Alexandre Dumas fils

Alexandre Dumas fils (Paris, 1824 – Marly-le-Roi, 1895) was a French playwright and novelist of the nineteenth century. He wrote in French, and his name is most closely tied to La Dame aux camélias, the story that became the basis of Giuseppe Verdi's opera La traviata. He matters because he used the stage to examine social prejudice and moral duty, and because he brought the situation of illegitimate children and marginalised women into the theatre.

He was the illegitimate son of the novelist Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers, and of Marie-Catherine Labay, a dressmaker. In 1831 his father formally recognised him and arranged for him to receive a strong education at the Collège Bourbon. The law of the time allowed the elder Dumas to take the boy away from his mother, and her suffering later shaped the younger Dumas's interest in tragic female characters. At boarding school his classmates mocked his origins. His paternal grandfather, General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, was the son of a French aristocrat and an enslaved woman in the colony of Saint-Domingue, a heritage that added to the pressures he faced and to his preoccupation with exclusion.

His first book was a collection of poems, Sins of Youth (1847), in which he distanced himself from the dissolute life of his early years. In 1844 he moved with his father to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and that same year, in Paris, he met Marie Duplessis, a young courtesan whose story inspired La Dame aux camélias (1848). The stage version, known in English as Camille, was so successful that it encouraged him to devote himself to drama. He later admitted he had made the adaptation largely for the money, but the production launched his career as a playwright. For much of the second half of the century he dominated the serious French stage with plays that attacked social hypocrisy and argued for the rights of women and children. One of his most debated plays held that a man who fathers an illegitimate child has a moral duty to acknowledge it and marry the mother. After his early works he almost stopped writing novels, although his semi-autobiographical Affaire Clémenceau achieved solid success.

In 1864 he married Princess Nadezhda Naryshkina in Moscow, and the couple had daughters. After her death he married Henriette Régnier in 1895. In 1863 the Catholic Church placed his romantic novels on the Index of Prohibited Books. He was admitted to the Académie française in 1874, despite the stubborn opposition of Victor Hugo, and received the Légion d'honneur in 1894. He died at his property in Marly-le-Roi in November 1895 and was buried in Montmartre Cemetery. His legacy rests on the moral drama he helped establish, on the enduring afterlife of Marguerite Gautier and Violetta Valéry, and on the museum in Villers-Cotterêts that honours him and his father together.