Balzac didn't just write novels, he created worlds. rich, many layered worlds that ran parallel to the early nineteenth century Parisian world that he inhabited. It's the rich detail of these worlds that draws readers into them.
Balzac's novels seem to foreshadow many things. They are the prose predecessors of motion pictures, providing the reader with a precise visual reality. They are the predecessors of hypertext, the minute details passing by quickly on a first reading, actually being more than any camera could ever provide. On subsequent readings, exact physical renderings of characters and setting stand out as separate and independent artistic wholes that can be enjoyed in their own right. They are also the predecessors of modern simulation computer gaming as one finds in games such as "The Sims", "SimCity", or "Sid Meier's Civilization".
With such a wealth of detail some have called the "Comedie Humaine" an ethnography of a historical period, early nineteenth century France, or as Balzac calls it: "A History of Manners". Balzac notes in his 1842 introduction:
French society would be the real author; I should only be the secretary. By drawing up an inventory of vices and virtues, by collecting the chief facts of the passions, by depicting characters, by choosing the principal incidents of social life, by composing types out of a combination of homogeneous characteristics, I might perhaps succeed in writing the history which so many historians have neglected: that of Manners.
(Balzac 1842 Introduction, Project Gutenberg: hciaa10.txt)
And once again:
By adhering to the strict lines of a reproduction a writer might be a more or less faithful, and more or less successful, painter of types of humanity, a narrator of the dramas of private life, an archaeologist of social furniture, a cataloguer of professions, a registrar of good and evil... (Balzac 1842 Introduction, Project Gutenberg: hciaa10.txt)
Like an anthropologist he is interested in the everyday lives of typical people, not the exceptional lives of public figures and the events that steer the course of history for the entire nation:
I attach to common, daily facts, hidden or patent to the eye, to the acts of individual lives, and to their causes and principles, the importance which historians have hitherto ascribed to the events of public national life.
He writes micro-history mirroring the concerns of modern historians such as Braudel, Lefebre, Ginzburg, and the Annales School.
What social institutions are targeted for observation and analysis in Balzac's ethnography? Marriage customs, especially marriage contracts and the role that notaries play in them (see "The Marriage Contract") as well as the social tradition among the upper classes of marital infidelity and the taking of mistresses or lovers (see "Cousin Bette", "A Daughter of Eve", and "The Duchesse de Langeais"). Friedrich Engels weaves these two strands together when he tells us that Balzac describes...
"How the Grande Dame, whose conjugal infidelities were but a mode of asserting herself, in perfect accord with the way she had been disposed of in marriage, gave way to the Bourgeoise, who acquired her husband for cash or cashmere." (Becker, 1963, 485)
The power of inheritances is always a driving force in Balzac's narratives which include many historical details unfamiliar to the modern reader such as setting up entails to protect the family's wealth for generations beyond the current generation. (see "Two Brothers", "The Marriage Contract", and "Cousin Pons"), Entails are often set up to guarantee that parents cannot waste the fortune their children will inherit.
The media and all forms of publishing are targetted critically (see "Lost Illusions"), as well as corruption and political influence in the government (see "A Commission in Lunacy"), and the waning power of the aristocracy and the rise of the middle class, (see "Father Goriot").
Balzac shows how government service "provided an alternative focus for the rising middle classes." (Hobsbawm, 229) (see "The Lesser Bourgeousie") by making his civil service characters come from the families of small entrepreneurs. Balzac also shows how reformers who want to make government more efficient are often crushed by the very weight of the bureaucracy they wish to reform (see "The Bureaucrats").
Finally, Balzac makes the point again and again that "Society is governed by strategically placed women," (Kane) The influence of this last idea on subsequent generations of Balzac readers can be seen in Proust when he has the Baron de Charlus describe his sister-in-law as a "charming woman who imagines that we are still living in the days of Balzac's novels, when women had an influence on politics." (Proust, tr. Moncrieff, Guermantes Way I, 402)
Despite professing to be a staunch conservative holding church, king, and family above all else, Balzac's fictional history of peasants subverting the world of their masters ("Les Paysans") was admired by Marx. In some ways it's a predecessor of the anthropologist James Scott's contemporary theories of peasants constructing their world by covertly subverting the world of their masters. After Balzac, authors such as Zola follow the lead of Balzac and use the novel and short story as a tool for social observation and criticism.
