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Threatening the Social
Order
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"The
thieves form a republic with its own law and its own manners
and customs....they present in the social scene a reflection
of those illustrious highwaymen whose courage, character, exploits
and eminent qualities will always be admired. Thieves have a
language, leaders, and a police of their own; and London, where
their association is better organized, they have their own syndics,
their own parliament and their own deputies. We have not reached
this height of perfection in France. Nonetheless it is a patent
fact that among us too robbery is a regular profession and honest
folk must be constantly on their guard."
- Honore de Balzac, Code des gens honnêtes
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this image
is a painting of Balzac
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- Singled out: Relations between
the Laboring and Dangerous Classes
- The relations between laboring and dangerous
classes are evident in Hugo's Les Misérables and
Sue's Les Mystères de Paris because their description
is dramatic, however it is hard to distinguish the various categories
of people, the honest workers from the rest, in the confused
hordes that appear in both novels. In Balzac's novels, the criminal
world was a closed world, and relationships between the dangerous
classes and the upper classes are more sharply defined than contacts
between the dangerous classes and the laboring classes. Masses
of the dangerous classes are absent in Balzac's novels, which
is why Balzac's way of describing the lower classes appears to
have slightly less sociological impact than that of either Hugo
or Sue. (Chevalier, 74) Instead,
every detail about Balzac's villians is known; their origins,
kinships, contacts, and shady practices.
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- Balzac's description of the dangerous
classes kept to older themes and was full of characters who seemed
to have been plucked directly out of the Ancien Régime.
The dangerous classes were described as being groups apart, despite
their extension underground into the laboring classes. By paying
more attention to the older forms of crime in his writing, Balzac's
description of crime was light-hearted in comparison with Hugo's
and Sue's sinister shadow cast over the landscape of Restoration
Paris. For example, robbery was described by resurrecting humerous
literature of the 18th century which made this sort of crime
an amusing tale. (Chevalier,
72)
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- Vautrin: a Sensationalized Reality
- Balzac's fidelity to older themes is evident
in that the world of evil was incarnate in a few figures larger
than life. Vautrin, a character created to be a prodigeous criminal,
is relevant only to a picturesque and adventurous crime, and
not to the confused criminality that rises from the crowd and
is engendered by destitution. Vautrin is the embodiment of the
infamous bandit turned policeman Eugène
Vidocq. Balzac met Vidocq at a dinner party and went away
fascinated; soon thereafter, he introduced the character Vautrin,
who reappeared in several Balzacian novels. Some descriptions
of Vautrin express the taste for the superhuman and the fantastic
which was characteristic of Balzac. This taste was a result of
the social upheavals exemplified in the aftermath of Revolution
and Empire by the sensational adventurees of ex-convicts raised
to high public office such as the marquis de Chambreuil, Coignard,
and Collet.
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- Comédie Humaine: Threatening the Social Order
- In the Comédie humaine,
the dangerous classes are still apart from the other classes,
forming a separate people who were isolated by its customs, speech,
history, mode of life and death, and the places where they lived
out and ended their existence. Balzac's description of the dangerous
classes lacks all romanticism present in Hugo's and Sue's writings.
The ways in which the terms and the technique used to present
the account confined the dangerous classes even more securely
within the world of the criminal class. In the work as a whole,
the social aspects of the problem of crime were stated, not so
much by the description of the haunts of criminals as by the
evocation of the potential criminality secreted by both the masses
and by the lower class districts. In these ways, Balzac continually
described the lower classes as threatening the social order.
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