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A comprehensive biography of the French novelist and playwright, founder of realism and author of La Comédie humaine. Learn about his life, works, influences, legacy, and personal struggles.
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Honoré de Balzac (born May 20, 1799, Tours, France—died August 18, 1850, Paris) was a French literary artist who produced a vast number of novels and short stories collectively called La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy). He helped to establish the traditional form of the novel and is generally considered to be one of the greatest novelists of all...
Balzac’s father was a man of southern peasant stock who worked in the civil service for 43 years under Louis XVI and Napoleon. Honoré’s mother came from a family of prosperous Parisian cloth merchants. His sister Laure (later de Surville) was his only childhood friend, and she became his first biographer.
Balzac was sent to school at the Collège des Oratoriens at Vendôme from age 8 to 14. At Napoleon’s downfall his family moved from Tours to Paris, where he went to school for two more years and then spent three years as a lawyer’s clerk. During this time he already aimed at a literary career, but as the writer of Cromwell (1819) and other tragic plays he was utterly unsuccessful. He then began writing novels filled with mystic and philosophical speculations before turning to the production of potboilers—gothic, humorous, historical novels—written under composite pseudonyms. Then he tried a business career as a publisher, printer, and owner of a typefoundry, but disaster soon followed. In 1828 he was narrowly saved from bankruptcy and was left with debts of more than 60,000 francs. From then on his life was to be one of mounting debts and almost incessant toil. He returned to writing with a new mastery, and his literary apprenticeship was over.
Two works of 1829 brought Balzac to the brink of success. Les Chouans, the first novel he felt enough confidence about to have published under his own name, is a historical novel about the Breton peasants called Chouans who took part in a royalist insurrection against Revolutionary France in 1799. The other, La Physiologie du mariage (The Physiology of Marriage), is a humorous and satirical essay on the subject of marital infidelity, encompassing both its causes and its cure. The six stories in his Scènes de la vie privée (1830; “Scenes from Private Life”) further increased his reputation. These long short stories are for the most part psychological studies of girls in conflict with parental authority. The minute attention he gave to describing domestic background in his works anticipated the spectacularly detailed societal observations of his later Parisian studies.
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From this point forward Balzac spent much of his time in Paris. He began to frequent some of the best-known Parisian salons of the day and redoubled his efforts to set himself up as a dazzling figure in society. To most people he seemed full of exuberant vitality, talkative, jovial and robustious, egoistic, credulous, and boastful. He adopted for his own use the armorial bearings of an ancient noble family with which he had no connection and assumed the honorific particle de. He was avid for fame, fortune, and love but was above all conscious of his own genius. He also began to have love affairs with fashionable or aristocratic women at this time, finally gaining that firsthand understanding of mature women that is so evident in his novels.
Learn about the life and achievements of Honoré de Balzac, a French novelist, playwright, and journalist who wrote La Comédie humaine, a vast collection of novels and short stories. Explore his early career, his love affairs, his debts, and his literary legacy.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Jan 18, 2019 · Learn about the life and achievements of Honoré de Balzac, a pioneer of realism in French literature. Discover his most famous novels, his coffee-fueled writing habits, and his love affairs.
- Amanda Prahl
Honoré de Balzac, nom de plume d'Honoré Balzac [n 1], né le 20 mai 1799 (1 er prairial an VII du calendrier républicain) à Tours et mort le 18 août 1850 à Paris, est un écrivain français.
2 days ago · Honoré de Balzac’s The Lily of the Valley, his fourteenth novel of nearly a hundred and the direct successor to his masterpiece Père Goriot, opens with a letter from Felix, a young romantic Frenchman, to Natalie, his beloved. Before taking their romance further she had asked to know his past. He eagerly accepts, indulgently providing
Sep 23, 2020 · Peter Brooks explores the extraordinary fictional lives of the French master Honoré de Balzac, who created over 2,000 characters in his novels. He shows how Balzac captured the dynamic forces of a new era, its entrepreneurs, artists, bohemians, and social mobility.
Honoré de Balzac (1799 – 1850) was a French novelist. Balzac is know for his complex multi-dimensional characters. This might explain why his books have been included in such a diverse selection of subjects (from bankruptcy to Tintin) by Five Books experts.
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