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Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) Biography - French Novelist
Honoré de Balzac (May 20, 1799 – August 18, 1850), was a French novelist.
He was born in Tours, Indre-et-Loire, France in the rue de l'Armée Italienne.
Arriving in Paris as a young man he mingled with the "children of the new century" who saw around them the ruins of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic empire, and who embraced creativity and personal excess with equal measures of disillusionment and idealism. In a long series of interconnected novels he set out to describe the society around him where a new, false aristocracy based on wealth and corruption had replaced the certainties of the Ancien Régime (Old Order). Religion, which had sanctioned the old hierarchy, had gone and a "new priesthood" of financiers had sprung up to be the new controllers of destinies. "There is nothing left for literature but mockery in a world that has collapsed" he wrote in 1831, but the view of humanity that emerges from his novels is not as jaded as this suggests -- it is moral and analytic, and as a result he is still widely read. Having first got into print by writing pot-boiler historical novels in the style of Walter Scott, it occurred to him that the modern history around him was as vivid and as full of intrigue as any scenario of the past, and capable of an equally vivid treatment.
In 1849, when his health had broken down, he travelled to Poland to visit Eveline Hanska, a rich Polish lady, with whom he had corresponded for more than 15 years. In 1850 she became his wife, and three months later, Balzac died.
He would become one of the creators of Realism in literature, though his work lies still largely in the tradition of French Literary Romanticism. His Human Comedy (La Comédie humaine) spanned more than 90 novels and short stories in an attempt to comprehend and depict the realities of life in contemporary bourgeois France.
Balzac had legendarily intimidating work habits - he wrote for up to 15 hours a day, fuelled by innumerable cups of black coffee. Because of this extraordinarily large output, many of the novels display minor imperfections and in some cases outright careless writing.
Balzac's realistic prose and his strength as an encyclopedic recorder of his age outshine any small detracting qualities of his style to make him a Dickensian bastion of French literature.
Balzac lies buried in Le Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, France. He is commemorated by a monumental statue commissioned from Auguste Rodin. |
