The return of the undead: the body politic in Le colonel Chabert

In Le colonel Chabert, Balzac tells the story of a revenant, since this officer in Napoleon’s army returns from the dead fallen at Leipzig. The novel goes beyond this singular episode and tells indeed a collective story with, at its heart, the notion that post-revolutionary France is built from characters returning from foreign lands, like Chabert, of course, but also his rival, the Count Ferraud who returned from emigration and married the woman supposed to be the colonel’s widow. However, Chabert is above all a body confronting other bodies, dead or alive, flesh or bones, and through these bodies, their metamorphoses, their wounds and their scars, Balzac tells the tale of his political vision of the Restoration. Most notably, the scar across Chabert’s skull is a metaphor for the transaction with his former wife, but also for the alliance between Bonapartists and Legitimists, both doomed to failure. Through a duel between two revenants, this novel presents returning as the defining trait of Restoration society.