Once a wealthy industrialist, Goriot has died a desolate old man, his fortune drained to provide a comfortable future for his two daughters who have now forgotten him. Having secured their places at the heart of the fashionable world by marrying wealthy noblemen, Delphine de Nucingen and Anastasie de Restaud ignore their father even in death, leaving it to Rastignac, a penniless student, to arrange his funeral. While this melodramatic finale clearly suggests that the attainment of wealth and fame in Paris is an exercise in heartless indifference and shameless egotism, it nonetheless fails to dissuade the young provincial from attempting precisely such a feat. Now that he knows the stakes, now that he has seen the depravity, the intrigues, the callousness that seem to pervade high society, he looks down on Paris with a mixture of disgust and desire, as if he is literally about to devour the city: “Rastignac, now all alone, walked a few paces to the higher part of the cemetery, and saw Paris spread out along the winding banks of Seine, where the lights were beginning to shine. His eyes fastened almost hungrily on the area between the column in the place Vendôme and the dome of the Invalides, home to that fashionable society to which he had sought to gain admission. He gave this murmuring hive a look which seemed already to savour the sweetness to be sucked from it, and pronounced the epic challenge: ‘It’s between the two of us now!’”
Rastignac’s successful social ascent and his conquest of the Parisian landscape in Goriot is often seen as the paradigmatic event of La comédie humaine, the massive series of interlinked novels in which Balzac sought to capture various aspects of contemporary society. The novel brings to the stage not only the young parvenu and the figure of his aristocratic protectress, but also Vautrin, the master criminal who unsuccessfully tries to drag Rastignac into a murder plot as a way to get rich and make his fortune in Paris. And yet, in so many ways Goriot follows a pattern obsessively rehearsed by the major bildungsromans of French realism, including Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir (The Red and the Black, 1830) and Balzac’s own Illusions perdues (Lost Illusions, 1837–43) and Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (A Harlot High and Low, 1838–47).1
An ambitious young provincial, with little money and even less social capital, emerges on the Parisian social scene. His aspirations may vary: political career, literary fame, vast fortune, lucrative marriage, noble title, a place in the fashionable salons, perhaps all of it. However he defines success, it goes without saying that greatness can be achieved in Paris, and in Paris only. As one of Balzac’s heroines puts it in Illusions perdues, “no honor, no distinction, comes to seek out the talent that perishes for lack of light in a little town; tell me, if you can, the name of any great work of art executed in the provinces!” For Stendhal, Paris is a “modern Babylon” and “the stage of great events.” For Balzac, it is a “labyrinth,” a “galaxy,” and “an Eldorado.” As he writes in Goriot, “Paris is a veritable ocean; take as many soundings as you like, you will never know how deep it is. Travel round it, describe it, but no matter how systematic your travels or your description, how numerous and eager explorers of that sea, there will always be some place untouched, some cave unknown, flowers, pearls, monsters, something unheard of, forgotten by literary divers.” A self-contained universe harboring untold secrets, separate from the rest of France and subject to its own laws, customs, and linguistic codes, Paris is both the exclusive site of social triumph and an opaque object of youthful fantasies.
To conquer Paris is, then, the central ambition of French realism. But doing so will require a tremendous effort. Rastignac in Goriot, Julien Sorel in Le rouge et le noir, and Lucien de Rubempré in Illusions perdues all reach Paris thoroughly unprepared, struggling to grasp the intricate rules of high-society etiquette. Invariably, their speech, their manners, and their gestures betray them. They say things that shouldn’t be said in polite company. They gesticulate too much. They dress badly. Upon arrival in Paris, neither Julien Sorel nor Lucien de Rubempré realize that there is a difference between morning and evening wardrobe. On his first appearance at the Opera, Julien is politely advised that he should come regularly, not in order to see the performances, but in order to observe the fashionable gentlemen and learn from them how to look like a proper Parisian. In Illusions perdues, Lucien fares much worse: having appeared at the Opera looking “positively pitiable,” he is quickly banished from the circle of Parisian aristocrats to which he desperately wants to belong.
