The inevitable context of the new was the city - for Balzac, Paris, where he made his way in 1814, to study law, which he never practiced, preferring to write novels in a garret while he pursued various ill-fated get-rich-quick schemes, including a printing and publishing business that swiftly went bankrupt. No wonder that despite his reactionary views and his fear of the urban proletariat, Balzac has always been a favorite of Marxist critics, starting with Marx and Engels themselves.

As Pére Goriot raves on his deathbed, nothing matters anymore but money: money will buy you anything, even your unfaithful daughters. His fictional philosopher, Louis Lambert, before sinking into sullen madness, formulates a 'law of disorganization' that characterizes the new society. The new era was one of convulsive egotism, the cult of the individual personality. Because of his reactionary stance, he was able to perceive all the more sharply the decline of the landed gentry, the coming of the cash nexus and the end of what he nostalgically saw as an ordered, organic society with each person in an assigned role.

His novels generally are set during the restoration but were written after its demise - written with a sense of its impending doom, its inevitable closure and the coming of the age that will ever be characterized by Francois Guizot's words, as Prime Minister, to his fellow citizens: 'Enrichissez-vous.' Make money, get rich.īalzac was a self-proclaimed reactionary, a monarchist who wanted to restore all the hereditary rights of the aristocracy and a Roman Catholic. Born a few months before Napoleon's coup d'état brought a halt to the French Revolution - while consolidating its liquidation of the ancien régime - Balzac came of age during the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy after Waterloo, and wrote most of his fiction during the bourgeois monarchy of Louis-Philippe, which followed the Revolution of 1830.

ESSAY: Realism in France (Ernest Boyd, March 21, 1923, New Republic) He had the advantage of living in an age of revolution, which made the passing of the old order starkly perceptible. Balzac has been called 'a realist in the observation of material facts,' but 'a Romanticist in his invention of plot and incident.'

Balzac by Graham Robb