memory of Slavery at SOAS, University of London. You may have read her wonderful book, African Europeans, An Untold History. And you will remember her from our episode on the Chevalier de Saint-Georges. It's Professor Olivette Autelet. Welcome back, Olivette. Oh, hello, Greg. Lovely to be back. We're delighted to have you back. And in Comedy Corner, she's an award-winning rising star who won the Chortle Best Newcomer Award in 2022. Maybe you've seen one of her sold-out live runs at the Edinburgh Fringe or Soho Theatre.

2:02I certainly have. Or watched her on TV, on Live at the Apollo, or heard her on all kinds of podcasts, including Off Menu and The Guilty Feminist. It's Celia AB. Welcome to the show, Celia. Hello. Thank you for having me. Oh, it's lovely to have you in. Your first time on the show, which feels like a booking error. We should have had you on ages ago. I've been trying to get you on for ages. I will say the difference between your intro and my intro is so funny. You're clearly like a genius. And then it's like, and Celia's a clown. But a very respected clown. Respected clown. Yes, it is I. So Celia, you are French Algerian and you grew up in Paris.

2:39How do you feel about history, French history at school? I didn't really like history at school. I like it a bit more now. but I would say the bit of history I know the most about is the Algerian war. It's not the funniest. No, but I like it. I like history also when it's like more specific. So like day of the life of someone who lived in that period. Social history. Yeah, that's what I mean too. Good stuff. And Alexandre Dumas, did you do him at school? Is he kind of like the French Dickens? Do you have to read him? So the only thing I remember about Alexandre Dumas is that the first boy I was in love with lived on Dumas Street.

3:17That's a good anecdote. We'll take it. I just found out he's a playwright just now. Just now. I thought he was a street. Yes, we wouldn't really do an episode on a street, but it's nice to know that there's a romantic link there for you because he was a romantic writer. I'm excited to find out about this guy. So, what do you know?

3:42This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener might know about today's subject. And I imagine some of you will know Dumas' work. Maybe you've read The Three Musketeers or The Count of Monte Cristo or watched many of the film or TV adaptations of them. Perhaps you enjoyed a baby-faced Leo DiCaprio in The Man in the Iron Mask. Or you've seen the romantic and bloody La Reine Margot, a French cinema classic. And if you've been to Paris, you may have gone to the street named after him or used a metro station named after Dumas. But who was the real man behind the stories? Was he as swashbuckling as his literary heroes?

4:15What life events inspired his epic novels? And just how many mistresses can one man have? Let's find out. Right, Celia, give us a guess on where you think the story starts. March 2020. The Covid pandemic, you think? The Covid pandemic, yeah. I think, OK, so I'm going to say it's beginning of the 1800s. Does that sound good? That sounds great. Olivette, more specificity, please. Yes, of course. She wasn't far off. Oh, there we go. I mean, he was born Alexandre Dumas David de la Pailleterie on the 24th of July 1802 in Villers-Cotterêts. OK. And he was the second son of General Thomas Alexandre Dumas David de la Pailleterie and Marie-Louise Elisabeth Labouret, an innkeeper's daughter.

5:04OK. So the father has a fantastic name. Yes, he did. And mum is an innkeeper's daughter, perhaps slightly less fancy. Less fancy. Still, they made a baby. They managed, yeah. So Thomas-Alexandre, the dad, was of dual heritage, of mixed race, and he was born in Haiti to a minor nobleman, an enslaved woman. But the Dumas decided to go by his mother's name, Dumas. Thomas-Alexandre's father brought him to France, freed him because he was born an enslaved person, gave him a French education. The dad was involved in the revolution. but on the Napoleonic side. Ah, OK. Right. Tell us about his military career.

5:46This is the father of Alexandre Dumas, Thomas Alexandre. Well, he joined the Queen's Dragoons in 1786 and quite quickly by 1793 he was general-in-chief of the Army of the Alps and commanded 50 ,000 troops. Wow. Wow. So this is during the French Revolution. An even racist Prussian soldier referred to him as the best soldier in the world. So he was admired by people who didn't like people like him. So I'm immediately getting a sense that the kind of musketeers book is basically fan fiction for Alexandre's own dad. Yeah, it must be so hard to have a dad this impressive. I'm very lucky. But there's a tragic twist in the tale.

6:28His heroic father, this soldier in charge of a vast army, passes away when Alexandre is very young. Yes, absolutely. I mean, he died of stomach cancer in 1806 when Alexandre was just three years old. And that really plunged the family into poverty. The thing was that Alexandre actually worshipped his father. How do you imagine his childhood going from that point? That's a pretty rough start to life, isn't it, Celia? Yeah, that would have been... Also, in terms of romanticising your dad, we all, growing up, think that our dads are heroes, but his dad was actually very impressive. Yeah, literally a hero.

7:03And to try and cling on to the last memory you have of him, that would be really hard. And the mum as well. Oh my God. Yeah, it's a really sad start. So you said they were plunged into poverty. I mean, we're talking Les Miserables sort of on the streets begging for scraps type. You know, is he singing like Anne Hathaway? What kind of poverty are we talking? Not quite. He moved with his maternal grandparents in their hotel in Villers-Cotterêts. OK. So not quite that level of poverty. Does he get an education? He attended a Paris school where he was taught by the very famous abolitionist, Abbé Grégoire.

7:41But he was not a very attentive student, so he learned little French literature and history. But he did read the Bible, Le Baron Buffon, Arabian Nights, Robinson Crusoe, and classical mythology. So he's taught by this famous abolitionist, Abbé Grégoire, who's a sort of great intellectual and campaigner against slavery, which is a hugely important thing happening at the time because, of course, Napoleon reintroduces slavery. But we should talk about Napoleon because this is peak Napoleon era, right? Napoleon makes himself emperor. He crowns himself emperor in 1804, which is the most Napoleonic thing you can do.

8:14Presumably that influences Alexandre's childhood, the Napoleonic Wars, all the kind of drama. How does that affect him? Quite strongly because the wars lasted throughout his childhood, 1803, 1813. Young Alexandre even saw Napoleon twice. and he described him as pale, sickly and impassive. Oh! That's a pretty brutal review, Celia. Yeah, Napoleon is probably like, didn't say short though. But after the Napoleonic Wars, Olivier, the Bourbon monarchs are trying to restore calm to France, which, you know, they're doing their best. Does that mean that Alexandre's sort of teenage years are a bit more chill?

8:52There's no more troops in the streets? Chilled, I'm not sure. I mean, he became... It's still France, so no. Yeah. He still became an underclark at 14 and worked for a solicitor in Crepy. So while he was working as an underclark, he skipped work and went to Paris one day and fell in love with the city and the theatre. And he eventually moved to the city in 1823 when he was 20. He continued his career. Two generals his father knew recommended him for secretariat. Oh, so daddy's friends. Yeah, of Duke of Baby. Duke of Baby, yeah, OK. Duke d 'Orléans, you know, no less. The assistant director of the office, Lasagne, a man called Lasagne, advised him, though, to educate himself further and to read people like Froissat, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Byron, Hugo, Lamartine.

9:46So he needed further his education. So he's reading the classics. But I'm going to have to stop you there because you said Monsieur Lasagne. Monsieur, yeah. There's a lot of layers to this guy. Hey, hello. I'd love to be called Monsieur Lasagne. Is there a missus, Lausanne? He sleeps under lots of... OK, so Monsieur Lausanne is telling him, read the classics, educate yourself. Does he start to write? Yes, I mean, he's fascinated by literature. He met somebody called Adolphe de Leuven, a well-educated son of a count, as you do, who'd been exiled from Sweden for complicity in the king's murder. Oh, excellent.

10:25Good. So a bit of an edge there. Wow. Is he seeing anyone? So you have Leven and Dumas started to collaborate on act and plays in verse comedies. He was also writing solo, though, not very successfully. His first verse tragedy, Les Grecs, wasn't that good. I mean, according to himself, he said he gave it its due by burning it. Oh, you've burned anything you've written? Have you ever gone that intense? I think everyone is like a bit embarrassed by the first thing that you write. Instead of burning it, I performed it every day at the Edinburgh Festival. So in 1830, France again thrown into, you know, we talk about the French Revolution.

11:07We get another French Revolution. The 1813 July Revolution. Do you know this one, Celia? The 14th of July. Oh no, that was a different one. I love revolutions in July. Yeah, well, it's sunny. You're out on the streets, you know, barbecue weather. You think, actually, I don't really like the king. I don't know this revolution. This is the 1830. It's called the Three-Day Revolution. It's basically the Glastonbury of revolutions. Do you want to tell us about it, Olivette? Yeah. I mean, it's not supposed to be funny, though. Sorry. Try and stop us. Yes. So you have Charles X, who was the brother of Louis XVIII, deposed and replaced with the Duke d 'Orléans.

11:49In a letter, Dumas claimed that he was sent by Marquis de Lafayette and the Duke on the mission to acquire gunpowder. I mean, he probably exaggerated, but he did approach Lafayette about forming a national guard in the Vendée region. But the king told Dumas to return to poetry. Oh, stick to poetry. It's quite the burn. It's so sassy. Isn't it? You know, the more I learn about the king. OK, well luckily for literature lovers, Dumas obeyed the royal decree of sticking to poetry and he started banging out plays. Absolutely. I mean, between 1829 and 51, quite a long time, he started a new play on the Parisian stage every year except one.

