The issue is to analyse the diffusion of, and translations and especially adaptations from, Eugène Sue’s Mystères de Paris, which was published in 1842-43 in the Journal des débats. The novel set off the writing of hundreds of derivation novels in practically every country in the world : G. Reynolds’ Mysteries of London (1844-48), Ned Buntline’s The Mysteries and Miseries of New York (1848), Camilo Castelo Branco’s Os Mistèros de Lisboa (1854)... This analysis attempts to account for the modalities and causes of this first massive occurrence of cultural globalisation. How does the particularly labile matrix of urban mystery bring to light not only the fact of literary globalisation but, just as equally, that of the strong resistance of local specificities, logics and series ?