The sacrifices, it would appear, begin to pay off. Lucien is granted the name de Rubempré by the king and is finally considered a serious candidate for a spot in high society. With his new name and a new lifestyle, financed by Vautrin’s scheming, Lucien will attain a social status that will allow him to marry the rich, aristocratic heiress Mademoiselle de Grandlieu. And given the financial gain and family connections such a marriage entails, his social standing as a legitimate member of the aristocratic elite will become unassailable: he is likely to be given the title of marquis and a prestigious diplomatic post. Such, at least, is the plan.
However, despite the noble name granted by the king and despite the tremendous amount of money Vautrin has amassed for him, Lucien still has to account for himself: “not only was Lucien’s situation insufficiently clear, and the words: ‘What does he live on?’ which everybody asked as he rose in the world, still in need of a reply.” Before he is allowed to marry Mademoiselle de Grandlieu, Lucien is faced with further tasks—to account for the sources of his money and to repurchase the historic Rubempré estate. The second task is entirely feasible; the first is, of course, impossible. With the dubious sources of his wealth exposed, the fiction of legitimacy cannot be sustained. Like Julien Sorel, Balzac’s hero is stopped in his tracks only one step away from success. Instead of a promising career and a lucrative marriage, Lucien ends up in prison, where he hangs himself, exhausted by the years of struggle to enter the Parisian beau monde. Fittingly, he is buried at the same Père Lachaise cemetery from which Rastignac observed the city before starting his conquest.
First Julien, now Lucien: what are we to make of these persistent failures? With Stendhal it is at least possible to argue that the defeat of Julien Sorel constitutes an unambiguous if deplorable triumph of the reactionary forces. Is it possible that a similar mechanism is at work in Illusions perdues and Splendeurs? The doctrine of self-invention, reiterated in countless forms throughout the two novels, may be wrong after all: ambitious provincials cannot just miraculously turn into noblemen; the sons of chemists cannot really conquer Paris; you cannot just reinvent yourself at will; nobility is not just a convenient fiction; and you cannot become someone just by pretending that you are someone. And yet, Balzac’s world is full of living examples of the contrary. Sixte Châtelet successfully becomes Duke du Châtelet. Rastignac, who was still living in a squalid boarding house in Goriot, now emerges as a dandy, a millionaire, and a prominent member of the club of fashionable young men that Lucien is desperately trying to enter. Even Vautrin, an escaped convict with a long and sordid criminal history, manages to reinvent himself as the chief of Parisian police, a post from which he will retire after fifteen years of service.
Why is it that in this world full of pretenders only Lucien can’t make it? The simple answer would be that he is just not good enough. The novel offers plenty of support for such a view, repeatedly underscoring his lack of strength and discipline. As Lucien himself admits to Vautrin in his suicide letter, “[Y]ou tried to make [me] a greater figure than I had it in me to be.” But if this is the case, why would a writer otherwise obsessed with the dynamics of social mobility spend two voluminous novels following the fate of a lackluster hero? According to Moretti, one of the main functions of the nineteenth-century bildungsroman was that it “contained the unpredictability of social change, representing it through the fiction of youth: a turbulent segment of life, no doubt, but with a clear beginning and unmistakable end.” As he adds elsewhere, the function of a literary form like the bildungsroman is that it “reduces and ‘binds’ the tensions and disequilibrium of everyday experience.” Balzac thus portrays the rebellious youth; he indulges high hopes and unchecked ambitions; articulates audacious assumptions about social mobility; and even offers examples of self-invention working perfectly well in practice. Yet in the central example, the one that matters, the desire to become someone is denied, and the doctrine of self-invention is refuted.
But perhaps a simpler solution might be in order. What if failure is about failure, period? That is to say, the defeat of Lucien de Rubempré in spite of all the efforts, and in spite of Vautrin’s mentorship, signals precisely the impossibility of ‘binding’ the tensions that pervade the world of post-Napoleonic France. As Balzac persistently demonstrates, we are dealing with a society whose elites were in constant flux, dissolved and recreated every few years, committed to aristocratic ideals of continuity and inherited privilege, yet inevitably confronted with captivating fantasies of upward movement. It is only natural that a social universe built around these contrary propositions would prove unnavigable.
