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• W3201164556 abstract "In Pere Goriot and other novels in Balzac’s Comedie humaine, readers enter asignificantly different world than they encounter in Le Fanu’s Gothic narratives: a world that is, culturally speaking, considerably more modern in thesense that it is much more secular in its vision of justice and how it may beattained. Le Fanu’s crime and ghost stories are derived from the eighteenthand early nineteenth-century Gothic mode of Romanticism in which nightmares, spooks, and midnight horrors may punish characters like Harbottle.In contrast, Balzac is one of the great transitional novelists linking Romanticism with the realism of later nineteenth-century literature, and he was oneof the writers who secularized Romanticism by creating human equivalentsfor the ghosts and supernatural paraphernalia that had fascinated the Gothicimagination. At one of the climatic moments of Goriot, Eugene de Rastignacexclaims, “It’s divine justice” (Balzac 1998: 149), believing that some formof supernatural retribution has punished the arch-criminal Vautrin for hiscrimes. But Rastignac is wrong. There are no supernatural powers dispensingjustice or causing injustices in Pere Goriot-only human criminals, policemen, spies, ordinary citizens, and informers, almost all of whom are living bythe predatory, ruthless code Vautrin outlines first to Rastignac in Pere Goriotand later to Lucien de Rubempre in Lost Illusions.Vautrin’s allusions to a secret, “scandalous kind of history” refers to a kindof political modus operandi, based on conspiracy theories, that flourished in thelate eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. That was when the Bastille as a symbol of injustice, secrecy, and illegitimate power was replaced,says Marilyn Butler, “by the even more ghastly image of the guillotine,” andit was believed that nations could succumb to secret societies led by bands“of dedicated fanatics bent on drawing the innocent into their clutches”(Butler 1975: 115). France during the Napoleanic era and afterwards-aperiod that coincided with the beginning of Balzac’s writing career in the1820s-was especially fertile ground for conspiracies and conspiracy theorizing. Bontapartists, revolutionaries, republicans, aristocrats, and opportunists all engaged in shady plots and strange alliances with or against eachother as they tried to gain power through assassinations, revolts, and coupsd’etat (Hunt 1972: 10-16). Meanwhile, shady financiers and swindlersschemed and conspired to get rich by defrauding or stealing from theirfellow citizens so that there were financial as well as political “secret”histories and scandals.For Balzac, such conspiracies (or rumors about them) were both sources forhis novels’ plots and one of the chief ways he was able to make the transitionfrom Gothicism toward a more “realistic” kind of Romanticism. Heexplained his rationale for this process explicitly in his “Preface” to TheHistory of the Thirteen, a novel he published in 1833, just before Pere Goriot(1835). In a previous novel, The Fatal Skin or, The Magic Skin (La Peau dechagrin), published in 1831, his main character relied on magic to achieve hisdesires, an ass’s skin inscribed with Sanskrit letters that gives its ownerwhatever he wishes. But in the History of the Thirteen Balzac wanted to depictcharacters who used their own extraordinary but human powers to achievesuccess. As Balzac describes it, that novel was supposed to portray a band ofruthless conspirators and Romantic rebels who were “impervious to fear; and[had never] trembled before public authority, [or] the public hangman …they were undoubtedly criminals, but undeniably remarkable for certainqualities which go to the making of great men. … they were the veryincarnations of ideas suggested to the imagination by the fantastic powersattributed in fiction to the Manfreds, Fausts and Melmoths of literature.”2 Inother words, political conspiracies and paranoia would replace the Gothicoccult as the locus for “fantastic powers.”Instead of depending on an ass’s skin with magic powers, Balzac’s band of“outstanding people” would rely on their pacts with one another and ontheir own extraordinary abilities, which would be quite enough for them todominate a “petty society” when they combined “their natural intelligence,their acquired knowledge and their financial resources” (Balzac 1974: 26).“Living in society but apart from it and hostile to it, accepting none of itsprinciples, recognizing no laws or only submitting to them out of sheernecessity,” he says, these conspirators would rule society in a manner that“was at once horrible and sublime.” Therefore, the author of their historywould not need to rely on the supernatural or on tricks, trap-doors, and othercrude Gothic devices. Such an author would, Balzac said,disdain to convert his story … into a sort of toy with a secret spring and,as some novelists do, drag his reader through four volumes from onesubterranean chamber to another, merely to show him a dried-up skeleton and tell him by way of conclusion that his bogey effects have beenobtained by means of a door hidden behind a tapestry. … the powerwielded by this organization [the Thirteen], though acquired by natural means,alone can explain the apparently supernatural agencies at work." @default.
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• W3201164556 date "2010-04-09" @default.
• W3201164556 modified "2023-09-23" @default.
• W3201164556 title "Law and the romantic ego: Conspiracy and justice in" @default.
• W3201164556 doi "https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203854372-9" @default.
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