Eugène Sue

Eugène Sue (1804–1857) was a French novelist. The son of a prominent Paris surgeon, he served as a naval surgeon in the 1820s before an inheritance let him live as a dandy and write sea novels. He turned to the lives of the poor in The Mysteries of Paris (1842–43), a serial that gripped the whole country and made him the most popular writer in France, and followed it with The Wandering Jew (1844–45), an anticlerical epic of a Jesuit plot. A convert to socialism, he was elected to the Assembly in 1850, went into exile after Louis Napoleon's coup of 1851, and died at Annecy in Savoy.