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 Sue's social critique as expressed in the character of a romance illustrate a method whereby social critique could receive literary treatment. That is the subject of this reesearch.
Sue's contemporaries recognized that his themes were a species of social commentary and critique, although there is evidence of a fairly high level of discomfort about the moral defensibility of the shape that this critique took. Writing in the Foreign Quarterly Review (and engag...