Honoré de Balzac (1799 – 1850)

Honoré de Balzac was a French realism novelist, playwright, essayist and critic. His serial novel, La Comédie humaine, is among his most extensive works.

Honoré de Balzac (May 20, 1799 – August 18, 1850) was a French novelist recognized as one of the founders of realism in European fiction. An immensely productive, if uneven writer, Balzac intended his massive (and ultimately incomplete) body of novels and stories, collectively entitled The Human Comedy (La Comédie humaine), to present a broad panorama of French society in the period of the Restoration (1815-1830) and the July Monarchy (1830-1848).

Balzac meticulously reconstructed French urban working class and provincial life, yet he was uniquely unsentimental in his perspective. This is notable because Balzac wrote during the Romantic era, a period in which sentiment and gothic melodrama—particularly the novels of Walter Scott, Alexandre Dumas, and Victor Hugo, and the paintings of Eugene Delacroix—enjoyed immense popularity. The works of Balzac and fellow French realists Gustave Flaubert and Stendhal, in contrast, were criticized as vulgar and cynical, although they are now considered by scholars as the most significant and influential works of nineteenth-century French literature.

Balzac believed that Romanticism, with its focus on individualism and sentimentality, failed to present a meaningful perspective on society. The goal of his Human Comedy, stated expressly in his preface, was to study the "social species" the way a scientist would examine the phenomena of the natural world.

His early training as a journalist informs his prose with precision, conciseness of diction, and attention to the drama of everyday life. In this respect, Balzac is distinctly modern before there was a term "modernism." His focus on the details of the actual world is similar to William Carlos Williams' maxim for modernist poetry, that there will be "No ideas but in things"—in other words, that all writing will be based on observed facts. Yet unlike modern novelists such as James Joyce, Balzac rendered human life not as an impersonal, directionless experience but governed within a recognizable moral framework, where ignoble acts or virtuous deeds bore moral consequences. Although not a moralist in any sense, Balzac, as well as the great Russian realistic novelists of the later nineteenth century, used the realistic form to more authentically, less didactically, present life, with its social protocols and hypocrisies, as the source material of art.

Balzac's influence among subsequent novelists as an observer of society and human psychology would be difficult to overestimate. Many authors throughout the world—from Leo Tolstoy in Russia, Ernest Hemingway and Tom Wolfe in America, Marcel Proust in France, or Robert Musil in Germany—would admit their immense debt to Balzac and his commitment to the truth.

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 French Revolution. He was educated at the 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 Sir 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 William Shakespeare’s 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 Charles 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 50 pages.

Balzac's work habits were legendary—he wrote for up to 15 hours a day, fueled 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 entirely 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 that are really no more than works-in-progress, such as Les employés (“The Government Clerks,” 1841), are of serious academic interest.

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 around 1847, when 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 traveled 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 Balzac died three months later.

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."

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“Reading brings us unknown friends” 

 “Notre coeur est un trésor, videz-le d'un coup, vous êtes ruinés.” 

“Our heart is a treasury; if you pour out all its wealth at once, you are bankrupt.” 

 “Every moment of happiness requires a great amount of Ignorance” 

 “There are no principles; there are only events. There is no good and bad, there are only circumstances. The superior man espouses events and circumstances in order to guide them. If there were principles and fixed laws, nations would not change them as we change our shirts and a man can not be expected to be wiser than an entire nation.” 

 “Paris that eternal monstrous marvel … the city of a hundred-thousand novels … a living creature, the great courtesan whose face and heart and mind-boggling morals they know: “They” are the lovers of Paris.” 

 “Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.”