84 SOCIAL SCIENTIST Among the texts that the Young Hegelians analysed in order to substantiate their position were popular novels from France (Flora Tristan's UUnion Ouvriere and Eugene Sue's Les Mysteres de Paris) in which aspects of urban life under capitalism, like the social problems of the working classes, crime and the underworld, were taken up in contrast to the traditional novel with its exclusive concern for the problems of middle and upper classes. Eugene Sue's novel The Mysteries of Paris in particular had achieved sensational success with the European reading public. Published as a serial in instalments in 1842-1843 in the Journal des Debats in Paris, Sue's novel about crime and punishment in the Parisian underworld had created a reading fever which is hard to believe. Contemporary reports mention that the Parisian public feverishly waited for the daily instalment of the novel and until it had been read, work in Paris did not start. Theophile Gautier remarked satirically that even the critically ill delayed the moment of death in order to keep up with the story. Published as a book in 1843 it was an European best seller. Already contemporary critics had noted that the success of the novel was due to the fact that it offered to the reader a world that was exotic; criminals, thieves and murderers, prostitutes and pimps, adventure and danger in the underworld of Paris were offered to the reader, the voyeur who shuddered with delight in the comfort of his armchair.2 A review of this novel from the standpoint of the criticism of the Young Hegelians was published in 1844 by the young infantary officer Franz Zychlin von Zychlinski under the pen name of Szeliga in Bauer's journal. Szeliga, who later wisely retreated from literature and died as a General, was concerned with showing that Sue's novel and Sue's position fully corresponded to the philosophical position of critical criticism. As Marx amusingly writes in The Holy Family, (t 'Critical criticism', incarnated in Szeliga-Vishnu, furnishes an apotheosis of Les Mysteres de Paris. Eugene Sue is dubbed a 'critical critic' ." The ideological position of the 'Critical Critics' which Marx demolishes had as its crux the glorification of the pure thinker who elevates himself above the masses since these have only material interests. In Sue's creation of the person of Rudolph, heir to the petty German principality of Geroldstein, Szeliga saw the "critical individual", a fictional correspondence to the postulates of "critical criticism". Armed with seemingly endless wealth this German Caliph^ as Marx ironically calls him, wanders through the underworld of Paris reforming the rcformable, punishing the incorrigible and in the process rescuing his daughter Fleur de Marie (long presumed dead) 2 Noibjrt Miller and Karl Riha, Afterword to the German translation of Sue*s novel Die Geheimnisse von Pans, Munchen, 1982.