ABSTRACT
Taking working-class writers’ reactions to Eugène Sue’s best-selling Les Mystères de Paris (1842) as a point of departure, this introductory chapter establishes the contours of the debate over the redefinition of le populaire in the first half of nineteenth-century France. It begins with a brief summary of the material conditions faced by workers living in Paris during the first half of the century, with special attention to questions of literacy, social and political organization. It then examines the impact that social utopian thought had on a generation of working-class writers whose literary production is at the center of my study of this period. This chapter concludes by laying the study’s theoretical stakes and methodological challenges at work in my analysis.
