In 1846, Alexandre Dumas was at the height of his fame and wealth, with
multiple serials running in French papers. Dumas had also authored several
popular books. The Minister of Public Instruction, M. de Salvandy, hatched
the clever scheme of sending Dumas to Algeria to write about that country,
with the effect of encouraging emigration and popularizing the French
policy.
Dumas agreed to go to Algeria, but drove a hard bargain with the French
Government: they were to put a warship at his disposal, and they would pay
him Fr. 10,000 for his expenses. Dumas was going to Spain to attend the
wedding of his friend the Duc de Montpensier (grand-son of King
Louis-Philippe) to the Infanta, and he asked the ship to pick him up at
Cadiz. With him, he took his 18 year-old son Alexandre, his friend and
collaborator, the historian
Auguste Maquet,
the artist Louis Boulanger, and
two others, Giraud and Desbarolles. Dumas described the Spanish portion of
the trip In
Paris à Cadiz, and the North African portion in
Le Véloce, ou Tanger, Alger et Tunis.
"Le Véloce" was a paddle-wheel steamship that served primarily to carry
dispatches (in those pre-telegraph days) between Algeria and France, but
which was sufficiently comfortably appointed to have carried Louis-Philippe
on a state visit to Britain. "Le Véloce" picked Dumas in Cadiz on 20
November 1846, and carried him first to Tangier (where Dumas attended
Jewish wedding), at that time still under Moroccan rule, then to Gibraltar,
and thence to the Spanish enclave of Melilla, where "Le Véloce" was to pick
a dozen ransomed French prisoners, the survivors of an 1845 military
debacle at the hands of the Arab chieftain Abdel-Qadir. As it transpired,
the prisoners had been released early, and had taken a boat to the
military camp at D'jema R'Azouat, whence "Le Véloce" hastened. At the
camp, Dumas attended a banquet for the released prisoners, hosted by the
local commander, Colonel McMahon (much later to become a Maréchal of
France, and subsequently a President of the Third Republic).
"Le Véloce" then sailed for Algiers with the released prisoners onboard.
At Algiers, the Governor, Maréchal Bugeaud, was absent for a fortnight,
and Dumas decided that, in the meantime, he would like to visit Tunis, at
that time an independent state. This formed no part of the Government's
plan, but Dumas was persuasive, and "Le Véloce" sailed for Tunis. At
Tunis, Dumas attended a ball, visited the ruins of Carthage, the memorial
of the Crusader Louis IX (St. Louis) who died in 1270 while besieging
Tunis, and called upon the cousin of the local ruler, (the ruler being
absent) who awarded him a decoration. Dumas also engaged a notable Arab
architect (a designer of the ruler's palace) to design some of the interior
rooms of his "Chateau de Monte Cristo."
On the return voyage to Algiers, "Le Véloce" called at several towns, and
Dumas took one trip into the interior, during which he acquired the
vulture Jagurtha about which he wrote entertainingly in
Adventures with My Pets.
Arriving back in Algiers on Christmas day, 1846, Dumas visited a
brothel, and the investiture of a local ruler, al-Mokhrani, by the
Governor, and returned to France in January 1847.
As is common in his travel books, Dumas combined travelogue, accounts of
local history and customs, biographies of people he met, and complete short
stories ostensibly told to him by his interlocutors. Dumas was a keen and
open-minded observer, and noticed much that (to a Twentieth Century reader
well-equipped with hindsight) that suggested that the French colonial
venture in North Africa carried the seeds of its own destruction from the
outset.
Dumas' return to France was filled with controversy. His publishers were
suing him for interrupting his serials (he left Stephen Gilbert lying
unconscious on the ground in Joseph Balsamo)
and questions were being
asked in the Assembly about how Dumas could use a French warship as if it
was a private yacht..
Le Véloce: Tangier a Tunis was published in four volumes between 1848 and
1851. It has apparently never been translated in full into English. The
most commonly available translation is the 1959 "Chilton" translation by
Alma Murch,
which encompasses about one-fourth of the original material,
mostly travelogue. Several of the embodied short stories were extracted
and published separately as Tales of Algeria in 1868.
