« Le succès tue le succès »

“Le succès tue le succès” is a maxim about the self-defeating pursuit of commercial success. In the publishing episode that gives it force, the triumph of Walter Scott’s fiction has made publishers eager to find English works that resemble it; the rush to imitate a winning model, the narrator observes, mistakes resemblance for the source of success.

Meaning in Context

The phrase appears amid a critique of the Paris book trade’s search for predictable returns. Fendant and Cavalier advertise their novel Les Strelitz as being in Walter Scott’s manner, hoping to attract readers through an already successful name. The maxim cuts against that strategy: a success cannot simply be reproduced by multiplying its analogues, and the market’s attention to one model may make further copies less compelling. The passage suggests that commercial success may lie instead in what differs from the familiar example.

The Publishing Calculation

The publishers’ plan shows how the maxim operates in practice. They want a successful book partly because it could help them sell accumulated stock, and they regard newspaper articles as essential to sales. They see Lucien de Rubempré not only as the author of a manuscript but as a journalist whose publicity could help move the book. The work is treated as a product made to serve an immediate commercial need, rather than as something readers will necessarily buy for its own merits. Against this calculation, “success kills success” registers the danger of confusing a marketable formula with the conditions that made an earlier work succeed.