Recommendations
Books Like Les Mystères de Paris
Best books to read after Les Mystères de Paris by Eugène Sue
If the serial energy of Les Mystères de Paris — the disguised Prince Rodolphe rescuing the innocent and punishing the guilty in the Paris underworld, one daily installment at a time — engaged you, these eight works share its territory: the serial novel and its successors, the Paris underworld as a literary subject, and the tradition of the melodramatic social panorama.
- 1Buy
Le Juif errant
by Eugène Sue
Sue's immediate successor serial, published 1844-45, equally panoramic and even more politically inflammatory — the Jesuit conspiracy novel that made Sue the most controversial writer in Europe for a decade.
- 2Buy
Les Misérables
by Victor Hugo
The great transformation of Sue's form into something philosophically ambitious: Hugo takes the social panorama, the Paris underworld, the melodramatic rescues, and the omniscient narrator who moves between social worlds, and gives them a depth of moral and political thinking that Sue never attempted.
- 3Buy
Notre-Dame de Paris
by Victor Hugo
Hugo's earlier historical novel of Paris — published twelve years before Les Mystères de Paris — established the panoramic-tour-of-Paris form that Sue inherits and converts into a social survey.
- 4Buy
The Count of Monte Cristo
by Alexandre Dumas
Dumas's great serial novel of disguise, revenge, and social panorama is the immediate companion and competitor to Les Mystères de Paris — both published in the same years, both built around a mysterious protagonist who moves between social worlds administering justice, both products of the feuilleton revolution.
- 5Buy
Oliver Twist
by Charles Dickens
Dickens's 1837-38 serial novel of the London underworld and its criminal networks is the English parallel published five years before Sue's Paris version — both are the founding texts of the urban underworld as a serial novel subject.
- 6Buy
Fantômas
by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre
The 1911 French serial novel of a master criminal whose identity is unknown is the twentieth-century descendant of Les Mystères de Paris's underworld formula, with the moral polarity inverted: where Rodolphe is the rescuing hero, Fantômas is the terrifying criminal.
- 7Buy
The Holy Family
by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Marx and Engels's 1844 philosophical critique of Les Mystères de Paris is the most important document of the novel's political reception: a chapter-by-chapter analysis of why Sue's humanitarian solutions to the social question are inadequate, written while the serial was still appearing.
- 8Buy
L'Assommoir
by Émile Zola
Zola's 1877 study of working-class alcoholism in Paris is the Naturalist heir to Les Mystères de Paris's social survey — both are tours of the Parisian underclass, but where Sue's is organized as a melodrama of rescue, Zola's is organized as a documentary of deterministic destruction.
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