Alexandre Dumas as a French Symbol

Philanthropy, and Civil Society: Toward a New Political Culture in the Twenty-First 
Century, eds. Soma Hewa and Darwin Stapleton (New York: Springer, 2005), 23, 
24; Schäfer, “Global History and the Present Time,” 108. As historian Lynn Hunt 
has observed, memory studies in history connect with those of time, yet the link 
between the two has remained underdeveloped. See: Hunt, Measuring Time, Making 
History (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2008), 16-24. 
36
In other words, a globalization (or universalizing) of the local and the localization 
(or particularization) of the global. See: Grew, “Global History and Globalization,” 
17; Schäfer, “Global Civilization and Local Cultures,” 301-319; Augé, An 
Anthropology for Contemporaneous Worlds, x. 
37
Manfred Steger defines the global imaginary “as a concept referring to people’s 
growing consciousness of global connectivity.” See: Manfred B. Steger, 
Globalization: A Very Short Introduction, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University 
Press, 2013), 10. 
38
On the relationship between a “portrait” and its subject, see: See: José Ortega y 
Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture, and 
Literature, trans. Helene Weyl (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968). 

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C
HAPTER 
O
NE
O
VATIONS AND 
O
MISSIONS
:
A
S
UMMARY OF 
A
LEXANDRE 
D
UMAS
’
S 
O
SCILLATING 
L
ITERARY 
L
EGACY
L
YNNE 
B
ERMONT
In 2019, the Musée de la Vie Romantique in Paris opened an exhibit on 
literary salons between 1815 and 1848 and the fecund interactions among 
writers, artists, and composers. The museum setting itself is emblematic of 
Romanticism given its convergence of the arts: its location, behind a 
courtyard strewn with roses and lilacs, is within the former home and studio 
of painter Ary Scheffer (1795-1858), who regularly hosted George Sand, 
Charles Dickens, Eugène Delacroix, Frédéric Chopin, Gioachino Rossini, 
Hector Berlioz, Ivan Turgenev, and Franz Liszt. The press release issued for 
the occasion referred to the greatest writers of the period, listed as Victor 
Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, Alfred de Musset, and Théophile Gautier. In its 
twenty pages, Alexandre Dumas was mentioned only once as one of Sand 
and Chopin’s neighbors, along with lesser-known Romantics such as 
“pianist Pierre-Joseph Zimmermann, singer Pauline Viardot, and painters 
Claude-Marie and Édouard Dubufe.”
1
The exhibit also included a painting by François-Joseph Heim encumbered 
with the title François-Guillaume Andrieux faisant la lecture de sa tragédie 
Junius Brutus dans le foyer à la Comédie-Française le 26 mai 1828. Despite 
the prolixity of its title, the painting offers a concise depiction of the French 
Romantic Movement: a panoramic portrait of writers including Hugo, 
Alfred de Vigny, and François-René de Chateaubriand. Dumas’s position in 
the painting echoes his devalorization in the exhibition as a whole: he is 
displaced at an oblique angle from Hugo and those occupying the 
illuminated center. He rests against the wall, his outline partly obscured by 
tenebrous space. By 1828, Dumas had already emerged, even sooner than 
Hugo, as one of the preeminent voices of Romantic theater. The 
composition is therefore prescient in that Hugo would continue to 

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Chapter One 
2
overshadow Dumas, despite the latter’s dramaturgical prowess. Dumas 
would be subject to scabrous critique, even as his works became among the 
most successful French works of all time, not only in France but also across 
the globe. For example, according to UNESCO’s Index Translationum, he 
ranks thirteen among the world’s top fifty most translated authors, just 
behind the Brothers Grimm and just ahead of Fyodor Dostoevsky.
2
Dumas’s literary ambition launched in his late adolescence. Rapt with 
the theater since his first provincial encounter with Hamlet at age eighteen, 
Dumas fled his northern village for Paris as a twenty-one-year-old to pursue 
his writing career. To pay the carriage fare, he sold etchings his father had 
brought back from Napoleonic battles in Italy and bartered six hundred 
glasses of absinthe won in a billiards game.
3
Once in Paris, Dumas 
supported himself with secretarial work for the Duke d’Orléans and 
attended weekly performances at the Théâtre de la Comédie-Française 
while he toiled away at poetry, short stories, and farces. 
As an aspiring dramatist, Dumas also submitted work to be read in the 
foyer of the Comédie-Française, the culmination of an arduous audition 
ritual as depicted in Heim’s aforementioned painting. Undaunted by the 
failure of his first scripts, Christine and Fiesque, Dumas submitted an even 
more audacious work, Henri III et sa cour (1829), which was accepted and 
staged. Written in prose, like comedies and melodramas of its day, the play 
was an amalgam of history and imagination, layered with rousing plots, 
salacious betrayal, and preternatural interventions. While purportedly a 
political fable or historical drama, its fantastical elements vexed 
conservative critics while enthralling the young Romantic contingent who 
embraced it as brazenly modern.
4
The success of Henri III secured Dumas’s place among the most 
distinguished writers of his time and entry into the most storied literary 
salons described in the exhibit at the Musée de la Vie Romantique. For 
example, Dumas participated in Hugo’s Cenacle, which included Gérard de 
Nerval and Musset, and the convivial soirées hosted by librarian Charles 
Nodier alongside Hugo, Alphonse de Lamartine, and Vigny. Among the 
literati at least, there was no question as to his prominent role in the 
burgeoning Romantic Movement. 
In February 1829, Dumas’s Henri III et sa cour ushered in an era of 
French Romantic theater at the Comédie-Française, which had been offering 
audiences William Shakespeare translated by Vigny and Johann Wolfgang 
von Goethe translated by Nerval. As Dumas described in his memoir,