When I read the book in my youth, I remember being surprised not only by the lack of muskets, but also that it was more about D'Artagnan than about the titular Three Musketeers.
Anyway, if you think about it, it makes sense: muskets were a new and unproven technology that still needed a lot of development to actually become usable firearms. While you were busy lighting the fuse on your musket, your opponent could attack and kill you with his sword. So, of course, the king's elite troops needed to be equipped with these "high-tech" weapons for prestige reasons, but due to their impracticality, it's not surprising that they didn't actually see much use...
The original novel is set in 1625-1628. At that point, firearms are well and truly established, having proven themselves to be the war-winning weapon in the Italian Wars more than a century ago. They are not new and unproven technology; they are the weapon that the great grandparents of the main characters fought and won with.
But they are a symbol of the wrong social class. A musket is something that a peasant or a burgher can use to kill a noble. All the main characters in the three musketeers are nobility, and their social class has suffered greatly from the "democratization" of war. They, like almost everyone like them historically, much prefer the old ways from when they were more pre-eminent, and look down their noses at firearms. They spend very little time at war, and a lot more time duelling and participating in schemes.
The high-tech of the early 17th century wasn't even matchlocks anymore, it was flintlocks. Those took another ~50 or so years to become general issue, but at the time of the novels upper class people who can afford modern weapons wouldn't have been fumbling with matches anymore.
I suppose you are right about the history of firearms. However, the novel was written in 1844, more than 200 years after the time in which it is set.
Which makes me wonder if the author (Alexandre Dumas) knew and cared about the historic facts.
Dumas was meticulously accurate, not to the world as it historically existed, but to how the French upper classes felt and wrote about. He was extremely well read in people's memoirs and diaries, and wrote his stories set in the world as the French aristocracy imagined it existed.
I believe he got this detail right in both ways; in that firearms were the most important weapons, and also the main characters would have done their very best to ignore that fact.
One thing that always bothered me was his use of currency. In the French original he mentions at least 5-6 types of currency and it seems they all have common sub-divisions, despite some of them being Spanish or even Italian.
Was France using other people's currrncy back then ?
The nation of France as we know it did not exist at that time and there was no standardized currency among the kingdoms that made up the crown. Livres, sous, and deniers were the standard unit of accounting but each major polity produced their own coinage. Kings also sometimes devalued their currencies to help pay for wars so traders preferred to use more stable currencies like Spanish and Dutch coins (Louis XIII did a major devaluation about a decade after the time period of the book, which colored perceptions of the time).
It was very common before nationalism and the standardization of currencies. I read primary sources about conquistadors and the contracts financing and supplying the expedition might involve a dozen currencies because each trader supplying the wood, food, animals, etc would work in their own preferred/local currency.
I'm no historian, but back then, coins were literally worth their weight in gold (or silver, copper, bronze, whatever), so it was probably easier to pay with foreign currency than we might assume...
It’s more that there was a standard unit of accounting (livres, sous, and deniers) and everyone could convert from one currency to that standard and back to another currency. It moved a lot slower than modern foreign exchange so except for local fluctuations, it was rather predictable.
> were literally worth their weight in gold (or silver, copper, bronze, whatever), so it was probably easier to pay with foreign currency than we might assume
Are you sure you know what the coin paid you is made of? A merchant of the time wasn’t. Those who care not to be scammed have never found it simple.
Experienced traders can make a quick estimate of the purity by rubbing it against a touchstone, which has been used since ancient times. And by treating the rubbings with mineral acids you can make even more accurate determinations, although I'm not sure if this was done in the 1620s.
Everyone used whatever currency was locally availible, with every merchant in border regions being very aware of conversion rates. Throughout history there was also a cronic shortage of smaller-denomination cash, stuff for normal people to buy normal things. Today, we see "clipped" coins as evidence of forgery when in fact much of that was likely related to a lack of loose change. Nobody in town able to break a gold crown? Well, maybe you buy a horse with a slice of gold from that crown.
above all, I believe he cared about getting the next draft ready for each week / before deadline, and then about keeping the cliffhanger suspense high, to keep his fish on their hooks.
