Balzac occulte: Alchimie, magnétisme, sociétés secrètes by Anne-Marie Baron (review)

This is an extensive and insightful study of Balzac’s writings, his readings, and a vast range of secondary studies. Two of Anne-Marie Baron’s previous books, Balzac, ou les hiéroglyphes de l’imaginaire (2004) and Balzac et la Bible (2007), clearly helped prepare her for this demanding and informative study, written more for Balzacian specialists than for the general reader. In her introduction, Baron demonstrates the importance of the occult and of secret societies in Balzac’s world-view, his life, and his novels. Baron provides extensive background information on the many metaphysical and occult writers and thinkers who inspired Balzac; but rather than merely show the historical roots of the various schools of thought that inspired Balzac, she emphasizes what alchemy, secrets, and the occult bring to Balzac’s novels.

Rencontres, Baron’s first chapter, begins by showing Balzac’s love of secrets: how often he uses the word secret in his correspondence, how many of his novels (and indeed their titles) are based on hidden facts (Une double famille, Une ténébreuse affaire). The secrecy necessitated by Balzac’s own family’s crimes (such as the murder committed by his uncle) and peccadillos made him aware of the ugly underside of a society committed to keeping up appearances, and this secret world fascinated him. In addition, his mother introduced him to the writings of the theosophists Swedenborg and Saint-Martin, whose precepts clearly inform Séraphîta and Louis Lambert and have a role in many other, more realistic novels, as well. Likewise, Balzac’s father was an active Freemason and introduced his son to certain influential Masons and to the social events of his local lodge. Freemasonry, which had its own variations of the metaphysics of the Catholic Church, shaped and inspired Balzac’s own preoccupation with secret societies. Balzac’s first intellectual contacts with the ideas of Gall (phrenology), Lavater (physiognomy), and especially with Mesmer (animal magnetism) are also discussed in this chapter.

Baron begins her second chapter with an overview of the alchemical concepts Balzac was exposed to, in writings dating from the Middle Ages, but often reexamined in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries. Operative alchemy, similar to modern chemistry, dealt with techniques and formulas for treating physical matter, but, far more importantly for Balzac, symbolic alchemy treated all levels of reality, from physiological through cosmic and even evangelical, dealing with Christian doctrine.

After addressing the influence of alchemical ideas in Balzac’s pre-Comédie humaine novels, Clotilde de Lusignan and L’Elixir de longue vie, Baron convincingly argues that, in La Recherche de l’absolu, Balzac saw himself as a literary alchemist who like Balthazar Claës confronts the mysteries of existence and seeks to discover their secrets. Baron then proposes an extensive if hypothetical interpretation of L’Auberge rouge.

In Sociétés secrètes, her third chapter, Baron describes Balzac’s France as exceptionally rich in secret societies, including the Freemasons, the Jansenists, the orders of Knights Templar and Hospitaller, the Charbonnerie, the Rosicrucians, and the Congregation, but she also shows the writer’s intensely personal attraction to the dreams of altruism, brotherhood, intimacy, and collective power evoked by his own fictional secret societies.

Secret societies require initiations, and Baron finds these especially important in Balzac—“le roman balzacien est par essence initiatique” (177)—in that its protagonist undergoes a symbolic death and becomes transformed by it. Baron shows this to be true even in novels like L’Auberge rouge, where there is no induction into a secret society, as well as in the two Balzacian novels most explicitly dedicated to secret societies, L’Histoire des Treize and L’Envers de l’histoire contemporaine.

The word spécialité, in Baron’s fourth chapter, La Sphère de la spécialité, refers to a supernatural ability to see the real and spiritual worlds evident in works like...