The Wandering Jew (original: “Le Juif Errant”) was written by Eugène Sue and first appeared in Le Constitutionnel (June 25, 1844-July 12, 1845). Marie Joseph “Eugène” Sue (1804-1857) was acclaimed during his lifetime as “the king of the popular novel” (original: “le roi du roman populaire”).¹ Sue made the roman feuilleton a successful and fashionable medium and was a more commercially successful novelist than even Dumas père and Honoré de Balzac. Sue wrote prolifically, sold hugely, and by the time of his death was perhaps the best-known man of letters in France. And in a further indication of the fickleness of literary reputations, by 1910 Sue was nearly completely forgotten. Critical opinion of Sue is again ascending, however. The Wandering Jew is one of the most enjoyable historical romances of the nineteenth century.

The Wandering Jew is about the salvation of Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, who scorned Christ and was cursed to wander until the end of time, and of Herodias, who had demanded the head of John the Baptist and was forced to suffer Ahasuerus’ fate. Their salvation is achieved through the final dispensation of the legacy of Marius, the Count de Rennepont. In the late seventeenth century de Rennepont had been cheated of his estate by the Jesuits, but he managed to save 50,000 crowns in gold and entrusted it to the care of Isaac Samuel, a Jewish man who de Rennepont had saved from an auto-da-fé. As the decades passed the descendants of Isaac Samuel wisely invested the de Rennepont money until, in 1831, it is worth over 212 million francs. And according to the terms of de Rennepont’s will, the fortune will be evenly distributed, in 1831, to all of de Rennepont’s descendants who attend the reading of the will.

There are seven surviving descendants: Gabriel Rennepont, a Jesuit priest; Jacques Rennepont, a ne’er-do-well drunkard; General Simon, a hero of the Napoleonic wars; Rose and Blanche Simon, the General’s twin daughters, in the care of François “Dagobert” Baudoin, a former member of the Imperial Guard and a friend to General Simon; François Hardy, a factory owner; Djalma, an Indian Prince; and Adrienne de Cardoville, a noblewoman. Only General Simon, his daughters, and Dagobert are aware of the Rennepont will.

Unfortunately, the Jesuits are well aware of it and have been conspiring for many years to acquire the Rennepont fortune. Father Rodin is a member of the Jesuits and a part of their conspiracy regarding the Rennepont fortune. He persuaded Gabriel Rennepont to become a priest and to join the Society of Jesus, and planned to persuade him to adhere to his vow of poverty and sign over the entire Rennepont legacy to the Church, which would allow the Church to regain power in France and in Europe. To ensure that Gabriel is the only Rennepont descendant to attend the reading, Father Rodin has his agents watch and follow the other descendants. When Dagobert, Rose, and Blanche arrive in Paris the girls are taken to a convent. General Simon is out of the country. Adrienne de Cardoville is betrayed by a servant, declared insane and imprisoned in an asylum. Jacques Rennepont is jailed for his debts. Prince Djalma is drugged. And François Hardy is sent out of town through the treachery of a friend, who is working for Rodin.

So Gabriel is the only descendant to attend the reading of the will at the house of the Samuels. Gabriel is accompanied by M. l’Abbé d’Aigrigny, the Jesuit in charge of the conspiracy, and Father Rodin, the Abbé’s secretary. Before the will is read Gabriel signs an agreement which gives his portion of the Rennepont legacy to the Church. But before all of the money is turned over to him Herodias appears and produces a codicil to the will which delays the conclusion of the legacy for three months. The Jesuits are furious, since they fear they will not be able to stop the other descendants from freeing themselves and attending the next reading of the will. Father Rodin deposes the Abbé and takes charge of the conspiracy. Rather than using violence against the seven descendants, Rodin decides to use psychology, letting each ruin themselves through their personality flaws.

Rodin pretends to have left the Jesuits and acts in a friendly way to the Rennepont heirs. He arranges the release of Rose and Blanche Simon and Adrienne de Cardoville, and for a while they believe him to be a friend. But Adrienne’s maid confesses that she was blackmailed into spying for the Jesuits, and Adrienne and the others learn about the Jesuit conspiracy and no longer trust or believe Father Rodin. Rodin provokes a worker riot at François Hardy’s factory, which is burned to the ground, and reveals the betrayal of Hardy’s friend. Hardy loses his mistress, his best friend, and his livelihood, and, emotionally shattered, takes vows at a Jesuit mission, dying as a result of too much fasting. Jacques Rennepont dies after drinking too much brandy, led to his death through the work of a Jesuit agent. Rose and Blanche are taken to a hospital during an outbreak of cholera and die of the disease. Prince Djalma, who has fallen in love with Adrienne, is fooled into thinking that Adrienne has betrayed him with Agricola, Dagobert’s son. Djalma attacks Agricola and the woman Djalma thinks is Adrienne, wounding Agricola and killing the woman. Djalma, wretched and heart-broken, takes poison, discovering before he dies that he was wrong about Adrienne. Adrienne finds the dying Djalma and takes poison, and the two die in each other’s arms. And General Simon dies in a duel with his old enemy, the Abbé d’Aigrigny.

Gabriel is the only descendant to live to attend the second reading of the will. But Samuel, the descendant of the Jewish family entrusted with guarding the Rennepont legacy, knows that Rodin has murdered the other descendants, and sets the treasure on fire rather than give it to him. Rodin almost immediately dies, having been earlier poisoned by Faringhea, an Indian who accompanied Djalma to France from India. Faringhea becomes one of the Jesuits and, on the orders of a Cardinal, poisons Rodin. Gabriel, appalled at what has happened, retires to a rural parish. And in a few years both Herodias and Ahasuerus die, forgiven by God at last.

