Reading royalty in Dumas’ Le Collier de la reine

Abstract

Capitalizing on the historical trend of Realist novels, Alexandre Dumas père published his Le Collier de la reine in 1849–1850. The novel dramatizes a factual case of fraud, forgery, and royal impersonation that shook the Ancien Régime in 1785. Dumas locates at the centre of his intrigue the figure of the queen (Marie-Antoinette), and shows how a series of public misinterpretations of the royal person actually contribute to the monarchy's downfall and the Revolution of 1789. I argue that Dumas uses the historical setting as a screen for his veiled comments on the contemporary political events of 1848–1850, a period fraught with yet another revolution, two failed regimes and the advent of Napoléon III's dictatorship (to which Dumas, like other republican authors of the time, was opposed). By casting his focus on the paradoxes of revelation and concealment around the person of the queen's impersonator in 1785, Dumas subtly and concurrently questions acts of cultural hierophany in the France of 1850, thereby calling attention to the fragility of both the republic and the whole idea of leadership itself.