The celebrated French author Alexandre Dumas was one-quarter Black through his father, the general Thomas-Alexandre. Did he ever face any discrimination due to his background, and did it affect his writing? Is there a strand of progressive advocacy in Dumas' works?

I'll add a few things about the previous answers linked by u/voyeur34, who mostly deal with his father, so here are information about the writer himself and how he faced racism.

For some background about racial discrimination in 19th century France, I will refer to a recent answer of mine, which covers this topic. In a nutshell, racism against black people, theoretical as well as practical, was very much a thing at that time and there were remaining discrimination practices - mixed-race marriages were forbidden in continental France until the late 1810s. However, this did not prevent (French) people of African descent from living regular lives, having regular jobs, and marrying people of whatever origin. The life of Alexandre Dumas is an example of this.

Dumas and discrimination

Alexandre Dumas never denied his African origins. He was particularly proud of his father, whom he turned into a legendary, larger-than-life figure (Mémoires, 1, 23):

My father, as we have already said, at the age of twenty-four, which he was then, was one of the handsomest young men that could be seen. He had that tanned complexion, those velvety brown eyes, that straight nose that belong only to the mixture of Indian and Caucasian races.

As a child, and until he turned 15, Alexandre Dumas did not "look" black. As he says in his memoirs, he had blond hair, blue eyes, and a very white skin (Mémoires, 1, 287-288):

As for the physique, I was a rather pretty child; I had long curly blond hair, which fell over my shoulders, and which did not became kinky until I reached my fifteenth year; large blue eyes, which have remained about the best thing I have in my face to this day; a straight nose, small and quite good; large, pink, sympathetic lips; white teeth, which were not well arranged. Underneath, finally, a complexion of a brilliant whiteness, which was due, as my mother claimed, to the brandy that my father had forced her to drink during her pregnancy, and which turned brown at the time when my hair turned frizzy. As for the rest of my body, I was as long and thin as a stile.

Dumas was bullied in school, but not for his skin colour, or at least he does not say so in his memoirs. Note that the Abbot Grégoire mentioned in Dumas' memoirs as being the head of his school is not the abolitionist and "friend of the blacks" Abbot Henri Grégoire (and thus not an influence on Dumas, as claimed mistakenly by Eric Martone, 2018), but a younger homonym, Louis-Chrysostôme Grégoire (Piquet, 1999), who seems to have been protective of the young Dumas and even introduced his niece to him, notwithstanding Dumas' origins. Dumas' first attempt at seduction, in 1818, failed due to his lack of fashion sense (Mémoires, 2, 179). As told by Dumas, his early life was made difficult by the financial situation of his family (he blamed Napoléon for this) and by being an uneducated "provincial" lacking Parisian esprit (Mémoires, 2, 299). He did not like his physical appearance: in 1823, he was still self-conscious about how ridiculous he looked, dressed fashionably for Villers-Cotterêts but not for Paris, a young man with long, frizzy hair that "formed a rather grotesque halo around [his] head" (Mémoires, 3, 143). Later, in the 1830s, while he still did not considered himself as handsome, he thought he had "character" (Mémoires, 6, 34):

I have said that I never was good-looking, but I was tall and well built, although rather slight; my face was thin, and I had large brown eyes, with a dark complexion; in a word, if it was impossible to create beauty, it was easy enough to form character.

This did not prevent him from becoming successful in the mid-1820s, and from womanizing (his first son, Alexandre Dumas fils, was born in 1824 from a liaison with a seamstress who was also his neighbour). He was also aware that being of African descent was detrimental to his standing, at least when compared with an aristocrat like Alfred de Vigny, who had won the affection of actress Marie Dorval, to whom Dumas wrote (Mémoires, 7, 183):

In that case, my dear, accept my sincere compliments; for, in the first place, de Vigny is a poet of very great talent; next, he is a true nobleman: both these attributes are better worth having than a mulatto like myself.

