Honore de Balzac

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Honoré de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac (May 20, 1799 – August 18, 1850) was a French novelist. Along with Gustave Flaubert, he is generally regarded as a founding father of realism in European fiction. His large output of novels and stories, collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, is a broad panorama of French society in the period of the Restoration (1815-1830) and the July Monarchy (1830-1848).

Balzac's position in literary history is peculiar both with respect to his contemporaries and his predecessors. Like Flaubert, Balzac was a proponent of realism, but unlike Flaubert or Stendhal, Balzac was uniquely unsentimental in his realistic technique. This is especially peculiar because Balzac emerged out of the literary period of French Romanticism, during which novels of sentiment and gothic melodrama — particularly the novels of Walter Scott and Alexandre Dumas — were the highest vogue. The works of Balzac and his fellow realists, at the time criticized as obscene and cynical and generally unpleasant, are now the most significant works read today by serious scholars of 19th century French literature. Balzac was unique in his times, and his influence would extend far into the beginning of the 20th century and into the emergence of modernism. Many authors from all over the globe—be it Tolstoy in Russia, Hemingway in America, Proust in France, or Musil in Germany—will admit their immense debt to Balzac and his commitment to the truth.

Balzac's career began as a journalist. As a result his prose exhibits the eye for detail, the precision of plotting, and the concision of words that characterize the best of journalism. Moreover, one must take into account the times in which Balzac lived to account for his particularly unsentimental (and at times, almost scientific) depiction of society. As Balzac and many other French writers saw it, the byproduct of the French people's preoccupation with Romanticism, with its focus on individualism above all else, had been precisely the disastrous revolutions and catastrophes that had caused woe to so many French citizens of all classes. Balzac believed that in order to get a meaningful perspective on the society in which he lived, the people must not spend their time reading books of fancies and idylls. His goal with constructing his massive (and ultimately incomplete) Human Comedy was stated expressly in his preface to that great work: to study the "social species," man, the way a scientist would examine the phenomena of the natural world.

In this respect, Balzac is distinctly modern before there was such a term as modernism. His attention to the details of the actual world and the presentation thereof calls to mind Williams' maxim for modernist poetry, that there will be "No ideas but in things"—in other words, that all writing will be based not on generalizations but on observed facts. Balzac in some ways, however, exceeded the limitations even of this definition; for unlike the modern writers of the coming century who would succeed him, Balzac's attention was turned not just to material things but to all things—psychological, social, animal, and human—that there are to be found in the world.

Life

Balzac was born at Tours, Indre-et-Loire, France in the rue de l'Armée Italienne (Street of the Italian Army), into a well-to-do bourgeois family. His father was a regional administrator during the Revolutionary period. He was educated at the somewhat spartan college of the Oratorians at Vendôme, and then in Paris (from 1816) where he matriculated in jurisprudence, then worked as clerk to an advocate. He soon drifted towards journalism, contributing to political and artistic reviews set up by a new generation of intellectuals who viewed the cultural debris of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire, and the complacency of the restored monarchy with a mixture of cynicism, idealism and regret. By 1830 political discontent had swelled enough to overturn the Bourbon monarchy for good. The new regime of the 'bourgeois monarch' Louis Philippe, which lasted until nearly the end of Balzac's life, is the context of most of his novels.

The journals to which he contributed were increasingly looking for short fiction, which Balzac was able to provide. A collection Scènes de la vie privée (Scenes from Private Life) came out in 1829, and was well received: these were tales told with a journalistic eye which looked into the fabric of modern life and did not shun social and political realities. Balzac had found a distinctive voice.

He had already turned out potboiler historical novels in the manner of Walter Scott and Anne Radcliffe, on commission from publishers, but only under pseudonyms. With Le dernier Chouan (1829) he entered the mainstream as an author of full-length, serious fiction. This sober tale of provincial France in Revolutionary times was soon overshadowed by the success in 1831 of La peau de chagrin (The Goat-skin), a fable-like tale delineating the excesses and vanities of contemporary life. With public acclaim and the assurance of publication, Balzac's subsequent novels began to shape themselves into a broad canvas depicting the turbulent unfolding of destinies amidst the visible finery and squalor of Paris, and the dramas hidden under the surface of respectability in the quieter world of provincial family life.

