1) His Biography:
Honoré de Balzac (1799–1855) was born in Tours, France, a small provincial town on the Loire River. As a young man, he had the opportunity to observe the customs of rural life, which later became the subject of numerous of his novels, the most well-known of which is arguably Eugénie Grandet.
But fortunately for us, Balzac’s father will depart for Paris, which at the time was the hub of the continent’s intellectual and creative life. The city is a fascinating location that exudes charm, elegance, and wealth and is teeming with opulent events, carriages, and stunning women. But it’s also a mudhole full of run-down houses and individuals with selfish ambitions and secret emotions, a jungle where the brutal struggle for survival corrupts the good and obliterates the weak. These two facets of the French city will act as Le Père Goriot’s backdrop.
After completing his studies in law and the humanities in this environment, Balzac would soon feel the need to pursue a career as a writer. After the failure of his tiny printing company, he will have to publish to make ends meet. He writes roughly 2,000 pages a year while working twelve to fourteen hours a day, battling sleep deprivation and weariness with endless cups of coffee.
This explains the numerous errors in his early writings that were serialized in newspapers. Most of them were Romanesque, Gothic romances and adventure books, with influences from James Fenimore Cooper, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley (Frankenstein), and Swedenborg. Particularly noticeable is Sir Walter Scott’s influence, which is plainly visible in Les Chouans, published in 1829 and marking Balzac’s ascent to renown.
However, one must wait until 1834 when Balzac makes the world aware of his brilliance through Le Père Goriot. Le Père Goriot serves as the foundation for his massive project, the epic story of contemporary society. Balzac split The Human Comedy into two sections, each containing 93 novels and short stories, 2,000 live individuals, and an attempt to cover every aspect of society: Social studies and philosophical studies are separated into six categories, with the former including private life, provincial life, Parisian life, political life, military life, and rural life.
Together with Shakespeare and Saint Simon, Balzac is the greatest source of knowledge we have ever had about human nature, according to Taine, a contemporary French critic. Balzac’s enormous endeavour, more comprehensive than the writings of a Walter Scott or a Dickens, inspired this statement from Taine.
2) Main Works:
The Chouans:
Honoré de Balzac (1799–1855), a French author and playwright, wrote the 1829 book Les Chouans, which is a part of the La Comédie humaine series’ Scènes de la vie militaire. The book, which is set in the Brittany area of France, combines a love tale between the aristocratic Marie de Verneuil and the Chouan royalist Alphonse de Montauran with military history. It occurs at Fougères during the 1799 post-war revolt.
The Village Priest:
Honoré de Balzac wrote the novel Le Curé de village (The Village Priest). In 1839, it originally appeared in La Presse. The corrected text, which underwent numerous revisions, was released as a separate volume in 1841. It touches on ideas that Balzac had already articulated in Le Médecin de campagne, such as the improvement of rural living standards and self-sacrifice as a means of atonement. The book’s main character, Véronique Graslin, has a cryptic attitude that remains a mystery until the very end. It was originally intended to be a detective story with a mysterious death.
A Marriage Contract:
Honoré de Balzac 1835 novel Le Contrat de mariage (A Marriage Contract) is a part of the Scènes de la vie privée section of his La Comédie humaine novel series. It is set in Bordeaux and tells the story of Paul de Manerville, a Parisian gentleman, and Natalie Evangelista, a beautiful but spoiled Spanish heiress.
The Exiles:
Honoré de Balzac’s short story “Les Proscrits” (The Exiles) was first published in 1831 by éditions Gosselin and again in 1846 by Furne, Dubochet, and Hetzel in Études philosophiques. He gave it the heading “historique esquisse.” It shares several themes with Louis Lambert, including the doctor Sigier theory that intelligence knows many avatars, ranging from animal intelligence to angelic intelligence, and the notion that angels live among men, which frequently appears in Balzac’s descriptions of women. It is a part of the Livre Mystique, just like Louis Lambert and Séraphîta.
The Old Maid:
The dense plot and quick succession of events in this brief but sharp novel make it stand out. Before getting to the meat of the affair, Balzac takes the time to carefully depict Mademoiselle Cormon’s home in the Alençon city. One of the best portraits in The Human Comedy is the one of Mademoiselle Cormon. In this book, Balzac offers one of his most subtle analyses of the social, political, and economic concerns of a provincial town.
