It is no overstatement to claim that Balzac is the nineteenth-century French novelist. In terms of influence and impact, Balzac is simply unrivalled. To write in the last 50 or 60 so years of the nineteenth century (and arguably in the first 50 or 60 years of the twentieth century) was inevitably to write within the broad shadow cast by Balzac. Balzac was the literary colossus whose work all subsequent writers had to negotiate. Balzac is the pre-eminent nineteenth-century French novelist, the novelist against which all subsequent novelists in France had to measure their own fictional practice.

Balzac's formidable reputation, his pre-eminent status comes not from the publication of any single novel but from the publication of a vast network of interconnected and interrelated texts known collectively as La Comédie humaine. La Comédie humaine is a truly monumental work which contains some 91 novels and short stories (some 137 were originally planned) and a cast of over 2,500 characters of which 573 appear in more than one text.

Let me give you a couple of examples of Balzac's influence. When in 1857 Gustave Flaubert gave to his novel Madame Bovary the subtitle moeurs de province it was in the full knowledge that such a subtitle had strong Balzacian echoes. I shall speak of these echoes a little later. Similarly, when Zola began work on his series of interconnected novels called Les Rougon-Macquart: histoire naturelle et sociale d'une famille sous le Second Empire (1871-1892) he could not help but situate himself and compare his own fictional project with Balzac's La Comédie humaine. Zola's unfinished and unpublished study provisionally entitled `Différences entre Balzac et moi' reveals this `anxiety of influence'. Moreover, the similarity between Balzac and Zola's respective fictional projects were well understood in the nineteenth century.

Balzac was, like Stendhal, a great admirer of Napoleon. In his flat on the rue Cassini he kept a plaster statuette of the Emperor on his mantlepiece and onto whose base he had pasted a piece of paper with the words: Ce qu'il a entrepris par l'épée, je l'accomplirai par la plume. What Napoleon had undertaken with his grande armée, Balzac would achieve through his writing. For Balzac the pen was at least as mighty as the sword. Balzac then had aspirations to imperial grandeur. He was, if you will, a literary megolamaniac. He wanted to be the self-styled Napoléon des lettres.

Just to give you a brief taste of just how grandiose Balzac's ambitious were and just how seriously he took them, take a look at the following quotations:

But what exactly did Balzac want to achieve with La Comédie humaine, what were his specific objectives? Well, although Balzac began writing novels in the 1820s it was not until the 1830s that his conception of his role as novelist became more serious and more ambitious. He saw himself as producing a total picture of French society in which every region, social class and interest would be documented. Balzac wanted to depict the stratification of French society as a whole, a society stratified by wealth and power. It should be noted here that, despite his ambition, Balzac was never really concerned to depict the urban working-class (not until the Naturalists in the 1870s and 1880s). For this work he chose the title La Comédie humaine, deliberately challenging comparison as well as contrast with The Divine Comedy (La Divina commedia) of Dante. Balzac's work is not a religious or metaphysical work - although there are elements of this - but a human and secular work which aimed to encompass the broad sweep of social types, the vast range of social situations and settings in the France of the Restoration. Balzac is central to the development of a realist aesthetic in his fundamental belief in the project of representing the social world in its entirety. The key concept here, and its one discussed by critics like Georg Lukàcs and Raymond Williams is that of totality or a totalizing vision. We can briefly define the concept of totality as the attempt to show individuals and society in their completeness, as a complex network of interrelations. This totalizing impulse lies at the heart of the classificatory system of La Comédie humaine (its divisions and sub-divisions, typical characters etc.) and of realist literature and art in general. By 1834, with the publication of Le Père Goriot, Balzac had hit on one of the devices which was to be an important part of the construction of La Comédie humaine, the introduction of characters who recur in a number of novels - in French this is generally referred to as le retour des personnages. This is a very important device for Balzac. It allows him to spin a web of connections and relations which helps hold together the imaginary world of La Comedie humaine.

In his plan of La Comédie humaine, he decided to adopt three major classifications of novel, each with its own sub-categories. The major division was to be between:

Études de Moeurs (Novels of Manners)

Études Philosophiques (Philosophical Novels)

Études Analytiques' (Analytical Novels)

He got much further with the first than the second and barely scratched the surface of the third. The section entitled Études de Moeurs (Novels of Manners) is by far the most important section and is itself divided into smaller sub-sections:

In 1842 Balzac published a Preface (Avant-Propos) to La Comédie humaine in which he set out his aims and objectives for the whole enterprise. This was a largely retrospective account as the majority of the texts that form the work had already been written. It helps the reader understand a little of the intellectual context in which Balzac was writing and it is of interest to readers today in understanding the development of a realist aesthetic.

