The Crowd in Alexandre Dumas’s Les Mohicans de Paris : Facets and Issues
In the novel Les Mohicans de Paris, Alexandre Dumas constructs an original portrait of the crowd that is closely linked to the fundamental issues of this impressive novel. The crowd takes on various faces, Dumas presenting it as a “simple” gathering of people, a destructive riot, or as the ever-changing public opinion. This article analyzes each of these facets in order to show how the novelist turns on itself the repeated motif of violence traditionally associated with the crowd in a way that is both logical and surprising. Under the pen of Dumas, the crowd is no longer simply threatening as it is generally portrayed, it also becomes, in a way, threatened.