In Le père Goriot (Old Father Goriot, 1835), his next big success, he transposed the story of King Lear to 1820s Paris to show that the only "legitimacy" left in the modern world was the law of influence and connections. His novels are unified by a vision of a world in which the social and political hierarchies of the Ancien Régime had been replaced by a pseudo-aristocracy of favoritism, patronage and commercial fortunes, and where a "new priesthood" of financiers had filled the gap left by the collapse of organized religion. "There is nothing left for literature but mockery in a world that has collapsed" he remarked in the preface to La peau de chagrin, but the cynicism grew less as his oeuvre progressed and he revealed great sympathy for those whom society pushes to one side when the old certainties have gone and everything is in flux.

Along with shorter pieces and novellas there followed notably Les Illusions Perdues (Lost Illusions, 1843), Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (The Harlot High and Low, 1847), Le cousin Pons (1847) and La Cousine Bette (1848). Of novels in provincial settings Le curé de Tours (The Vicar of Tours, 1832), Eugénie Grandet (1833), Ursule Mirouet (1842) and Modeste Mignon (1844) are highly regarded.

Many of his novels were initially serialized, like those of Dickens, but in Balzac's case there was no telling how many pages the stories would cover. Illusions perdues extends to a thousand pages after starting inauspiciously in a small-town print shop, whereas La fille aux yeux d'Or (Tiger-eyes, 1835) opens grandly with a panorama of Paris but ties itself up as a closely-plotted novella of only fifty pages.

Balzac's work habits were legendary — he wrote for up to 15 hours a day, fuelled by innumerable cups of black coffee, and without relinquishing the social life which was the source of his observation and research. (Many of his stories originate from fragments of the plot overheard at social gatherings, before uncovering the real story behind the gossip.) He revised obsessively, sending back printer's proofs almost obscured by changes and additions to be reset. His ever expanding plans for new works and new editions of old ones took its toll on even a sturdy physique like his. There was unevenness in his prodigious output, but some works which are really no more than works-in-progress, such as Les employés (The Government Clerks, 1841), are of serious academic interest.

Bust of Balzac by Auguste Rodin, in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Curiously, he continued to worry about money and status even after he was rich and respected, believing he could branch out into politics or into the theater without slowing the pace of production on his novels. His letters and memoranda reveal that ambition was not only ingrained in his character, but acted on him like a drug — every success leading him on to enlarge his plans still further — until before his time, around 1847, his strength began to fail. A polarity can be found in his cast of characters between the profligates who expend their life-force and the misers who live long but become dried-up and withdrawn. His contemporary Victor Hugo exiled himself to Guernsey in disgust at French politics, but lived on to write poems about being a grandfather decades after Balzac's death. Balzac, by temperament, was more like the young and reckless heroes of his fictions, unable to draw back or curtail his vision.

In 1849, as his health was failing, Balzac travelled to Poland to visit Eveline Hanska, a wealthy Polish lady, with whom he had corresponded for more than 15 years. They married in 1850, and three months later, Balzac died.

He lies buried in the cemetery of Père Lachaise, overlooking Paris, and is commemorated by a monumental statue commissioned by Auguste Rodin, standing near the intersection of Boulevard Raspail and Boulevard Montparnasse. "Henceforth" said Victor Hugo at his funeral "men's eyes will be turned towards the faces not of those who are the rulers but of those who are the thinkers."

La Comédie humaine

La Comédie humaine (1799 – 1850) is the title of Honoré de Balzac's project, a multi-volume collection of interlinked novels and stories depicting French society in the period of the Restoration and the July Monarchy 1815-1848. La Comédie humaine consists of 95 finished works (stories, novels or analytical essays) and 48 unfinished works (some existing only as titles). It does not include Balzac's five theatrical plays or his collection of humorous tales, the Contes drolatiques (1832-37). Even in its unfinished state, it represents an immense literary endeavor, larger in scope and length than possibly any other literary work undertaken in recent history, and comparable perhaps only to the output (again, with an admitted debt to Balzac's example) of William Faulkner's series of interlinked novels and stories on the history of the American South.

Overview

The title of the series is a reference to Dante's Divine Comedy. While Balzac sought the comprehensive scope of Dante, his title indicates the worldly, human concerns of a realist novelist. The "Comédie humaine" slowly evolved into a large project. The first of Balzac's works were written without any global plan ("Les Chouans" is a historical novel; "La physiologie du mariage" is an analytical study of marriage), but by 1830, Balzac began to group his first novels ("Sarrasine", "Gobseck") into a series intitled "Scènes de la vie privée" ("Scenes from Private Life").

