D’Artagnan was a French soldier and commander of the musketeers in the 1600s. He inspired the character in Alexandre Dumas’ novel The Three Musketeers. Dumas wrote two sequels. D’Artagnan was also a bodyguard, governor, and spy, but was killed in 1670. Dumas’ novels were highly fictionalized, but popular. The character has appeared in other works and has become more famous than the real person who inspired him.
D’Artagnan was the name of a French soldier who served during the reign of Louis XIV in the 1600s. He was a commander of the musketeers, the famed royal guard that protected the king and other dignitaries. He inspired the character of the same name in Alexandre Dumas’ novel The Three Musketeers. Dumas wrote two more novels featuring the heroic musketeers. Due to the worldwide popularity of these books, the fictional character is now much better known than the real person who inspired him.
His full name was Charles Ogier de Batz de Castelmore, comte d’Artagnan, the latter part of the name being his hereditary title. He served in France’s elite musketeer corps during the mid-1600s, eventually becoming their commander. During his prestigious career, he also worked as a bodyguard, provincial governor and spy. He was killed, ironically, by a musket shot, a primitive firearm, during France’s war with the Netherlands in 1670. In 2008, a French historian offered strong evidence that his grave is in the southern part of the Netherlands, near where he died.
In 1700, the French writer Gatien de Sandras published The Memoirs of M. d’Artagnan, a novel based on the reminiscences of de Sandras’ fellow soldiers, who knew the musketeer. This work, like the life of d’Artagnan itself, would probably have been forgotten by history had it not been discovered 140 years later by the popular author Alexandre Dumas. Dumas made d’Artagnan the subject of his next novel, The Three Musketeers. Like de Sandras’ book, The Three Musketeers was highly fictionalized, but Dumas pretended it was an authentic historical manuscript to make the work more compelling. The novel was so successful that Dumas wrote two sequels starring his Musketeers.
In the novel, d’Artagnan begins as a young aspiring soldier who meets the three musketeers of the title. This is a common literary device, allowing the writer to introduce the characters and their world through the experiences of the main character. Musketeers Porthos, Athos and Aramis are also based on real historical figures, but most of their actions and character traits were invented by Dumas. The heroes appear in two other Dumas novels, Twenty Years After and The Vicomte of Bragelonne, better known in English as The Man in the Iron Mask.
Dumas d’Artagnan’s novels have been translated worldwide and reprinted many times since they first appeared in the 1840s. Their tales of swashbuckling adventures proved well-suited for film adaptations. The Three Musketeers in particular has been remade as a film every five to ten years since the advent of motion pictures in the 1840s. D’Artagnan appeared in other fictional works, including Edmund Rostand’s play Cyrano de Bergerac. These appearances ensured a literary immortality for a man who might otherwise have been forgotten outside his native France.
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