Even though firearms were well and truly established by the 17th Century, blade weapons remained important right on through to the mid-1800s.
Bayonet charges were a major aspect of Napoleonic warfare, and only really went away with the development of firearms that had higher rates of fire and were accurate out to larger ranges. In the Napoleonic era, soldiers would close to within 50-100 meters, fire off a few volleys, and then charge in with the bayonet.
By the time armies were equipped with breech-loading rifles that could fire half a dozen accurate shots a minute at a distance of a few hundred meters, the volume and accuracy of fire made the bayonet charge obsolete. But that was rather late (the 1860s or so).
By the Napoleonic Wars, something below 10% of casualties were caused by melee weapons. And even that was mostly cavalry, bayonets account for ~2%. The purpose of the bayonet charge was not to kill your enemy, it was to convince your weakened enemy to cede his position after you had already done the killing. The forces rarely fought hand-to-hand and when they did it was notable, usually one side was so weakened and shocked that they fled or refused to charge.
Also it would be pretty hard for officers to make soldiers do bayonet attack if it weren't known they'd probably face little or no resistance. People tend to value their lives.
Even though most of the casualties were caused by musket and artillery fire, the bayonet was tactically very important in Napoleonic warfare. A bayonet charge is absolutely terrifying, and the reason why there were relatively few casualties from them is likely because soldiers would break rank and flee in the face of one. If soldiers had stood their ground and fought, casualties would have been much higher, and with their low rate of fire, muskets would have been of little use in hand-to-hand combat.
They key change that happened in the mid-1800s is that firearms finally achieved ranges and rates of fire that made closing with a massed enemy nearly impossible.
Yeah, I guess that's what I meant with "impractical". Sure, if you had your enemy on the other side of a battlefield, or outside the walls of your castle, muskets were great. If you met them on the streets of Paris, not so much...
If you planned the meeting with the enemy in Paris you might bring a musket, but you wouldn't carry one normally. I know lots of gun advocates and none of them carry a long gun with them except when they are planning on using it - they carry a small pistol for emergencies, but not the long gun. (they might keep the long gun in the truck, but not on their person). If I was planning on shooting someone in Paris I'd want the more accurate long gun (assuming I could get it to where I need it), but I'm not going to carry it when I'm "our for coffee" and happen to see my enemy.
The novel is more about politics. There are very few scenes where I'd expect a modern solider of any nation to have their gun with them either. (though a few scenes where I would expect one they often don't seem to have them)
The whole point of The Three Musketeers is that they are men out of their time, in an end-of-epoch story, surely.
Nobody drinks and carouses like they do, nobody has their sense of chivalry, artistry and old-fashioned justice. The world has lost its colour, its joy and its sense of fairness, and they are loyal to an institution which is itself corrupted and whose time is clearly ending. And so they are lost: they have no cause and they are slowly destroying themselves.
This is why they are portrayed as musketeers who think muskets (representing callous modernity) are clumsy and uncouth. It underscores that the three don't even feel they really fit with the rest of the musketeers. They know muskets have their place. It's just not with them. So there's no reason to explain them away logically. It's a literary device.
The second point is that D'Artagnan is there to remind them of who they were and could be again. D'Artagnan is the hero of the story because he has not been corrupted by life experience.
The third layer is he's also a proxy for the reader who wishes they were there. He is there to get life lessons on the reader's behalf: that stories don't tell the whole truth, that people begin to confuse themselves with their own personal mythologies, that fame isn't reality, that there are risks in meeting your heroes, that adults will let you down, that no institution is better than its people, etc.
This trope has been parodied in various ways since, not least I think in the form of "person who confuses actors for the people they play and convinces them they know as much about the job as the characters they play". Which has itself been parodied in Three Amigos! and also in Galaxy Quest.
And the trope of guns being impersonal compared to swords and knives turns up everywhere.
Lawrence Ellsworth's translations are good (he's a sword and sorcery writer), but good luck trying to disambiguate them on Amazon. Look for red cursive titles.