Of course, the young hero is not discouraged by such setbacks. After all, the conquest of Paris is an arduous process during which blunders are inevitable. This is why, only moments after the disastrous showing at the Opera, Lucien appears as determined as ever: “‘this is my kingdom,’ he thought to himself. ‘This is the world that I must conquer.’” Resolve is another shared property. As Stendhal writes of Julien, “who could have guessed that this face, as pale and as gentle as a girl’s, hid the unshakable determination to risk a thousand deaths rather than to fail to make his fortune!” Balzac is more succinct: “I shall succeed,” cries Rastignac; “I will triumph,” repeats Lucien. However, the young protagonist will have to show more than just determination in order to succeed: he will have to demonstrate an utter lack of scruples. For each of the three heroes, the path to success will entail a series of audacious gestures, some of them just shameless, and some outright criminal. In Goriot, Rastignac drains his family of their last savings in order to fund the conquest of fashionable salons. In Le rouge et le noir, the only way for Julien Sorel to move up the social ladder is to live in a state of perpetual dissimulation: because the elites are dominated by reactionaries—the clergy and the conservative aristocracy—he decides to play the role of a devoted Catholic and a royalist, while he is in fact a liberal and an admirer of Napoleon Bonaparte and despises the very world he seeks to penetrate. In Illusions perdues and Splendeurs, Lucien de Rubempré goes even further: he cheats, gambles, joins various conspiracies, engages in financial speculation, embezzles funds, uses his journalistic career to destroy reputations, forges checks, prostitutes his lover, and, it would appear, exchanges sexual favors for the guidance of the criminal mastermind Vautrin.
Success, however, doesn’t come easily. In fact, it usually doesn’t come at all. Among Balzac’s and Stendhal’s young parvenus, only Rastignac triumphs. He becomes a man of great wealth and excellent connections, a fixture of prestigious salons, a government minister, a duke, and a peer of France. However, after declaring war on Paris at the end of Goriot, Rastignac is reduced to a reoccurring minor character. Bits and pieces of his life story are revealed in Balzac’s subsequent novels, most notably in La maison Nucingen (The Firm of Nucingen, 1837), but he will never again take center stage. And while Rastignac’s meteoric rise is reduced to a piece of gossip, the dismal failure of Balzac’s other young parvenu, Lucien de Rubempré, occupies not one but two large novels. In fact, both Balzac and Stendhal appear to be more interested in the mechanisms of not making it. Having dragged Lucien and Julien through the jungle of Parisian intrigues, they orchestrate their protagonists’ defeats just as they are about to cement a place in fashionable society by marrying wealthy noble heiresses. A strange asymmetry thus pervades the French realist bildungsroman: on the one hand, a veritable obsession with ambitious young men trying to succeed in Paris; on the other, a curious desire to have them crushed to pieces. What is it that makes a meteoric rise such powerful fantasy, intensely seductive, yet impossible to fulfill?
The answers to this question have traditionally focused on the economic reality that the realist novel sought to depict. According to this line of interpretation, young parvenus are both attracted to and destroyed by the unruly forces of early capitalism. As the critic Georg Lukács insisted, the fundamental problem that Balzac’s novels explore is the commodification of all aspects of life. Everything is for sale: not just real estate, industrial products, and stocks and bonds, but also literature, ideas, and reputations. This is certainly a viable description of Balzac’s universe, particularly given the fact that
so many of his heroes make (and more often lose) their fortunes by engaging in risky financial transactions, speculating on anything from wheat to books. As one of Balzac’s professional speculators notes in La maison Nucingen, “we live in an age of greed in which no one cares about the value of a thing, as long as he can earn something on it and pass it on to his neighbor.”
And yet, although the spirit of speculation animates so much in Balzac, the reality is that the young parvenus of French realism have little interest in becoming captains of the financial industry. They are certainly eager to exploit capitalist modes of acquiring money and influence, including industrial advances and financial speculation, but these are primarily tools for fulfilling other ambitions. What they really want is to be received in the prestigious salons, to be counted among the selected few who make up le beau monde, to be famous, to be someone. But what does it mean to be someone, a success, a person of consequence in France, circa 1820? On the one hand, the novels of Stendhal and Balzac eagerly offer startling examples of self-made men and their meteoric rise from humble beginnings: “Bernard Palissy, Louis XI, Fox, Napoleon, Christopher Columbus, and Julius Caesar, all these famous gamblers began their lives crushed by debt or destitute,” we are told in Illusions perdues. On the other hand, the notions of success and social prestige were still tied to an essentially aristocratic set of values: to be someone is to have a proper pedigree, an illustrious name, and a noble title conferred by the royal patent. It is this tension that gives rise to the central problem of the realist bildungsroman: how do you become someone in a society that was of two minds about what it was to be “someone”?
The sources of this tension lie in the vicissitudes of French political history. Beginning with the Revolution of 1789, France was embroiled in a persistent political crisis. As the historian Roger Magraw points out, “France’s unique volatility and instability stemmed from the lack of consensus about political legitimacy. Each successive regime suffered a legitimacy deficit. In eight decades [between the 1790s and 1870s] France had twelve constitutions, and passed through three monarchies, two Empires and three Republics!” In the 1830s and 1840s, when Balzac and Stendhal were writing their novels, many of these political dramas had already taken place. The Revolution of 1789 had uprooted the ancien régime, an absolutist monarchical order dominated by Catholic clergy and the aristocracy, abolishing in the process the very institution of nobility. As the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen specified, because everyone is equal before the law, everyone will be “equally eligible to all high offices, public positions and employments, according to their ability, and without other distinction than that of their virtues and talents.” Although the early years of the Revolution were marked by extreme violence, it nonetheless introduced a powerful republican, egalitarian, and meritocratic political ideal in the place of the ancien régime’s reliance on inherited privilege: individual abilities instead of illustrious names and noble titles.
Not for long, however. In 1799, a young general named Napoleon Bonaparte executed a coup d’état. While still committed to many key republican values, including legal equality, the abolition of inherited privilege, and meritocratic civil service, Napoleon also established a powerful cult of personality. By 1804, he had created an imperial throne for himself and installed a hereditary dynasty, establishing his relatives as princes of France and his brothers as kings of the countries he conquered. By 1808, this former republican of undistinguished origin was creating his own nobility. The irony was not lost on his enemies. As one contemporary commentator observed, “can the arch-commoner Bonaparte give what he himself doesn’t have?”
But there are further twists to be noted. In 1815, with Napoleon overthrown, a conservative monarchy was in place, once again led by the same Bourbon dynasty that was ousted during the Revolution. During this period, known as the Restoration, the old nobility was also restored. And yet, the legitimists had little choice but to acknowledge the existence of a new imperial aristocracy. France now had two coexisting nobilities—one created during the centuries of the ancien régime and one created out of thin air by the “arch-commoner Bonaparte.” Mme de Staël, one of the most prominent literary figures of the period, offers a particularly eloquent account of this state of confusion: “after the Restoration,” she writes, “we met in all directions with counts and barons created by Bonaparte, by the court, and sometimes by themselves.”
It was this unusually complex moment of French political and social history that attracted the attention of the realist bildungsroman. Rastignac arrives in Paris in 1819, Lucien in 1821, and Julien Sorel toward the end of the same decade. And although the world in which they try to succeed is still rife with feudal notions about wealth and social standing as inherited rather than acquired, recent French history offered a powerful demonstration that a pedigree is not just something to be inherited: rather, it is a thing that can be constructed, a much sought-after commodity, and, finally, something you can just invent for yourself as needed. In a society continuously suspended between competing visions of political legitimacy, a society that has witnessed successive disappearances and resurrections of various elites, in which yesterday’s nobility is wiped out only to reappear tomorrow, and in which a republican general has managed to reinvent himself as an emperor with an aristocracy of his own making, the apparently simple question of who is who, becomes unusually vexed.
