In The Three Musketeers, Dumas subverts the adventure novel’s typical straightforward approach to protagonists and antagonists.

Dumas’s version of the court of Louis XIII is a murky, intrigue-riven place whose influence on society is hard to categorize as either good or bad. Intended to be a centralized locus of power—both secular and religious—the court is actually so divided into factions at odds with one another that its ability to effectively govern is often compromised. While d’Artagnan’s father advises him to be extra respectful to the people who run the country, d’Artagnan soon sees that this blanket advice means little when admiration of one court figure is as like as not to incur the wrath of another. Queen Anne, who is Austrian by birth, is having an affair with the English Duke of Buckingham, an enemy of France. Because the Musketeers are our protagonists, readers accept their commitment to upholding her honor and see the lovelorn and relatively powerless queen as sympathetic. However, this forces the Musketeers to split their loyalty: They officially serve the king, whom the queen’s actions are betraying both personally and politically, especially after the queen asks her Austrian ruler brother to declare war on France.