Some of my recollection is reinforced by the movies, I must confess, because I remember them more than the book, which I think I read a bit too young. I should read it again now I am an old bloke.
The films make more of the musketeers' slow ruin, I think, than the book does. But Porthos is vain and a bit dim, Athos drinks like a fish, etc. If I remember the book right, the films also tend to make a bit less of D'Artagnan's naïvete and tidy up his personal morality, and Athos is usually a loud, drunken, loyal powerhouse in the films rather than an alcoholic.
The fundamentals of the films are usually right: the musketeers are aimless and in need of direction, aware they serve a pretty weak monarch, mostly powerless to deal with the corruption around him. Everyone has their own motivations.
Weirdly, the delightful eighties Dogtanian and The Three Muskehounds series is pretty close to the book — it's toned down rather than bowdlerised. D'Artagnan really is a feisty puppy, basically.
And now I have that song stuck in my head.
I think what I should actually do is read the book again while rewatching Dogtanian, because that sounds fun and I read the book largely because of it!
> Nobody drinks and carouses like they do, nobody has their sense of chivalry, artistry and old-fashioned justice. The world has lost its colour, its joy and its sense of fairness, and they are loyal to an institution which is itself corrupted and whose time is clearly ending. And so they are lost: they have no cause and they are slowly destroying themselves.
If you wrote it set in the present day, they'd be a bunch of 50-somethings pining for the 90s, bucket hats, blasting Pablo Honey and Modern Life Is Rubbish from the Sharp "Full Auto Reverse" in the Astra, and bemoaning how you can't get decent E and no-one gets in fights any more. They probably own very expensive guitars, too, that they can't really play. The Kia e-Niro will run out of battery at the most inconvenient time leaving our trio stranded on their way to retrieve the stolen diamond to pay off the local councillor Ritchley, who is really fronting for a shadowy property developer who he is very much in love with but has no chance with.
They all dream of one day leaving Swindon.
Athos, Porthos and Aramis are Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and Dylan Moran, Ritchley is Bill Nighy, and Milady is Tamsin Greig.
Quite a lot of people absolutely hate it, but somehow still have a pirate copy squirrelled away.
Yeah — quite a lot of "let's get the gang back together to fight the old enemy which is reorganising with the new enemy" films borrow quite heavily from it, I think. Especially because there's almost always a newbie who has heard all the stories (some of them untrue, some of them edited) — someone's recently disclosed lovechild, some kid who was kept safe in prison by one of their dead friends, etc.
Matchlock Musket took forever to fire. It needed all these steps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KTS8PQ06Qo
This is powerful when in actual battle, pretty impractical in the Paris streets and situations these guys find themselves in.
Comments here make big conclusions basically out of mundane historical realities. Our modern stories about soldiers feature soldiers using arms appropriate to occasion too - not just the most powerful but least practical gun assigned to their unit.
Tl;dr modern tank battalion guy is not driving tank everywhere either. Not because there is some profound disconnect with social class or system or other people, but because he is not an idiot.
Flintlock tech was available at the time the books were set. The pan could be primed and loaded in advance and kept ready to fire.
Still only good for one shot before you need to switch to a blade in close battle, of course, and utterly beside the point of the story, but worth calling out.
When I read the book in my youth, I remember being surprised not only by the lack of muskets, but also that it was more about D'Artagnan than about the titular Three Musketeers.
Anyway, if you think about it, it makes sense: muskets were a new and unproven technology that still needed a lot of development to actually become usable firearms. While you were busy lighting the fuse on your musket, your opponent could attack and kill you with his sword. So, of course, the king's elite troops needed to be equipped with these "high-tech" weapons for prestige reasons, but due to their impracticality, it's not surprising that they didn't actually see much use...
The original novel is set in 1625-1628. At that point, firearms are well and truly established, having proven themselves to be the war-winning weapon in the Italian Wars more than a century ago. They are not new and unproven technology; they are the weapon that the great grandparents of the main characters fought and won with.
