Le Juif errant Reading Order

Le Juif errant (The Wandering Jew, 1844-45) by Eugène Sue is his most ambitious and politically inflammatory serial novel — a panoramic work in ten volumes published in daily installments in Le Constitutionnel (June 1844-August 1845), organized around two plots: the story of the Wandering Jew (Ahasuerus) and his female companion the Wandering Jewess, who are condemned to wander the earth until the Day of Judgment, and the story of a Jesuit conspiracy to seize the enormous inheritance left to the descendants of a Protestant family. The Jesuit conspiracy plot was the more sensational: Sue depicted the Society of Jesus as a secret government within the government, using systematic manipulation, forgery, and murder to accumulate wealth and power at the expense of French Protestant and liberal families. The novel appeared at the height of the 'Jesuit question' in French politics (the Society had been briefly expelled and then permitted to return, and its political role was a subject of intense public debate), and Le Juif errant sold more copies than any French novel had before it and made Sue the most politically powerful novelist in Europe. The novel's reception included a papal condemnation, a polemical response from the Jesuit press, and a parliamentary debate about whether the Society should again be expelled from France. Karl Marx's analysis of Sue's social politics, extended from The Holy Family's analysis of Les Mystères de Paris, continues in his unpublished notes on Le Juif errant.