Edit: u/Bodark43 had written an accurate (now deleted) answer that arrived at the same conclusion as my longboat below.

I'd like to expand a little on the question of violence directed at servants in Ancien Régime France.

Beating servants on stage

Alexandre Dumas is not exactly the most credible source when it comes to historical truth. He was a formidable writer who put entertainment first, and claimed in his Memoirs that "raping history was allowed on the condition that you give her a child" (Dumas, 1860). When he wrote the Musketeers, Dumas was still mostly known as a playwright: he had started writing historical novels after seeing the commercial success of Victor Hugo and Walter Scott. It is thus not surprising that, in this particular case and writing 200 years after the facts, he drew from a tradition that audiences were familiar with: the master-valet relationship in European theatre.

French farces and comedies of the 17th and 18th century, themselves inspired by the Italian commedia dell'arte, by Spanish plays, and by plays of ancient Rome and Greece, made ample use of this relation, both as a plot device and as a source of comedy. In those plays, servants are routinely insulted, threatened, slapped, and beaten, with no physical or emotional consequences: the wrath of the master and the fear of the servant are sources of laughter (Emelina, 1975). In the Musketeers, Planchet is introduced as "making rings and plashing in the water" and is picked up by Porthos for the reason that "this occupation was proof of a reflective and contemplative organization". The complaining of Planchet, which gives d'Artagnan a reason for trashing him, is a typical behaviour of comedy servants: 2000 years ago, Aristophanes already made fun in The Frogs of this stage tradition: when the slave Xanthias asks his master Dionysius about the audience-pleasing jokes he can tell, Donysius replies "Anything but the one about how miserable you feel!"

Seventeenth-century audiences found abusing male servants to be knee-slapping funny. The beatings are primarily farcical and make for entertaining and lively stage action. In France, the traditional Guignol puppet shows still use old-style beatings for fun, much to the delight of TikTok-era children. Stage violence mostly targets men, rather than women: audiences possibly did not find mistreating women to be as funny. In Tartuffe, the servant Flipote is slapped by her mistress, somehow randomly, but this remains uncommon in French theatre. This tradition of abusing servants on stage goest back to Greek and Roman plays where the servants were slaves, not free men and women, and French plays sometimes cited directly this tradition. In Don Juan (Act IV, Scene I), the titular character resents his valet Sganarelle's attempts at reminding him that God is watching his misdeeds, and he threatens him:

Don Juan - If you tease me any more with your stupid morality, if you say the least word more upon that head, I'll call somebody to fetch a bull's pizzle, I'll have you held by three or four people, and drub you with a thousand blows. D'ye take me ?

Sganarelle - Oh! very right, Sir, perfectly right; you explain yourself clearly; that's the good of you, that you affect no windings or turning; you express things with an admirable plainness.

Don Juan's threats were pretty harsh, even by 17th century standards, and for a reason: these two lines, including Sganarelle's subservient-but-cheeky reply, are taken directly from Roman playwright Terence's Andria play (Act 1 Scene 2), performed in 166 BC, where Simo threatens his slave Davus to be "beaten with stripes" and "sent to the mill", the pistrinum (the hand-mill for grinding grain that was used as a mode of punishment for refractory slaves).

Of course, comedies are hardly representative of actual human behaviour. Even in our modern comedies, characters routinely engage in actions that would be considered sociopathic in real life, rather than funny or endearing. However, there are also examples of servant abuse in non-farcical works. Paul Scarron's Roman comique (1651-1657) features several realistic situations where servants are threatened with beatings, and one where a servant is beaten and threatened with torture for having "betrayed" his master (cited by Emelina, 1975). The anonymous pamphlet L'Etat de servitude, ou la Misère des domestiques (The State of servitude, or the Misery of domestics, 1711) is a 23-page long first-person description of the life of a lackey. But here, abuse and violence are not presented as the primary source of misery. The man is overworked, underfed, underpaid, unable to have a love life, and forced to obey the silly whims of his masters, but he is not generally mistreated. One line, however, shows that the threat is always there:

Then you go and scrub the stairs

Do not fail to make an exact review

For the other day Madam took a look at it

And finding by chance a wisp of straw,

The little Cascaret was roughly beaten.

At the end of the poem, the narrator is still lucky of not having to serve a bigoted woman, a false devotee that is outwardly pious and charming, but "indulges in hitting and beating" servants at home.

How were these fictional beatings representative of actual violence against servants?

-> PART 2