Honoré de Balzac was born on the 20th May, 1799 in the French city of Tours into an upper middle class family.
At birth Balzac was wet-nursed and often then schooled away from home by parents who seemed remote. So difficult was life that at 15 he attempted suicide. The family’s intention was for him to have a career in law but Balzac preferred literature. An avid reader, he began writing but his early attempts showed little promise.
He thereafter settled in Paris and began to publish anonymously across political, philosophical, and historical novels.
In 1825, Balzac purchased a printing house. He was soon bankrupt and forced to return to writing in order to reduce his debts. But his literary fortunes had changed, and his writing was now to achieve considerable success. He was accepted among the city’s literary élites and its salons and would play an important role in establishing the copyright law in France.
Balzac often worked on more than one project at a time and in his magnus opus ‘The Human Comedy’ all types of texts were collected to offer a rare narrative of different classes and social stereotypes of society. For many Balzac is considered the father of French realism, yet his works also cover philosophical and psychological questions. His writing was a fundamental source of inspiration for many distinguished and later writers such as Flaubert, Zola and Proust.
Balzac also tried his hand at magazine publication with ‘La Chronique de Paris’ and ‘La Revue Parisienne.’ Although he was partnered with others such as Victor Hugo, it was another complete financial failure.
As a committed Catholic, Balzac’s stories also dealt with themes of mysticism, esotericism and spirituality, as well as universality and humanism.
In politics, he was a staunch defender of the French Crown but unlike his contemporaries he was not an implacable enemy of the republicans. He often presented disagreements between royalists and republicans as a tolerable difference in political opinion.
Despite many relationships Balzac married only towards the end of his life and it was in 1833 that he met the Polish Countess Hanska, who only became his wife 17 years later after an extensive relationship by correspondence and, by then, his health was ruinously bad.
Honoré de Balzac died on 18th August 1850 in Paris. He was 51.
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