12:31He pioneered two new genres, romantic historical drama and modern drama. And the plays often featured illegitimate or poor heroes struggling against societal obstacles and heroines who become victims to their lovers. There's one called Henry III and his court, or Henri-Trois. There's one called Antony. What's the general theme of his work? Antony, 1831, was about an illegitimate hero who was unable to marry his love because of social position. Right, OK. And in the end, she begs him to kill her. Oh, you said he was funny, Olivier. That doesn't sound very funny. Another one, La Tour de Nel, 1832.

13:12That was his most successful romantic drama and it was about Margaret of Burgundy who killed her lovers. OK. I'm sensing a theme. Yes. I mean, he was very successful, though, because you have 800 consecutive performances. That's absolutely huge. OK, that is amazing. That's extraordinary. Wow. That's like mousetrap level, isn't it, of having a play that just runs and runs and runs. In 1832, Celia, we get another French Revolution. This one's more famous. This one's the Anne Hathaway Revolution. This is Les Miserables. I like to call that Dance Dance Revolution. So we have the barricades in the streets.

13:49Yes. This time, Dumas, he has to leave France. He's in trouble. How old is he around this time? He's about 29. He's late 20s. So he's written, he's done all of this before 29. Yeah. Very prolific. Well, nepotism will get you anything. No, that's really, there was 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. And 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? Oliver. it 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 tax 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 Switzerland.

14:57Yeah, 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. 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. 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. OK, he married, right? Alexandre, he found a wife, he settled down, he married her, and that was the love of his life, yes?

15:43No, 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. OK. But he didn't stop there, though. He had, well, allegedly he had 40 mistresses throughout his life. Four 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 would you even... But you can say anything, can't you? I mean, sure. No one's going to be like, all right, bring them.

16:24From 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 recognises 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. Wow. OK, who are the kids he recognises? Do we have a kind of roll call of like official Dumas heirs? Yes, we do. I mean, we have Alexandre Dumas' fils. Yes. With the dressmaker Catherine or Catherine Labey. Dumas' fils went on to become famous because he wrote the novel La Dame aux Camellias. Yeah, The Ladies and the Camellias.

17:03And 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 wife, his mistresses are cheating on their husbands. That's great. That's also lovely. Michaela, Clely, Josepha, Elisabeth Cordier with Emily Cordier, who was 19 at the time when Dumas was 57. Celia. What did they talk about? Yeah. You pulled the face there, Celia, that best we described as smell the fart. It was an absolute... She was 19. He was 57. Yeah. They probably didn't talk right. No. Okay. Whatever did they get up to? I think we know.

17:47At the start of the episode, Olivier, 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. He writes a lot of novels, but we'll know some of the big ones. 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. 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.

18:21But his greatest success is, of course, with the d 'Artagnan romances, including the three musketeers serialised for six years and the Count of Monte Cristo serialised for two years in 1844-46. A lot of his stories are based on real historical events, aren't they? D 'Artagnan was a real guy. Was he? Yeah, and the musketeers were real and d 'Artagnan was real. That's so cool. We should mention, however, the ghost writer, August Macquet. Yes. You know one, we're not doing a podcast about this guy. Yes. 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.

19:06He 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, like, I think some stand-up will have directors, but directors take on different roles, so, like, 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. It seems to me that it was a collaboration between the two. Development ideas, it's a bit like they're brainstorming, and then they're 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.

19:50The 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 ghostwriter 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. Oh, that's sick. He sued the journalist and he won. That'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.

20:29I imagine journalists wanting to... Yeah, take 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? So Dumas is an incredible superstar of writing and, you know, he's doing a play every year for those 30 years. He's writing these vast novels, co-creating them with Macquet. 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?

21:05Where is the chateau? It's in northern France, isn't it? Yes, it's in the outskirts. 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. But he didn't relax for long, Olivette. He was off travelling again. You know, 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. Ah. Represent. 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.

21:47And he had to pay an awful lot of money to his ex-wife. 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, the name would feel so sad. It's like if you had a house called Chateau de Greg Genin. 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? But, you know, he used that as an excuse to kind of evade his creditors.

22:26Oh, good. So he's on the run. Okay. 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. 1858, he travels to Russia. He did. He even, he travelled 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. So he's involved in politics again. So this is Risorgimento. This is the unification of Italy.

23:05Absolutely. He's getting involved in other people's politics. He's getting involved. He's saying, well, let me help. Let me stay and help. Because he's on the run, but he can't stay away from the action. I'm fascinated by this guy. Yeah. I don't know if I like him. I can't figure it out. And that's what's interesting. We could do so many podcasts on his writing career. But at 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.

23:58So 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. From the street of the boy I fancy. There we go. To an entire man. The nuance window!

24:19It'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 you have a number of people of African descent from aristocratic families across Europe.

24:56However, 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. His popularity with readers and theatre goers made him very well known as a literary figure.

25:35In 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.

26:10They 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. Yeah, I was thinking about, Izzy, 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 you can, we'll talk about racism, but not classism in France.