The Many Faces of ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’
Alexandre Dumas’s novel is by turns an adventure story, a paean to bourgeois values, and a Greek epic. No wonder it continues to fascinate.
That our culture is stagnant has become an often-repeated trope. It offers no more than retellings of recent events, critics claim—Prince Andrew’s “car crash” interview of 2019 has already been dramatised twice—or merely churns out the same stories featuring the same characters, unable to think beyond the boundaries of its major commercial franchises.
Much the same could be said of Classical Athens—Aeschylus’s Persians retells the story of the Battle of Salamis, which took place eight years earlier, while his Oresteia extends Agamemnon’s story beyond the Trojan War. Sophocles’ Ajax fills in details missed out in the Homeric Fictional Universe while Euripides’s Bacchae gives the origin story of the god Dionysus.
An Athenian who did not fancy the latest offering at the theatre might engage a rhapsode, an individual who had memorised the Iliad and the Odyssey and would perform them on demand. There is, as those who often return to their favourite books know, a certain comfort in revisiting a story and characters one knows well. And there is always a certain freshness to the experience as well. To misquote Heraclitus, the book you re-read is not the book you once read, and you are not the person who read it.
In this light, we might see the recent French cinematic adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo as less a sign of stagnation than of continuity. In making it the country’s second most-watched film last year, audiences behaved in a way that would be familiar to any Greek of a couple of millennia ago. For Alexandre Dumas’s novel has become part of our cultural furniture, just like Hamlet or the tales of the Trojan War. Even those who have not read the book, which is understandable given its length—1,243 pages in my Penguin Classics translation, not including notes—often know the story: Edmond Dantes is unjustly imprisoned, escapes, turns himself into the Count of Monte Cristo, and sets out to obtain retribution. It is an archetypal revenge tale.
Elena Shalneva
Originally published in serial form in the Journal des Debats between 1844 and 1846, Dumas’s tale clearly spoke to the reading public. A “corrected” book edition was published in the year the serialisation concluded and the first single-volume English abridgement appeared at almost the same time. And the book continues to speak to us. It has never been out of print. In his introduction to the most recent Barnes and Noble edition, Luc Sante counts 29 film versions and there have been 28 television serialisations. Dumas himself wrote a dramatisation. There is even a musical.
So, what is it about this “morally abhorrent revenge fantasy” that continues to captivate? In part, it is the subject itself: revenge has fascinated us since at least the times of Euripides and Seneca, who both wrote tragedies about Medea’s bloody vengeance on Jason for leaving her. But although The Count of Monte Cristo is the revenge novel par excellence, there is more to it than that.
Since literature was invented, it has told the stories of heroes, doers of mighty deeds beyond the capability of normal humans. Since at least the time of Homer, some of these figures have undergone extended periods during which they surpass even the heroic norm to become almost divine. In The Iliad, several characters experience what the ancients called aristeiai (“excellences”): periods during which they are effectively invincible. In book v, Diomedes cuts a swathe through all he meets and is able to wound the gods Ares and Aphrodite, who are fighting on the Trojan side. Hector also exceeds mortal capability when he drives the Greeks back to their ships before meeting his death at the hands of Achilles, while that hero is in the throes of an aristeia of his own, the poem’s greatest. Nor is this just a feature of Greek literature—a Norse hero in the sagas touching the same heights was said to go berserk.
Once Dantes has escaped prison and become the Count, he too appears semi-divine, albeit in a way more appropriate to the nineteenth century. He speaks numerous languages with a fluency that enables him to pass for a native. His knowledge of philosophy allows him to tie the Chief Prosecutor of Paris in knots. He bests the finest fencing masters in the city and can hit each of the four segments on the ace of clubs with a pistol. Just as Achilles became the Bronze Age warrior archetype taken to its highest extreme, so the Count is the nineteenth-century gentleman turned up to eleven—even if his knowledge of poisons is somewhat ungentlemanly.
It is in Dantes’s omniscience, however, that he most closely approaches the divine. One of his enemies is undone because he knows of his private financial speculations, another because he is aware of his misdeeds while serving abroad. The last is driven mad by the reappearance of a child he had thought dead, a child whom only the Count knew had survived and had been able to locate.
The ancients were clear that mortals could do no more than briefly touch the divine. Diomedes is driven from the fray when Ares retaliates. Achilles requires the intervention of other, more powerful gods when he takes on the river deity, Scamander. Even the mightiest human performing at the peak of his powers is no match for the lowliest of gods. So too in Dumas’s novel. The Count may know more than anyone else but he does not know enough. When his machinations lead to the unforeseen death of an innocent, the man who had come to see himself as the agent of divine justice is forced to admit that justice must be left to the gods. This is exactly what a classically educated audience would have expected.
In the 1930s, scholar Milman Parry showed that the Homeric epics were originally bardic works, performed ex tempore to audiences at feasts and celebrations. They reflected the values of the society that produced them, and particularly of those members of the society able to pay for them. What emerged was an aristocratic literature. The heroes of Greek myth are the sons of kings or gods—there is only one named “lower class” character in The Iliad: Thersites, an ugly, stupid figure of fun who gets assaulted by Odysseus. It is their aristocratic lineage that makes Homer’s protagonists heroes. We learn Achilles’s father’s name before we learn his.