But they are a symbol of the wrong social class. A musket is something that a peasant or a burgher can use to kill a noble. All the main characters in the three musketeers are nobility, and their social class has suffered greatly from the "democratization" of war. They, like almost everyone like them historically, much prefer the old ways from when they were more pre-eminent, and look down their noses at firearms. They spend very little time at war, and a lot more time duelling and participating in schemes.
The high-tech of the early 17th century wasn't even matchlocks anymore, it was flintlocks. Those took another ~50 or so years to become general issue, but at the time of the novels upper class people who can afford modern weapons wouldn't have been fumbling with matches anymore.
I suppose you are right about the history of firearms. However, the novel was written in 1844, more than 200 years after the time in which it is set. Which makes me wonder if the author (Alexandre Dumas) knew and cared about the historic facts.
Dumas was meticulously accurate, not to the world as it historically existed, but to how the French upper classes felt and wrote about. He was extremely well read in people's memoirs and diaries, and wrote his stories set in the world as the French aristocracy imagined it existed.
I believe he got this detail right in both ways; in that firearms were the most important weapons, and also the main characters would have done their very best to ignore that fact.
One thing that always bothered me was his use of currency. In the French original he mentions at least 5-6 types of currency and it seems they all have common sub-divisions, despite some of them being Spanish or even Italian.
Was France using other people's currrncy back then ?
The nation of France as we know it did not exist at that time and there was no standardized currency among the kingdoms that made up the crown. Livres, sous, and deniers were the standard unit of accounting but each major polity produced their own coinage. Kings also sometimes devalued their currencies to help pay for wars so traders preferred to use more stable currencies like Spanish and Dutch coins (Louis XIII did a major devaluation about a decade after the time period of the book, which colored perceptions of the time).
It was very common before nationalism and the standardization of currencies. I read primary sources about conquistadors and the contracts financing and supplying the expedition might involve a dozen currencies because each trader supplying the wood, food, animals, etc would work in their own preferred/local currency.
I'm no historian, but back then, coins were literally worth their weight in gold (or silver, copper, bronze, whatever), so it was probably easier to pay with foreign currency than we might assume...
It’s more that there was a standard unit of accounting (livres, sous, and deniers) and everyone could convert from one currency to that standard and back to another currency. It moved a lot slower than modern foreign exchange so except for local fluctuations, it was rather predictable.
> were literally worth their weight in gold (or silver, copper, bronze, whatever), so it was probably easier to pay with foreign currency than we might assume
Are you sure you know what the coin paid you is made of? A merchant of the time wasn’t. Those who care not to be scammed have never found it simple.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debasement
Experienced traders can make a quick estimate of the purity by rubbing it against a touchstone, which has been used since ancient times. And by treating the rubbings with mineral acids you can make even more accurate determinations, although I'm not sure if this was done in the 1620s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchstone_(assaying_tool)
In practice though, you only have to be as confident as the guy who will eventually sell you something for it.
Everyone used whatever currency was locally availible, with every merchant in border regions being very aware of conversion rates. Throughout history there was also a cronic shortage of smaller-denomination cash, stuff for normal people to buy normal things. Today, we see "clipped" coins as evidence of forgery when in fact much of that was likely related to a lack of loose change. Nobody in town able to break a gold crown? Well, maybe you buy a horse with a slice of gold from that crown.
For more on this, see the (sadly, hastily researched to some degree) biography of his father, _The Black Count_:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13330922-the-black-count
which arguably served as a template for a famous novel which also features a count in the title.
above all, I believe he cared about getting the next draft ready for each week / before deadline, and then about keeping the cliffhanger suspense high, to keep his fish on their hooks.
Even though firearms were well and truly established by the 17th Century, blade weapons remained important right on through to the mid-1800s.
Bayonet charges were a major aspect of Napoleonic warfare, and only really went away with the development of firearms that had higher rates of fire and were accurate out to larger ranges. In the Napoleonic era, soldiers would close to within 50-100 meters, fire off a few volleys, and then charge in with the bayonet.
