And suddenly, in this convulsed spring of demonstrations and social anger in France over the unpopular pension reform, d'Artagnan and the musketeers return.
They do it with a new film directed by Martin Bourboulon, number 46 inspired by the novel by Alexandre Dumas.
And evidence: there are French people who continue to see in those characters and in their adventures something deep within themselves.
"There are character traits that span the centuries," says the popular historian and specialist in monarchies Stéphane Bern, who has released a television documentary on the royal d'Artagnan.
“It is this willingness to permanently challenge power and established truths and the attempt to rise above its stature.
This is very French."
Every country has its mythology, the legendary mirror in which it likes to look at itself or in which others identify its virtues and defects.
Spain has Don Quixote.
France has several.
Bern is referring to Asterix, the comic book character created by Gosciny and Uderzo.
But, above all, D'Artagnan, that "18-year-old Don Quixote": this is how Dumas presents him in his 1844 novel, the young man who in the spring of 1625 leaves his native Gascony to serve Louis XIII as a musketeer. .
The Three Musketeers
is a story from the 17th century: the intrigues of Cardinal Richelieu, the religious wars, a medieval world that has not yet died and the modern world that is taking its first steps.
And it is a story from the 19th century, starting with the figure of the boy from the provinces who goes up to the capital to make a name for himself.
Also a current myth?
Athos, Porthos, Aramis ayynd D'Artagnan portrayed in an illustration.DEA PICTURE LIBRARY (De Agostini via Getty Images)
"The musketeers are a myth that permeates the French imagination," observes the journalist Sébastien Le Fol, author of the recently published
En bande organisée.
Mitterrand, le pacte secret
(In an organized gang. Mitterrand, the secret pact).
This book is a chronicle of a band of friends who, like D'Artagnan and the musketeers Porthos, Athos and Aramis, accompanied François Mitterrand, President of the Republic between 1981 and 1994, throughout his life. XIII and that of Emmanuel Macron there are coincidences, according to Le Fol: “We have a country that continues to be a flammable, eruptive, fighting, divided country.
The farmland that musketeers grew up in in the 17th century hasn't changed much."
"The myth goes beyond France," says Claude Schopp, Dumas's biographer.
"Its universality is very masculine: the image of virile friendship, with an underlying idea: if we have the right to do justice on our own, as in The Count of
Monte Cristo
", he adds, alluding to the other famous novel by the author of 'The three Musketeers'.
When this specialist is asked if Dumas has heirs in current literature, he does not cite any French: “The true descendant of Alexandre Dumas is Arturo Pérez-Reverte, the author of The Dumas Club
”
.
What is specifically French, in the myth of the musketeers, are a series of clichés about the autochthonous character.
The most cited among those interviewed for this chronicle is the
panache
: courage, fierceness mixed with a somewhat unconscious pride.
Cyrano de Bergerac has
panache
.
d'Artagnan, too.
“It's a bit of an overrated notion, a way of being, slightly revolutionary,” explains Schopp.
"In the protests these days there is something of the musketeers, a lack of good sense."
Bern points out: "There is in the musketeers a camaraderie and fidelity to the king and to a principle, although at the same time they are free, jokers, rowdy."
Vincent Cassel and Eva Green in 'The Three Musketeers: D'artagnan'.
Macron, complaining a few years ago about the reluctance of the French to accept economic reforms, spoke of "the refractory Gauls".
He was surely thinking of Asterix, but, according to Bern, there is also in the musketeers “this somewhat bravado side that defies authority, while being faithful to certain values”.
There is something of the musketeers in the protesters but also in Macron, a president who, as he confessed to Javier Cercas in January in a conversation for EL PAÍS, considers that, deep down, literature "is the only thing that matters."
He, like d'Artagnan or the Balzacians Rastignac or Rubempré, was also a boy who landed in Paris hungry for the world and power.
He was someone who, as Dumas writes of Monsieur de Tréville, the chief of the musketeers and himself of provincial origin, could say: “His insolent bravery, his even more insolent joy even at a time when blows fell like hail , they had raised him to the top of this difficult staircase that we call the favor of the court, and whose steps he had climbed four at a time.
Bern, close to the Macron couple, sees in the president simultaneously traits of Richelieu and of D'Artagnan.
Macron-Richelieu, according to Bern: “he was a brilliant and eminent character, calculating.
Macron has something of him."
Macron-D'Artagnan: “He is the bravado, almost provocative side.
'If you don't love me, I don't care about him'.
Not everyone is capable of not needing to be loved.
D'Artagnan did not seek to be popular either.
There is an essential trait of D'Artagnan that, according to the journalist Le Fol, Macron lacks: he lacks a gang, some musketeers who have accompanied him in his battles.
At least they are not known.
The core of his team is him and his wife, Brigitte.
Mitterrand once told the journalist Jean Lacouture: "You should know that politics is a story of gangs."
Le Fol quotes the sentence at the beginning of his book about Mitterrand and his childhood and youth friends Pierre de Bénouville, François Dalle and André Bettencourt.
It was a true gang of musketeers, four bourgeois from the provinces who flirted with the extreme right in the thirties, who knew the ambiguities of the future president during the years of occupation and resistance, and who, without ever breaking the loyalty pact they linked them, they helped him conquer Paris and power as the first socialist head of state in the Fifth Republic.
"In every band of musketeers there is a boss, and the boss was Mitterrand: they all defended him against the attacks because of his past, because they knew his secrets," says the author.
Mitterrand's story is proof that the myth of the musketeers lives on and determines how politics and history are lived in this country.
Although times change.
Today perhaps a D'Artagnan, or a Mitterrand, would not go to Paris.
"Before, if you wanted to succeed, you had to conquer Paris," summarizes Le Fol.
“Today, young provincials with a desire for success do not necessarily go to Paris.
They will go to Silicon Valley.
Or to Madrid”.
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