![]() ![]() The next year, his second play, Christine, was equally popular. His first play, Henry III and His Courts, produced in 1829 when he was 27 years old, met with acclaim. As an adult, he used his slave grandmother's surname of Dumas, as his father had done as an adult. While working for Louis-Philippe, Dumas began writing articles for magazines and plays for the theatre. Career Īlexandre Dumas by Achille Devéria (1829) Dumas was promoted to general by the age of 31, the first soldier of Afro-Antilles origin to reach that rank in the French army. As an adult, Thomas-Alexandre used his mother's name, Dumas, as his surname after a break with his father. īrought as a boy to France by his father and legally freed there, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas Davy was educated in a military school and joined the army as a young man. It is not known whether his mother was born in Saint-Domingue or in Africa, nor is it known from which African people her ancestors came. At the time of Thomas-Alexandre's birth, his father was impoverished. Thomas-Alexandre had been born in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), the mixed-race, natural son of the marquis Alexandre Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, a French nobleman and général commissaire in the artillery of the colony, and Marie-Cessette Dumas, an enslaved woman of Afro-Caribbean ancestry. Their parents were Marie-Louise Élisabeth Labouret, the daughter of an innkeeper, and Thomas-Alexandre Dumas. He had two older sisters, Marie-Alexandrine (born 1794) and Louise-Alexandrine (1796–1797). His tongue was like a windmill – once set in motion, you never knew when he would stop, especially if the theme was himself." Īlexandre Dumas, engraving by Antoine Maurin.ĭumas Davy de la Pailleterie (later known as Alexandre Dumas) was born in 1802 in Villers-Cotterêts in the department of Aisne, in Picardy, France. He also was the most delightfully amusing and egotistical creature on the face of the earth. The English playwright Watts Phillips, who knew Dumas in his later life, described him as "the most generous, large-hearted being in the world. Among his affairs, in 1866, Dumas had one with Adah Isaacs Menken, an American actress then less than half his age and at the height of her career. They are known as Alexandre Dumas père ('father') and Alexandre Dumas fils ('son'). He acknowledged and assisted his son, Alexandre Dumas, to become a successful novelist and playwright. He was known to have had at least four illegitimate children, although twentieth-century scholars believe it was seven. Though married, in the tradition of Frenchmen of higher social class, Dumas had numerous affairs (allegedly as many as 40). In 1861, he founded and published the newspaper L'Indépendent, which supported Italian unification, before returning to Paris in 1864. Decades later, after the election of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte in 1851, Dumas fell from favour and left France for Belgium, where he stayed for several years, then moved to Russia for a few years before going to Italy. At age 14, Thomas-Alexandre was taken by his father to France, where he was educated in a military academy and entered the military for what became an illustrious career.ĭumas's father's aristocratic rank helped young Alexandre acquire work with Louis-Philippe, Duke of Orléans, then as a writer, a career which led to early success. ![]() His father, General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie, was born in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti) to Alexandre Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, a French nobleman, and Marie-Cessette Dumas, an African slave. In the 1840s, Dumas founded the Théâtre Historique in Paris. He also wrote numerous magazine articles and travel books his published works totalled 100,000 pages. Prolific in several genres, Dumas began his career by writing plays, which were successfully produced from the first. His novels have been adapted since the early twentieth century into nearly 200 films. Many of his historical novels of high adventure were originally published as serials, including The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After and The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later. His works have been translated into many languages and he is one of the most widely read French authors. Alexandre Dumas ( UK: / ˈ dj uː m ɑː, d ʊ ˈ m ɑː/, US: / d uː ˈ m ɑː/ French: born Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie ( ), 24 July 1802 – 5 December 1870), also known as Alexandre Dumas père (where père is French for 'father', to distinguish him from his son Alexandre Dumas fils), was a French writer. ![]()
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