Alexandre Dumas as a French Symbol

One Alexandre Dumas or Many?
 
 
The Dumas of French Memory and the Forging
of a Contemporaneous Humanity 
These multifaceted conceptions/constructions of Dumas reflect attempts 
to realign this symbol of “France” with changing, seemingly crystalized 
notions of French identity circulating within the collective French 
consciousness. What it means to be French, however, has not been static, 
but rather in a constant state of revision during the past two centuries despite 
proclamations of cultural continuity. Narratives of national development 
erase the incongruities through which national identity was formed into a 
linear and seemingly inevitable progression. As Etiénne Balibar has argued, 
the “formation of the nation thus appears as the fulfillment of a ‘project’ 
stretching over centuries, in which there are different stages and moments 
of coming to self-awareness.”
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Nations, as imaginary constructions whose 
authentication rests on a system of cultural fictions, rely on popular media 
and public ceremonies to help preserve stories of national origin and 
evolution that create a national memory. The Dumas of memory has 
emerged as an integral component of the memorial heritage of the French 
nation’s formation in the construction of these cultural fictions. 
Since lieux de mémoire are in a state of flux, the Dumas of memory has 
had its own complex construction dating from Dumas’s lifetime. The 
Dumas of memory and the historical Dumas are obviously intertwined: the 

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Alexandre Dumas as a French Symbol since 1870 
xv 
Dumas of memory derives its reality from the Dumas of history, and the 
Dumas of history is reconstituted in retrospect by the Dumas of memory. 
Elites occupy key roles in manifesting, actualizing, and articulating national 
identity.
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The consensus views reached when government officials or their 
representatives, along with intellectuals, arrived at a general agreement 
about how Dumas and his works should be perceived and evaluated in 
broader French society have changed over time. French intellectuals and 
politicians of different generations have thus created multiple Dumases, 
imposing intentionally anachronistic interpretations on the Dumas of the 
past to create ones to meet the needs of different presents. Each instance 
resulted in a Dumas selectively distinct from the historical one. The conflict 
over how to classify, or situate, Dumas, a symbol of French culture, as a 
result of his biracial heritage reflected a larger conflict over who and what 
constituted being French. At the heart of Dumas’s (re)conceptualizations 
over time has been the problem of how to reconcile his dual racial identities 
within his context as a French symbol.
This “Dumas puzzle” reflected a local variation of a wider Western 
geo-psychology dating from the early modern era that organized the globe 
temporally, creating contemporaneous (in the present) and non-
contemporaneous (backward) peoples even though all existed in the same 
present to justify European dominance over an “expanding” globe. Such a 
process formed individual European identities in opposition to “distant” 
Others.
30
However, the spreading of transportation, communication, and 
information networks via colonialism, particularly during the New 
Imperialism, unintentionally resulted in the rise of a single “technoscientific 
civilization” and the socio-cultural collapse of identities based on 
distance/difference.
31
Consequently, a new dominant geo-psychology has 
formed since the World War II era characterized by a contemporaneous 
humanity—a newly conceptualized form of social integration in which 
individuals/groups increasingly identify themselves as part of a single and 
equal human race in which all exist in the same time/present.
32
Colonial 
empires thus served as globalizing agents that resulted in a sense of time-
space compression that displaced non-contemporaneity in our global era 
and allowed a reassessment of Europe’s relationship to the wider world.
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Conceiving national identities within a contemporaneous globe has 
provided new challenges to Western nation-states. 
Because of Dumas’s simultaneous connections to France and perceived 
connections to Africa due to his black heritage, examining the different 
conceptions of Dumas over time at specific moments reveal French attempts 
to resolve or come to terms with problems of national identity linked to a 
globalizing world and the shift to contemporaneity. Dumas’s 

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Introduction 
xvi
heritage/hybrid status is non-variable; one cannot change someone’s 
ancestry. But different, or variable, interpretations of this ancestry, and of 
Dumas’s role within French society and culture, reflect not only changing 
perceptions of French identity but also shifting conceptions of the 
contemporaneous and non-contemporaneous worlds, or changing con-
ceptions of Europe’s relationship to global diversity. As a result, changing 
interpretations of Dumas reflect aspects of the local (i.e. national) cultural and 
social effects of the processes of globalization. Dumas thus reflects part of the 
French localization of globalization, or how local French culture and society 
is continually reshaped through diverse processes of globalization.
34
It thus 
sheds light on how some of globalization’s cultural and social 
consequences were internalized and adapted in France.
35
Globalization 
processes consequently consist of an interaction, rather than confrontation, 
between the global and the local resulting in the reconstitution of both.
36
Broadly speaking, shifting views of the Dumas of memory reflect perceived, 
accelerating processes of globalization, or what might be called a heightened 
global imaginary, and their socio-cultural ramifications on 
n
ational identity in 
France.
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For the sake of analysis, the different symbolic interpretations of Dumas 
can be perceived as falling into four dominant types: the “non-
contemporaneous” Dumas (chapter one), the “imperial” Dumas (chapter 
two), the “postwar” Dumas (chapter three), and the “global” Dumas (chapter 
four). The composition of each different Dumas over time—rearranging and 
constructing diverse aspects, characteristics, and interpretations of Dumas 
in a mosaic fashion to generate various and different “portraits” of him after 
his death to meet the needs of changing notions of Frenchness—can thus be 
contextualized within attempts to resolve or come to terms with problems 
of French national identity linked to a globalizing world and shifting notions 
of France’s place in the world (as well as its relationship with non-Western 
peoples and cultures).
38