Other things not to forget about Alexandre Dumas:
chose to take on his slave grandmotherโs last name, Dumas, like his father did before him.
grew up too poor for formal education, so was largely self-taught, including becoming a prolific reader, multilingual, well-travelled, and a foodie, resulting in his writing both a combination encyclopedia/cookbook (which justโ is fucking outrageous to me) AND the adaptation of The Nutcracker on which Tchaikovsky based his ballet
he also wrote a LOOOOT of nonfiction and fiction about history, politics, and revolution, bc he was pro-monarchy, but a radical cuss, and that got him in a lot of hot water at home and abroad.
even beyond that, he generally put up with a lot of racist bullshit in France, so he went and wrote a novel about colonialism and a BLATANTLY self-insert anti-slavery vigilante hero (which he then cribbed from to write the Count of Monte Cristo, the main character of which, Edmond Dantรฉs, Dumas also based on himself).
(โฆa novel which also features a LOAD of PoC beyond the Count, and at LEAST one queer character, btw, bc EVERY MOVIE ADAPTATION OF ANYTHING BY DUMAS IS A LIE; seriously, at LEAST one of the four Musketeers is Black, y'all.)
famously, when some fuckshit or other wanted to come at Dumas with some anti-Black foolishness, Dumas replied, โMy father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends.โ
for the bicentennial of his birthday, Pres. Jacques Cirac was like, โโฆsorry about the hella racism,โ and had Dumasโs ashes reinterred at the Panthรฉon of Paris, bc if youโre gonna keep the corpses of the cream of the crop all together, Dumasโs more widely read and translated than literally everybody else.
and they are still finding stuff old dude wrote, seriously; like discovering โlostโ works as recently as 2002, publishing stuff for the first time as recently as 2005.
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