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Eugéne Sue was without doubt the most successful writer of serial novels in France during the first half of the nineteenth century. He had a huge following among the country's expanding reading public, particularly from the time of the publication, in Journals des Débats, Les Mystères de Paris (1842-1843; translated as The Mysteries of Paris, 1844). It is for this work that he is best remembered. A convert to socialism shortly before he embarked on the composition of this epic novel (it might be more accurate to refer to him as a républicain-socialiste), Sue littered his narrative with overtly didactic references to the plight of the poor, the criminal classes, prostitutes, and unhappily married women. Sue's firm insistence on issues that were topical at the time in part helps to explain why the man whom Jean-Louis Bory refers to as "le roi du roman populaire" (the king of the popular novel)--a novelist more successful than Alexandre Dumas père and even Honoré de Balzac in his heyday--fell into almost total oblivion in France by the early twentieth century.
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