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in his novel he describes the French people, Sue considers them as a real bourgeois does, oversimplifying everything: in his eyes they are the starving masses, doomed to crime through ignorance and poverty. He ignores the true virtues and vices of the people; nor does he suspect that the people may have a future which the party at present triumphantly in power will never see, because the people have faith, enthusiasm, and moral strength. Eugène Sue has compassion for the sufferings of the people; why refuse him the novel faculty of compassionparticularly when it brings in such sure profits? But what sort of compassion is it? That is another question entirely. Sue hopes that the people will one day be freed from poverty and that they will cease to be starving masses driven to crime against their will, becoming instead a fully satisfied community that is presentable and behaves as it should, while the bourgeoisie and the present lawgivers remain the masters of France, a race of highly cultivated speculators. Sue demonstrates in his novel how French laws offer an involuntary protection to crime and debauchery, and it must be said his argument is exact and plausible. But what he does not realize is that the evil is inherent, not only in certain laws, but in the entire system of French legislation, in the organization of society as a whole.
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The charge made against him is clear: Sue's attitude is typical of the reformer who aims at changing something in order that in the end everything will stay the same. In political terms he is a social democrat; from a literary point of view, he is a sensation monger who speculates on human misery. |
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If at this point we turn back and reread the pages of Marx and Engels' Die Heilige Familie, we shall find the same polemical elements.8 The work aims at the systematic satirization of the young Hegelians of the Allgemeine Literaturzeitung and, in particular, of Szeliga, who presented Les Mystères as the epic of the straits which divide the ephemeral from the immortal and which are continually being narrowed. It is Szeliga, not Sue, who is the central target. But in order to succeed and to be convincing, Marx and Engels' analysis must discredit Sue's work by showing it as a kind of ideological hoax that could look like a message of salvation only to Bruno Bauer and his associates. The reformist and petit-bourgeois character of the work is vividly illustrated in the words spoken by the unfortunate Morel at the height of his financial misfortunes: "Oh, if only the rich knew of it!" The moral of the book is that the rich can know of it and can intervene to heal by their munificence the wounds of society. |
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Marx and Engels go further: not content with stressing Sue's reformist roots (they are not satisfied, for example, with judging the value of the idea of a paupers' bank, as suggested by Prince Rodolphe, on purely economic grounds), they point out that Rodolphe's executioner's revenge |
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