3) Main Themes:
Realism:
Balzac was a pioneer of literary realism because of the considerable use of detail, particularly the detail of objects, to depict the lives of his characters. While admiring and being influenced by Scottish author Walter Scott’s Romantic style, Balzac aspired to portray human existence via the use of particulars. He stated “the author firmly believes that details alone will henceforth determine the merit of works” in the preface to the first edition of Scènes de la Vie privée. The characters are given life by the numerous descriptions of the furniture, clothes, and other belongings.
Henri de Latouche, a close friend of Balzac, was an expert at hanging wallpaper, for instance. This was carried over by Balzac into his descriptions of the Pension Vauquer in Le Père Goriot, where he made the wallpaper speak of the inhabitants’ identities.
A more pessimistic and analytical version of realism and naturalism aims to explain human behavior as being inextricably tied with the environment. Some critics view Balzac’s writing as an example of naturalism. Balzac was hailed as the inventor of the naturalist fiction by the French author Émile Zola. According to Zola, although the Romantics viewed the world through a tinted lens, a naturalist sees the world through a clear glass, which is the exact effect Balzac sought to create in his writings.
Characters:
Balzac aimed to show his characters as totally human beings who were neither fully good nor fully bad. In the introduction to Le Lys dans la vallée, he stated that “writers use whatever literary device seems capable of giving the greatest intensity of life to their characters”. Robb writes that Balzac’s characters “were to him as real as if he were witnessing them in the outside world.” Oscar Wilde, the author of the play Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, made notice of this truth when he said: “One of the greatest tragedies of my life is the death of [Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes protagonist] Lucien de Rubempré. It haunts me in my moments of joy”.
The characters also represent a variety of socioeconomic classes, including the honorable soldier, the scoundrel, the arrogant worker, the daring spy, and the seductive mistress. Balzac’s ability to strike a balance between the individual’s strength, and the type’s depiction is proof of his talent. According to one critic, “Balzac’s world has a core and a periphery.”
Balzac’s use of recurring characters who appear in multiple novels of the Comédie improves the realist portrayal. When characters reemerge, according to Rogers, “they don’t just arrive out of thin air; they emerge from the privacy of their own lives that we haven’t been allowed to view for a while.” Additionally, he employed the realistic approach known as “retrospective illumination” by French novelist Marcel Proust, in which a character’s backstory is revealed decades after the individual first appears.
The protagonists in Balzac’s works are propelled by an almost limitless supply of energy. They may lose more often than they win as they struggle against social and psychological currents, but they rarely give up. Balzac’s personal social struggles, those of his family, and an interest in the Austrian mystic and physician Franz Mesmer, who founded the field of animal magnetism, are all reflected in this universal quality. Balzac frequently referred to the “nervous and fluid force” that exists between people, and Raphael de Valentin’s deterioration in La Peau de Chagrin serves as an example of the peril of isolating oneself from other people’s society.
Place:
Balzac’s realism depends on accurate depictions of the city, the countryside, and the inside of buildings; these scenes frequently serve to provide a realistic background against which the lives of the individuals unfold. This earned him the title of an early naturalist. Sometimes lengthy descriptions of places take up fifteen or twenty pages. Balzac researched these places as thoroughly as he studied the people around him, visiting isolated areas and comparing his notes from earlier excursions.
La Comédie is heavily influenced by Paris, with depictions of the weather and wildlife in the countryside contrasted with nature deferring to the man-made city. These provincial villages are almost always depicted in their natural environment, even though Rogers claims that in Paris “we are in a man-made territory where even the seasons are forgotten.” According to Balzac, “Paris’s streets have human traits, and we can’t get rid of the memories they leave behind.”
His confusing city served as a creative inspiration for writers like Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky and English novelist Charles Dickens. La Comédie Humaine’s emphasis on Paris is crucial to understanding Balzac’s realist legacy. According to critic Peter Brooks, “Realism is nothing if not urban”; Balzac’s works, such as Illusions Perdues, frequently feature scenes of young men entering cities in search of their fortune.
Between 1830 and 1837, Balzac spent time at the Château de Saché in Touraine, which belonged to his friend Jean de Margonne (who was also his mother’s lover), and he wrote many of the books in the “La Comedie Humaine” series there. The writing desk, quill pen, and chair from Balzac’s office are currently on display in a museum dedicated to him.
Perspective:
Over time, Balzac’s literary tone changed from one of despair and chagrin to one of camaraderie and bravery—but not optimism. One of his earlier books, La Peau de Chagrin, is a bleak tale of chaos and ruin. The cynicism, however, lessened as his body of work evolved, and the characters in Illusions Perdues show empathy for individuals who are marginalized by society. As the novel developed in the 19th century into a “democratic literary genre,” Balzac declared that “les livres sont faits pour tout le monde” (“books are written for everybody”).