The Wandering Jew was the most popular of Sue’s works and represents the high point of his career; he continued to produce romans feuilleton after The Wandering Jew, but none reached the heights of The Wandering Jew, and after the February Revolution of 1848 he split his attentions between his fiction and politics, allowing himself to be elected as a deputy in 1850.

The Wandering Jew was influential as fiction, doing more than any other nineteenth century work to create the parameters of the myth of the Wandering Jew. But The Wandering Jew was not as influential on French society as The Mysteries of Paris. Sue’s intent in writing The Wandering Jew was more political than his intent in writing The Mysteries of Paris, and he is more specific in his identification of social ills, especially the inadequate salaries given to the poor and underprivileged, and in his ideas for reforms. Sue presents the factory of François Hardy as a model for both labor and management. Sue also stresses the need for healthy living conditions for the poor, better education for the poor, and increased social and legal rights for women. But while Sue is successful in making his case for the necessity of such things, they would have required far too much money and time to put in place even if those in power had been willing to begin the reforms. As he did in The Mysteries of Paris, Sue alerted the readers of The Wandering Jew about the realities of life en bas, among the poor and oppressed, and while he helped awaken a social conscience among the upper class and a self-awareness among the lower classes, there were fewer concrete results from The Wandering Jew than there were from The Mysteries of Paris.

There are many things to criticize about The Wandering Jew. It is extremely melodramatic. Characterization, though vivid, is one-dimensional. The dialogue too often goes from impassioned to hysterical. While the figure of the Wandering Jew is inherently antisemitic, The Wandering Jew is on balance well-intentioned toward Jews, but is far less kind to Catholicism.

In the United States, the thirst for credible testimony of the Church’s iniquity from those most familiar with its spirit and workings led opponents of Catholicism to turn to a range of French sources, including literary works. The most popular fictional attack on the Jesuits was undoubtedly Eugène Sue’s bestseller Le juif errant...²

For a generation of American readers, the murderous Rodin became not only the ultimate figure of Jesuit intrigue, but also a yardstick against which all forms of cunning and hypocrisy could be measured. Commenting on an unrelated case of fraud, the Boston Daily Atlas in 1846 marveled at a plot which was “as deep laid a scheme of villainy as the jesuitical Rodin of Eugene Sue could ever have conceived.” Sue’s novel had become, in short, not only an American publishing phenomenon, but an exposé of a Society widely understood to be one of the deadliest enemies of the Republic, a work which, in the words of one reviewer “should be in the hands of every American citizen.”³

In sum, Sue has brought together two principal themes of the decade: romantic socialism and secret societies. He does not focus, as did George Sand, on the process of initiation but exposes, rather, the arcane machinations by which the Order strives to achieve its unholy goals and to combat social progress. To this extent The Wandering Jew is a direct predecessor of many contemporary conspiracy-thrillers.⁴

The plot is complicated and the story is long, and the reader can be forgiven for thinking that there is too much of each. Sue occasionally engages in didactic lecturing, and his style is simplistic.

But as is the case with Ouida’s Under Two Flags, criticism of The Wandering Jew is almost entirely beside the point. The novel is far from perfect, but if the reader is willing to lower their critical standards and simply embrace the story, they will find it compulsively readable and immensely enjoyable. To enjoy The Wandering Jew is not to slight style in favor of substance, but rather to glory in the pleasures of delightfully excessive over-the-top characters, concepts, and plot complications. As Thomas Disch aptly put it:

The Wandering Jew has got, as the form demands, everything: an heiress falsely accused of madness and incarcerated in a lunatic asylum; a destitute hunchbacked seamstress of the highest moral character hopelessly in love with a blacksmith (who is a patriotic poet on the side); bloodthirsty panthers, telepathic twins, debauchery, murder, suicide, duels, supernatural manifestations, blazing passions, wild mobs, a plague of cholera, scenes in Java and the Arctic, the two best Reading of the Will scenes that ever were, and, towering over all these attractions, the nastiest crew of villains ever brought together in one book, presided over by the fiendish, the insidious, the wholly diabolic Jesuit priest and arch-hypocrite, Père Rodin, who is hell-bent on becoming the next pope.⁵

A recitation of the events of The Wandering Jew might well provoke a listener to incredulous laughter, but in the context of the book the laughter is delighted; the reader laughs with Sue rather than at him.

Father Rodin is an interesting deviation from the prevailing trends in villains. Sue did not make Rodin into a Hero-Villain, but instead hearkened back to the figure looming over all later master villains: John Milton’s Satan. Father Rodin is worthy of the comparison. Milton’s Satan is a Promethean rebel of grandeur. Rodin is almost heroic in his refusal to submit to authority, in his willingness to use any tactics to become the next Pope, in his schemes, which stretch across decades and continents, in his diabolical cunning–a plot summary of The Wandering Jew cannot adequately capture Rodin’s deviousness—in his ruthlessness, and in his willingness to send a dying enemy off with a sneer and an insult. Rodin towers over The Wandering Jew. He is a villain for the ages.

Print: Eugène Sue, The Wandering Jew. Brattleboro, VT: Skyhorse Publishing, 2013.

¹ One hundred and twenty years later Jean Louis Bory would entitle his biography of Sue Eugène Sue: le roi du roman populaire (Paris: Hachette, 1962).

² Timothy Verhoeven, Transatlantic Anti-Catholicism: France and the United States in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 32.

³ Verhoeven, Translantic Anti-Catholicism, 33.

⁴ Ziolkowski, The Lure of the Arcane, 116.

⁵ Thomas M. Disch, “The Wandering Jew,” in Stephen Jones and Kim Newman, eds., Horror: The 100 Best Books (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1998), 49.