"Anthropologist" or "participant observer" doesn't quite describe the trajectory Balzac's life took through French society and the observations he made along the way that form the basis of his work. His knowledge of Parisian social institutions was acquired first-hand: knowledge of finance acquired by being continually in debt, knowledge of publishing through bankruptcy as a publisher, knowledge of aristocracy through numerous romantic liasons, intimacies, and finally marriage to a member of the Russian nobility.
Participant observers are expected to be more detached from the subjects and events they describe to ensure objectivity. Balzac distances himself through the irony he injects into his writing, the ironic detachment of an intimate participant, an irony that is directed at the very group that he claims to be politically and morally allied with as Friedrich Engels observes:
Balzac was a political legitimist; his great work is a constant elegy on the irreparable decay of good society; his sympathies are with the class that is doomed to extinction. But for all that, his satire is never keener, his irony never more bitter, then when he sets in motion the very men and women with whom he sympathizes most deeply--the nobles. (Becker, 485; my emphasis)
Every anthropologist has "his people" that he goes out into the field to study and for whom he plays the advocate for when they face danger or extinction. Balzac's "people" were the French aristocracy that faced a gradual extinction during the historical period of the Comedie Humaine.
Balzac's novel "The Cabinet of Antiquities" does a good job of describing this process of extinction. An aging notary devoted to his master, a member of the local landed gentry who still lives in the 18th century, plays the role of the hero anthropologist who stakes everything to save "his people." When it becomes clear that the son of the nobleman will not take his own life after disgracing the family name, it is clear that the old aristocratic system of values is quickly disappearing.
But it is not merely the extinction, but rather the replacement of the aristocracy by a culture of money that provides the main thread of historical narrative running through the Comedie Humaine. Friedrich Engels describes this historical narrative:
Balzac,...gives us in his Comedie Humaine a most wonderfully realistic history of French "society," describing, chronicle fashion, almost year by year from 1816 to 1848, the ever-increasing pressure of the rising bourgeoisie upon the society of nobles that established itself after 1815 and that set up again, as far as it could (tant bien que mal) the standard of the vieille politesse francaise. He describes how the last remnants of this, to him, model society gradually succumbed before the intrusion of the vulgar moneyed upstart or was corrupted by him. (Becker, pp484-485, my emphasis)
And then Engels praises Balzac as a source of historical information:
And around this central picture he groups a complete history of French society from which, even in economic details (for instance the redistribution of real and private property after the French Revolution) I have learned more than from all the professional historians, economists, and statisticians of the period together. (Becker, 484; my bold)
Which finds its parallel in the sociologist Sorel via Proust. When Balzac's use as literature has been exhausted, his use as a historical source begins:
"...so, at the depressing moment when we must say goodbye to a Balzac character--a moment that Balzac had put off as long as he could by making him reappear in other novels-- just when he is about to disappear and be no more than a dream, Sorel says to us: 'not at all. This isn't a dream. Study them, it's authentic, it's part of history." (Proust, By Way of Saint-Beuve, 126)
And what kind of authentic historical detail should we look for?
"...so when Peyrade, Felix de Vandenesse, and the like, don't seem to have much life in them, Albert Sorel tells us that it is in them we must study the police system of the Consulate or the politics of the Bourbon restoration." (Proust, By Way of Saint-Beuve, 126)
Proust's own characters invoke Balzac in their conversations when they are hunting for detail for the sake of detail, the sort of historical fact that they claim to have no desire to put to use for personal gain. Proust has the intrusive Bloch ask:
"Tell me,...how much do you suppose St. Loup has? Not that it matters to me in the least, you quite understand, don't you. I'm interested from the Balzacian point of view. You don't know what it's in, French stocks, foreign stocks, or land or what? (Proust, Guermantes Way I, Moncrieff, 298)
What is meant by "the Balzacian point of view" here? With the reference to different forms of wealth "French stocks, foreign stocks, or land" he seems to be referring to the surplus of detail Balzac uses to describe his characters. With the qualification that "it matters to me in the least" he seems to be referring to description for the sake of description, a feature of Balzac's writing that Proust criticizes in his essays.