The first reminder of his origin that Dumas wrote about happened during the Revolution of 1830. Dumas had been tasked by La Fayette with collecting gunpowder in the Soissons armoury. When negociating with the Commander of the garrison, des Liniers, the officer's wife appeared terrified, telling her husband to surrender to Dumas (Mémoires, 6, 233):

O my friend, surrender! surrender! she cried; it is a second revolt of the negroes! [...] Remember my father and mother, massacred in Saint-Domingue! Seeing my frizzy hair, my complexion darkened by three days in the sun, and hearing my slightly Creole accent - if, however, in the midst of the hoarseness with which I was afflicted, I still had any accent left - she had taken me for a negro, and had given way to an inexpressible terror. This terror was, moreover, easy for me to understand, when I knew, since then, that Madame de Liniers was a demoiselle de Saint-Janvier. Her father and mother, M. and Madame de Saint-Janvier, had been mercilessly slaughtered before her eyes in the Cape revolt.

(For a background on the Saint-Janvier story, see my previous answer here).

In the 1830s, Dumas's reputation as a playwright was growing, and his peculiar physical appearance started to be noticed (Mémoires, 6, 5):

Moreover, my name was making a lot of noise at the time; I was credited with a host of adventure, as I have since been credited with a host of witticisms. I had African passions, it was said, and my frizzy hair and dark complexion were called upon, which could not and would not deny my tropical origin.

Once successful and rich, Dumas was targeted by numerous critics and enemies, and they did use racist stereotypes and imagery to do so. Some of his friends - including his son Alexandre Dumas fils - did that too. The most aggressive of these enemies was journalist Eugène de Mirecourt (Charles Jacquot) who published in 1845 a 80-page pamphlet against Dumas titled Fabrique de romans: maison Alexandre Dumas et compagnie (Factory of novels: House Alexandre Dumas & Co.). Mirecourt began with a lengthy racist screed against Dumas, picturing the writer as a black person impersonating an aristocrat, and having the faults of both:

The physique of M. Dumas is well known: the stature of a drum major, the limbs of Hercules in all possible extension, prominent lips, African nose, frizzy head, tanned face. His origin is written all over his person; but it reveals itself much more in his character. Scratch the bark of M. Dumas and you will find the savage. He is both a negro and a marquis. However, the marquis hardly goes beyond the epidermis. Wipe off the make-up a little, tear off a dishevelled suit, pay no attention to certain "regency" manners, pretend not to hear gutter language, prod at any point on the civilised surface, soon the negro will show his teeth. The marquis plays his part in public, the negro betrays himself in private. [...] The fair sex, admiring the brilliance of a splendid name, overcome by a crazy prodigality, enraptured by the promises of a powerful neckline, the fair sex, let us say, does not delay in resorting to the bottle of ether to neutralize a certain suspicious perfume, which comes to mingle indiscreetly with the charm of the tête-à-tête: Negro!

The "suspicious perfume" - the smell of black people - was a staple of racial literature: biologist Julien-Joseph Virey dedicated several pages to this particular problem in the Nègre entry of the Dictionaire des sciences médicales (1819). Mirecourt probably alludes to a widely reported anecdote: in 1829, actress Mademoiselle Mars, who was starring in Dumas's play Henri III et sa cour, allegedly said about Dumas "The Negro stinks, his hair stink of Negro" and, after he had left a room, she had said "He has come! Open, open the windows" (Descombes, 1856). Whether the anecdote is true cannot be determined. In any case, it did not prevent Dumas and Mars from collaborating on two other plays in the following years.

Mirecourt's other "proofs" of Dumas' fundamental blackness were his alleged love of shiny baubles, or the bizarre notion that Dumas lived naked at home, eating potatoes without peeling them. But Mirecourt's core accusation was that Dumas was a fraud, that he did not write his books and plays but paid ghost writers instead. As we know, Dumas did rely heavily on the work of collaborators, notably Auguste Maquet, and the extent of such collaboration is part of literary debate about Dumas. Mirecourt's only contribution to the French language is in the following sentence:

Those who write with you must sign with you; they must formally demand it, they must compel you to do so: otherwise, they are reduced to the condition of negroes, working under the whip of a mulatto.

After that, ghost writers would be called nègres - negroes - in colloquial French, and this term has only been deprecated recently.

Dumas sued Mirecourt for libel, and won: Mirecourt was sentenced to 15 days in jail (Le Droit, 17 April 1845). Mirecourt, strangely enough, became a priest later in his life and moved to Haiti, of all places, where he died in 1880. Chronicler Léon Chapron hoped that Dumas would welcome his old foe in Paradise by giving him a "good thrashing" (Chapron, 1880).

>Continued