Dumas’s audience was different. Although the Industrial Revolution had been slower to take hold in France than Great Britain, in part due to the Napoleonic Wars, the fall of the emperor had opened the floodgates. As historians Peter N. Stearns and Roderick Floud and D.N. McCloskey et al have shown, imports of machinery from the country’s erstwhile rival allowed cotton production to double between 1815 and 1830, while coal production rose nine times between the Battle of Waterloo and 1840. The benefits of this growth trickled down—wages for skilled workers rose 50 percent after inflation between 1830 and 1860. At the time the novel was published, around 25 percent of Britain’s population counted as “middle class,” up from 10 percent in 1760. The population of Paris doubled between 1800 and 1850.
At the same time as people were becoming richer and better educated—literacy rates in France hit 70 percent in 1850; the first lending library opened in 1842—technological changes were making publishing cheaper. The price of a three-volume novel dropped from 31 shillings in 1820 to 15 in 1850—a price within the reach of a clerk or shopkeeper. The result was an explosion of writing. By 1850, there were over 6,000 magazines in Europe, offering their readers lifestyle tips, serialised fiction, and tales of upward mobility. Some were wildly popular. Britain’s The Penny Magazine sold 200,000 copies a week in the 1840s, while across the Channel, Emile de Girardin’s Journal des Connaissances Utiles, launched in 1831, cost four francs for an annual subscription and had a print run of 80,000.
Pierre Azou
In his previous work, published just a few months earlier, the novelist had presented a hero the ancients would have recognised. D’Artagnan may be an outsider—just like Theseus, Perseus et al.—but from the moment he enters The Three Musketeers, he is a fully developed hero. Nature has made him a brilliant swordsman, as it made Achilles a mighty warrior. He may have the rough edges of youth knocked off over the course of the novel, but he does not change substantially.
Dantes, by contrast, has a character arc. We first meet him as a charming, competent sailor, the son of a provincial petit bourgeois—and nothing more. That he ends the novel with a multitude of impressive skills and having succeeded in his project is entirely down to his own efforts and those of the Abbé Faria who trains him. If D’Artagnan is a hero of natural talent, Dantes is a hero of will. He chooses to craft himself into the hero he becomes and it takes lengthy and arduous work.
Many of Dumas’s readers would surely have seen themselves in the Count as they flicked through their copies in shops and offices. They may not have ever been unjustly imprisoned, they may never have set out on a mission of revenge, but, like the Count, they had risen by their own efforts. They could look back on times of struggle and see them as times of growth. They could survey their unpromising origins from the vantage point of relative comfort. What they had achieved they owed to their own desires and efforts, not to their birth. Perhaps they too had left the provinces to seek their destinies in the big city. In Dantes, they had a middle-class hero for the middle-class world they were building.
Dumas straddled the shift from aristocratic to bourgeois values. The latter have now won out. We lionise those who struggled to achieve their worldly success. By the end of the novel, the Count might seem to epitomise this kind of successful, self-made man—he is wealthy, eminent, and has the love of a woman so stunning an entire opera house falls silent when she enters. He leads the life coaches offer and influencers flaunt.
In some ways, his arc mirrors the story so beloved of the self-help industry. He suffers a trauma, uses it as motivation to work on himself, escapes from prison, and reaps the benefits of his efforts. His cell is a tomb for Edmond Dantes but a womb for the Count of Monte Cristo. One character who hears Dantes’s history relates, “I have learnt what willpower can achieve… there are people who have suffered greatly, and who did not die, but raised a new fortune on the ruins of all those promises of happiness that heaven had made to them.” Dantes believed, and the Count achieved.
To view the story in this light, however, would be to avoid reckoning with the ending. If it is to be read as a metaphor for personal development, the novel most closely mirrors the five-level Positive Disintegration model of the Polish psychologist Kazimierz Dabrowski. At the beginning of the story, Dantes is a normal member of society, content to live by its rules and values and pursue what it has taught him to pursue (level i). He undergoes a crisis (level ii), which leads him to reconsider his approach to life (level iii). Escaping from prison, he is able to apply his new values and obtain success (level iv). So far, this is a classic story arc of the kind beloved of writers of fiction.
Dabrowski, however, believed some individuals could go further than this, to reach what he called level v, in which they transcend their egos and act purely for the benefit of society. It is this stage that the Count appears to have reached at the novel’s conclusion. Hints of this self-effacing concern for others appear earlier in the novel—for example, when he decides to deliberately lose a duel, thereby risking his life at the hands of a younger opponent whom he could easily have defeated. At the end of the book, guilt-stricken that his actions have led to the death of an innocent, he gives away the treasure that funded his mission of vengeance to a young couple for whom he feels a fatherly concern, insisting that, in return, the woman give her own substantial inheritance to the poor of Paris.
The Count of Monte Cristo, then, is both a revenge-driven potboiler and the story of a Homeric hero as well as a paean to emerging middle-class values, a celebration of human potential and a warning of the dangers of self-absorption. This is why it continues to fascinate and why those who want another adaptation will not have long to “wait and hope.”
