Balzac and the Tragedy of Enclosures

Balzac's work is colossal, to say the least. It presents his posterity with an immense challenge. His Human Comedy project is infinitely more complex than the extensive series of novels that followed, from Romain Rolland to Maurice Druon, through Roger Martin du Gard and Georges Duhamel. None of them has claimed the ability, or even expressed the ambition, to “compete with the registry”. The registry is a list of names – The Human Comedy has two thousand, five hundred of them – and a list of names has nothing in common with a catalog. Even less so with a land registry, which maps a geographical area. The Human Comedy traces the history of a society, brought to life and above all made “present” through a myriad of biographies that the reader meets in one book after the other in the most diverse situations, with no apparent concern for…