Considered at one time classics of Marxist/Socialist thought, these books are mostly forgotten today, and the English-language editions published at the beginning of the 20th Century have only become available again recently through large-scale digitization projects of Public Domain books. Daniel DeLeon, leader of the Socialist Labor Party of America and translator of this series into English, wrote in his Preface to The Gold Sickle that it was owning class influence that kept English translations of this series from being available for over 50 years. A 2004 article entitled "Eugène Sue : Champion of the Oppressed" in The People, written to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the English translations, said the following about the series:
"It is by far the best work ever written for giving the working class reader an intimate picture of society as it evolved in France from the days of Gaul, before the Roman conquest, to the middle of the 19th century. It is especially valuable for the picture that it provides of the various phases of feudal society, and the growth of infant capitalism within the feudal womb."
While Sue's anti-Catholic works The Wandering Jew and The Mysteries of Paris are still known, this Socialist series of 19 novels has been out of print for over 100 years. Here is a listing of them:
The Mysteries of the People; or History of a Proletarian Family Across the Age series
1. The Gold Sickle or Hena, the Virgin of the Isle of Sen: A Tale of Druid Gaul
2. The Brass Bell; or, The Chariot of Death: A Tale of Caesar's Gallic Invasion
3. The Iron Collar; Or, Faustina and Syomara: A Tale of Slavery Under the Romans
4. The Silver Cross; or, The Carpenter of Nazareth: A Tale of Jerusalem
5. The Casque's Lark; or, Victoria, The Mother Of The Camps: A Tale Of The Frankish Invasion Of Gaul
6. The Poniard's Hilt; or, Karadeucq and Ronan: A Tale of Bagauders and Vagres
7. The Branding Needle; or, The Monastery of Charolles: A Tale of the First Communal Charter
8. The Abbatial Crosier; or, Bonaik and Septimine: A Tale of a Medieval Abbess
9. The Carlovingian Coins; or, The Daughters of Charlemagne: A Tale of the Ninth Century
10. The Iron Arrow Head; or, The Buckler Maiden: A Tale of the Northman Invasion
11. The Infant's Skull; or, The End of the World: A Tale of the Millennium
12. The Pilgrim's Shell; or, Fergan the Quarryman: A Tale from the Feudal Times
13. The Iron Pincers; or, Mylio and Karvel: A Tale of the Albigensian Crusades
14. The Iron Trevet; or, Jocelyn the Champion: A Tale of the Jacquerie
15. The Executioner's Knife; or, Joan of Arc: A Tale of the Inquisition
16. The Pocket Bible; or, Christian the Printer: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century (2 volumes)
17. The Blacksmith's Hammer; or, The Peasant Code: A Tale of the Grand Monarch
18:1. The Sword of Honor; or, The Foundation of the French Republic: A Tale of the French Revolution
18:2. The Sword of Honor: Part II - The Bourgeois Revolution: A Tale of the French Revolution
19. The Galley Slave's Ring; or, The Family of Lebrenn: A Tale of the French Revolution of 1848
Having already enjoyed Sue's The Wandering Jew, I looked forward to starting a work which united my interest in serial novels, historic fiction, and Class Warfare. Fortunately, the whole series is now available free to anyone who has Kindle or epub software on their reading device.
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.
With this story, The Galley Slave's Ring; or, The Family of Lebrenn, closes the series of the nineteen historic novels comprised in Eugene Sue's monumental work The Mysteries of the People; or, History of a Proletarian Family Across the Ages.
They who have read the preceding eighteen stories will agree that from the moment they began the first volume of the series, The Gold Sickle; or, Hena the Virgin of the Isle of Sen, down to the eighteenth, The Sword of Honor; or, The Foundation of the French Republic, they enjoyed a matchless promenade as they followed Sue through the Ages of History, from the time of the invasion of Gaul by Julius Caesar, shortly before Christ, down to the great epoch marked by the French Revolution. Nor will their expectations concerning this closing story be disappointed.
