His father, General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie, was born in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti) to Alexandre Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, a French nobleman, and Marie-Cessette Dumas, an African slave.

Alexandre acquired work with Louis-Philippe, Duke of Orléans, then as a writer, a career that led to his early success.

Decades later, after the election of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte in 1851, Dumas fell from favour and left France for Belgium, where he stayed for several years.

Thomas-Alexandre had been born in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), the mixed-race, natural son of the marquis Alexandre Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie (Antoine), a French nobleman and général commissaire in the artillery of the colony, and Marie-Cessette Dumas, an enslaved woman of Afro-Caribbean ancestry.

In 1775, following the death of both his brothers, Antoine left Saint-Domingue for France in order to claim the family estates and the title of Marquis.

There, Thomas-Alexandre received his freedom and a sparse education at a military school, adequate to enable him to join the French army, there being no question of the mixed-race boy being accepted as his father's heir.

Some scholars have suggested that Thomas-Alexandre devised the surname "Dumas" for himself when he felt the need for one, and that he attributed it to his mother when convenient.

Until the mid-1830s, life in France remained unsettled, with sporadic riots by disgruntled Republicans and impoverished urban workers seeking change.

An improving economy combined with the end of press censorship made the times rewarding for Alexandre Dumas's literary skills.

Although attracted to an extravagant lifestyle and always spending more than he earned, Dumas proved to be an astute marketing strategist and writer.

He founded a production studio, staffed with writers who turned out hundreds of stories, all subject to his personal direction, editing, and additions.

He featured Beatrice Cenci, Martin Guerre, Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia, as well as more recent events and criminals, including the cases of the alleged murderers Karl Ludwig Sand and Antoine François Desrues, who were executed.

Dumas refers to Grisier with great respect in The Count of Monte Cristo, The Corsican Brothers, and in his memoirs.

[16] Dumas wrote the short novel Georges (1843), which uses ideas and plots later repeated in The Count of Monte Cristo.

His writing earned him a great deal of money, but he was frequently insolvent, as he spent lavishly on women and sumptuous living.

[18]) In 1846, he had built a country house outside Paris at Le Port-Marly, the large Château de Monte-Cristo, with an additional building for his writing studio.

[3] He made use of his experience, writing travel books after taking journeys, including those motivated by reasons other than pleasure.

Dumas spent two years in Russia and visited St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kazan, Astrakhan, Baku, and Tbilisi.

While there, he befriended Giuseppe Garibaldi, whom he had long admired and with whom he shared a commitment to liberal republican principles as well as membership within Freemasonry.

[18] He is known to have fathered at least four children by them: About 1866, he had an affair with Adah Isaacs Menken, an American actress who was twenty-six years younger than Dumas and at the height of her career.

In the late 20th 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.

[26] Researchers have continued to find Dumas works in archives, including the five-act play The Gold Thieves, found in 2002 by the scholar Réginald Hamel [fr] in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

The collection contains about 3,350 volumes, including some 2,000 sheets in Dumas's handwriting and dozens of French, Belgian and English first editions.

The village eventually bowed to the government's decision, and Dumas's body was exhumed from its cemetery and put into a new coffin in preparation for the transfer.

[30] 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.

[15] In his speech, 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.

[31]Chirac acknowledged the racism that had existed in France and said that the re-interment in the Pantheon had been a way of correcting that wrong, as Alexandre Dumas was enshrined alongside fellow great authors Victor Hugo and Émile Zola.

Claude Schopp, a Dumas scholar, noticed a letter in an archive in 1990 that led him to discover the unfinished work.

His Henri III et sa cour (1829) was the first of the great Romantic historical dramas produced on the Paris stage, preceding Victor Hugo's more famous Hernani (1830).

Produced at the Comédie-Française and starring the famous Mademoiselle Mars, Dumas's play was an enormous success and launched him on his career.