The power of the “disequilibrium”—to use Moretti’s term—that pervaded nineteenth-century France is perhaps best felt in the way in which history intervened in the process of novel writing and publication. In the case of Le Rouge et le noir, history was quicker than Stendhal’s publisher. At the end of the novel, whose action takes place in 1830 and coincides with the moment of writing, Mme de Rênal wants to ask King Charles X to spare Julien’s life. The trouble is that by the time the novel was published, Charles X was no longer in power: in late July 1830, just as Stendhal was correcting the proofs of the already completed book, a revolution took place. Within days, the reactionary regime of the Bourbon Restoration was replaced with the liberal constitutional monarchy under the reign of Louis Philippe, the so-called Citizen King. The very context of Julien’s rise and fall became obsolete before the novel was published. And given Stendhal’s own biography, one cannot but wonder what this regime change would have meant for Julien. A former Napoleonic civil servant, Stendhal was a “notorious liberal” and stood no chance of reentering government service during the Restoration. Yet by the fall of 1830, he was on his way to Italy to take up an appointment as a consul.
The period during which Balzac wrote Illusions perdues and Splendeurs was not quite so eventful. He managed to complete the story of Lucien de Rubempré—which he developed from mid-1830s to 1847—without experiencing revolutionary turmoil, though just barely. In 1848, a year after he completed Splendeurs, a revolution occurred yet again, reestablishing France as a republic. Just a few years later, in a particularly ironic historical reversal that took place in 1852—and which Balzac would surely have appreciated had he not died in August 1850—the president of this new republic, who happened to be Napoleon’s nephew, was crowned as the emperor of the French. Since 1789, France has been a republic, an empire, a monarchy, a liberal monarchy, a republic yet again, and another empire under the rule of a Bonaparte. Who can blame poor Lucien de Rubempré for constantly trying to reinvent himself in such an erratic world, and who can blame him for failing?
NOTE
1. Richard Terdiman adduces a succinct description of the bildungsroman (literally, “novel of formation” or “novel of education”) as a genre “that investigated how individuals approached and entered what their culture designated as adulthood.” While the history of this genre and the term itself (bildung meaning “formation” in German) is extremely complex, in current Anglo-American usage the term is applied to any novel that chronicles the processes of individual development and socialization of a young protagonist, however successful or unsuccessful such processes may be. Major European examples include Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield and Great Expectations, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, among many others.
WORKS CITED AND RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING
Alter, Robert, and Carol Cosman. Stendhal: A Biography. London: Allen & Unwin, 1980.
Balzac, Honoré de. A Harlot High and Low. Translated by Rayner Happenstall. London: Penguin, 1970.
———. Illusions perdues. Paris: Gallimard, 2004.
———. Lost Illusions. Translated by Kathleen Raine. New York: Modern Library, 1997.
———. La maison Nucingen—Melmoth réconcilié. Edited by Anne-Marie Meininge
r. Paris: Gallimard, 1989.
———. Le Père Goriot. Paris: Gallimard, 1999.
———. Père Goriot. Translated by A. J. Krailsheimer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
———. The Works of Honoré de Balzac. Vol. 1. Translated by Ellen Marriage. Philadelphia: Avil Publishing Co., 1901.
Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Reprinted in The Human Rights Reader. Edited by Micheline Ishay. London: Routledge, 1997.
Iung, Théodore. Bonaparte et son temps, 1769–1799: D’après les documents inédits. Vol. 1. Paris: Charpentier, 1880.
Lukács, Georg. Studies in European Realism. Translated by Edith Bone. London: Hillway Publishing Co., 1950.
Magraw, Roger. France 1800–1914: A Social History. London: Longman, 2002.
McLynn, Frank. Napoleon: A Biography. London: Jonathan Cape, 1997.
Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. Translated by Albert Sbraglia. London: Verso, 2000.
Pettiteau, Natalie. Elites et mobilités: La noblesse d’empire au XIXe siècle (1808–1914). Paris: La Boutique de l’Histoire, 1997.
