Alexandre Dumas - Death and Legacy

Death and Legacy

At his death in December 1870, Dumas was originally buried at his birthplace of Villers-Cotterêts in the department of Aisne. His death was overshadowed by the Franco-Prussian War and later, changing fashions decreased his popularity. In the late twentieth century, scholars such as Reginald Hamel and Claude Schopp have caused a critical reappraisal and new appreciation of his art, as well as finding lost works. These contributed to the ceremony in 2002 to reinter Dumas in the Panthéon de Paris, an honor reserved for the great in French culture.

• 1970, the Alexandre Dumas Paris Métro station was named in his honour.
• His country home outside Paris, the Château de Monte-Cristo, has been restored and is open to the public as a museum.

Researchers have continued to find Dumas works in archives:

• In 2002, the scholar Reginald Hamel found Dumas' five-act play, The Gold Thieves, in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. It was published in France in 2004 by Honoré-Champion.

• In 2002 for the bicentennial of Dumas' birth, the French President, Jacques Chirac, had a ceremony honoring the author by having his ashes reinterred at the mausoleum of the Panthéon of Paris, where many French luminaries were buried. The proceedings were televised: the new coffin was draped in a blue velvet cloth and carried on a caisson flanked by four mounted Republican Guards costumed as the four Musketeers. It was transported through Paris to the Panthéon. In his speech, President Chirac said:

"With you, we were D'Artagnan, Monte Cristo, or Balsamo, riding along the roads of France, touring battlefields, visiting palaces and castles—with you, we dream."

Chirac acknowledged the racism that had existed in France and said that the reinterment in the Pantheon had been a way of correcting that wrong, as Alexandre Dumas was enshrined alongside fellow great authors Victor Hugo and Emile Zola. Chirac noted that, although France has produced many great writers, none has been so widely read as Dumas. His novels have been translated into nearly 100 languages. In addition, they have inspired more than 200 motion pictures.

• 2005, Dumas' last novel, The Knight of Sainte-Hermine, was published in France in June of that year. Featuring the Battle of Trafalgar, Dumas described a fictional character killing Lord Nelson. (In fact, he was killed by an unknown sniper.) Writing and publishing the novel serially in 1869, Dumas had nearly finished it before his death. It was the third part of the Sainte-Hermine trilogy. Claude Schopp, a Dumas scholar, noticed a letter in an archive in 1990 that led him to discover the unfinished work. It took him years to research it, edit the completed portions, and decide how to treat the unfinished part. Schopp finally wrote the final two-and-a half chapters, based on the author's notes, to complete the story. Published by Editions Phébus, it sold 60,000 copies, making it a bestseller. Translated into English, it was released in 2006 as The Last Cavalier, and has been translated into other languages.

Schopp has since found additional material related to the Saints-Hermine saga. Schopp combined them to publish the sequel Le Salut de l'Empire in 2008.