Eric Hazan, a lifelong Parisian who died in June, wrote several books about his hometown, with a particular focus on the class politics of the built environment. In Balzac’s Paris he revisits the 19th-century social geography of the French capital through the fiction of one of its most famous novelists. Honoré de Balzac’s La Comédie humaine (Human Comedy) – a vast series of novels and stories depicting French society between 1814 and 1848 – is one of the canonical texts of literary realism. In these works, Hazan writes, the street is more than just a setting: “The places where the characters live and evolve are part of their personality; they define them in the same way as their physique, their dress or their psychology.”
First published in France in 2018 and now available in English thanks to David Fernbach’s translation, Balzac’s Paris is a blend of literary criticism and historical psychogeography. Hazan narrates in the manner of a tour guide, hopping from location to location and offering up nuggets of commentary: pertinent quotes from the novels, or Balzac’s personal correspondence; etymological titbits; an apposite line from Baudelaire or Proust. The format, and the languid, dizzyingly directionless prose style, will be familiar to readers of Hazan’s best-known work, The Invention of Paris, a sprawling radical history of the city, which was published in English in 2010.
One moment we’re amid the jumbled streets and medieval architecture of Old Paris, where Balzac’s characters can be found frequenting the gambling dens of the Palais-Royal, or schmoozing at the Opéra. The next we’re being led through New Paris, the area stretching from Montmartre to the city walls, which was built up during a flurry of construction under the July Monarchy (1830-48). Its residents range from the wealthy bankers of the fashionable Chaussée-d’Antin district to the sex workers, known as lorettes, associated with the neighbourhood around the church of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette. (Hazan observes that Balzac portrays them sympathetically, “whereas the noble ladies of high society are either seductive, egotistical, and brutal … or else more or less virtuous dimwits”.)
The less salubrious districts are home to a number of socially marginalised characters. In the Latin Quarter we meet an escaped convict, a mentally fragile marquis down on his luck, and the slimy title character of Gobseck (1830), a moneylender who brags: “I like to leave mud on a rich man’s carpet; it is not petty spite, I like to make them feel a touch of the claws of Necessity.”
For the most part, however, Balzac – a staunch conservative and monarchist – was concerned with depicting the comings and goings of high society. Across the novels, we meet workers “only in passing … because Balzac’s characters, whether bourgeois or aristocratic, have no business in the working-class suburbs”. The political strife of the 1830s rarely featured: “nothing happened – at least nothing in the streets: neither riots nor uprisings, nor insurrections. It is just in the turn of a sentence, in a quick allusion, that we sometimes perceive the distant echo of battles.”
Hazan’s peregrinations culminate in a thoughtful disquisition on literary realism, in which he suggests that the term itself is misleading. He points out that Balzac’s novels make no mention of the railways that were then proliferating in the city, or the new fortifications built in the 1840s; people with chestnut hair – the majority – are conspicuously under-represented in the Human Comedy, as Balzac preferred to populate his stories with characters who have either blond or jet-black hair.
Were this any other writer, the appropriate response would be: so what? He was a novelist, not an archivist. But something about the panoramic breadth and descriptive detail of the Human Comedy, with its cast of about 2,500 characters, has tempted generations of readers and critics to view it as something akin to a factual chronicle. Of course, the novels were only intended as entertainment. “Balzac,” Hazan quips, “is no more of a realist than Scheherazade”. Even so, the mythos of great literature bleeds into our sense of history.
• Balzac’s Paris: The City as Human Comedy by Eric Hazan, translated by David Fernbach, is published by Verso (£15.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