By the time armies were equipped with breech-loading rifles that could fire half a dozen accurate shots a minute at a distance of a few hundred meters, the volume and accuracy of fire made the bayonet charge obsolete. But that was rather late (the 1860s or so).
Bayonet charges were not obsolete, but the killing in war was done by fire.
See, for example: https://journals.gold.ac.uk/index.php/bjmh/article/download/...
By the Napoleonic Wars, something below 10% of casualties were caused by melee weapons. And even that was mostly cavalry, bayonets account for ~2%. The purpose of the bayonet charge was not to kill your enemy, it was to convince your weakened enemy to cede his position after you had already done the killing. The forces rarely fought hand-to-hand and when they did it was notable, usually one side was so weakened and shocked that they fled or refused to charge.
Also it would be pretty hard for officers to make soldiers do bayonet attack if it weren't known they'd probably face little or no resistance. People tend to value their lives.
Thanks for the interesting article.
Even though most of the casualties were caused by musket and artillery fire, the bayonet was tactically very important in Napoleonic warfare. A bayonet charge is absolutely terrifying, and the reason why there were relatively few casualties from them is likely because soldiers would break rank and flee in the face of one. If soldiers had stood their ground and fought, casualties would have been much higher, and with their low rate of fire, muskets would have been of little use in hand-to-hand combat.
They key change that happened in the mid-1800s is that firearms finally achieved ranges and rates of fire that made closing with a massed enemy nearly impossible.
I suspect running into grapeshot was a tad more terrifying than a bayonet charge.
IIRC, the British Army employed bayonet charges in Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s.
lol
Bayonets have been used recently in Afghanistan.
No; muskets were a battlefield weapon, and little of the book takes place on the battlefield. You wouldn’t carry them around Paris.
Yeah, I guess that's what I meant with "impractical". Sure, if you had your enemy on the other side of a battlefield, or outside the walls of your castle, muskets were great. If you met them on the streets of Paris, not so much...
If you planned the meeting with the enemy in Paris you might bring a musket, but you wouldn't carry one normally. I know lots of gun advocates and none of them carry a long gun with them except when they are planning on using it - they carry a small pistol for emergencies, but not the long gun. (they might keep the long gun in the truck, but not on their person). If I was planning on shooting someone in Paris I'd want the more accurate long gun (assuming I could get it to where I need it), but I'm not going to carry it when I'm "our for coffee" and happen to see my enemy.
The novel is more about politics. There are very few scenes where I'd expect a modern solider of any nation to have their gun with them either. (though a few scenes where I would expect one they often don't seem to have them)
The whole point of The Three Musketeers is that they are men out of their time, in an end-of-epoch story, surely.
Nobody drinks and carouses like they do, nobody has their sense of chivalry, artistry and old-fashioned justice. The world has lost its colour, its joy and its sense of fairness, and they are loyal to an institution which is itself corrupted and whose time is clearly ending. And so they are lost: they have no cause and they are slowly destroying themselves.
This is why they are portrayed as musketeers who think muskets (representing callous modernity) are clumsy and uncouth. It underscores that the three don't even feel they really fit with the rest of the musketeers. They know muskets have their place. It's just not with them. So there's no reason to explain them away logically. It's a literary device.
The second point is that D'Artagnan is there to remind them of who they were and could be again. D'Artagnan is the hero of the story because he has not been corrupted by life experience.
The third layer is he's also a proxy for the reader who wishes they were there. He is there to get life lessons on the reader's behalf: that stories don't tell the whole truth, that people begin to confuse themselves with their own personal mythologies, that fame isn't reality, that there are risks in meeting your heroes, that adults will let you down, that no institution is better than its people, etc.
This trope has been parodied in various ways since, not least I think in the form of "person who confuses actors for the people they play and convinces them they know as much about the job as the characters they play". Which has itself been parodied in Three Amigos! and also in Galaxy Quest.
And the trope of guns being impersonal compared to swords and knives turns up everywhere.