Balzac was primarily preoccupied with the darker aspects of human nature and the distorting effects of middle-class and high-class communities. He frequently walked through the streets of Parisian society surreptitiously to conduct his research in to see humanity in its most representative state. In his writings, such as Eugénie Grandet and Louis Lambert, he drew on occurrences from his life and the people around him.
Politics:
Balzac was a legitimist, and in many ways, his ideas ran counter to the democratic republicanism of Victor Hugo. “The one and only absolute authority that the mind has conceived, is God’s authority, which functions according to principles that He has set on Himself,” said Balzac in his essay ‘Society and the Individual’. He can wipe out all His worlds and go back to His rest, but as long as He lets them exist, the laws that together produce order continue to govern them.
When Louis XVI was executed, the Revolution “beheaded in his person the fathers of families,” according to the Balzac, who was influenced by the counter-revolutionary philosopher and statesman Louis de Bonald. However, many socialists, particularly Marxists, respected him for his astute understanding of working-class realities. Balzac was cited by Engels as his favourite author. Balzac’s writings are also mentioned in passing in Marx’s Das Kapital, and Trotsky is infamous for reading Balzac aloud during Central Committee meetings, much to the displeasure of his comrades and colleagues.
4) His Influence:
Balzac had an impact on authors in his own time and beyond. He is regarded as one of Charles Dickens’ major influences and has been compared to Dickens. Literary critic W. H. Helm refers to one as “the French Dickens” and the other as “the English Balzac.” According to literary critic Richard Lehan, Balzac was “the bridge between the humorous realism of Dickens and the naturalism of Zola”.
Balzac had a big impact on Gustave Flaubert as well. Flaubert once praised his depiction of society while criticizing his prose, saying: “What a man he would have been had he known how to write!” While he disliked the term “realist”, Flaubert was evidently influenced by Balzac’s meticulous attention to detail and straightforward portrayals of bourgeois life. This impact can be seen in Balzac’s Illusions Perdues, which Flaubert references in his work L’éducation sentimentale. Lehan notes, “What Balzac started, Flaubert helped finish.”
Marcel Proust took a lesson from the Realist examples and loved and studied Balzac’s writings while also criticizing what he saw as Balzac’s “vulgarity.” Balzac’s 1822 short story Une Heure de ma Vie, in which intricate details are followed by profound introspection, is a clear forerunner of the approach Proust employed in A la recherche du temps perdu. However, Proust later claimed that it was “madness” to put Balzac higher than Tolstoy in the current literary climate.
Henry James, an American novelist living abroad, was possibly the author most influenced by Balzac. James wrote four essays praising Balzac in 1878, lamenting the lack of attention he was receiving at the time (in 1875, 1877, 1902, and 1913). Large as Balzac is, he is all of one piece and he hangs nicely together, James wrote in 1878.
He praised Balzac’s attempt to write about “a beast with a hundred claws” in his essay. The Comédie Humaine’s artist is “half buried by the historian” James said in relation to how his own works focused more on the psychological motivations of the characters than the historical sweep displayed by Balzac. However, both authors explored society’s workings and the many motivations behind human conduct using the realist novel genre.
In his 1971 book Letters from 74 rue Taitbout or Don’t Go But If You Must Say Hello To Everyone, William Saroyan included a short narrative about Balzac. Both left-wing and rightwing political critics have agreed with Balzac’s depiction of a society where class, wealth, and personal ambition are the dominant factors. “I have learned more [from Balzac] than from all the professional historians, economists, and statisticians put together,” Marxist Friedrich Engels penned. Critics as diverse as Walter Benjamin and Camille Paglia have praised Balzac highly.
James Baldwin also complimented him, saying in 1984: “If I hadn’t encountered Balzac, I have no doubt that my life in France would have changed significantly. He taught me about that nation’s politics and social structure.” S/Z, a thorough critique of Balzac’s short novel Sarrasine and a foundational piece of structuralist literary criticism, was published in 1970 by Roland Barthes.
Balzac also had an impact on pop culture. Le Père Goriot (1968 BBC miniseries), Les Chouans (1947), Travers Vale’s Père Goriot (1915), and La Cousine Bette (1974 BBC miniseries, starring Margaret Tyzack and Helen Mirren; 1998 film, starring Jessica Lange) are only a few of his writings that have been adapted into well-known movies and television programs. In the comedic musical The Music Man by Meredith Willson, Balzac is mentioned. He appears in the 400 Blows by François Truffaut from 1959. Balzac and Proust, in Truffaut’s opinion, were the two finest French authors.