14 - Balzac: ‘All is true’

Summary

I shall have carried an entire society in my head!

– Balzac, Letter of 1844

The importance of Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) in the history of French literature lies in his exemplary role in the establishment of the fictional model that came to be known as ‘realism’ – a sociological type of fiction that emphasized the material and historical circumstances of people's lives rather than individual psychology. The realist novel is concerned above all with man in society. It privileges the world of common experience, presenting man in a dynamic relationship with the forces and institutions that shape collective existence: money, power, class, convention. As an aesthetic category, realism is defined above all by its mimetic urge: that is, by its commitment to the idea that the primary role of the novel is the representation of the ‘real’ world.

The Human Comedy

Born at the very end of the eighteenth century, Balzac grew up during the turbulent years of Napoleon, came of age during the Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy after Waterloo and wrote most of his fiction during the reign of Louis-Philippe (the so-called citizen king, 1830–48). The central social development of Balzac's lifetime was the rise of the bourgeoisie to a commanding position in French economic and political life. The ethos of the age was encapsulated in the celebrated phrase of François Guizot, Louis-Philippe's prime minister (referring to his belief that suffrage should be restricted to propertied men, and that those who wanted the vote should become rich through thrift and hard work): ‘Make money’ (‘Enrichissez-vous’). Balzac himself was a man of reactionary views, a monarchist and a Roman Catholic who lamented the passing of what he saw as the ordered, organic world of the Ancien Régime. His reactionary stance, however, enabled him to see all the more clearly the inevitable demise of the old order.