Balzac makes some important claims on this last point. Firstly, he claims to be an impartial observer or historian of contemporary social reality. He grounds or bases this claim in the transparency and immediacy of his own writing. Within his conceptualization of the novel, the novelist is akin to a secretary - French society was to be the historian I had only to be the secretary'. Balzac compares his task to `drawing up an inventory'. He will be as dispassionate as the secretary or clerk. Balzac here articulates a concept central to realism and the realist aesthetic in the nineteenth century: that of transparency. The text the realist produces is an immediate and unmediated depiction of the real. The novelist is like a secretary or scribe who takes down or jots down details from everyday life in a sort of visual dictation. The text in this way is, in Balzac's own words, a `reproduction rigoreuse' of reality.

Secondly, Balzac further substantiates his claims to objectivity by drawing on what he considers to be scientific theory. Backed up by various biological and physical theories prevalent in the early nineteenth century, theories elaborated by scientists like Buffon, Cuvier and Saint-Hilaire, Balzac asserts the validity of the idea of unity of substance. All animal life shares a common essence which is modified by certain environmental conditions. Society too might be said to resemble nature in this respect insofar as human beings too are influenced by environmental conditions. Just as there are zoological species, so are there social species, though their operation is more complex. It is interesting to note here that our set text, Le Père Goriot is dedicated to the zoologist Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire who originally elaborated the notion of unity of substance. Here is Balzac in his Avant-propos:

The novelist is then concerned with men, women and things, bound together in society which plays an essential role in forming them and shaping their destinies. He is in this sense a scientist as well as a historian of society, and indeed much superior to professional historians who have neglected the history of manners, morals and social behaviour. Balzac claims he will write `l'histoire oubliée par tant d'historiens, celle des moeurs'.

The central and most obvious social development of Balzac's lifetime that shaped individuals' character and behaviour, was the growing power of the bourgeoisie - the commercial and industrial middle-class who came to dominate French economic and political life. France was considerably less industrialized than England - the growth of industrial towns like Lille in the north and Lyon in the south was less spectacular than what was happening in the north of England: but the growth of smaller industries, railways, banking and commercial expansion was striking and this involved not only the rise of new men (like Crevel in La Cousine Bette) but the `bourgeoisification' of older aristocratic families who themselves became more involved in finance and industry. This was also the period of the first large-scale French colonial adventures in North Africa. Indeed, the transfer of money and power from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie is absolutely central to Balzac's fiction. We see this in Le Père Goriot. One of the principal characters - if not the principal character - is an impoverished young aristocrat whose family had lost all its land and its investments during the revolution when all land and property - the biens nationaux - were seized by the state and sold off. New fortunes were made and the character of old Goriot himself is a good example of this. Goriot's life story is a product of history. He makes his money trading pasta and flour in the wake of the revolution and the collapse of other peoples' fortunes. Because of the wealth he amassed he was able to secure for his two daughters an advantageous marriage: Anastasie to a member of the old aristocracy, Monsieur de Restaud and Delphine to a newly enobled banker, Baron de Nucingen. When Napoléon came to power he created a pseudo-aristocracy from the upper middle-class, the haute bourgeoisie, often to reward financial services. To put it more crudely, it was possible to buy a title. Again we can see examples of this newly created nobility in Le Père Goriot in the character of Baron de Nucingen. Unlike other nobles in the novel however like Madame de Beauséant, he has bought himself a place in the aristocracy. Hence, in Le Père Goriot we see a rivalry between old Goriot's two daughters: Delphine who is married to Baron de Nucingen and thus can never attain real class or social status and Anastasie who is married to a real old aristocrat, Monsieur de Restaud and who has real social credibilty and access to the glittering salons of the old nobility. Delphine ultimately becomes poisoned by the knowledge that she will never, ever have access to the higher echelons of social prestige.

