Alexandre Dumas, fils

This article is about the son. For his father, also an author, see Alexandre Dumas.

Alexandre Dumas
Born	Alexandre Dumas, fils 27 July 1824(1824-07-27) Paris, France
Died	27 November 1895(1895-11-27) (aged 71) Marly-le-Roi, Yvelines, France
Occupation	Author, novelist, playwright
Information
Period	Romanticism
Genre	Historical novel, Romantic novel

Alexandre Dumas, fils (French pronunciation: [alɛksɑ̃dʁ dyma fis]; 27 July 1824 – 27 November 1895) was a French author and dramatist. He was the son of Alexandre Dumas, père, also a writer and playwright.

Biography

Dumas, fils

Alexandre Dumas (fils) in his later years.

Tomb, Montmartre Cemetery

Dumas was born in Paris, France, the illegitimate child of Marie-Laure-Catherine Labay (1794-1868), a dressmaker, and novelist Alexandre Dumas. During 1831 his father legally recognized him and ensured that the young Dumas received the best education possible at the Institution Goubaux and the Collège Bourbon. At that time, the law allowed the elder Dumas to take the child away from his mother. Her agony inspired Dumas fils to write about tragic female characters. In almost all of his writings, he emphasized the moral purpose of literature and in his play The Illegitimate Son (1858) he espoused the belief that if a man fathers an illegitimate child then he has an obligation to legitimize the child and marry the woman. In boarding schools, Dumas fils was constantly taunted by his classmates because of his family situation. These issues profoundly influenced his thoughts, behaviour, and writing.

Dumas' paternal great-grandparents were Marquis Alexandre-Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, a French nobleman and Général commissaire in the Artillery in the colony of Saint-Domingue — now Haiti — and Marie-Cesette Dumas, an Afro-Caribbean Creole of mixed French and African ancestry.

During 1844 Dumas moved to Saint-Germain-en-Laye to live with his father. There, he met Marie Duplessis, a young courtesan who would be the inspiration for his romantic novel The Lady of the Camellias (La Dame aux camélias), wherein Duplessis was named Marguerite Gauthier. Adapted into a play, it was titled Camile in English and became the basis for Verdi's 1853 opera, La Traviata, Duplessis undergoing yet another name change, this time to Violetta Valery.

Although he admitted that he had done the adaptation because he needed the money, he had great success with the play. Thus began the career of Dumas fils as a dramatist, which was not only more renowned than that of his father during his lifetime but also dominated the serious French stage for most of the second half of the 19th century. After this, he virtually abandoned writing novels (though his semi-autobiographical L'Affaire Clemenceau (1867) achieved some solid success).

On 31 December 1864, in Moscow, Dumas married Nadjeschda von Knorring (1826 – April 1895), daughter of Johan Reinhold von Knorring and widow of Alexander, Prince Naryschkine. The couple had two daughters: Marie-Alexandrine-Henriette Dumas, born 20 November 1860, who married Maurice Lippmann and was the mother of Serge Napoléon Lippmann (1886–1975) and Auguste Alexandre Lippmann (1881–1960); and Jeanine Dumas (3 May 1867–?), who married Ernest d' Hauterive (1864–1957), son of George Lecourt d' Hauterive and his wife Léontine de Leusse. After Nadjeschda's death, Dumas married Henriette Régnier de La Brière (1851–1934) in June 1895, without issue.

During 1874, he was admitted to the Académie française and in 1894 he was awarded the Légion d'honneur.

Alexandre Dumas fils died at Marly-le-Roi, Yvelines, on November 27, 1895 and was interred in the Cimetière de Montmartre in Paris. His grave is, perhaps coincidentally, only some 100 metres away from that of Marie Duplessis.

Bibliography

Novels

French literature

By category

French literary history

Medieval 16th century · 17th century 18th century · 19th century 20th century · Contemporary

French writers

Chronological list Writers by category Novelists · Playwrights Poets · Essayists Short story writers

Portals

France · Literature

v · d · e

• The Lady of the Camellias (Camille) (1848)
• L'affaire Clemenceau (The Clemenceau Case) (1867)

Opera

• Verdi's La Traviata (based on The Lady of the Camellias)

Plays

• Atala (1848)
• The Lady of the Camellias (1848)
• Diane de Lys (1853)
• Le Bijou de la reine (1855)
• Le Demi-monde (1855)
• La Question d'argent (1857)
• Le Fils naturel (The Illegitimate Son, 1858)
• Un Père prodigue (1859)
• Un Mariage dans un chapeau (1859) coll. Vivier
• L'Ami des femmes (1864)
• Le Supplice d'une femme (1865) coll. Emile de Girardin
• Heloise Paranquet (1866) coll. Durentin
• Les Idees de Madame Aubray (1867)
• Le Filleul de Pompignac (1869) coll. Francois
• Une Visite de noces (1871)
• La Princesse Georges (1871)
• La Femme de Claude (1873)
• Monsieur Alphonse (1873)
• L'étrangère (1876)
• Les Danicheff (1876) coll. de Corvin
• La Comtesse Romani (1876) coll. Gustave Fould
• La Princesse de Bagdad (1881)
• Denise (1885)
• Francillon (1887)
• La Route de Thebes (unfinished)

See also

• Illegitimacy in fiction
• Legitimacy (law)

References

• Maurois, André (1957). The Titans, a three-generation biography of the Dumas. trans. by Gerard Hopkins. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers. OCLC 260126. 
• Lewis H. D. "A Critical Edition of the Manuscripts of 'La Route de Thebes' by Alexandre Dumas fils" Doctorate, University of Leeds, 1982

External links

• Works by Alexandre Dumas, fils at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Alexandre Dumas, fils in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

Persondata
Name	Dumas, Alexandre, fils
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	27 July 1824
Place of birth	Paris, France
Date of death	27 November 1895
Place of death	Marly-le-Roi, Yvelines, France