French political culture long stressed binding Paris to the countryside.

Evidence

In French political literature, the necessity of binding the town (Paris) to the countryside had always been vividly felt and expressed. It is enough to recall the series of novels by Eugene Sue, 55 very widely disseminated in Italy too (Fogazzaro in his novel Piccolo Mondo Antico shows Franco Maironi receiving clandestinely from Switzerland the successive episodes of the Mysteres du Peuple ; these were in fact burnt at the hands of the public executioner in certain European cities—Vienna, for example). Sue’s novels stress with particular insistence the necessity of having a concern for the peasantry, and of binding it to Paris. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 440

Categorization

• SHARE: Eugene Sue’s Mystères du Peuple burned by the public executioner in Vienna — a specific literary-history tidbit for a 19th-century-europeanist friend.