In 1833, with the publication of "Eugénie Grandet", Balzac envisioned a second series entitled "Scènes de la vie de province" (Scenes from Provincial Life). Most likely in this same year Balzac came upon the idea of having characters reappear from novel to novel; the first novel to use this technique was "le Père Goriot" (1834-5).

In a letter written to Madame Hanska in 1834, Balzac decided to reorganize his works in three larger groups, allowing him (1) to integrate his ""La physiologie du mariage" into the ensemble and (2) to separate his most fantastic or metaphysical stories — like "La Peau de chagrin" (1831) and "Louis Lambert" (1832) — into their own "philosophical" section.

The three sections were:

• Etudes de Moeurs au XIXe siècle (Studies of Manners in the 19th Century) - including the various "Scène de la vie..."
• Etudes philosophiques
• Etudes analytiques - including the "Physiology du mariage"

In this letter, Balzac went on to say that the "Etudes de Moeurs" would study the effects of society and touch on all genders, social classes, ages and professions. Meanwhile, the "Etudes philosophiques" would study the causes of these effects. Finally, the third "analytical" section would study the principles behind these phenomena. Balzac also explained that while the characters in the first section would be "individualités typisées" ("individuals made into types"), the characters of the "Etudes philosophiques" would be "types individualisés" (types made into individuals").

By 1836, the "Etudes de Moeurs" was itself already divided into six parts:

• "Scènes de la vie privée"
• "Scènes de la vie de province"
• "Scènes de la vie parisienne"
• "Scènes de la vie politique
• "Scènes de la vie militaire"
• "Scènes de la vie de campagne"

In 1839, in a letter to his publisher, Balzac mentioned for the first time the expression "Comédie humaine", and this title is in the contract he signed in 1841. The publication of the "Comédie humaine" in 1842 was preceded by an important preface describing his major priciples and the work's overall structure. Claiming inspiration from the biologists Buffon, Cuvier, and Saint-Hilaire, Balzac wrote that through the Comedie Humaine he sought to understand "social species" the way a biologist would analyze zoological species. He restates this position somewhat later in the same preface, by arguing that he views himself as a "secretary" who is transcribing his society's history. This view was no doubt influenced by Balzac's early work in journalism, and once again he stresses the importance of paying attention to the facts. Ultimately, his stated goal was to write a history of moeurs (customs, manners, and morals) in order to observe not just the events of history, but the underlying forces and principles that shape it. His preface concludes with Balzac propounding his own belief in what he calls two great truths—religion and monarchy—and his great concern for understanding individuals within the context of their families.

Balzac's intended collection was never finished. As he continued to work on the project he continued to envision more and more additions, and by his death the projected Comedie humaine would have been, had it been finished, a truly mammoth body of text.

Legacy

After his death Balzac became recognized as one of the fathers of Realism in literature, and distinct in his approach from the "pure" Romantics like Stendhal and Victor Hugo. La Comédie humaine spanned more than 90 novels and short stories in an attempt to comprehend and depict the realities of life in contemporary bourgeois France. In the 20th Century his vision of a society in flux, where class, money and personal ambition were the major players, achieved the distinction of being endorsed equally by critics of Left-wing and Right-wing political tendencies.

He guided European fiction away from the overriding influence of Walter Scott and the Gothic school, by showing that modern life could be recounted as vividly as Scott recounted his historical tales, and that mystery and intrigue did not need ghosts and crumbling castles for props. Maupassant, Flaubert and Zola were writers of the next generation who were directly influenced by him, and Marcel Proust (that other weaver of a massive work of French literature) cited his immense debt to him.

Balzac, as an observer of society, morals and human psychology, continues to appeal to readers today. His novels have always remained in print. His vivid realism and his encyclopedic gifts as a recorder of his age outweigh the sketchiness and inconsistent quality of some of his works. Enough of them are recognized as masterpieces to rank him as the Charles Dickens of France.

External links

• Works by Honoré de Balzac. Project Gutenberg
• Honore de Balzac by Albert Keim and Louis Lumet, available for free via Project Gutenberg
• Comprehensive works with dates

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