"Mysteries of Paris"
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As the Enlightenment and the disappointments of the French Revolution gave way to the Napoleonic era and Romanticism there emerged in Europe a strand of reformist social progressivism. In France, it was expressed in the work and writings of Baron de Gerando, a noble-born philanthropist whose influence was felt in both Europe and America. Gerando, who appears to have functioned as a kind of court philosopher for Napoleon, developed a philosophy of social activism that was expressed in 1819 in Le visiteur du pauvre and in De la bienfaisance publique, published in 1838. Gerando's compassion for the poor and articulation of a shared social responsibility for them entailed assumptions about the benefits that would accrue to society if the underclasses could be brought to consciousness of their moral potentialities, with morality understood as referring by and large to Christian bourgeois conventions.Ratcliffe (349) cites Gerando's distinction between the "deserving" and "undeserving" poor. This research examines Eugene Sue's novel Mysteries of Paris with a view toward identifying how it elaborates the themes of social philanthropy promulgated by Gerando. First serialized in 1842, Eugene Sue's Les Mystères de Paris was completed by 1844. It can be read at least in part as an adumbration of Gerando's text. The fact that Sue begins the action on a dark and stormy night in 1838 is surely one key clue in that regard. Affinities between what could be called Gerando's social theory and
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public bureaucracy has in its power the option of relocating the poor out of the poor areas in which they live. Gerando advocates being creative with finding the poor a place of refuge (246). In Mysteries of Paris, Rodolphe simply enacts that possibility when he invites La Goualeuse for a ride in the country and takes her--making no demands on her--to the farmhouse where his old nurse lives. Gerando also sees something like a divine plan in the presence of the disadvantaged in the lives of others. That is, the poor offer those who have every advantage the opportunity to behave mmorally, and protect those who are at risk for destruction (302). The compact between Rodolphe and Clemence is indicative of this, and Rodolphe always comes to the aid of others with an open heart. That attitude is to be contrasted with the attitude of, say, Pipelet, who enables the bailiffs to besiege the Morels but who says of his prompt-paying tenant in disguise: ""Man is born to assist his fellow-man . . . and more particularly so when his fellow-man is so good a lodger as yourself" (1,38).
Rodolphe's attitude is also to be compared--favorably, this time--with that of Miss Dimpleton (later Rigolette), who attempts to help the Morels despite her own s
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Approximate Word count = 3260
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)
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