History and Novel in Balzac's The Peasants

102 the minnesota review Pierre Macherey History and Novel in Balzac's The Peasants Balzac himself called The Peasants "the most considerable work which I have undertaken," and we know the importance that Marx and Engels accorded it. What is the reason for this interest? The novel is political from start to finish, traversed, on the word of Balzac himself, by the class struggle: it is about going into "remote country districts to study the permanent conspiracy of those whom we call the weak against those who imagine themselves to be the strong." The well-known commonplace that makes Balzac "an inexorable observer of the reality of his time" is thus immediately exploded. Balzac's project is not to observe reality but to transform it: for him the representation of social reality is inseparable from the taking of a political position within that reality. From the outset, literary fiction is placed at the service of a determinate ideology: The Peasants is an antipopular novel that takes on an expressly reactionary objective in the sense that it opposes a historically dominant tendancy, the decline of landed estates. It is clear that Balzac speaks of peasants in his novel only insofar as he also speaks against them. This choice produces an immediate literary effect: the decomposition of the Romantic cliché in accordance with which the peasantry were formerly represented, i.e., the edifying pastoral that might take the form of an archaizing fiction imitating antiquity or of a folkloric reconstruction whose lapsed rhetoric no longer corresponds to the historical reality whose conflict it more or less adroitly masks. This outmoded image is represented in the novel by the character of MUe. Laguerre, the opera singer of the acncien regime for whom the countryside was first a stage set. She represents not only the annals of time but the half-effaced memory of the illusory masquerade of the ancien régime, testifying to the fact that the time of the peasant idyll has not yet passed. In order to give novelistic form to the new historical phase of social war, Balzac elaborates a new system of references by formulating a new cliché that responds to those which preceded it by inverting their meaning . The peasant according to Balzac is the Savage, the Indian hidden in the forests of America, a character borrowed from the novels of the constantly cited James Fenimore Cooper. This insistent comparison is designed to call attention to the peasant threat: the social danger represented by an avid people pushed to the conquest of power by the revolution. It gives a particularly somber, pessimistic character to Balzac's work. The nar- macherey 103 rative is haunted throughout by the warning of a catastrophe and the despair of watching the means to avert it, one after the other, disappear. Thus, the Balzacian fiction, which reflects in its way the peasant risings of the epoch, is characteristic of the years preceding 1848. If we content ourselves with developing these few observations, it appears that there is an extraordinary harmony between Balzac's work and its ideological project. It all seems as if Balzac sought in his "art" the very means that would permit the transmission of a message whose content is in the last instance political (that the rich, by uniting, give themselves the means to become strong and to resist the ruses of the poor who will soon overthrow their power). From this point of view, it is clear that Balzac allows us to read, not reality itself, but the ideological discourse within which a class (but what class?) interprets this reality at the same time that it acts upon it. In literary terms, Balzac's work signifies by its high level of coherence, the homogeneity and convergence of the elements that compose it and which render this discourse perfectly legible. In the following study, we will start from exactly the inverse hypothesis: Balzac's fiction is not reducible to the ideological project from which, on the contrary, it never ceases to deviate. It is this deviation that makes the work significant, that precisely constitutes its literary quality. At the same time that the novel makes legible the ideological project upon...