Balzac

French society, Frederick Lawton says, was trying to recover from an earthquake: religion, laws, customs, even old castes had been shaken loose. In that unsettled France, what would it take for Honoré de Balzac to turn upheaval into a world of novels?

Lawton’s early-twentieth-century biography opens in France after revolution and empire, where an old aristocracy, new fortunes and uneasy social customs struggle to share the same ground. Balzac’s life, the book argues, cannot be separated from his writing: his upbringing and literary influences helped shape his fierce attention to a society whose parts no longer fit neatly together. As France remakes itself, he must find a way to capture its contradictions—and the people caught inside them. How did Balzac make a nation in flux live on the page?

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