BALZAC, HONORÉ de. — French writer, b. at Tours on 20 May 1799, and d. at Paris on 18 Aug. 1850. He studied law and attempted to practise as a lawyer, but, dominated by his passion for literature, he soon left the provinces and in 1819 settled in Paris, devoting himself to the novel. To increase his meagre earnings, he embarked upon more than one commercial speculation, but all of them failed: he was thus forced to struggle continually with debts, even when his literary fame ought to have allowed him a comfortable and peaceful life.
In 1829 he achieved his first success with Les Chouans, followed by a series of novels published over the course of two decades and culminating in such masterpieces as Le père Goriot, Eugénie Grandet, La Cousine Bette, etc. Having begun with the imitation of W. Scott, B. nevertheless soon abandoned the historical no-
vel, restricting his field of observation to the contemporary world around him; yet he knew how to observe and reproduce it in its manifold variety of places, types, and social conditions, grasping its essence without renouncing the meticulous and vigilant care of realistic detail, which he regarded as indispensable for giving character to each individual and creating within him that social nature which, in his eyes, is a nature within nature. Thus were born the Scènes de la vie privée, vie de province, vie parisienne, vie militaire, which in 1842 the author brought together under the title of Comédie humaine. In this gigantic work, the entire Balzacian world finds a place: a world in which, alongside love, politics, business, and speculations of every kind play a large part, always driven by the interplay of those dominant passions that find a living and powerful embodiment in the principal characters. La Comédie humaine faithfully portrays French society under the July Monarchy, but B., who is its painter, does not love that bourgeois world. A Legitimist in politics, he defends and exalts the strong and centralized monarchy, whose ideal he sees embodied in Caterina de' Medici, the queen who knew how to uphold the central power and defend it against every attack, without shrinking from extreme measures when the integrity of the State required them.
B.’s Legitimism corresponds to his attitude in religious matters; he was not an orthodox believer, yet he fully perceived the value of the religious unity of peoples and the power of Catholicism as the foremost factor of social order. “I write,” he says in the Préface to the Comédie, “in the light of two eternal truths: religion and monarchy.”
The assertion, as regards religion, is nevertheless of very little value; his works, in fact, were all placed on the Index with the formula: Omnes fabulae amatoriae (decr. 16 Sept. 1841; 28 Jan. 1842; 5 Apr. 1842; 20 June 1864). And the reasons are very serious: “He was called an anatomist of the human heart, often of an exasperating coldness in ‘dissecting’ vice and the hardness of hearts; he considers man only from his worst side, in a moral deformity that crushes; no virtue exists; vice aims calculatedly at its own gratification. An exaggeration of realism in describing the passions that brutalize man; no educational purpose in art... He often draws from facts conclusions that generalize vice.” (G. Casati, L'Indice dei libri proibiti, III, Milano 1939, pp. 29-30).