Marx and Balzac

[penguinfoot]

Hey all, I'm new, but this is an issue I've been thinking about - namely the role of literature in Marx's work, Balzac in particular.. I think that anyone who reads Capital or Marx's other works for the first time is struck by how many literary allusions there are and how these allusions show the significance of Marx's emotional commitment to anti-capitalism above and beyond a positivist analysis of capitalism's inner laws of motion, and the writer who seems to be referenced more than others is Balzac. I recently dipped into Balzac myself, starting with 'Eugenie Grandet', and could not help but feel that the entire book was effectively a case study of Marx's assertion in the Communist Manifesto that the family is turned into a mere money-relation rather than being a home under conditions of capital accumulation, because the story itself is effectively about the attempts of a leading financier in a French provincial village to enrich himself by various means, especially in relation to his daughter and nephew, and the destructive impacts of these attempts on the wellbeing of his family members - for those who haven't read it yet, I would seriously recommend it. Has anyone else been able to find elements of Balzac that could well have served as the basis of some of Marx's ideas and arguments, and are there any other Balzac texts that are particularly intriguing from a social realism point of view?

As a side note, I think it's also fascinating that Balzac was a reactionary - and a reactionary in the technical sense of the term, in the tradition of de Maistre and Bonald. I think the French reactionaries are very interesting to study, because they often offer an incipient albeit distorted critique of finance capital and desublimation.

[Vanguard1917]

Good topic. I've actually just started reading my first Balzac novel (Le Père Goriot), mainly, i admit, because of Engels's famous statement about having learnt more from him 'than from all the professional historians, economists and statisticians put together.'

But yeah, i'd hope those with better knowledge of his works could share their insights.

[ComradeOm]

Do you have any idea how hard it is to read histories of 19th C France without constantly tripping over Balzac references? Balzac this, Balzac that, here Balzac illustrates blah blah blah. Fucking Balzac :mad:

That said, the reason why historians keep harping on about this omnipresent bastard is that he was the social realist par excellence of his time. His works are essentially a collective pen portrait of the French toiling classes and a pretty honest one at that. Its unsurprising that Marx and Engels, who were building their theories on actual observations of class antagonisms, would find them of interest


As a side note, I think it's also fascinating that Balzac was a reactionary - and a reactionary in the technical sense of the term, in the tradition of de Maistre and Bonald. I think the French reactionaries are very interesting to study, because they often offer an incipient albeit distorted critique of finance capital and desublimationMeh, the Legitimist critiques of the emerging capitalism (or indeed late feudalism - they were in opposition to the Restoration as well) are (arch)typically reactionary in being grounded in hopeless romanticism and belonging to an era that was clearly, even at the time, long dead. I don't believe that there is anything to learn from them or other reactionary critiques of the cash nexus (such as those put forward by later fascists)

If you're interested though, Rene Remond's The Right Wing in France: From 1815 to de Gaulle is a well written work that charts, as the title suggests, the evolution of the French Right

[clio22]

I just happened upon this forum while searching for a specific critique of Balzac.

In response to the inquiries about additional Balzac works relating to Marx and/or social realism, I would say that about 75% of Balzac's Comedie Humaine attacks the newly-emergent and rampant capitalism of the July/Bourgeois Monarchy and depicts its concommitant effects on the politics and social order of the first half of 19thC France. I must disagree, however, with ComradeOm in that Balzac's focus is primarily the bourgeoisie and not the working class. As to Balzac's reactionary stance, Engels put it astutely when he said that Balzac's highlighting (in spite of himself) of the contradictions and injustices created by the July Revolution promoted the exact same proletarian revolution that Balzac actively tried to prevent. The ironies of history!

My suggestions for further Balzac reading follows. (Since I've interrupted my aforementioned search to reply to this forum, I can't really devote the time to synopsize each novel, but I'm sure you can find the same online.) If you have trouble finding these books in print, go to Project Gutenberg online where I and two others put up Balzac's entire Comedie Humaine (in English translation) as free e-texts.

In addition to Eugenie Grandet and Pere Goriot, I recommend: Muse of the Departement; House of Nucingen (based on James Rothschild's exploitation); Gobseck (a usurer); Cousin Bette; Cousin Pons; The Government Clerks and Unconscious Humorists (for a hilarious Dikensian portrait of bureaucracy); The Middle Classes (Bourgeoisie).

If you would like reading French social realism in the second half of the 19thC from a proletarian perspective, I would suggest Zola's Rougon Macquart series (most of which we also put up on Project Gutenberg, but some were omitted due to copyright infringement). Zola was another conservative who nonetheless managed to remarkably depict the vagaries of capitalism. I think, however, that a basic knowledge of the history of the period might be necessary to fully appreciate his works (Wikipedia *might* do). In any event, I recommend: The Fortune of the Rougons; The Kill; The Fat and the Thin; L'Assommoir and its sequel, Nana; The Downfall. Not listed at PG, but readily available in print are his classic Germinal with its shades of Marxism, anarchism and trade unionism in a coal mining camp; The Ladies' Paradise on the mechanisms of a new economic entity: the department store and its exploitation of women and destruction of small merchants; The Earth (land grabs); La Bete Humaine (set against the rise of railways); Money (market speculation).

To expand on Engels, I believe one could learn more French history from both Balzac AND Zola.

Have fun,
Bonnie