The Three Dumas (2007)
Explicitly produced to mark the bicentennial of the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, this dramatized documentary takes the family history covered in this site's own piece on Dumas and race as its central subject, giving the novelist's father, General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, equal or greater weight than the more famous novelist himself.
Centering the Grandfather's Story
The documentary's framing, describing Alexandre Dumas as "the grandson of a slave" who "overcame all the obstacles of prejudice to create the first modern superhero," puts real emphasis on the family's origins in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) and the documented enslavement of Marie-Cessette Dumas, the novelist's paternal grandmother. This matches the real historical record closely: General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas was born to an aristocratic French planter and an enslaved woman, brought to France, and rose to become one of the highest-ranking men of African descent in any European army of his era.
The Real General's Documented Career
The documentary's account of the general opposing Robespierre on humanitarian grounds, later falling out with Napoleon Bonaparte over what the source material describes as the emperor's "overweening imperialism" during the Egyptian campaign, and being denied a military pension he was owed, tracks closely with the real historical record; this is substantially the same account given in Tom Reiss's Pulitzer Prize–winning biography The Black Count, which similarly established the general as a significant, long-underrecognized figure in French Revolutionary history.
A Direct Line to the Novels
The documentary's own framing directly connects the general's real, dramatic life (his military triumphs, his imprisonment, his political conflicts) to the fiction his novelist son would later write, a connection also drawn by Reiss's biography and widely accepted among Dumas scholars: the general's real experiences of imprisonment, betrayal, and injustice are frequently cited as a likely influence on stories like The Count of Monte Cristo, even though Dumas himself was only four years old when his father died and had no direct memory of these events.
Political Cartoons and Documented Racism
The documentary's account of contemporary political cartoons depicting the novelist "in a gross, overtly racist manner" reflects real, documented mockery Dumas faced throughout his career because of his mixed-race heritage, precisely the pattern this site's own coverage of Dumas and race discusses, including the racist caricatures and insinuations he faced despite his enormous popular success.
Made Amid Growing Recognition of the General's Story
This documentary arrived roughly contemporaneous with growing broader public interest in General Dumas's own remarkable, long-underrecognized biography, a wave of attention that would crest a few years later with the 2012 publication of Tom Reiss's Pulitzer Prize–winning biography The Black Count. Framing a documentary specifically around "three Dumas" (grandfather, father, and by extension the novelist's own son Alexandre Dumas fils) situates the novelist's fame within a really three-generation family story of achievement against considerable social obstacles, a framing this site's own biographical coverage takes seriously rather than treating as incidental family trivia.
Read more about the real General Dumas and his son's heritage in this site's own dedicated essay, or see the full Biography for Dumas's own life story.