However, and this is a big however, Balzac sees for himself at the same time another role: the novelist as critic. He needs to study not just the social facts but their causes and to `discover the meaning hidden in that immense assembly of faces, passions and events'. He is critic and moralist as well as historian. The novelist has a moral responsibility to be a revealer of truth. It is important, when one describes Balzac's `point of view' towards and within his novels as `god-like', to recognize the accuracy of that statement. Balzac in his novels fulfils a role of god-like narrator - his `point of view' is that of an omniscient creator. And this is, in the last analysis, because philosophically he sees his role as novelist as an equivalent (within its own sphere) of the role of God in the universe. And just as God is to Balzac the Catholic both scientist and moralist, a creator who is not only omnipotent and omniscient but also good; so must Balzac the artist, in plumbing to the cause of things, reveal not only facts but tendencies and therefore judge what he reveals. This is a fundamental philosophic point: the act of judgement is implicit in the act of creation or revelation.

Essential to Balzac's work is his conviction that `man is neither good nor evil' and that he is essentially a social being. In other words, it is through society that man is either improved or corrupted; and society is not, to Balzac, something external to man. That is why he says, explicitly, 'I regard the family and not the individual as the true social unit'. To conceive of man as an isolated individual, Balzac argues, is to hand him over to the full force of destructive egoism; to emphasize the family, on the other hand, is to put the stress on those social forces which are capable of improving, if not human nature, at least human behaviour.

This is why Balzac places so much stress on the role of the Church and the Monarchy as conservative forces within French society. Just look at quotation 11 to see the emphasis Balzac places on both the Church and the Monarchy:

Balzac's emphasis on Religion and Monarchy has to be seen as bound up with his suspicion of individualism and egoism as destructive forces in man and society. And his criticism of contemporary French society is basically that, with the rise of the bourgeoisie, individualism and egoism have become the dominant ideas and forces in French society. You will see, I think, how deeply this conviction permeates Le Père Goriot. An interesting and, indeed, fundamental question, which the Avant-propos to La Comédie humaine raises explicitly for us is how far this conviction arises out of an objective, scientific analysis of actual life in France or how far it has to be seen as a prejudice which Balzac imposes upon his material and therefore upon his readers.

On the one hand Balzac seems to be saying that the novel is an objective record of society as it is; on the other he seems to be introducing an element of moral judgement. So, how does he reconcile the two? The answer is, in my own opinion, that he doesn't and that the problematic tension between two conflicting aims (to be both dispassionate and objective and partial and critical) is found throughout Balzac's work. The contradiction doesn't invalidate Balzac's work so much as animate it, endow it with a dynamism and energy. We need to think of it as the dramatic chiaroscuro of a painting, its constrast between light and shade. In a sense just how far you think Balzac succeeds in producing an objective record of French society is really up to you as readers. Just out of interest however, you might wish to take a closer look at quotation 18 by Friedrich Engels who claims that Balzac, in spite of his politics, manages to produce "a most wonderfully realistic history of French `society'". Balzac is, reluctantly and in spite of himself more historian than moralist.

Balzac then, as we have seen, brought to the novel a seriousness that was, in France at least, without precedent. He had grandiose ambitions for the novel at a time when the novel was still considered by many to be a lesser literary form lacking the dignity and high aspirations of drama and poetry. He redifines the novel in historical and philosophical terms never see before. But Balzac was also - and this is a point that we should not forget - a genuinely popular novelist with a wide readership that eagerly sought his latest publication. One of the most striking cultural developments taking place in post-revolutionary France was the extension of the reading public. The influential nineteenth-century critic Sainte-Beuve wrote of what he called "l'invasion de la démocratie littéraire" (De la littérature industrielle 1863). A number of reasons explain this new phenomena: demographic explosion, the growth and increasing power of the bourgeoisie, the expansion of the urban working-class, a general improvement in literacy thanks to the 1833 primary education act and the development of the commercial press. It is the early nineteenth century then, that witnesses the beginning of `mass culture' and `mass communications' and the split between so-called `high culture' and `popular culture'. All these developments led to a transformation of the nature of the reading public. This change in the reading public was particularly influential to the development of the novel which becomes in the nineteenth century the most widely read literary form. Novels were not read, as they are now, in single volumes. Rather, they were read in installments published in various newspapers and magazines and known by the name roman-feuilleton. Without going to much into the details, in the 1830's there was a commercial battle between the old established newspapers which were relatively expensive and new daily newspapers which sold for half the price. The only way these new newspapers could make a profit was through advertizing. Since advertizers needed to reach a high target audience the new newspapers included stories published in serial form. Thus le roman-feuilleton was born and Balzac's La Vieille Fille was in fact the very first.

