Balzac, Honoré de

Balzac, Honoré de (1799-1850, original name Honoré Balssa), French Realist, novelist considered one of the major figures of European literature.

Balzac, the son of a peasant turned civil servant, was born in Tours, where he spent an unhappy childhood. At his father’s insistence, he studied law in Paris from 1816 to 1819. After being licensed to practise, however, he chose to embark on a literary career, with his parents’ grudging financial support. Between 1820 and 1829 he lived precariously, writing unsuccessful potboiler novels for the popular market. In 1825 Balzac ventured into the publishing and printing business but was forced to withdraw in 1828, on the verge of bankruptcy and with debts that were to plague him for the rest of his life.

In 1829 he produced the novel, Le Dernier Chouan (later called Les Chouans), the first he was prepared to publish under his own name, about Breton peasants and their role in the Royalist insurrection of 1799 during the French Revolution. Although the work shows some of the weaknesses of his earlier writing, it is his first important novel and signals Balzac’s growing development as a writer. An indefatigable worker, he was to produce about 95 novels and many short stories, plays, and journalistic pieces within the next 20 years.

Balzac had begun in 1832 to correspond with a Polish countess, Eveline Hanska, who admired his work. She was the most important, though not the only, woman in his life. She promised to marry Balzac when her husband died. He died in 1841, but although she and Balzac continued to meet, they did not marry until March 1850. On August 18, 1850, Balzac died.

At some point in 1833, Balzac conceived the ingenious notion of having his characters recur in certain novels, thus giving them life and continuity. In 1834 he formalized the idea of collecting his novels, completed and projected, into one mammoth continuum for which, in 1840, he found the title La Comédie Humaine (The Human Comedy). His aim was to create a panoramic view of French society in all its aspects from the Revolution to his own day. In a famous introduction written in 1842 he made explicit the underlying philosophy of the work, which reflected some of the views of the naturalists Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Balzac argued that just as differences of environment and heredity produce various species of animals, so do the varying pressures of society produce differentiations among human beings. The task he set for himself was that of depicting each of the so-called human “species”. The work was to comprise 150 novels divided into three main groups: Études de Moeurs (Studies of Customs), Études Philosophiques (Philosophical Studies), and Études Analytiques (Analytical Studies). The first group, comprising most of his work already completed, was subdivided into six scènes—private, provincial, Parisian, military, political, and country life. The novels were to involve about 2,000 characters, the most important of whom recurred, as appropriate, in different novels. Balzac ultimately accomplished about two thirds of this enormous project. Among the best-known novels of the series are Le Père Goriot (1834-1835), the story of a father’s excessive sacrifices for his ungrateful daughters; Eugénie Grandet (1833), where a miserly father obsessed with money destroys his daughter’s chance for happiness; La Cousine Bette (1846), about the evil vengeance of a jealous, impoverished old woman; La Recherche de l’Absolu (The Quest for the Absolute, 1834), a compelling study of monomania; and Illusions Perdues (Lost Illusions; 1837-1843), and Splendeurs et Misères des Courtisanes (1838-1847), following the ambitions of the criminal mastermind, Vautrin.

Balzac’s avowed objective was to depict French society, which he found both appalling and fascinating, with the utmost realism. His greatness, however, lies in his ability to transcend mere representation and to infuse his novels with a kind of “suprarealism”. His description of background, for example, is almost as important as his development of characters. Balzac once said that “the events of public and private life are intimately linked up with architecture”, and consequently he portrays the houses and rooms through which his characters move in such a way as to reveal their passions and desires.

Although Balzac’s characters are highly believable and real, they are nearly all possessed by their own particular type of monomania. They all seem more active, vivid, and highly developed than their living models could be, “larger-than-life” being a hallmark of Balzacian characterization. What was mediocre in life Balzac made sublime in his writing by persistently deepening the shadows and heightening the luminosity. He gave to the usurer, the courtesan, and the dandy the grandeur of epic heroes.

Another aspect of Balzac’s extreme realism lies in his attention to the prosaic exigencies of everyday life. Far from leading idealized lives, Balzac’s characters are obsessively embroiled in a materialistic world of business transactions and financial crises. More often than not such matters form the crux of their existence; avarice, in particular, is one of his most common themes. In his dialogue, Balzac displays an extraordinary mastery of language, adapting it with amazing skill to the portrayal of widely diversified characters. His general prose style, although on occasion verbose, has a rich, dynamic quality that makes it compelling and absorbing.

Among his numerous important works, besides those already cited, are the novels La Peau de Chagrin (The Wild Ass’s Skin, 1831), Le Lys dans la Vallée (The Lily of the Valley, 1835-1836), César Birotteau (1834-1837), and Le Curé de Village (The Village Priest, 1839); the short stories Contes Drolatiques (Droll Stories, 1832, 1833, 1837); the play Vautrin (1839); and his correspondence with Eveline Hanska, Lettres à l’Étrangère (Letters to a Stranger, 1906; repub. in 4 vols., 1967-1971).