Honoré de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac (Tours, 1799 – Paris, 1850) was a French novelist and playwright and one of the leading figures of nineteenth-century realist fiction. He wrote in French, and his name is tied to an unprecedented literary project: La Comédie humaine, a sequence of dozens of novels meant to portray French society after Napoleon. He is now regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature.

He was born into a middle-class family in Tours. His father, originally named Bernard-François Balssa, came from a farming family in the Tarn and had built a respectable position in Paris. He adopted the surname Balzac, claiming a distant aristocratic connection that was probably invented. Honoré's childhood was cold. He spent his first years with a wet nurse, and once back home his parents kept him at a distance. At the age of ten he was sent to the Oratorian school in Vendôme, where he spent seven years with little pocket money, frequent punishments and a method of rote learning that did not suit him, though he read eagerly whatever came his way.

In 1814 the family moved to Paris. After an uneven period of schooling, he entered the Sorbonne in 1816 and attended lectures by Guizot, Villemain and Cousin. His father wanted him to become a lawyer, so he worked in the office of a notary, Passez, but the routine was unbearable. In 1819 he announced that he meant to be a writer and settled in Paris, living in a garret on very little money.

His early years were a period of apprenticeship and financial failure. He wrote a verse tragedy, Cromwell (1820), which his family received coolly, and then turned to commissioned potboilers published under pseudonyms. Between 1826 and 1828 he went into business: a publishing house, a printing firm and a type foundry. All of them failed and left him with debts he carried for years. At one point he owed his mother 50,000 francs.

These experiences fed his work. Through the 1830s he wrote most of the novels that would form La Comédie humaine, a panorama in which objects, houses, clothes and debts carry as much weight as people. Paris becomes a character in its own right. His protagonists are complex and morally ambiguous, even the minor ones. He worked with an almost punishing discipline, which probably contributed to the health problems that dogged him all his life.

His private life was just as strained. He sought in older women the affection he had not received from his mother, and his sharp criticism cost him more than one friend. In 1850, a few months before his death, he married Ewelina Hańska, a Polish aristocrat and the love of his life. He died in Paris that August.

His legacy is wide. Writers such as Zola, Dickens, Proust, Flaubert and Henry James acknowledged their debt to him, and his way of treating society as an interconnected system left its mark on the films of Truffaut and Rivette. Many of his novels have been adapted for the screen, and they are still read as portraits of an era and of human ambition.