Balzac, Honoré de (1799-1850), French writer of realist novels that are considered among the greatest in world literature.

Balzac was born in Tours, May 20, 1799, the son of a self-made man, and spent an unhappy childhood. At his father's insistence, he studied law in Paris from 1818 to 1821. After being licensed to practice law, however, he chose to embark on a literary career despite his father's objections. Between 1822 and 1829 he lived in dire poverty, writing bad plays and melodramatic novels that showed very little promise. In 1825 Balzac ventured into the publishing and printing business. When he finally withdrew in 1828, he had incurred debts that were to plague him for the rest of his life.

In 1829 he produced his first important novel, Les chouans, a novel about Breton peasants and their role in the conflict between the Royalists and Republicans during the French Revolution. Although the novel shows some of the weaknesses of his earlier works, it is far superior in quality and signals Balzac's maturity as a writer. An indefatigable worker, he was to produce about 95 novels and many short stories, plays, and journalistic pieces within the next 20 years.

In 1834 he conceived the idea of collecting his novels, completed and projected, into one mammoth continuum entitled La comédie humaine (The Human Comedy). His goal was to create a panoramic view of French society in all its aspects from the Revolution to his own day. In an introduction written in 1842 he made explicit the underlying philosophy of the work, which reflected some of the views of the naturalists Jean Baptiste de Lamarck and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Balzac argued that just as differences of environment and heredity produce various species of animals, so do the varying pressures of society produce differentiations among human beings. The task he set for himself was that of depicting each of the so-called human "species." The work was to comprise 150 novels divided into three main groups: "Studies of Customs," "Philosophical Studies," and "Analytical Studies." The first group, comprising most of the work actually completed, was subdivided into six sections called "Scenes of Private Life," "Scenes of Provincial Life," "Scenes of Parisian Life," "Scenes of Military Life," "Scenes of Political Life," and "Scenes of Country Life." The novels were to involve about 2000 characters, the most important of whom would appear throughout. Balzac ultimately accomplished about two-thirds of this enormous project. Among the best-known novels of the series are Le père Goriot (1834-35), dealing with a father's sacrifices for his ungrateful daughters; Eugénie Grandet (1833), concerning a miserly father who destroys his daughter's chance for happiness; La cousine Bette (1846), about the evil vengeance of a jealous, impoverished old woman; and La recherche de l'absolu, (The Quest for the Absolute, 1834), a compelling study of monomania.

Balzac had begun in 1832 to correspond with a Polish countess, Eveline Hanska. She promised to marry Balzac when her husband died. He died in 1841, but although she and Balzac continued to meet, they did not marry until March 1850. On August 18, 1850, Balzac died.

Balzac's avowed objective was to depict French society with the utmost realism. His greatness, however, lies in his ability to transcend mere representation and to infuse his novels with a kind of "suprarealism." His description of background, for example, is almost as important as his development of characters. Balzac once said that "the events of public and private life are intimately linked up with architecture," and consequently he portrayed the houses and rooms through which his characters move in such a way as to reveal their passions and desires.

Although Balzac's characters are highly believable and real, they are nearly all possessed by their own particular type of monomania. Their very one-sidedness serves to expose qualities that in reality would probably be obscured within the morass of a person's total personality. They all seem more active, vivid, and highly developed than their living models could be. What was mediocre in life Balzac made sublime in his writing by persistently deepening the shadows and heightening the luminosity. He gave to the usurer, the courtesan, and the dandy the grandeur of epic heroes.

Another aspect of Balzac's extreme realism lies in his attention to the prosaic exigencies of everyday life. Far from leading idealized lives, Balzac's characters are obsessively embroiled in a materialistic world of business transactions and financial crises. More often than not such matters form the crux of their existence; avarice, in particular, is one of his most common themes. In his dialogue, Balzac displays an extraordinary mastery, adapting it with amazing skill to the portrayal of widely diversified characters. His general prose style, although on occasion pretentious, has a rich, dynamic quality that makes it compelling and absorbing.

Among his numerous important works, besides those already cited, are the novels La peau de chagrin (The Wild Ass's Skin, 1831), Le lys dans la vallée (The Lily of the Valley, 1835-36), César Birotteau (1834-37), and Le curé de village (The Village Curate, 1839); the short stories Contes drolatiques (Droll Stories, 1832, 1833, 1837); the play Vautrin (1839); and his correspondence with Eveline Hanska, Lettres a l'étrangère (Letters to a Stranger, 1906; repub. in 4 vol., 1967-71).

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