Balzac's Paris: The City as Human Comedy

by Eric Hazan

Overview

Exploring Paris arm in arm with Balzac, nineteenth-century France’s most famous novelist and observer

In Balzac’s vast Human Comedy, a body of ninety-one completed novels and stories, he endeavoured to create a complete picture of contemporary French society and manners. Within this work is a loving ode to Paris and an incomparable introduction to the first capital of the modern world.

To this ageless city he makes a declaration of love in an accumulation of finely observed detail – the cafés, landmarks, avenues, parks – and captures the populace in countless meticulously drawn portraits: its lawyers, grisettes, journalists, concierges, usurers, salesmen, speculators.

Balzac gathered the elements of this Paris by sauntering through it. ‘To saunter is a science,’ he writes, ‘it is the gastronomy of the eye. To take a walk is to vegetate; to saunter is to live.’ Eric Hazan follows in Balzac’s footsteps, criss-crossing the city in the novelist’s outsize boots, running between printers, publishers, coffee merchants, mistresses and friends, stopping for a moment, struck by a detail that would be fixed in Balzac’s photographic memory.

More than a tour of the city, Balzac’s Paris is an attempt to measure the soul of a city as recovered in its finest literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781839767289
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	06/25/2024
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Eric Hazan is the founder of the publisher La Fabrique and the author of many books, including Paris in Turmoil, A Walk Through Paris, A People's History of the French Revolution, A History of the Barricade, Notes on the Occupation and the highly acclaimed The Invention of Paris. He has lived in Paris, France, all his life.

Table of Contents

Translations and Acknowledgements


Why Paris?
A Wanderer
The Street
Quarters
The Press
Publishers
At the Theatre
Friends, Politics, and the ‘Realism’ of Balzac’s Paris


Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

04/29/2024

Hazan (Paris in Turmoil), founder of book publisher La Fabrique, presents a transportive study of the 19th-century French novelist Honoré de Balzac’s relationship with Paris. Hazan notes that Balzac got to see much of the city during his peripatetic life, which saw him move frequently between neighborhoods in an effort to stay one step ahead of creditors, who sought repayment after his printing business failed in 1828, and even publishers, whom Balzac had sold purportedly finished manuscripts that in actuality “had been barely sketched out.” Offering a detailed portrait of mid-19th-century Paris rooted in passages from Balzac’s magnum opus, The Human Comedy, Hazan suggests that the description of an exiled Polish nobleman’s tawdry mansion, “built of stone decorated like a melon,” is meant to represent “the luxury and bad taste of the nouveau riche established west of the Chaussée-d’Antin.” As well, the various “students, aspiring writers, journalists, artists, dreamy philosophers” who populate the Latin Quarter in Balzac’s fiction attest to the neighborhood’s contemporaneous reputation as the “territory of youth.” Hazan’s scrupulous readings of Balzac bring 19th-century Paris to life, shedding light on the social friction between old money and the nouveau riche that shaped the city in the wake of the 1830 July Revolution. It’s an enchanting literary love letter to the City of Lights. Photos. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"Amid the intellectual murkiness of the European scene, a few bright flames are burning: as witness the work of Eric Hazan."
—New Left Review

"Hazan's scrupulous readings of Balzac bring 19th-century Paris to life, shedding light on the social friction between old money and the nouveau riche that shaped the city in the wake of the 1830 July Revolution. It's an enchanting literary love letter to the City of Lights."
—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher