His novels generally are set during the restoration but were written after its demise - written with a sense of its impending doom, its inevitable closure and the coming of the age that will ever be characterized by Francois Guizot's words, as Prime Minister, to his fellow citizens: 'Enrichissez-vous.' Make money, get rich.īalzac was a self-proclaimed reactionary, a monarchist who wanted to restore all the hereditary rights of the aristocracy and a Roman Catholic. Born a few months before Napoleon's coup d'état brought a halt to the French Revolution - while consolidating its liquidation of the ancien régime - Balzac came of age during the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy after Waterloo, and wrote most of his fiction during the bourgeois monarchy of Louis-Philippe, which followed the Revolution of 1830. ESSAY: Realism in France (Ernest Boyd, March 21, 1923, New Republic) He had the advantage of living in an age of revolution, which made the passing of the old order starkly perceptible. Balzac has been called "a realist in the observation of material facts," but "a Romanticist in his invention of plot and incident."
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