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.

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carschno an hour ago | parent | next [-]

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.

	▲	Tuna-Fish 19 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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.
	▲	fifticon 17 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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.

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DiogenesKynikos an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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).

	▲	Tuna-Fish 13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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.