Honoré de Balzac

French writer, he was born on May 20, 1799, in Tours, and died on August 18, 1850, in Rue Fortunée (now Rue de Balzac), in Paris. When Balzac was born, his father was 53 years old and his mother 21. He was sent to school between the ages of eight and fourteen. With the fall of the Napoleonic government, the family moved from Tours to Paris, where Balzac attended two more years of school and spent the next three years working in a lawyer's office. Balzac's personality would be marked by the absence of maternal affection. All his literary work was developed in the environment of a bourgeois family representative of the mutation of the times. The Ancien Régime had been overthrown with the French Revolution.
Honoré de Balzac decided at the age of twenty to dedicate himself to literature. As a writer Cromwell (1819) and other tragic plays he did not go beyond an absolute failure. He then wrote novels under pseudonyms. As his works were not very successful, he launched himself into business in 1825. He associates himself with a bookseller and becomes a printer, but in 1828 he ends up ruining the family. This painful experience will influence the literary work. In 1829, the publication of two works set the tone for the beginning of the success of his career: les Chouans , a love novel that tells the story of the insurrection of the Breton peasants against revolutionary France of 1799, and la Physiologie du mariage , a humorous and satirical essay. A year later he published Scènes de la vie privée , a work that increased his reputation. These stories told by Balzac were, for the most part, psychological studies based on conflicts between parents and children. He is a writer who observes the social façade in great detail. He is like a scientist, he owes a lot to Comte's positivism (observation and experience). He writes what he thinks of society, but in a dispassionate way. Balzac spent most of his time in Paris. He frequented the Parisian salons and invested efforts to become a dazzling figure in the city of lights. He was hungry for fame, fortune and love. He began a series of love relationships with women of the aristocracy of his time. Between 1828 and 1834 it had a truly tumultuous existence. The ostentation of the social life he cultivated was a way of unwinding himself from his enormous capacity for work, about 14 to 16 hours a day, time spent writing with a goose feather and dressed in a white, almost monastic toga, and always accompanied by coffee, his vice. These years were also of intense journalistic activity. Between 1832 and 1835 he produced more than twenty works, of which the following stand out: le Médecin de campagne (1833), Eugénie Grandet (1833), l'Illustre Gaudissart (1833) and Père Goriot (1835), one of his masterpieces. In this novel, characters from previous novels reappear for the first time. It tries to build a coherent universe of beings and situations that form a whole. The year 1834 marks the climax in the writer's career, when he decided to publish a series of books where he would portray the society of his time divided into three categories of novels: in Etudes analytiques he portrays the principles that govern life and society, in Etudes philosophiques he reveals the causes of the determinism of human action and in Etudes de murs shows the effects of these causes and divides them into six scènes - private, provincial, Parisian, political, military, and rural. This project resulted in a total of 12 volumes written between 1834/37. In 1840 he collected all the volumes and a few later writings, bringing them together in a work he entitled la Comédie humaine . The definitive edition, of 24 volumes, was only published between 1869 and 1876. In the period between 1836 and 1839 he wrote le Cabinet des Antiques (1839) and the first two parts of Illusions perdues , considered a masterpiece, which was not completed until 1843. This book tells the story of a young provincial who comes to Paris and who, when confronted with a new reality, shakes his romantic ideas. There is no more Balzachian theme than that of an ambitious young provincial who struggles in the competitive and adverse world of the great city of Paris. Balzac admires these individuals and is especially attracted to the theme that puts the individual in conflict with society. Balzachian characters are continually affected by the pressures derived from material difficulties and social ambitions. Still during the thirties he wrote some novels related to psychology, mysticism and erotic themes. The variety of themes made Balzac the supreme observer and chronicler of contemporary French society. His novels are unparalleled both in their narrative vitality and diversity, and in their obsessive interest in the various aspects of life, the contrast between the habits and customs of the city and the province, industry, commerce, art, literature, culture, political intrigue, romantic love, scandals in the aristocracy and the high bourgeoisie. Most of these subjects were still unexplored in French fiction. The history that Balzac set out to write is above all a history of bourgeois society, not neglecting the individual in his silences and ellipses. Balzac had an extraordinary power of observation, photographic memory and intuitive ability to perceive the attitudes of others, their feelings and motivations. The Balzachian novel makes the reader discover the soul and the unknown sufferings, in particular the sufferings of abandonment and humiliation. His novels are forbidden to one-dimensional readers.