BALZAC, HONORÉ de. - French writer b. at Tours on May 20, 1799, and d. at Paris on Aug. 18, 1850. He studied law and attempted the legal profession, but, dominated by a passion for letters, he soon abandoned the provinces and in 1819 settled in Paris, devoting himself to the novel. To increase his meager earnings, he launched more than one commercial speculation, but all of them failed: he was thus forced to struggle constantly with debts, even when literary glory should have allowed him a comfortable and tranquil life.
In 1829 he achieved his first success with Les Chouans, which was followed by a series of novels published within twenty years and culminating in masterpieces such as Le père Goriot, Eugénie Grandet, La Cousine Bette, etc. Having started from the imitation of W. Scott, B. nevertheless immediately abandons the historical novel, restricting his field of observation to the contemporary world around him, but this he knows how to observe and reproduce in its manifold variety of places, types and social conditions, grasping its essence, yet without renouncing the meticulous and vigilant care of realistic detail, which he feels to be an indispensable element for giving character to every individual and creating in him that social nature which is in his eyes a nature within nature. Thus are born the Scènes de la vie privée, vie de province, vie parisienne, vie militaire, which in 1842 the author gathers under the title of Comédie humaine. In this gigantic work, the entire Balzacian world finds a place; a world where, alongside love, politics, business, and speculations of every kind enter largely, always driven by the play of those dominant passions that in the principal characters find living and powerful incarnation. The Comédie humaine faithfully portrays French society of 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 centralizing monarchy, whose ideal he sees incarnated in Catherine de' Medici, the queen who knew how to sustain central power and defend it against every attack, without shrinking from extreme means when the integrity of the State required it.
To B.'s Legitimism corresponds his attitude in matters of religion; he was not an orthodox believer, yet he felt all the value of the religious unity of peoples and the force of Catholicism as the greatest 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, however, worth very little; his works, in fact, were all placed on the Index with the formula: Omnes fabulae amatoriae (decr. Sept. 16, 1841; Jan. 28, 1842; Apr. 5, 1842; June 20, 1864). And the reasons are very serious: "He was called an anatomist of the human heart, often of an exasperating coldness in 'dissecting' vice, the hardness of hearts; he considers man only from the worst side, in a moral deformity that casts him down; no virtue exists; vice aims with calculation at its satisfaction. Exaggeration of realism in describing the passions that brutalize man; no educational intent in art... From facts he often draws conclusions that generalize vice." (G. Casati, L'Indice dei libri proibiti, III, Milan 1939, pp. 29-30).
Bibliography16 works
Maria Teresa Sposato