ABSTRACT
In Père Goriot and other novels in Balzac’s Comédie humaine, readers enter a significantly different world than they encounter in Le Fanu’s Gothic narratives: a world that is, culturally speaking, considerably more modern in the sense that it is much more secular in its vision of justice and how it may be attained. Le Fanu’s crime and ghost stories are derived from the eighteenthand early nineteenth-century Gothic mode of Romanticism in which nightmares, spooks, and midnight horrors may punish characters like Harbottle. In contrast, Balzac is one of the great transitional novelists linking Romanticism with the realism of later nineteenth-century literature, and he was one of the writers who secularized Romanticism by creating human equivalents for the ghosts and supernatural paraphernalia that had fascinated the Gothic imagination. At one of the climatic moments of Goriot, Eugène de Rastignac exclaims, “It’s divine justice” (Balzac 1998: 149), believing that some form of supernatural retribution has punished the arch-criminal Vautrin for his
crimes. But Rastignac is wrong. There are no supernatural powers dispensing justice or causing injustices in Père Goriot-only human criminals, policemen, spies, ordinary citizens, and informers, almost all of whom are living by the predatory, ruthless code Vautrin outlines first to Rastignac in Père Goriot and later to Lucien de Rubempré in Lost Illusions. Vautrin’s allusions to a secret, “scandalous kind of history” refers to a kind
of political modus operandi, based on conspiracy theories, that flourished in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. That was when the Bastille as a symbol of injustice, secrecy, and illegitimate power was replaced, says Marilyn Butler, “by the even more ghastly image of the guillotine,” and it was believed that nations could succumb to secret societies led by bands “of dedicated fanatics bent on drawing the innocent into their clutches” (Butler 1975: 115). France during the Napoleanic era and afterwards-a period that coincided with the beginning of Balzac’s writing career in the 1820s-was especially fertile ground for conspiracies and conspiracy theorizing. Bontapartists, revolutionaries, republicans, aristocrats, and opportunists all engaged in shady plots and strange alliances with or against each other as they tried to gain power through assassinations, revolts, and coups d’état (Hunt 1972: 10-16). Meanwhile, shady financiers and swindlers schemed and conspired to get rich by defrauding or stealing from their fellow citizens so that there were financial as well as political “secret” histories and scandals. For Balzac, such conspiracies (or rumors about them) were both sources for
his novels’ plots and one of the chief ways he was able to make the transition from Gothicism toward a more “realistic” kind of Romanticism. He explained his rationale for this process explicitly in his “Preface” to The History of the Thirteen, a novel he published in 1833, just before Père Goriot (1835). In a previous novel, The Fatal Skin or, The Magic Skin (La Peau de chagrin), published in 1831, his main character relied on magic to achieve his desires, an ass’s skin inscribed with Sanskrit letters that gives its owner whatever he wishes. But in the History of the Thirteen Balzac wanted to depict characters who used their own extraordinary but human powers to achieve success. As Balzac describes it, that novel was supposed to portray a band of ruthless conspirators and Romantic rebels who were “impervious to fear; and [had never] trembled before public authority, [or] the public hangman … they were undoubtedly criminals, but undeniably remarkable for certain qualities which go to the making of great men. … they were the very incarnations of ideas suggested to the imagination by the fantastic powers attributed in fiction to the Manfreds, Fausts and Melmoths of literature.”2 In other words, political conspiracies and paranoia would replace the Gothic occult as the locus for “fantastic powers.” Instead of depending on an ass’s skin with magic powers, Balzac’s band of
“outstanding people” would rely on their pacts with one another and on their own extraordinary abilities, which would be quite enough for them to
dominate a “petty society” when they combined “their natural intelligence, their acquired knowledge and their financial resources” (Balzac 1974: 26). “Living in society but apart from it and hostile to it, accepting none of its principles, recognizing no laws or only submitting to them out of sheer necessity,” he says, these conspirators would rule society in a manner that “was at once horrible and sublime.” Therefore, the author of their history would not need to rely on the supernatural or on tricks, trap-doors, and other crude Gothic devices. Such an author would, Balzac said,
disdain to convert his story … into a sort of toy with a secret spring and, as some novelists do, drag his reader through four volumes from one subterranean chamber to another, merely to show him a dried-up skeleton and tell him by way of conclusion that his bogey effects have been obtained by means of a door hidden behind a tapestry. … the power wielded by this organization [the Thirteen], though acquired by natural means, alone can explain the apparently supernatural agencies at work.
