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.