> And the trope of guns being impersonal compared to swords and knives turns up everywhere.
"This is the weapon of a Jedi Knight. Not as clumsy or random as a blaster. An elegant weapon for a more civilized age."
You made me want to buy the books now, despite seeing all the movies many times before :)
No need to buy, though arguably, the better translations are still in copyright, see Goodreads and Steven Brust's recommendation of a translation.
Lawrence Ellsworth's translations are good (he's a sword and sorcery writer), but good luck trying to disambiguate them on Amazon. Look for red cursive titles.
Some of my recollection is reinforced by the movies, I must confess, because I remember them more than the book, which I think I read a bit too young. I should read it again now I am an old bloke.
The films make more of the musketeers' slow ruin, I think, than the book does. But Porthos is vain and a bit dim, Athos drinks like a fish, etc. If I remember the book right, the films also tend to make a bit less of D'Artagnan's naïvete and tidy up his personal morality, and Athos is usually a loud, drunken, loyal powerhouse in the films rather than an alcoholic.
The fundamentals of the films are usually right: the musketeers are aimless and in need of direction, aware they serve a pretty weak monarch, mostly powerless to deal with the corruption around him. Everyone has their own motivations.
Weirdly, the delightful eighties Dogtanian and The Three Muskehounds series is pretty close to the book — it's toned down rather than bowdlerised. D'Artagnan really is a feisty puppy, basically.
And now I have that song stuck in my head.
I think what I should actually do is read the book again while rewatching Dogtanian, because that sounds fun and I read the book largely because of it!
> Nobody drinks and carouses like they do, nobody has their sense of chivalry, artistry and old-fashioned justice. The world has lost its colour, its joy and its sense of fairness, and they are loyal to an institution which is itself corrupted and whose time is clearly ending. And so they are lost: they have no cause and they are slowly destroying themselves.
If you wrote it set in the present day, they'd be a bunch of 50-somethings pining for the 90s, bucket hats, blasting Pablo Honey and Modern Life Is Rubbish from the Sharp "Full Auto Reverse" in the Astra, and bemoaning how you can't get decent E and no-one gets in fights any more. They probably own very expensive guitars, too, that they can't really play. The Kia e-Niro will run out of battery at the most inconvenient time leaving our trio stranded on their way to retrieve the stolen diamond to pay off the local councillor Ritchley, who is really fronting for a shadowy property developer who he is very much in love with but has no chance with.
They all dream of one day leaving Swindon.
Athos, Porthos and Aramis are Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and Dylan Moran, Ritchley is Bill Nighy, and Milady is Tamsin Greig.
Quite a lot of people absolutely hate it, but somehow still have a pirate copy squirrelled away.
I can't believe I didn't catch the reference until Swindon.
What's the reference?
Yeah — quite a lot of "let's get the gang back together to fight the old enemy which is reorganising with the new enemy" films borrow quite heavily from it, I think. Especially because there's almost always a newbie who has heard all the stories (some of them untrue, some of them edited) — someone's recently disclosed lovechild, some kid who was kept safe in prison by one of their dead friends, etc.
My guess is that the use of mousquetaires was more a reference to a specific corps of the military than to the weapon itself.
It would be like the gendarmes today — literally "armed people", even if they don't always carry an arm.
Does anybody know which edition with the cheerful footnotes is referred here?
Matchlock Musket took forever to fire. It needed all these steps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KTS8PQ06Qo This is powerful when in actual battle, pretty impractical in the Paris streets and situations these guys find themselves in.
Comments here make big conclusions basically out of mundane historical realities. Our modern stories about soldiers feature soldiers using arms appropriate to occasion too - not just the most powerful but least practical gun assigned to their unit.
Tl;dr modern tank battalion guy is not driving tank everywhere either. Not because there is some profound disconnect with social class or system or other people, but because he is not an idiot.
Flintlock tech was available at the time the books were set. The pan could be primed and loaded in advance and kept ready to fire.
Still only good for one shot before you need to switch to a blade in close battle, of course, and utterly beside the point of the story, but worth calling out.