ABSTRACT
The first is 'the Victor Hugo-Eugène Sue (Les Misérables, Les Mysteres de Paris) type: overtly ideologico-political in character and with democratic tendencies linked to the ideologies of 1848'. Easily confused with the factitious releases engineered by the entertainment industry, and Gramsci is quick to identify that confusion, not only in the later forms of mass-produced fiction but also in its earlier forms, including the works of Sue. Certainly, it is difficult to read a single page of Sue without seeing, from a literary point of view, the omnipresence of the charlatan. Gramsci nevertheless sensed something else, brought into the foreground by his placing of Sue in the company of Victor Hugo. Sue was an operator in the literary marketplace who happened to find a formula that worked. But the question transcends Sue's motives and intentions. It is rather a point about the formula itself, both how it came into being and how it 'worked', at this historical juncture.
