Balzac has been called "a realist in the observation of material facts," but "a Romanticist in his invention of plot and incident..."

    -ESSAY: Realism in France (Ernest Boyd, March 21, 1923, New Republic)

He had the advantage of living in an age of revolution, which made the passing of the old order starkly perceptible. Born a few months before Napoleon's coup d'état brought a halt to the French Revolution -- while consolidating its liquidation of the ancien régime -- Balzac came of age during the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy after Waterloo, and wrote most of his fiction during the bourgeois monarchy of Louis-Philippe, which followed the Revolution of 1830. His novels generally are set during the restoration but were written after its demise -- written with a sense of its impending doom, its inevitable closure and the coming of the age that will ever be characterized by Francois Guizot's words, as Prime Minister, to his fellow citizens: 'Enrichissez-vous.' Make money, get rich.

Balzac was a self-proclaimed reactionary, a monarchist who wanted to restore all the hereditary rights of the aristocracy and a Roman Catholic. Because of his reactionary stance, he was able to perceive all the more sharply the decline of the landed gentry, the coming of the cash nexus and the end of what he nostalgically saw as an ordered, organic society with each person in an assigned role. The new era was one of convulsive egotism, the cult of the individual personality. His fictional philosopher, Louis Lambert, before sinking into sullen madness, formulates a 'law of disorganization' that characterizes the new society. As Pére Goriot raves on his deathbed, nothing matters anymore but money: money will buy you anything, even your unfaithful daughters. No wonder that despite his reactionary views and his fear of the urban proletariat, Balzac has always been a favorite of Marxist critics, starting with Marx and Engels themselves.

The inevitable context of the new was the city -- for Balzac, Paris, where he made his way in 1814, to study law, which he never practiced, preferring to write novels in a garret while he pursued various ill-fated get-rich-quick schemes, including a printing and publishing business that swiftly went bankrupt. Paris doubled in size during the first 30 years of the century, mainly through immigration from the provinces. If some of the new arrivals were ambitious young men like his own creations Eugène de Rastignac and Lucien de Rubempre, drawn to the sphere where talent could prosper and gain recognition, most contributed to the creation of a new sense of a dangerous urban underclass. Paris was becoming a jungle, and Balzac, an avid reader of James Fenimore Cooper, saw himself as its pathfinder.

    -ESSAY: A Monarchist Marxists Could Love (PETER BROOKS, May 23, 1999, NY Times Book Review)

The idea of association, one of the greatest of all social forces, the source of Europe's rise in the Middle Ages, is rooted in sentiments that have withered in France since 1792, when the Individual finally triumphed over the State. Association requires, first, a sense of devotion that is no longer understood in our land; second, an artless faith that runs counter to the new spirit of our nation; and finally, a discipline against which we now inevitably rebel, and which is to be found only in the Catholic faith. We French may well try to form associations, yet no sooner have our countrymen left an assembly marked by an outpouring of the finest sentiments than they begin searching for some way to milk that common cow for their own benefit, making a mockery of that collective devotion, of that union of strengths.