Alexandre Dumas (Dumas père)

Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870) was the grandson of a French nobleman and an enslaved Afro-Caribbean woman, Marie-Césette Dumas, in Saint-Domingue (Haiti). His father, General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, rose to become the highest-ranking person of color in any continental European army, whose heroic exploits inspired many of his son's novels.

Blessed with inexhaustible narrative energy and aided by collaborator Auguste Maquet, Dumas gripped the 19th-century public through serialization in Paris newspapers. In 1844, he published both The Three Musketeers (introducing d'Artagnan, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis with their rallying cry 'Tous pour un, un pour tous!') and The Count of Monte Cristo, the definitive saga of betrayal, subterranean treasure, and patient vengeance. In 2002, on the bicentenary of his birth, President Jacques Chirac presided over the transfer of Dumas's remains to the Panthéon.