"The Statue represents Dumas standing proudly on a high stone base, a feather in one hand and the other hand on a column on which the names of many of Dumas' works are engraved.
History of the statue
A first statue was created by the sculptor Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse. The monument was inaugurated in 1885 in the presence of Alexandre Dumas fils and the Dumas family and many personalities including Jules Verne. The sculpture is 3 meters high and weighs more than 900 kilos.
During the Second World War, the statue was melted down. Only the pen that the writer held in his right hand was saved and has since been preserved by the Alexandre Dumas museum in Villers-Cotterêts. The base, on the other hand, is dismantled and stored in neighboring quarries. When the project to rebuild the monument took shape, the stones were exhumed, allowing the new statue to rest on the original base. The MASCETTI family had preserved almost all of the stones of the pedestal in its quarry in Bonneuil in Valois. These children made the graceful return to the city.
An identical bronze statue was cast by the sculptor Jean-Loup Bouvier. It was inaugurated in December 2005.
The Character
Alexandre Dumas (also known as Alexandre Dumas père) is a French writer born July 24, 1802 in Villers-Cotterêts (Aisne) and died December 5, 1870 in the hamlet of Puys, former commune of Neuville-lès-Dieppe, today integrated into Dieppe (Seine-Maritime).
He is the son of Marie-Louise Labouret (1769–1838) and Thomas Alexandre Davy de La Pailleterie (1762–1806) (born in Saint-Domingue, present-day Haiti), known as General Dumas, and the father of the writers Henry Bauër and Alexandre Dumas (1824–1895), known as Dumas fils, author of La Dame aux camélias.
Close to the romantics and turned towards the theater, Alexandre Dumas first wrote a successful vaudeville and historical dramas such as Henri III and his court (1829), La Tour de Nesle (1832), Kean (1836). A prolific author, he then turned to historical novels such as the musketeers trilogy (The Three Musketeers (1844), Vingt Ans après (1845) and Le Vicomte de Bragelonne (1847–1850)), or even Le Comte de Monte -Cristo (1844–1846), La Reine Margot (1845) and La Dame de Monsoreau (1846).
The authorship of some of his works is contested. Dumas was thus suspected by several critics of his time of having resorted to pen-lenders, notably Auguste Maquet. However, contemporary research has shown that Dumas had established a cooperation with the latter: Dumas took care of choosing the general theme and modified Maquet's sketches to make them more dynamic. We cannot therefore deny him the authorship of his work, even if he would perhaps not have been able to produce all his masterpieces of the years 1844–1850 without the presence at his side of a handyman. efficient and discreet.
The work of Alexandre Dumas is universal; according to the Index Translationum, with a total of 2,540 translations, he ranks thirteenth among the most translated authors in a foreign language."