Les Mystères de Paris Reading Order

Les Mystères de Paris (1842-43) by Eugène Sue is the founding text of the French serial novel — the feuilleton published daily in the newspaper Le Journal des Débats from June 1842 to October 1843 that transformed French fiction and made Sue the most-read novelist in Europe for a decade. The novel follows the mysterious Prince Rodolphe, disguised as a working-class man in the Parisian underworld, who moves through the city's criminal districts rescuing the innocent and punishing the guilty with a combination of vigilante justice, social reform, and romantic melodrama. Sue's method is panoramic: Les Mystères de Paris is a tour of the social geography of Paris from the tapis-francs (criminal taverns) of the Île de la Cité through the bourgeois districts, the prisons, the hospitals, the countryside of the Île-de-France, and finally the palaces of Germany — a social survey organized as a serial melodrama. The political implications of the novel made it a document of the 1840s social debate: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote extensively about it (in The Holy Family, 1844) as a symptom of bourgeois humanitarianism's inadequacy as a response to the social question. The influence of Les Mystères de Paris on French fiction is immense: it inaugurated the serial novel form that Balzac, Dumas, Flaubert, and Zola all worked in relation to, and it invented the Parisian underworld as a literary subject that the roman noir and the crime novel would inherit.