Le roman réaliste

FR 20070

Reading the Nineteenth Century II: The Realist Novel

Balzac’s Realism

Quotations

1.Le caractère principal des peintres réalistes est donc de prendre leurs sujets et leurs inspirations dans la vie ordinaire, et de peindre ce qu’ils voient tel qu’ils le voient, sans parti pris de convention, sans distinction du noble et de l’ignoble. Ils prennent le daguerréotype et la photographie comme archétype de l’art.

Claude Vignon, ‘Salon de 1852’, in Jean-Paul Bouillon et al. (eds), La Promenade du critique influent: Anthologie de la critique d’art en France 1850-1900 (Paris: Hazan, 1990), p. 30.

2.Balzac […] in La Comédie humaine gives us a most wonderfully realistic history of French ‘Society’, describing chronicle-fashion, almost year by year from 1816 to 1848, the progressive inroads of the rising bourgeoisie upon the society of nobles, that reconstituted itself after 1815 and that set up again, as far as it could, the standard of la vieille politesse française [the old French ways]. He describes how the last remnants of this, to him, model society gradually succumbed before the intrusion of the vulgar moneyed upstart, or were corrupted by him; how the grande dame whose conjugal infidelities were but a mode of asserting herself in perfect accordance with the way she had been disposed of in marriage, gave way to the bourgeoise, who corned her husband for cash or cashmere; and around this central picture he groups a complete history of French Society from which, even in economical details (for instance, the re-arrangement of real and personal property after the Revolution) I have learned more than from all the professed historians, economists and statisticians of the period together. Well, Balzac was politically a Legitimist; his great work is a constant elegy on the irretrievable decay of good society; his sympathies are all with the class doomed to extinction. But for all that his satyre [sic] is never keener, his irony never bitterer than when he sets in motion the very men and women with whom he sympathises most deeply — the nobles. And the only men of whom he always speaks with undisguised admiration, are his bitterest political antagonists, the republican heroes of the Cloître Saint Merri [Méry], the men, who at that time (1830-36) were indeed the representatives of the popular masses. That Balzac thus was compelled to go against his own class sympathies and political prejudices, that he saw the necessity of the downfall of his favorite nobles, and described them as people deserving no better fate; and that he saw the real men of the future where, for the time being, they alone were to be found — that I consider one of the greatest triumphs of Realism, and one of the grandest features in old Balzac.

Friedrich Engels, Letter to Margaret Harkness, April 1888, in Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski (eds), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on Literature and Art (New York: International General Editions, 1974), pp. 115-17 (pp. 116-17).

3.Engels showed that Balzac, although his political creed was legitimist royalism, nevertheless inexorably exposed the vices and weakness of royalist feudal France and described its death agony with magnificent poetic vigour. […] A great realist such as Balzac, if the intrinsic artistic development of situations and characters he has created comes into conflict with his most cherished prejudices or even his most sacred convictions, will, without an instant’s hesitation, set aside these his own prejudices and convictions and describe what he really sees, not what he would prefer to see.

Georg Lukács, Studies in European Realism, trans. by Edith Bone (1950; London: Merlin, 1972), pp. 10-11.

4.No one experienced more deeply than Balzac the torments which the transition to the capitalist system of production inflicted on every section of the people, the profound moral and spiritual degradation which necessarily accompanied this transformation on every level of society. At the same time Balzac was also deeply aware of the fact that this transformation was not only socially inevitable, but at the same time progressive.

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