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The Beginnings of Bleeding-Heart Liberalism: Eugène Sue's Les Mystères de Paris

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Edward R. Tannenbaum
Edward R. Tannenbaum
Affiliation:
New York University
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Extract

Eugène Sue's novel Les Mystères de Paris created a stir when it appeared in 1842–43 in serial form in the daily Journal des Débats and in ten one-volume installments, plus a number of truncated and pirated editions. This rambling episodic work comprises over a dozen melodramas held together mainly by the direct or indirect involvement in them of the hero-savior Rudolph Grand Duke of Gerolstein, the miserly notary and arch villain Jacques Ferrand, the vulnerable sullied virgin Fleur-de-Marie, and the well-meaning aristocratic lady Clemence Marquise d'Harville. Longer than most serial novels, Les Mystères maintains its readers' interest with lurid exposés of Paris low life, heart-rending descriptions of the sufferings of the deserving poor, diabolical intrigues, knick-of-time rescues, and scenes of sex and violence at all social levels. Periodically the author interrupts his narrative with moralizing commentaries and proposals for social reform. Contemporary observers claimed that everyone from duchesses to house porters read Les Mystères de Paris for its sensationalism. It has also been argued that the book's working-class readers wrote so many letters to Sue urging him to stress the high moral qualities of his fictional workers—epitomized by the craftsman Jérome Morel—that their “collective constraint” transformed it from a book about the “dangerous” classes into a book about the laboring classes, and converted the author himself into a champion of their cause.

Type
The Press and the Liberal Mind
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 23 , Issue 3 , July 1981 , pp. 491 - 507
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1981

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References

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7 The works of Restif de la Bretonne. the Marquis de Sade, and Sébastien Mercier had been neither written for, nor read by, the bankers, stock brokers, academicians, and conservative officials and politicians at whom the Journal des Débats was aimed.

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25 Sue acknowledges this by noting that in a recent session of the legislature a proposal for establishing homes for workers crippled on the job elicited “a general and prolonged hilarity.” Les Mystères, 495.Google Scholar

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29 Ibid., 2, n. 2. But Sue himself never mastered the subtleties of this argot, no matter how hard he tried. Commenting on the name Fleur-de-Marie, which was argot for The Holy Virgin, he says, “étrange hasard! les inventeurs de cette épouvantable langue se sont ainsi élevés à une sainte poésie.” He completely misses the brazen disrespect intended, which is comparable to that conveyed by “you mother!” in black ghetto English.

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33 See the paintings and drawings of Daumier, who also contributed many illustrations to the ten-volume edition of Les Mystères de Paris.

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37 Ibid., 288.

38 Ibid., 108.

39 Ibid., 124.

40 See the parable in ibid., 215–16.

41 See ibid., 114–11 for the chapter, “La Banque des Pauvres.”

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51 Sperber, Dan says the same thing vis-à-vis Balzac in Le Symbolisme en général (Paris: Hermann, 1974), 102.Google Scholar

52 Sue, , Les Myslères, 578.Google Scholar

53 Ibid.