The reading public was no longer a tiny, highly educated élite but a genuinely mass and heterogenous mix. This created some new problems for writers. How were writers to respond to this new situation? Should they write for a mass audience at the risk of compromising their artistic standards? Should writers seek to educate and enlighten this new mass audience? Or else, should they shun popular acclaim and retreat to the ivory tower of pure art? At the risk of greatly oversimplifying literary history, these were the three responses available to writers in nineteenth-century France. Writers like Eugène Sue, Frédéric Soulié and Alexandre Dumas took the first option and capitulated to the pressures of the market. Victor Hugo, Alfred de Vigny and Leconte de Lisle all took the second option and developed the notion of the writer as a kind of leader or educator, a deeply elistist view in itself with its distinction between the `leader' and the `herd'. Lisle, in fact, described writers as "éducateurs d'âmes" and Vigny as "les maîtres de la pensée et les guides éloquents des grandes nations" (Quoted in Predergast 1978 p.24). Finally, the third option was taken by writers like Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire and Flaubert ("Il faut vivre pour sa vocation, monter dans sa tour d'ivoire") who deliberately turned their backs on a mass audience and cultivated an aloof, quasi-aristocratic aestheticism. One might also add at this point that Stendhal probably fits into this last group. Despite his republican sympathies, Stendhal tended to address his works to an élite or to an imagined posterity. It is in this spirit that he dedicates La Chartreuse de Parme to the "Happy Few".

And where does Balzac fit into this scheme of things? Well, as I mentionned before Balzac was a popular novelist and a novelist with serious philosophical ambitions. And his work seems to me to be a curious mixture: in some repects he craves the attention of a mass audience, deliberately writes to please them and yet, he also wants to confer on the novel a high moral seriousness that it had never had before. It is possible to argue in fact that Balzac uses popular literary forms to make a serious point about the world.

There are strands of populism running throughout Balzac's writing, in particular his taste for the comic and most of all, for the melodramatic. Melodrama may be defined as a dramatic piece characterized by sensational incident and violent appeals to the emotions but with a happy ending. In formal terms melodrama is organized by a limited number of devices: antithesis, hyperbole, stereotype, mystery, coincidence and poetic justice. Although melodrama was essentially a theatrical genre it played a decisive influence on the development of prose fiction in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. This influence was two way, as by the 1830's and 1840's most popular melodramas were dramatic adaptations of novels by Scott, Ainsworth and Dickens in England and Balzac, Sue and Dumas in France. What is particularly interesting about melodrama though, is its function. Christopher Prendergast decribes the dominant function of melodrama as "making available an uncomplicated moral reading of the universe" (Prendergast: 1978 p.8), a universe free from doubt, uncertainty and ambiguity. It is essentially about the release from moral tension into moral certitude. What Balzac does in his novels however, is use some of the formal techniques of melodrama but radically revises its function. In Balzac's hands melodrama is a mode of writing which is used to reveal of world of moral ambiguity, where no-one is either black or white but a different shade of grey. Even the character of Old Goriot, the closest the novel has to a character symbolizing innocence and purity, is tainted, his former wealth originating from revolution, speculation and exploitation.

This is, I think, where Balzac's real social prejudices emerge: for him breeding will always out, you cannot buy nobility or ultimately change fundamentally your lot in life.

I should also point out here that this is yet another of Balzac's `contradictions', since he also claims that individuals are shaped by society and thus open to change.

Goriot's ascent was just as much a product of history as his descent. Under Bourbon Restoration, the non-aristocratic source of his wealth becomes an intolerable embarassment to his two daughters who force him to withdraw from practising his commercial activities. Furthemore, in an effort to conceal the ignoble origins of their wealth, they force their father into obscurity, refusing to be seen in public with him. Elevated by the revolution, Goriot was abased in its aftermath.

Put very crudely then, the main social phenomenon that interests Balzac is the large-scale capitalist development taking place in post-revolutionary France. This new capitalist development both replaces the stable social order of the ancien régime of pre-revolutionary France and it also replaces the heroic ideals and aspirations of the Napoleonic era. The era is one of vulgar money-grabbing with little room for idealism. One of the issues Balzac is also concerned with, and here there is a very useful comparison to be made with Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir, is the impossibility of heroic action. What we find in much post-revolutionary and specifically post-Napoleonic fiction is the degradation of the hero. This reaches its culmination in Gustave Flaubert's L'Éducation sentimentale (1869) but is evident in both Stendhal's Julien and Balzac's Eugène de Rastignac. For a concise synthesis of this idea take a look at Georg Lukács's comments: