Balzac's Paris: The City as Human Comedy

by Eric Hazan

Pourquoi Paris, pourquoi pas la constellation provinciale, Issoudun et Guérande, Saumur et Fougères, Besançon et Sancerre ? C'est que Paris est à la fois l'épicentre de la Comédie humaine et "une fille, une amie, une épouse" pour Balzac. Le livre mêle d'ailleurs ces deux aspects : en même temps qu'on voit se déployer la ville de Ferragus, de Diane de Maufrigneuse, de De Marsay et de Rastignac, on suit l'existence de Balzac dans Paris, ses déménagements sous la pression des créanciers, ses démêlés avec ses éditeurs, ses malheurs au théâtre, ses journaux, ses courses dans les rues entre ses imprimeurs, ses marchands de café et ses nombreux amis. Il est par moments comme fondu dans la foule de ses personnages, ducs et pairs, actrices, espions, journalistes, poètes et banquiers. Réaliste, Balzac ? "J'ai maintes fois été étonné que la grande gloire de Balzac fût de passer pour un observateur ; il m'avait toujours semblé que son principal mérite était d'être visionnaire, et visionnaire passionné. Tous ses personnages sont doués de l'ardeur vitale dont il était animé lui-même. Toutes ses fictions sont aussi profondément colorées que les rêves", c'est Baudelaire qui le dit, et c'est aussi ce qui ressort de ce livre, exploration de la cathédrale balzacienne et quête sur son architecte.

Genres: France, History, Nonfiction, Paris, Literary Criticism, Biography, Literature

208 pages, Hardcover

First published January 23, 2018

About the author

Eric Hazan is a writer, historian and founder of the independent publishing house La Fabrique. His most recent books in English include The Invention of Paris (2012) and A People's History of the French Revolution (2014).

Reviews

[Jason Furman]

Effectively a short collection of interrelated essays on different aspects of Balzac, including where he located his books in Paris and what was going on at the time with newspapers and the publishing industry. Part biography, part appreciation, it has a generous helping of block quotes and pictures. One interesting perspective was the ways in which Balzac did not fully capture his time. Like Dickens some of it was a little bit older (e.g., he barely mentions the railroad or railroad terminals in the Human Comedy, even thought it was extensive when he wrote). Also some of the major political events of the day went unreflected. But in other ways he was hyper focused, including on money. And, of course, Paris.

[David C Ward]

Disappointing. There’s so much you could say about Balzac and Paris but this is basically a compendium of quotes (some excessively long; one is five Kindle pages!) from the Comedie Humaine with practically no analysis or context. You’re better off just reading the novels.

[Karl Lawson]

This book makes it evident that Eric Hazan is an incredibly intelligent scholar, who studies Balzac's prose and life with the same attention a parent gives their child. Hazan pulls broadly from his work to find a taxonomy of "Balzac's Paris," and does quite a good job of it. However, it is quite difficult to track his taxonomy, his streets, without an intimate knowledge of The Human Comedy and/or Paris already present. Perhaps that means that I am simply not his intended audience, but nonetheless, it leads to the first half of the book being interesting but quite annoying to follow, as someone who's only read a few works of Balzac and has never been to France. The latter half, however, is fantastic. It is a more biographical look, focusing on the relationship between Balzac the personality, the publishing and theatre industries of France, and Balzac's struggling financial balance. While I only give this work three stars, I think the book to be very valuable to anybody interested in The Human Comedy, and that it would most likely become 4 stars to someone who knows Paris.

[David Sogge]

A mix of gazetteer and potted biography, this book builds on massive Balzac scholarship as well as on the author's own ground-level acquaintance with Paris and its history. Beyond his scholarly work, Hazan (who died on 6 June 2024 at the age of 87) was a surgeon and political activist. In this book he offers revealing glimpses of the social spheres, high and low, in which Balzac moved during the last decades of his life (1799-1850) spent in Paris. As a vademecum, the book may be of greatest interest and use to readers acquainted with Paris as it was in the early 19th century; hence my sense in this book of sometimes not knowing quite where I was.

With his intimate knowledge of Paris past and present, Hazan shows how Balzac, a seasoned wanderer in the city, “left out whole sections, political and urban, of the Paris of his time". His sociology was skimpy and he rarely signposted major developments, such as the emergence of railways. Literary critics, especially on the Left, have lauded Balzac for his realism. Hazan agrees that “On money, Balzac’s documentary accuracy is unparalleled…” But failures to pay attention to what was around him in Paris, suggest needs to re-assess Balzac’s reputation as a producer of "realistic and documentary work" and to see that reputation as a legend "created by Balzac himself, who insisted … on his concern for exhaustiveness and accuracy.” Hazan demonstrates that in literary history, there's no substitute for local knowledge and first-hand observation.

[Sanjuro]

The nineteenth century was full of fascinating figures in literature, music, and painting, and this is true across both Europe and the U.S. In this book, Hazan takes a look at Paris during that time through the eyes of one of its documenters, Honore de Balzac. At the time of reading this, I'd read just two of Balzac's works, and I'm on the verge of reading a third, so when I saw that this book was released, I hoped it would make for a decent introduction to Balzac's "The Human Comedy" (a series of nearly 100 novels and stories depicting life in Paris). As an intro, it did just the trick. The book was breezy and informative. There was nothing too remarkable about this book, but it did its job just fine. For anyone interested in Balzac, this makes for a solid, quick introduction.

[Tacodisc]

"Balzac therefore left out whole sections, political and urban, of the Paris of his time. This is because The Human Comedy is neither a history of the city nor an investigation according to the rules of sociology, a science whose name emerged in the year in which A Great Man in Embryo, the second part of Lost Illusions, was published (1839). The legend of a realistic and documentary work was created by Balzac himself, who insisted in both his Introduction and his prefaces on his concern for exhaustiveness and accuracy. Since then, this legend has persisted as a matter of course, relayed in particular by Marxist critics who, from Engels to Lukács, have praised Balzac’s realism."

[Jim]

Eric Hazan's Balzac's Paris: The City as Human Comedy is a labor of love in which the author shows us that, in Balzac's Human Comedy, Paris is one of the major characters. I particularly enjoyed the neighborhood-by-neighborhood survey of Paris as reflected in Balzac's novels and stories.

[Carol Griffiths]

A very detailed look at Balzac's vast Human Comedy in relation to the various areas of Paris in which the stories are set. I enjoyed it for the descriptions of the Paris of the 1800s and to see what has changed. Anyone more familiar with Balzac's novels than I am would probably find a great deal to enjoy.

[Luca Lamanna]

Not what I was looking for really so wasn't able to connect very much with the book.

[Kyle Pennekamp]

First half is brutal. Second half is incredibly enjoyable.

[Caterina Pierre]

Contains spoilers for some Balzac novels.

[Mark]

A wonderful roadmap into Balzac's Paris.