Abstract EN:

Dumas’ historical novels fully participate in the process of redefinition of historical writing in the early nineteenth century. His work sheds light on recaptured time, a history which is alive and gradually taken charge of by the people, and the recipient of which is explicitly the people. Through historical myths and providentialist ideology, Dumas provides his readers, through the specific methodology of the novel, with the hermeneutics of an emancipatory history. The historical novel, informed by republican ideology, projects the issues of the present into the past. On the political and artistic levels, Dumas is fully engaged with his own time. His characters are the historian’s substitute. Through them, he displays an analysis of historical methods and a reflection on the ways history is constructed. As a form of reflected time, History is reconceptualized through methods of fictionalization and dramatization, which place it at the heart of Dumas’ poetics. By blending history and poetry together, Dumas puts the historical novel at the service of an artistic project which is simultaneously total and democratic, thus confirming his status as a major romantic author.