The Three Musketeers

In The Three Musketeers, Dumas subverts the adventure novel’s typical straightforward approach to protagonists and antagonists.

Dumas’s version of the court of Louis XIII is a murky, intrigue-riven place whose influence on society is hard to categorize as either good or bad. Intended to be a centralized locus of power—both secular and religious—the court is actually so divided into factions at odds with one another that its ability to effectively govern is often compromised. While d’Artagnan’s father advises him to be extra respectful to the people who run the country, d’Artagnan soon sees that this blanket advice means little when admiration of one court figure is as like as not to incur the wrath of another. Queen Anne, who is Austrian by birth, is having an affair with the English Duke of Buckingham, an enemy of France. Because the Musketeers are our protagonists, readers accept their commitment to upholding her honor and see the lovelorn and relatively powerless queen as sympathetic. However, this forces the Musketeers to split their loyalty: They officially serve the king, whom the queen’s actions are betraying both personally and politically, especially after the queen asks her Austrian ruler brother to declare war on France. Moreover, the intrigue between Queen Anne and King Louis has been partly engineered by Cardinal Richelieu, nominally the king’s top adviser, but in practice, a man who rivals the king in power and authority. The internecine conflict is hard to simplify into good versus evil: The deeply sympathetic is committing treason, while the malevolent cardinal is correct to worry that her actions will mean war between at least England and France, if not the rest of Europe as well.

Characters too often straddle the line between good and bad. Structurally, Cardinal Richelieu is an antagonist: He acts against the Musketeers, his Guards are an opposing force forever dueling with our protagonists, and he hires nefarious agents to spy on his enemies and commit assassinations. However, in many ways, the cardinal is acting along the same principles as the novel’s protagonists. Like the Musketeers, he clearly wants to protect France and the Catholic Church—the correct motivations for someone in his position. Additionally, while readers are primed to condemn the cardinal’s use of people like Rochefort to accomplish secret missions, we cheer on the Musketeers when they are engaged in almost identical secret counter-missions against them. While the cardinal clearly wants to destabilize the king’s rule to amass more power for himself, he is also a pragmatic technocrat: When opposing the Musketeers is no longer politically sensible, he promotes d’Artagnan to lieutenant to buy his secrecy and loyalty. Conversely, one of our ostensible heroes also has a disturbing dark side. Athos is first presented as a quintessential Musketeer: an ally to his comrades, a good friend, and a loyal soldier. However, Athos admits that he murdered his wife (unsuccessfully, as it turns out) after discovering her criminal past. Instead of going through the justice system, Athos simply used his status as a member of the elite to execute her—a shocking revelation that makes us see the Musketeers’ power and authority in an unpleasant new light.