Samuels, Maurice. The Spectacular Past: Popular History and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004.
Scott, Walter. The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, the Emperor of the French, with a Preliminary View of the French Revolution. Paris: Galignani, 1828.
Staël, Germaine de. Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution. Edited by Aurelian Craiut. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2008.
Stendhal. The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of the Nineteenth Century. Translated by Catherine Slater. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
———. Vie de Napoléon. Edited by Henri Martineau. Paris: Le Divan, 1930.
Terdiman, Richard. Discourse/Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985.
In The Way of the World, Franco Moretti (see above) offers the most consequential account yet of Balzac and Stendhal in relation to both the history of the European bildungsroman and the history of capitalism. Compelling interpretations of Le rouge et le noir can be found in Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953); and Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1984). In The Spectacular Past, Maurice Samuels (see above) offers an extensive discussion of Julien Sorel’s relationship to the Napoleonic model, as well as, more broadly, of the significance and the representations of Napoleon in the nineteenth century. Readers interested in the relationship between realism and capitalism should consult Georg Lukács’s pioneering Studies in European Realism (see above), as well as the chapter on Balzac in Christopher Prendergast, The Order of Mimesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Although a work of economic rather than literary history, Thomas Picketty, Capital in the 21st Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014) offers a penetrating analysis of economic relations in Balzac’s novels. Readers interested in Goriot might want to consult the Norton Critical Edition, edited by Peter Brooks, for a wide selection of twentieth-century scholarship on the novel. Among the numerous discussions of Illusions and Splendeurs, and the figure of Lucien de Rubempré in particular, it is worth noting those in D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); and Peter Brooks, The Realist Vision (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005); as well as A. S. Byatt, “The Death of Lucien de Rubempré,” in The Novel, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), vol. 2. The most significant contemporary treatment of forms of sexuality in Balzac, including the relationship between Lucien and Vautrin, is Michael Lucey, The Misfit of the Family (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
Hugo and Romantic Drama
The (K)night of the Red
SARAH ROCHEVILLE AND ETIENNE BEAULIEU
On February 25, 1830, France’s greatest monument of neoclassical culture, the Comédie-Française, was stormed by a mob of young, bearded, shaggy eccentrics, who entered the theater a few hours before the start of the scheduled performance, a tragedy by Victor Hugo titled Hernani, despite opposition from the police and from the theater staff, who threw garbage and refuse at the protesters as a deterrent. An apocryphal legend even relates how the young Honoré de Balzac was struck by a cabbage stalk square on the head. The artists, students, and composers who made up this group included Théophile Gautier, Gérard de Nerval, and Hector Berlioz. But within their ranks were several hundred figures less well known today, such as Petrus Borel and the sculptor Dusseigneur (whose workshop served as a meeting place for the Romantics of the Petit Cénacle), as well as a crowd that a year later, in 1831, an article in Le Figaro would christen the “Young France,” whose names history has for the most part forgotten. Confined within the dark auditorium for four hours, this Romantic contingent was forced to eat, drink, urinate, and defecate in the boxes of the fourth floor, while their leader, Victor Hugo, watched through the peephole cut in the stage curtain. It was prelude to a spectacle that would be of paramount importance a few months later, when on July 25, the authority of Charles X would be rejected during the following “Three Glorious Days,” as political power passed to the Orléans branch of the royal family in the person of Louis-Philippe, who ascended the throne at the beginning of the July Monarchy as king of the French, and no longer king of France, as the Bourbons had proclaimed themselves.
A veritable dress rehearsal for the revolution of 1830, the battle of Hernani lasted four months and gave rise to a general uproar throughout Paris at each of its performances. As with all plays in the nineteenth century, the whole shebang started with what was then called the “claque,” which is to say the more or less homogeneous group of spectators who were paid to gather in the theater in order to honor a play with a loud welcome upon the arrival of the actors and to applaud the heroics—or, on the other hand, to jeer at the playwright’s inappropriate language or the actors’ lack of ability. (It should be noted that in the nineteenth century, the role of “director” of theatrical works had not yet been developed, and it was often the playwright or a seasoned and popular stage actor who supervised the presentation of the performance.) Sometimes fights (in the literal sense of the term) also broke out within the claque—as occurred during the performance on March 10, when the police had to intervene—or between rival gangs who sought to outdo one another in making noise and in drawing the opinion of the hall over to its side, for or against the show.
