Balzac, le texte et la loi by Michel Lichtle (review)

The seventeen articles and essays contained in this handsome volume have been collected as a tribute to the editor-in-chief of L’Année balzacienne, whose twenty-seven numbers published since 1986 constitute their own monument to Michel Lichtlé’s erudition, good judgement, and generosity towards other scholars irrespective of their professional standing. The collection opens with ‘Pour Balzac’, Lichtlé’s introduction to the recent Le Monde–Classiques Garnier edition of La Comédie humaine, which, by virtue of its implied status as a plaidoyer, fits neatly with the volume’s overall theme. It ends with his first publication, his still widely cited 1971 article on Louis Lambert, and his informative reconstruction of the publishing history of Le Père Goriot, highlighting in particular the novel’s fate at the hands of the French educational system. The kernel is formed by a range of authoritative articles devoted, in various ways, to Balzac’s engagement with the law and, to a lesser extent, with contemporary political thought. They include Lichtlé’s finely researched piece on Balzac and the English Revolution. These studies will be familiar to seasoned Balzacians, but they acquire new resonance when reread in close proximity to each other. Less familiar, probably, will be an examination of Balzac and the death penalty that first appeared in the proceedings of a German colloquium. The collection also includes two studies that were ‘forthcoming’ at the time of its compilation. The first is a magisterial demonstration that Balzac’s infamous corrections in proof betray a more complex (and problematic) activity than has usually been assumed; it is nicely observed in parenthesis that serial publication ran counter to his habit of treating the printed page as a preliminary manuscript. The second is an authoritative forty-five-page account of Balzac’s involvement with Le Siècle, the newspaper that published his article on the Peytel Affair, itself the subject of one of the pieces reprinted; this account follows on from Lichtlé’s earlier analysis of Balzac’s troubled relationship with the St Petersburg Revue étrangère. A further essay, on Le Colonel Chabert viewed as ‘un roman judiciaire’, is published here for the first time. It demonstrates incontrovertibly that the novel originates in Balzac’s awareness of the extensive recourse made to the law on missing persons in the wake of massive emigration and of Napoleon’s military campaigns. It is a worthy counterpart to Lichtlé’s important examination of L’Interdiction in relation to Title XI of Book I of the Code civil. Had the author been his own editor, he would perhaps have included a synthesis of his findings, but in Françoise Mélonio his work has found an insightful commentator from outside the realm of Balzac studies. The inclusion of two reliable indexes is welcome. Yet this reader would willingly have sacrificed the fifteen-page bibliography of works already fully referenced in the footnotes in exchange for a complete list of Lichtlé’s own publications. This would have allowed due prominence to be given, for example, to his valuable introductions to Louis Lambert, Béatrix, and all three parts of Histoire des Treize.