How is one to navigate the path up the social ladder in a society plagued by such overwhelming ideological tensions? One obvious solution was to closely follow the great Napoleonic example. As Maurice Samuels argues, “The French were obsessed with Napoleonic history in the early nineteenth century. Hungry for details about the great man, the post-Revolutionary public devoured the historical representations of the Napoleonic period in all forms.” For several generations, he offered the archetypal tale of a man from the margin who rose to a position of unprecedented prominence. Born in Corsica in 1869, shortly after the Mediterranean island came under French government, he could hardly have come from a place more obscure. And although his family was a part of Corsican nobility, this was hardly a sufficient recommendation for a brilliant career in metropolitan France. As Frank McLynn observes, “Corsican ‘nobles’ were as common as ‘princes’ in Czarist Russia.” The family background was, however, good enough to secure Napoleon a place at the Ecole de Brienne, a military school in France. Once commissioned as an officer, he advanced quickly. At age sixteen, he was a second lieutenant. At twenty-four, he was a brigadier general. At thirty, he was the first consul, effectively ruling France, despite being an outsider whose command of the French language had always been shaky. At thirty-five, he was the emperor of the French and was soon in control of most of continental Europe. By the age of forty-six, he was defeated and exiled. At fifty-one, he died a prisoner on an island far more remote than the one he came from, a symbolically significant fact that will require further consideration.
Unsurprisingly, Stendhal, who served under Napoleon and wrote a biography of the deposed emperor, created a hero simultaneously endowed with Napoleonic psychology and infatuated with the Napoleonic example. Julien Sorel, the protagonist of Le rouge et le noir, is an outsider par excellence: a carpenter’s son, he has the distinct disadvantage of being born in the remote town of Verrières on France’s eastern border. Like everyone else, he dreams of Paris: “[H]e imagined with rapture that one day he would be introduced to the pretty women of Paris, and would succeed in drawing himself to their attention by some glorious deed. Why shouldn’t he be adored by one of them, just as Bonaparte, still penniless, had been adored by the dazzling Mme. de Beauharnais?” Despite unexceptional beginnings, he is mentored by the local priest, Abbé Pirard, and manages to learn Latin. This proves to be a vital piece of cultural capital that will open the way to further advances. He first becomes a tutor in the family of Monsieur de Rênal, the town’s mayor and a provincial aristocrat whose wife he seduces, and then, realizing that the path
to success leads through the Church, he goes on to a Catholic seminary. Recognized as a promising young talent, he leaves for Paris to become a private secretary to the highly distinguished and deeply conservative Marquis de la Mole. Although disdainful of this aristocratic world, he gradually learns its rules, manages to transform himself into “a real dandy,” and becomes the lover of the marquis’s capricious daughter Mathilde.
Julien’s trajectory—from a sawmill on the outskirts of Verrières to Hôtel de la Mole, one of the best-regarded houses in France—embodies the sharp upward movement associated in the collective imagination with Napoleon’s triumph. But the analogies run deeper than that. To begin with, Julien’s education in the seminary carries an uncanny resemblance to Napoleon’s years in Ecole de Brienne. A school report described the young Bonaparte as “quiet, fond of solitude, capricious, conceited, extremely egotistical, speaking little, energetic in his responses, quick and serious in his replies, very much in love with himself, ambitious and aspirant above all.” The same image of solitude and conceit emerges in Stendhal’s own Vie de Napoleon (Life of Napoleon, 1817–18): “[H]e spent his years in solitude and silence. He never took part in the games his mates played; he never addressed them with a single word.” Twelve years later, as he is writing Le rouge et le noir, Stendhal describes Julien’s arrival at the seminary in almost identical terms: “Recreation time came round. Julien became an object of general curiosity. But his only response was reserve and silence. In accordance with the maxims he had drawn up for himself, he considered his three hundred and twenty-one fellow students as enemies.”
A History of Modern French Literature Page 51