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is an act of hypocrisy; hypocritical, too, is the description of the social regeneration of the Ripper; Sue's new penal theory is entirely vitiated by religious hypocrisy, as the punishment of the Schoolmaster shows; finally, the redemption of Fleur-de-Marie is not only hypocritical, but a typical example of religious alienation in Feuerbach's sense of the term. Thus Sue is branded, not as a naive social democrat, but as a reactionary, a legitimist, and a follower of de Maistre, at least in youth, when he wrote in praise of slave-trading colonialism.
If we wanted to trace the personality of Sue along the curve formed by his life, we should have to modify the negative judgment passed on him by Marx and Engels. Already in 1845, when Le Juif Errant was published, the languid, easygoing humanitarianism of the former dandy had given place to a clearer, sterner vision of the struggle between the working-class world and officialdom. And if in Le Juif Errant this dissension still wears the imaginative disguise of a symbolic struggle between the characters of the novel (the wicked, intriguing Jesuit and the virtuous, heroic priest), if it is expressed in terms of a Fourierist Utopia, in his next long, unshapely but revealing work, Les Mystères du Peuple, Sue shows that he has seen to the bottom of the class conflict. The period of composition of this book extends from the time when he first threw himself body and soul into the political struggle, as a candidate for the socialist republican party, when he opposed Louis Napoleon's coup d'ètat, until he went to spend the last years of his life in exile at Annecy, by then the universally recognized laureate of the proletarian revolution.
Marx and Engels' verdict is limited to Les Mystères de Paris, however. Our study of the text should likewise leave aside other, earlier and later writings and concentrate on expounding the plot structures and stylistic devices which correspond to given ideological attitudes.
5.2. The 'Consolatory' Structure
The author of a popular novel never expresses his own problems of composition to himself in purely structural terms (How to write a narrative work?), but in terms of social psychology (What sort of problems must I solve in order to write a narrative which I intend will appeal to a large public and arouse both the concern of the masses and the curiosity of the well-to-do?).
I suggest a possible solution: let us suppose an existing everyday situation in which are to be found elements of unresolved tension (Paris and its poverty); then let us suppose a factor capable of resolving this tension, a factor contrasting with the initial reality and opposing it by offering an immediate and consolatory solution to the initial contradictions. If the initial reality is authentic and if the conditions necessary for the resolu-

 
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