ABSTRACT
The Fantomas series of Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain rapidly established itself as part of the everyday culture of its time, first within the field of the popular crime novel and soon after as a phenomenon of the silent screen. First and foremost, Fantomas was a sensation of popular fiction, an epic melodrama and the bestseller of its time. Launched in February 1911 in Fayard's sixty-five-cent livre populaire series, the first volume was priced at only thirty-five centimes, and according to Allain, sold up to two-and-a-half million copies. The infatuation of the avant-garde with Fantomas first emerged in Apollinaire's review Soirees de Paris, in July 1914, and was taken up by visual artists. The appeal of Fantomas to young men embittered by the War, lay not only in the violent, subversive threat that its criminal protagonist posed to society in a fantastically transformed Paris, but also in its populist writing style and opposition to traditional literary forms.
