The Count of Monte Cristo

About this book

The Count of Monte Cristo is a French adventure novel by Alexandre Dumas, written with his regular collaborator Auguste Maquet and serialized between 1844 and 1846. It is one of the longest popular novels of the nineteenth century and one of the most adapted, with stage versions, films and television series appearing steadily since the book’s own decade.

The novel has lasted because its central idea is simple and its execution is anything but. A man is destroyed by the lies of people he trusted, disappears for years, and comes back with limitless money and a plan. Dumas takes that premise and spins it into dozens of interlocking subplots across Marseille, Rome and Paris, with a cast that keeps turning out to be connected in ways the reader did not expect.

The story

In 1815, as Napoleon waits on Elba, a young sailor named Edmond Dantès returns to Marseille about to be made captain of his ship and to marry Mercédès, the woman he loves. Three men who envy him arrange his arrest on a false charge of Bonapartist conspiracy. A prosecutor with his own reasons for burying the matter sends Dantès to the Château d’If, an island fortress, without trial.

He spends fourteen years there. In prison he meets an elderly fellow inmate, the Abbé Faria, who educates him and tells him of a treasure hidden on the island of Monte Cristo. What happens after Dantès gets out, and how he uses his new identity as the Count to re-enter the lives of the men who ruined him, occupies the remaining three-quarters of the book.

Themes and historical context

Dumas set the novel across the years from 1815 to 1838, a period French readers of the 1840s remembered well. The plot runs through the Hundred Days, the Bourbon Restoration and the July Monarchy, and the political shifts of those years are what make Dantès’s enemies rise and give the Count his openings. Dumas drew the core situation from a police memoir about a shoemaker named François Picaud who was falsely denounced and later took revenge on his accusers.

The book is a revenge story, but it is also a sustained argument with itself about whether revenge can be just. The Count sees himself as an instrument of providence, settling accounts that human courts failed to settle. As his schemes play out and begin to harm people who were not guilty of anything, the novel asks whether a man can take that role without becoming what he is punishing.

The collaboration with Maquet was typical of Dumas’s working method. Maquet researched and drafted; Dumas rewrote, expanded and gave the prose its energy. Maquet later sued for recognition and lost, and the books continued to appear under Dumas’s name alone. Modern catalogs, including Project Gutenberg’s, now credit both.

Who should read it

This is a book for readers with time. The Gutenberg text runs to well over a thousand pages in most printings, and the story takes a while to reach Paris, where most of the revenge unfolds. Once it does, the chapters are short and the momentum is constant. The prose in this translation is plain and the French setting needs no special background. Readers who dislike coincidence as a plot device should know that Dumas uses it freely and without apology.

Edition notes

The Gutenberg edition is a complete, unabridged English translation; the translator is not named in the Gutenberg credits. Many printed English editions of the novel are abridged, sometimes heavily, so readers who have met a shorter version may find a good deal here they have not seen. The transcription was produced by anonymous Project Gutenberg volunteers, Dan Muller and David Widger.