Alexandre Dumas as a French Symbol

Comment je devins auteur dramatique, the play progressed with the 
audience’s “growing delirium.”
5
Even the Duke d’Orléans, whom Dumas 
had invited, tipped his hat to the writer and joined in the uproarious 

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Ovations and Omissions 
3 
applause.
6
Enthusiastic young Dumas fans ran through the theater after the 
performance, proclaiming the end of Jean Racine, the canonical 
seventeenth-century tragedian, and attempted to defenestrate the busts of 
ancient playwrights.
7
However, in February 1830, Dumas was demoted from his leading role 
in French Romantic theater. Hugo’s Hernani was performed in the 
Comédie-Française and has since been deemed the “public triumph of 
Romantic doctrine.”
8
Gautier presided over the young, Romantic faction in 
the audience while wearing a red doublet, a ribbon around his neck under 
his scandalously long hair. As historian Anita Brookner explains, “he was 
reported to have seen the play forty times, and no doubt loyally joined in 
the roar of approval when the famous enjambment, or irregularly stressed 
couplet, was heard.”
9
This metric aberration was just one example of 
theatrical transgressions that scandalized the audience as Hugo breached the 
three unities of classical theater: unity of setting, time, and plot. 
Dumas, Balzac, Berlioz, and Nerval were also in attendance that night 
and compounded the pro-Hugo clamor, impassioned debate, and polemical 
paroxysm that ensued in newspapers long after the performance.
10
While 
Dumas’s epochal play, Henri, preceded Hernani, Hugo’s work somehow 
became inscribed in literary history as the cataclysmic event that initiated 
Romantic theater. It would not be the last time literary laurels would elude 
Dumas in favor of Hugo, his dear friend and contemporary. 
Despite the demotion, the ardor of Dumas’s literary ambition and 
audacity were undiminished. For example, during the Revolution of July 
1830, Dumas joined the insurrection in the streets of Paris protesting King 
Charles X. The king’s promulgation of undemocratic constraints, exacerbated 
by high unemployment and high wheat prices, instigated riots in which 
2,500 members of the royal troops were killed.
11
When hordes stormed the 
Museum of Artillery seeking arms, Dumas saw an opportunity to 
theatricalize his participation in the revolt. According to his memoirs, 
Dumas donned the helmet, shield, and sword of King François I, and then 
returned to the streets decked out in Renaissance armor.
12
The insurgence 
resulted in the removal of King Charles X and a new constitutional 
monarchy led by his nephew, Louis-Philippe, Duke d’Orléans. 
In an August 1830 letter to the poet Marceline Desbordes Valmore, 
Dumas admits that his fervid historical narratives seem pallid in contrast to 
the revolt in which he participated, and yet he recounts it as an aesthetic 
event rather than a political reality: “What I have just seen is so beautifully 
poetic and dramatic, Madame, that there are moments when I believe I have 
now given up writing, even one word; what is there to be done after what 
has already been done? What theatrical drama can match that of the 

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Chapter One 
4
street?”
13
Despite this momentary incertitude, Dumas emerged from the 
barricades an emboldened playwright, adamant as ever to subvert the 
traditional temporal constraints of the genre. He invested this vigor into his 
next theatrical endeavor, Napoléon Bonaparte, ou Trente ans d’histoire de