Everyone remembers La Dame aux Camelias (Camille), which inspired Verdi’s opera La Traviata, but how many people are familiar with the life of its author, the novelist and playwright Alexander Dumas fils? Marianne and Claude Schopp portray the turbulent life of that witty literary gentleman, starting with his relationship to the renowned creator of The Three Musketeers. Everything would seem to have encouraged Alexander Dumas fils to symbolically kill his father: his out-of-wedlock birth, the hardship inherent to being born a bastard in the nineteenth century, his father’s dissolute lifestyle, their diametrically opposed personalities and their rivalry as novelists and authors. And yet, the unworthy son never tried to sever ties with his famous father, as their abundant correspondence shows. Delving into it means reliving a period that was fertile in both social upheaval and dramatic turns of events. It was a time when Dumas fils was as well-known as his father, and his realistic, somewhat preachy plays about social issues were staged in all the best theatres.

Marianne and Claude Schopp have written the first biography of Alexandre Dumas fils. It is the anti-Oedipal story of a protective son of a big child who he had very young. But the author of La Dame aux Camelias is more than just his father’s son. His life was a complex adventure in its own right. As a champion of lost women and a fierce opponent of dissolute morals, he is one of the shiniest incarnations of Napoleon III era French bourgeois artistic life.