The Conspirators
A plot against the Regent. A soldier with nothing to lose.
Paris, 1718. France is ruled not by a king but by a regent, Philippe d'Orléans, governing in the name of the child Louis XV — and a circle of disaffected nobles is plotting to bring him down. Into this dangerous game steps the Chevalier Raoul d'Harmental, a proud, impoverished soldier of fortune recruited into the conspiracy almost by accident. When he falls in love with a young woman living secretly under his own roof, his loyalty to the plot and his heart pull him in opposite directions, in what George Saintsbury called one of Dumas's finest achievements — and the very first novel Dumas wrote together with Auguste Maquet.
Where Dumas and Maquet Began
Published in 1843, this novel holds a special place in Dumas's career: it was the very first book he wrote together with Auguste Maquet, the historian and collaborator who would go on to help shape The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, and more than a dozen other novels over the following years. Dumas reworked an earlier draft Maquet had brought him, and the partnership that resulted would define the most productive years of Dumas's career.
The novel dramatizes a genuine conspiracy: the Cellamare plot of 1718, a scheme hatched with Spanish backing to remove Philippe d'Orléans from the regency and replace him with King Philip V of Spain. Real figures move through the story — the Regent himself, the ambitious Duchesse du Maine, and the Spanish ambassador Cellamare — and the plot's real, almost anticlimactic collapse (its ringleaders were eventually pardoned rather than executed) gives Dumas's fictional hero an unusually precarious, morally shaded position to occupy.
A Duel Critics Still Remember
Among the novel's most celebrated set-pieces is an early duel fought in a forest clearing, staged with a precision and tension that critics have singled out for well over a century as one of the finest action sequences Dumas ever wrote. It sets the tone for a book that — despite its focus on court conspiracy rather than open warfare — loses none of the swordplay and daring that made Dumas famous just one year before he would publish The Three Musketeers.
A Novel With a Sequel
Dumas and Maquet returned to several of this novel's characters in a direct sequel, The Regent's Daughter, which continues the story of the Cellamare conspiracy's aftermath. Together the two books form a loose duology set during one of the stranger interludes in French royal history — a kingdom ruled by a regent, its court riddled with competing plots, in the years between the death of Louis XIV and the coming of age of Louis XV.
"Ranked Among His Masterpieces"
The English critic and literary historian George Saintsbury described The Conspirators as usually ranked among Dumas's masterpieces — high praise for a novel that has nonetheless remained less widely read today than The Three Musketeers or The Count of Monte Cristo. Dumas himself had mixed feelings about the book, acknowledging both its strengths and its flaws, but its central duel, its doomed conspiracy, and its complicated hero have kept it in print, and in adaptation, for well over a century.
First Published
1843, Dumas's first collaboration with Auguste Maquet.
Setting
Paris, 1718, during the real Cellamare Conspiracy against the Regent of France.
Genre
Historical adventure and court conspiracy, with one of Dumas's most celebrated duels.
Followed By
The Regent's Daughter, continuing the story's aftermath.