Veracity rather than style or entertainment value is the usual criterion for ethnographic description. In his 1842 introduction Balzac acknowledges the problem of being truthful as well as maintaining interest in a narrative. After providing a list of virtuous characters in his novels as a response to critics who find his novels dominated by characters who are not virtuous, he provides a list of virtuous characters and asks the reader, "Do not all these solve the difficult literary problem which consists in making a virtuous person interesting?" (Intro of 1842)
A participant observer is also expected to suppress his ego a bit. Malinowksi, one of the first anthropologists tarnished his name when the ego-laden diaries he had kept while doing field work in the Trobriand islands surfaced in the 1960's. The arrogance that Balzac is famous for, that permeates every inch of Renoir's controversial statue of him, puts into question his objectivity. As Proust observes in his criticism of Balzac's short story "Autre Etude de Femme", a collection of witty remarks and dinner party repartee:
Does Balzac want to construct from that triumph of de Marsay's narratives the triumph that he, Balzac, enjoyed in that evening party at which we were not present? Does he quite simply give way to the admiration that he felt for the lines that flowed from his pen? Perhaps it was a mingling of the two? I have a friend, one of the few authentic geniuses I have known and endowed with a magnificient Balzacian arrogance. Retailing for my benefit a lecture he had given in a theatre at which I had not been present, he interrupted himself from time to time to clap his hands where the public had clapped theirs. But he put so much fervour into it, so much energy, and went on for so long that I really believed that instead of giving me a faithful version of what took place, he was applauding himself. (Proust, Saint Beuve and Balzac, 133, my emphasis)
Let's summarize what Balzac himself said his ethnographies described in the extracts from the Introduction of 1842 given above:
But he he also wishes to go beyond the observations, categorization, and cataloguing:
...to deserve the praise of which every artist must be ambitious, must I not also investigate the reasons or the cause of these social effects, detect the hidden sense of this vast assembly of figures, passions, and incidents? And finally, having sought--I will not say having found --this reason, this motive power, must I not reflect on first principles, and discover in what particulars societies approach or deviate from the eternal law of truth and beauty? (Balzac 1842 Introduction, Project Gutenberg: hciaa10.txt)
Is there a social theory implicit in his descriptions of this fictional world? How much theorizing does he do and does it form a consistent whole? Does he provide a description in the abstract of the mechanism behind this world? Balzac devotes long sections of many of his stories to very explicit political theorizing. "The Duchesse de Langeais" is representative, inserting a long conservative politic polemic right after the prologue. In his Introduction of 1842 he states that he is unequivocably an advocate of the church and the monarchy:
Man is neither good nor bad; he is born with instincts and capabilities; society, far from depraving him, as Rousseau asserts, improves him, makes him better; but self-interest also develops his evil tendencies. Christianity, above all, Catholicism, being--as I have pointed out in the Country Doctor (le Medecin de Campagne)--a complete system for the repression of the depraved tendencies of man, is the most powerful element of social order.
One has to wonder how complete a system it is, even in Balzac's world, when one reads in Cousin Pons how low level poorer church functionaries join in the conspiracy to acquire Pons' inheritance by fraudulent means after his death. All the social institutions surrounding death in which the church is complicit are thrown in a rather bad light.
Just as in the French historian Braudel's theory of history everyday life and the historical events that drive nations mutually condition each other in Balzac's works. As Martin Kanes observes, "Balzac was interested precisely in the texture of everyday life produced by large-scale historical events" (Kanes, 1993, 7). He draws attention to the "breakdown in law and order that often occurs in postwar periods. Old culture patterns had been destroyed and new ones were trying to establish themselves." (Kane, 1993, 3)
The large-scale historical events that Balzac analyzes under a microsope include the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the restoration of the nobility to their position of importance after the Napoleonic wars, and the simultaneous rise in importance of commerce and the new middle class. The Napoleonic wars loom large in the background of many stories. Military service during the Napoleonic wars is a major part of the background of male characters. Each has a sort of military pedigree, who he served under, what battles he fought in, his promotions and decorations, and whether he received that all necessary ribbon of the legion of honor that those who have received it always wear when they go out in public in Balzac's novels. Just like Vietnam war veterans many of them find it difficult to adjust to civilian life again (Two Brothers).
Loyalties during one political period effect the political possibilities in the next. Most of the main characters in "The Lesser Bourgeousie" are government officials before 1830 and were forced to resign after the change of government in 1830. Similarly, Phillipe Bridau who zoomed up the social ladder just before 1830 falls quickly and is banished to Algeria after choosing the wrong side. Raoul Nathan is an author ruined by choosing the wrong side. Others such as Montriveau in the "The Duchesse de Langeais" gain after 1830 by not having chosen sides.
[To be continued]