This method of manipulating artistic opinion, albeit very common in the Romantic period and almost always favorable to the neoclassical writers, figures importantly in Balzac’s novel Illusions perdues (Lost Illusions, 1837), when Lucien de Rubempré attends an evening at the theater, an episode that was strongly inspired by the battle of Hernani. A wonder-struck Lucien goes backstage and, dumbfounded, discovers that the theatrical performance is extended into the audience by the claque, which consists of bribed applauders who must laugh and cheer at the right times, and, conversely, that the stage itself mirrors the auditorium, in that the very dialogue of the play is crafted to court favorable reviews from the “spin doctors”—the critics who shape public opinion.
During the battles over Hernani, the claque was infiltrated by supporters of Hugo’s Romantic dramas, who were opposed to the neoclassical tragedies of playwrights like Jean Galbert de Campistron and liberal critics like Armand Carrel (the latter of whom wrote four articles against Hernani). The Romantics gave loud support to the performance while holding small red cards on which were printed the Spanish word hierro (iron), and they dressed in the most vivid colors, like the famous red jacket worn by Théophile Gautier, which literary history has elevated to the level of myth (as it was really a pink-poppy doublet). This was intended to create a striking visual contrast with the attire of the bourgeoisie, who were all dressed in black, as was proper according to the dress code of the time. In his
history of Romanticism, Théophile Gautier notes the deep opposition, both sociological and historical, that is revealed by Hernani:
For us, the world was divided into flamboyants and graybeards, the former the object of our love, the latter of our aversion. We wanted life, light, movement, boldness of thought and execution, the return to the beautiful times of the Renaissance and true antiquity. And we rejected faded colors, lean and dry design, compositions resembling groups of mannequins, what the Empire bequeathed to the Restoration. Graybeard also had literary meanings in our thinking: Diderot was a flamboyant, Voltaire a graybeard, same as Poussin and Rubens. But we also had a distinctive taste: adoration of the red. We loved this noble color, now disgraced by political fury—the purple. Red is blood, life, light, heat, and it blends so well with gold and marble. It was a real sorrow for us to see it disappear from modern life, even from painting. Before 1789, you could wear a scarlet coat with gold stripes, but now to see some examples of this forbidden color we were reduced to watching the Swiss Guard take up position, or to viewing the red outfits of the English fox-hunters on display in printsellers’ windows. Is Hernani not a sublime opportunity to reinstate the red within the place it never should have ceased to occupy? And is it not proper for a young art student with the heart of a lion to be made the Knight of the Red and to come shaking the blazing color, odious to the graybeards, on this heap of classics which is every bit as much the enemy of the splendors of poetry? These cattle will see the red and will hear the lines of Hugo.
Affirmation of the red against the black, romantic youth against the neoclassical age, artistic passion against the “established” mentality of the Restoration—these are also among the interpretations of the title of Stendhal’s novel Le rouge et le noir. Chronique de 1830 (The Red and the Black: Chronicle of 1830), which would be published eight months later in November 1830. The red is intended to be the color of Romantic thought itself, that scarlet red that appears, for example, in the allegorical painting by Eugène Delacroix, La liberté guidant le peuple (Liberty Leading the People). The scene is of a barricade (in October 1830); featured prominently in the center of the canvas, Marianne holds in her hand a windswept French flag on which we see the red of the blue-white-red tricolor flag replacing the white of the monarchy. A historian of colors (following the research of the medievalist Michel Pastoureau, among others) could easily show that the color of the era is red—a bright, blood red that recalls the beating heart of society, the passion and enthusiasm of youth, and also the carnage of the Napoleonic battlefields found in the historical paintings of Delacroix, such as La mort de Sardanapale (The Death of Sardanapalus, 1827, inspired by Lord Byron), which is largely covered with blood red, but also with a refined red tending toward ocher, as in Sardanapalus’s bedspread.
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