The Loterie des Lingots d’or: Chance, Power, and Social Control in Nineteenth-Century France

Abstract

This article examines Alexandre Dumas fils’s Histoire de la Loterie depuis la première jusqu’à la dernière (1851), a largely neglected pamphlet that sheds light on the cultural, social, and political significance of gambling in mid-nineteenth-century France. Written in support of the Loterie des Lingots d’or, the text reveals Dumas’s complex fascination with money, chance, and easy wealth at the dawn of the Second Empire, a period marked by the growing dominance of financial values. Through historical, mythological, and contemporary examples, Dumas situates the lottery within a long tradition of games of chance, from antiquity to modern Europe. The article argues that the pamphlet is both promotional and prophetic, anticipating the central role of money in modern society and exposing the ambiguities of philanthropy, speculation, and state power. By linking the lottery to the Californian Gold Rush and political strategies of exclusion, Dumas’s discourse ultimately presents chance as a governing principle of life itself, encapsulated in his assertion that “everything in this world is a lottery.”