Balzac et le politique (review)

Resulting from a series of seminars and a conference, this collection divides into three sections: Balzac’s ‘imaginaire auctoriale’, his ‘construction du politique’ and his ‘représentation de la politique’. In the first section, Patricia Baudouin’s nice analysis of Balzac’s unfulfilled electoral ambitions of 1831–1832 leads neatly into José-Luis Diaz on Balzac’s similarly failed attempts to identify politicians, artists and entrepreneurs as all ‘intelligentiels’. Given that the Scènes de la vie politique are, for primarily material reasons, ill-defined and incomplete (Pierre Laforgue) and given the lack of obvious political teleology in Balzac (Michèle Riot-Sarcey), politics and history need to be combined and reconstructed by Balzac ‘homme de plume’, as suggested in the Introduction to Sur Catherine de Médicis (Aude Déruelle). Although, in the second section, representations of a ‘grand homme’ such as Benassis in Le Médecin de campagne are seen to give a sense of coherence and purpose to politics and history (Marion Mas), such reconciliations are less secure in the more fragile bodies of L’Envers de l’histoire contemporaine (Chantal Massol) and are impossible in the imposed presence and unflattering figure of Maxime de Trailles in the unfinished Le Député d’Arcis (Xavier Bourdenet). However, just when it seems that Balzac is failing to ‘constituer le politique en romanesque’ (Bourdenet, p. 121), other papers show ‘le politique’ moving from individuals to more diffuse forms of power, such as in the reinforced political role of the police (Gérard Gengembre), the semi-hidden spaces of the boudoir, initiating ‘[l]e ministre [qui] ne boude pas’, Henri de Marsay (Jean-François Richer, p. 139), and, in Saint-Simonian fashion, in certain socio-political women such as Véronique Graslin in Le Curé de village (Philippe Régnier). As the third section shows, moreover, the politics of the ‘grand homme’ is being displaced by the depersonalized dynamics of society as a whole (Jacques-David Ebguy), and by the power of infinitely mobile social signs (Jacques Neefs), which are subject to multiple layering and (re-)contextualizations combining and re-configuring both ‘la politique’ and ‘le politique’ (Elisheva Rosen). Indeed, the changing perspectives on apparently straightforward plots can, as in L’Envers de l’histoire contemporaine, be integral to readings of Balzac as a political writer (Claire Barel-Moisan). As Alain Vaillant suggests in a final piece, the texts’ poetics can be so complex that, in a paradoxical return to the politics of the ‘grand homme’ and the ‘intelligentiel’, they need to be co-opted by an all-powerful author whose ‘littérature rémunère le défaut de la politique’ (p. 226). By placing ‘la politique’ firmly within the framework of ‘le politique’ and by the variety and the subtlety of its analyses, this volume shows how far research has developed not only from seeing Balzac as an apologist of political and social reaction but also from ‘un Balzac républicain malgré lui’ (Lyon-Caen and Thérenty, p. 6). This is, therefore, a worthy and welcome addition to the bi-annual series published, under the aegis of Nicole Mozet, by the Groupe international de recherches balzaciennes.