Le brigand amoureux : une figure de l'imaginaire dumasien

In the Roman episode of the Count of Monte Cristo, the brigand Carlini kills his beloved so that she does not serve as a collective amusement to his comrades. As for the shepherd Luigi Vampa, he becomes a brigand to impress and defend the beautiful Teresa. The erotic dimension plays an important role in the construction of a romantic “type”, the “Italian brigand”, to whom Dumas entrusts a large part of the action and the moral of the novel. The brigand in love is also a recurring figure of Dumasian imagination, if one thinks of Pauline or Pascal Bruno. The staging of deviant eroticism also provides access to the cultural systems of representation of crime, of which Dumas becomes at one and the same time a receiver, an artisan and a speaker.