Eugène Sue, the forgotten king of Feuilleton

Abstract

The important place conquered by the feuilleton in the nineteenth-century France, as well as in other countries, including Brazil, is intimately associated with the figure of Eugène Sue, a French writer of the third Romantic generation. Although relatively unknown, he was one of the biggest promoters of popular literature. The success achieved with Les Mystères de Paris (1942-1943), his first novel in which the gothic and the urban universes are associated, besides inspiring other writers who would stand out even more than himself in the genre, opens the door to the popular literature that inspires other styles, such as crime novels. Moreover, the new communication media, such as the radio and the television, would give an important contribution to the evolution and maintenance of the feuilleton, insuring its success until now, with a new design. However, although the genre has been perpetuated, the same didn’t happen to Sue, whose name, rarely remembered, is occasionally quoted in literary manuals. This article, recognizing the importance of his work for the literary context, aims to promote some of his novels, making a sort of parallel between the evolution of the writer and the evolution of the man.