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(ii) the market conditions which determined or favored the conception, the writing, and the circulation of the book; and (iii) the narrative devices. |
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5.1. Eugène Sue
An Ideological Standpoint |
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In order to understand Sue's ideological attitude at the time he wrote Les Mystères de Paris (hereafter Les Mystères), it is necessary to make a brief resumé of his intellectual evolutiona subject which has already been treated fully and very ably elsewhere.
4 Sue himself gives a short summary of this evolution in a work composed toward the end of his life. |
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I began to write sea stories because I had seen the sea; these early novels have a political and philosophical side to them (La Salamandre, Atar-Gull, La Vigie de Koat-Ven and others) which is radically opposed to the convictions I held from 1844 onwards (Les Mystéres de Paris); it would perhaps be interesting to trace by what successive transformations in my intellect, studies, ideas, tastes and the liaisons I formedafter having believed firmly in the religious and absolutist doctrine embodied in the works of Bonald, de Maistre and Lamennais (De l'indifference en matière de religion), my masters at the timeI came, guided only by justice, truth and virtue, to a direct recognition of the supremacy of democratic and social republicanism.5 |
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By way of political legitimism, and of dandyism both in public and in private life, Sue arrived at a profession of faith in socialism. Of what kind was his socialism? A brief glimpse at his biography tells us that at first he was moved by occasional fits of enthusiasm, the result of meeting a cultured and politically mature member of the working class, whose class consciousness, rectitude, simple behavior, and revolutionary ardor drove Sue to a confession of faith that was purely emotional. There is reason to believe that at first socialism represented for Sue merely a new and exciting way of displaying his eccentric dandyism. At the beginning of Les Mystéres, a taste for the diabolical, for morbid situations, for the horrific and the grotesque is predominant in his narrative. He describes the sordid tapis-francs of the Ile de la Cité and reproduces the thieves' slang used in the Paris underworld, yet continually begs his readers' forgiveness for the horrors and miseries of which he speaksan indication that he still imagines himself addressing an aristocratic and bourgeois public, eager for emotions but having nothing to do with the protagonists of his novel. But, as the novel advances, and as one instalment follows another in the Journal des Débats, Sue gradually succumbs to public approbation. The classes of whom he writes become the classes for whom he writes; the author is suddenly promoted to the rank of poet of the proletariat, |
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