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Eugène Sue's novel Les Mystères de Paris created a stir when it appeared in 1842–43 in serial form in the daily Journal des Débats and in ten one-volume installments, plus a number of truncated and pirated editions. This rambling episodic work comprises over a dozen melodramas held together mainly by the direct or indirect involvement in them of the hero-savior Rudolph Grand Duke of Gerolstein, the miserly notary and arch villain Jacques Ferrand, the vulnerable sullied virgin Fleur-de-Marie, and the well-meaning aristocratic lady Clemence Marquise d'Harville. Longer than most serial novels, Les Mystères maintains its readers' interest with lurid exposés of Paris low life, heart-rending descriptions of the sufferings of the deserving poor, diabolical intrigues, knick-of-time rescues, and scenes of sex and violence at all social levels. Periodically the author interrupts his narrative with moralizing commentaries and proposals for social reform. Contemporary observers claimed that everyone from duchesses to house porters read Les Mystères de Paris for its sensationalism. It has also been argued that the book's working-class readers wrote so many letters to Sue urging him to stress the high moral qualities of his fictional workers—epitomized by the craftsman Jérome Morel—that their “collective constraint” transformed it from a book about the “dangerous” classes into a book about the laboring classes, and converted the author himself into a champion of their cause.

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