Balzac, Literary Sociologist by Allan H. Pasco (review)

In this lively and engaging study, Allan H. Pasco revisits the notion of Balzac as a sociologist who used his fiction to explore the profound changes wrought to French society by the Revolution, Napoleonic Empire, Bourbon Restoration, and July Monarchy. As Pasco explains in his introductory remarks, Balzac was less concerned with documenting the major social and political upheavals of his time than with reflecting on their impact at the level of individuals and families. La Comédie humaine abounds especially in stories of familial disharmony, the consequence of what Balzac perceived as an erosion of religious values and parental authority, and of an increasingly widespread obsession with money. In representing this ‘personalization’ of history, Pasco argues, ‘Balzac rehearses many of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century conclusions of sociology, though in some cases the results that the novelist saw would not be apparent to other observers for well over a century’ (p. 21). The book focuses on the Scènes de la vie de province, principally on the grounds that this sub-division of La Comédie humaine illustrates many of the key tenets of Balzac’s sociological thought, and in particular his view that the dual forces of capitalism and industrialization were beginning to challenge the traditional attitudes and behaviours of early nineteenth-century French provincial society. One of the most effective innovations of this study is that it considers these ten novels and shorter fictions in the order in which they appear in La Comédie humaine, thereby enabling Pasco to draw out new artistic and ideological connections between them. Starting, therefore, with Ursule Mirouët (1842), he explains how this novel presents a nexus of themes that radiate outwards through the rest of the Scènes de la vie de province, not least that of bourgeois greed, which Balzac develops further in his depiction of the relationship between gold, love, and religion in Eugénie Grandet (1833). Further chapters offer re-appraisals of under-discussed works such as La Rabouilleuse (1842), which Pasco identifies as a Balzacian appeal for a regeneration of French society led by figures of genius, L’Illustre Gaudissart (1833), in which the joviality of the people of Touraine is disrupted by the emerging power of Parisian capitalism, and La Vieille Fille (1836), in which Balzac re-energizes the well-worn literary theme of suicide by reshaping it into a lament at France’s neglect of youthful intellect and ambition. While much of this material has been published elsewhere, it has been revised extensively for this volume, and it is in this format that Pasco’s fascination with the interconnectedness of the Scènes de la vie de province is illustrated to its best advantage. Impeccably finished and containing an extensive bibliography of critical material, this vibrant interdisciplinary study should prove a valuable reference for students and specialists alike.