The Paris Review

Balzac and the Reassembly of France

Louis Boulanger, Balzac, 1836.

In the 1820s, when Honoré de Balzac decided to become a writer, the novel was a minor literary genre in France. Like Voltaire, educated French people preferred poetry and grand tragedy, wherein virtue, truth, enthusiasm, and hope marched solemnly across the page. As a result, contemporary French novelists were almost ashamed of their prose. Many published under pseudonyms—the men because their tone tended to be light, schoolboyish, and edgily anticlerical; the women because they knew to expect prim, frowning disapproval if they openly wrote for publication.

Then the sentimental novel began to win popularity. Writers such as Adelaïde de Souza, Sophie Cottin, Germaine de Staël, Madame de Genlis, and Madame von Krüdener gravitated toward Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1761 , enriching its approach to prose with fresh narrative procedures that realist novelists would later adopt. With remarkable precision, these authors analyzed contemporary dilemmas regarding, for instance, the postrevolutionary longing for individual freedom and and (individual morality and the collective ethic, respectively).

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from The Paris Review

The Paris Review2 min read
Contributors
ANGELA BALL’s most recent book of poetry is Talking Pillow. MICHAEL BERRY is a writer and translator. He is the director of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. AIMEE CHOR is a poet and translator. SARAH CHARLE
The Paris Review1 min read
Life Poem 1
A leaf falls here/there, now/thenbehind the rain, a curtain of rain,the trees in their own time.I see now that time falls in layers. There were deer there once, in the clearing,three deer, large as memory objects.They stood in a circleas if they knew
The Paris Review1 min read
Farah Al Qasimi
Farah Al Qasimi’s first photographs were of the dreary New Haven winter: reflections in water, a dead cat, an angry dog. She was an undergraduate at the Yale School of Art, where in 2017 she also received her M.F.A. Since then, Al Qasimi has turned h

Related Books & Audiobooks