The Three Musketeers

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1844

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-14

Chapters 15-31

Chapters 32-46

Chapters 47-58

Chapter 59-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Background

Literary Context: The Chivalric Romance

One of the most popular kinds of medieval literature was romance. These chivalric or courtly love stories usually featured complex relationships between characters of noble birth. Their plots were convoluted and full of adventure; often, knights were charged with repeatedly rescuing the objects of their affection from a variety of dangers.

The novel’s 17th-century setting plays with several tropes from this genre. The valiant, loyal, and highly physically competent Musketeers are emblematic of chivalric ideals of heroism and fighting prowess. The men support one another in dangerous situations, never back down from a conflict, and are deeply committed to protecting the French monarch whom they serve—all values that would have been completely familiar to a reader of medieval romances.

The lighthearted sexual exploits of the young d’Artagnan, who is very fickle in his desire, echo behaviors familiar from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1392) and the comedies of Shakespeare. D’Artagnan is very attracted to Constance, but when Constance is gone, his desire shifts to the mysterious Milady and her maid Kitty. D’Artagnan’s bed-hopping is meant to be humorous; the fact that none of the women he is with take him very seriously adds to the sense that his actions have few repercussions. Similarly, Porthos’s long-standing affair with Madame Coquenard, who is married to a wealthy man, is often played for laughs: In one comedic scene, he is angry with her for buying him an old pony instead of a war horse. Porthos’s happy ending is to marry Madame Coquenard when her husband dies, thus securing an opulent lifestyle.

The novel’s two stories of doomed love play on more dramatic elements of medieval romance. Queen Anne and the Duke of Buckingham are genuinely in love; however, their relationship could bring war between England and France. Readers are meant to see this tragic love story with sympathy. Similarly, Athos’s painful marriage to a woman who turns out to be a dangerous criminal and who believes his only recourse is to be her judge, jury, and executioner is a deeply disturbing and emotionally complex story, one that calls on readers to consider the ethical and moral implications of what he owes to himself, his ex-wife, and to society.

Literary Context: The Swashbuckler

Swashbucklers were a popular subgenre of in 18th- and 19th-century European literature. They featured narratives of adventure and bravery. Heroes of this genre tended to be highly skilled in swordsmanship, horsemanship, and cunning; their main quality was bravado, which was sometimes used for dramatic action set pieces and other times for humor.

The Three Musketeers is an exemplary novel of this genre. The ethos of the Musketeers is all about skill and bravado, which plays out in the novel’s absurdist escalation of violence. Every perceived slight is a reason for a duel, which are treated as casual events despite the fact that they often end in death. The Musketeers value honor, pride, and the courage to embrace the possibility of death above human life—often to a comical degree. For example, d’Artagnan, a natural swashbuckler obsessed with battle, challenges the three Musketeers to duels within minutes of meeting them—a clearly ridiculous event that earns the Musketeers’ respect.

Historical Context: 17th-Century France

The Three Musketeers is also a piece of historical fiction, because it was published in the 19th century but is set in the 17th century. Dumas uses real-life historical figures and events for his fiction: King Louis XIII, Queen Anne, and Cardinal Richelieu are historical figures; the Battle of La Rochelle really happened; and conflicts between the Huguenots and the French Catholics were a long-standing issue in France.

In the 17th century, nationalism and religion were intimately tied. One was not only French: they were French and Catholic. Protestant England, which was constantly at war with France, could find allies with the Huguenots (French Protestants). Cardinal Richelieu, Chief Minister of France from 1624 to 1642, was the second-most powerful man in France. Richelieu worked hard to centralize power in France and was successful in maintaining France’s global religious dominance. Although many pieces of fiction portray him as a sinister power behind the throne, the historical Richelieu was of course a much more complex and three-dimensional man.

Dumas’s selection of 17th-century France as his setting for a novel published in 1844 is purposeful. By the end of the 17th century, France was a formidable world power, but most French people were poor farmers. The Estate System was an established hierarchy that grouped people into castes based on socio-economic and religious status. Clerics and nobles ranked high, increasing the wealth gap. The king was an absolute ruler, and this lack of democracy meant that French people could not advocate for progress. However, the development of the Estate called the bourgeoisie—a better-educated middle class—was instrumental for the adoption of the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment, planting the seeds of the French Revolution of 1789.

Dumas’s own time was repeating the same cycle. For decades, France struggled with its political identity: vacillating between democracy, monarchy, and dictatorship. The July Monarchy, which began in 1830, was a limited constitutional monarchy; however, as Dumas wrote The Three Musketeers, the resistance that would lead to the Revolution of 1848—and establish France’s Second Republic—was gaining ground. Dumas’s novel captures some of the conflicts that informed French political and cultural life in the 19th century. Readers would have seen The Three Musketeers as indicative of France’s continuing political crises: Abuses of power, such as the cardinal’s evil machinations, along with the king’s relative uselessness, pointed to the drawbacks of absolute monarchy and institutionalized religion.