Alexandre Dumas (Dumas fils)

Alexandre Dumas known as Dumas fils , 1824-95, French dramatist and novelist, illegitimate son of Dumas Père. He was the chief creator of the 19th-century comedy of manners. His first important play, La Dame aux camélias (1852, tr. 1856), known in English as Camille, was a sensation. It was based on a partly autobiographical novel of the same title, which he had published in 1848. Portraying a love affair of a courtesan, the play became the vehicle of many famous actresses, and it was the basis of Verdi's opera La Traviata. Another successful play, Le Demi-Monde (1855, tr. 1858), aroused much discussion because of its portrayal of the disreputable world of French society. In later plays Dumas preached a revolt against romantic morality, the excesses of the wealthy, and bourgeois puritanism and propounded social and psychological questions. His stage works are notable for skillful construction, though the characterizations are somewhat lacking in vitality. His novels include Tristan le Roux (1850) and Diane de Lys (1853). Among his best plays are also The Money Question (1857, tr. 1915), Le Fils naturel [the natural son] (1858), Les Idées de Mme Aubray (1867), L'Étrangère [the strange woman] (1876), and Denise (1885). His early essays, Entr'actes (1878-79), are mostly on social subjects. In 1874 he was elected to the French Academy.

Bibliography: See study by H. S. Schwarz (1927, repr. 1971).

Dumas, Alexandre (or Dumas fils) (1824–95) French dramatist. He became one of the most successful dramatists of the Second Empire. His play La Dame aux camélias (1852) was based on Dumas's own novel (1848) and inspired Verdi's opera La Traviata (1853).

Dumas, Alexandre, fils (1824–95), French dramatist, natural son of the above, who approached the theatre by way of a dramatization of his own novel La Dame aux camélias (1848). First acted in 1852, this became one of the outstanding theatrical successes of the second half of the 19th century, and is still occasionally revived. As Camille, it was equally popular in England, America, and Italy; but in spite of its success it was destined to remain the younger Dumas's only Romantic play. He turned to social drama and, though himself an agnostic, sought to enforce Christian virtues and conventional morality by using the stage as a pulpit, as in Les Idées de Madame Aubray (1867). Dumas had little liking for the bohemian society in which his childhood had been passed and which he summarized in the title of his play Le Demi-Monde (1855). The bitterness of his own illegitimacy found expression in Le Fils naturel (1858) and Un père prodigue (1859), while the question of sexual morality was ventilated in such plays as La Femme de Claude (1873), L'Étrangère (1876), and his last play Francillon (1887). Only occasionally, as in La Question d'argent (1857), did he deal with social issues of more general interest, and most of his plays have disappeared with the conditions which gave rise to them. In his own day a popular and powerful social dramatist, he is now remembered only by his least typical work, La Dame aux camélias, on which Verdi based his opera La Traviata (1853).