The Galley Slave's Ring; or, The Family of Lebrenn is staged on the Age that witnessed the downfall of Louis Philippe--the last of the Bourbon line--and the aspirations that raised the Second Republic. While several of the figures are historic, in this story historic characters step forth less pronouncedly than historic principles. In this story are found the Principles, the old and the newest, that have since occupied the stage of man's history, and the clash of which, down to our own days, occupies man's attention.
Inestimable as the previous stories are to the understanding of the Age of the present story, the present story, enlivened with the vein of romance, is inestimable to the understanding of our own Age.
DANIEL DE LEON.
Milford, Conn., February, 1911.
The Galley Slave's Ring begins in Paris on Rue Saint-Denis on February 23, 1848 during the constitutional monarchy of Louis-Philippe, and ends in December, 1851 during the French Second Republic headed by Louis-Napoleon. It is the story of Marik Lebrenn and his family who run a cloth and clothing shop and live upstairs. He and his wife are about 50 years old, and they have an adult son and daughter that help in the shop. Although he is a bourgeois shop keeper, his values and ethics are aligned with the working class of his ancestors. The book begins with Lebrenn preparing to take part in the "February Revolution" that ended the reign of Louis-Philippe. It was one of the many uprisings of The Peoples' Spring that spread across Europe in 1848.
At the same time he is helping his shy neighbor George Duchene, a laborer who takes care of his aging grandfather, to become engaged to his daughter Jeanike. Jeanike loves George but has caught the eye of Count Gonthram of Ploernel, who is descended from the Neroweg Franks whose family has oppressed Marik's family for centuries. The Count, not knowing the history of their two families, hopes to win over Marik with a large order of uniforms for his garrison so he can seduce his daughter Jeanike. Their dialog is one of the high points of the book as the Count plays on his wealth and class, and Marik, armed with his knowledge of the history of the two families, counters with the socialist values that have become so prominent in Europe in this time. The Count realizes he has met his match, and both go back to planning for their roles in the impending revolution.
They meet again on the barricade at Rue Saint-Denis on opposite sides of the battle, where the workers led by Lebrenn hold off the troops. At the end of the battle, Lebrenn hides the wounded Count in his house and arranges for his safe transport home, possibly saving his life. The battle ended the constitutional monarchy of Louis-Philippe, and marks the beginning of the Second Republic. However through a strange twist of fate, Marik finds himself accused, found guilty and sentenced to the life of a galley slave, while the Count becomes an officer in the army of the Republic.
Eugene Sue himself suffered a reversal similar to Marik's. After the French Revolution of 1848, he was elected to the Legislative Assembly in April 1850, only to be exiled the following year to Sardinia for his protest of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte's coup d'état of 1851. It is in Sardinia that Sue writes the 19 volumes of The Mysteries of the People.
As the last volume of the series, Eugene Sue uses this story to recap the history of the family that has been told in the previous 18 volumes and to point out the moral strength of the socialist working class. His goal in portraying the struggles of the working class is to show that set backs like the Second Empire should not cause people to give up hope, but to realize that the long history of progress has often been accompanied by losses that seemed hopeless at the time. At the end of the book, after showing his family the stories of his ancestors going back over 1,000 years, Marik tells them "What does it matter, my children, whether we actually witness or not the dawn, if we have the certainty that the sun of that beautiful day is bound eventually to shine over a regenerated world!" He goes on to say "Whatever appearances may be, whatever the present depression, revolutionary thought is at this very hour germinating under the soil. It is spreading and gaining in depth through a thousand underground rootlets. Sooner or later, its sudden and last irresistible explosion will be heard. Upon the ruins of the old social system a new social order will be established. There can be no doubt whatever, my children, regarding that great and crowning event. Progress is the law of humanity -- for society as well as for the individual. Our plebeian narratives furnish the irrefutable proof."
Prior to reading Sue's "Mysteries of the People" which ends in 1851 with the beginning of France's Second Empire, I had read Emile Zola's 20 Rougon-Macquart novels which are a panoramic account of the Second Empire. They are the story of a family between the years 1851 and 1871 who descend from the two family lines of the Rougons and Macquarts. The two series are wonderfully complimentary to each other and I recommend them to anyone looking for 40 or so novels to read that reveal the history of France.
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