Alexandre Dumas

Alexandre Dumas was born in 1802 in Villers-Cotterêts, a small town north-east of Paris. His father, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, was the son of a French nobleman and an enslaved woman in Saint-Domingue and rose to be a general in the Revolutionary army. He died when Alexandre was four, and the family was left poor.

Dumas moved to Paris at 20 to work as a clerk for the future King Louis-Philippe and began writing plays. His historical dramas made him famous in the 1830s. He then turned to serial novels for newspapers, often written with assistants, above all Auguste Maquet. The Three Musketeers (1844) came out of this partnership, and so did The Count of Monte Cristo (1844 to 1846). It follows Edmond Dantès, a sailor framed and jailed for 14 years, who escapes, finds a hidden fortune and returns under a new name to punish the men who betrayed him.

He earned and spent fortunes and fled creditors more than once. Critics in his day called his workshop a fiction factory. He died in 1870. In 2002 his remains were moved to the Panthéon in Paris.