Author of The Human Comedy, monument of the realist novel
The founder of the French realist novel. He set himself a staggering ambition: to give the whole of French society a "history of manners" through one unified body of fiction. His Human Comedy holds more than ninety works and over two thousand characters, from aristocratic salon to marketplace counting-house, writing to the full how money corrodes the human heart. He wrote a dozen hours a day, sustained by strong coffee, and at last built with words a panoramic edifice of French society — Engels said one learns more from him than from all the historians and economists.
What Balzac set out to do was to have the same characters reappear across different novels, woven into a single social web. In The Human Comedy no story stands alone — Old Goriot’s tragedy, Rastignac’s ambition, are chapters of one history of French society. He proved a novel could give a whole age its biography, as a chronicle does.
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.