Review: Balzac in "Deputy for Arcis" attempted to introduce the parliamentary novel before Disraeli

Benjamin Disraeli has been credited, by Morris Edmund Speare in 1924, with the invention of “the political novel.” This is a dubious claim, as the novel was under development for 2,000 years, according to Margaret Anne Doody, and fictional writings dealt with political and war intrigues early on. Consequently, the critic George Watson suggested amending Disraeli’s achievement to the creation of “the parliamentary novel.” “No nation other than Victorian-Edwardian Britain has ever explored its elective institutions so extensively in fiction,” Watson writes. And in fact even America didn’t really boast a novel on the Washington congressional scene until Mark Twain’s The Gilded Age in 1873. But in May 1839, some five years before Disraeli had conceived his political trilogy, Honore de Balzac was beginning the process of writing a novel, The Deputy for Arcis, that was to analyze in sociological detail the inner workings of the French Chamber of Deputies, or more specifically one rural election for a seat in that chamber. I’m taking a break from reviewing Disraeli’s novels to explore the broader context of the political novel by reviewing that novel. It can be argued that The Deputy for Arcis quietly inaugurated the parliamentary novel before Disraeli with a book that helps show why parliamentary novels have been so rare. Strikingly, the novel demonstrates a surprising affinity not just with Balzac’s famous reactionary “legitimist” politics but with Disraeli’s brand of specifically English Toryism.

The Deputy for Arcis tells the story of a small-town election in Arcis-sur-Aube. Balzac says in the introduction to the book that its events didn’t actually take place in Arcis, but in some other rural district of France. He wrote all of the book’s first part and some of the book’s second part before he died in 1850. After Balzac's passing, his friend Charles Rabou was commissioned by Balzac’s wife (who married him the year he died) to write the rest of part two and all of part three. “It is not as easy as one might hope to detect the point at which Balzac’s wine turns into Rabou’s water,” as Balzac biographer Graham Robb put it. “Part One: The Election”, the first 114 pages in the 1899 Gebbie edition of the novel, ends with two competitors for the Arcis seat in the Chamber of Deputies: republican Simon Giguet, a young hometown boy who puts the audience to sleep by speaking on the meaning of the word “progress” for two hours, and the bourgeois Mayor Beauvisage, who built a small fortune on hosiery during the Napoleonic Wars. In the second part, another competitor emerges, Charles Dorlange, a heroic sculptor who discovers he is a member of the nobility. Suddenly given the title of Charles de Sallenauve by his long-lost father, he is a member of the democratic party, and as one character describes him, “neither Legitimist nor Conservative, nor Left Centre, but a republican who deprecates a republic.” This cantankerous ideology is reminiscent of Balzac’s despite the fact that he was generally no republican.  The notion of an artist running for a seat in the chamber is dear to Balzac’s heart, as he stood for election to parliament himself. Balzac was not a democrat or a republican, emphasizing monarchy and the Catholic Church (“throne and altar”) in the manner good conservatives did in 19th Century France. He continued to support the ousted Bourbon regime after the 1830 revolution. Sallenauve’s iconoclastic and idiosyncratic political style reminds one of Balzac, who had bitingly satirical words for almost everyone and rarely wrote a purely heroic character. Ironically, that’s just what Rabou did with Sallenauve: he wrote a distinctly heroic politician.

Scarcity of English-language Scholarship

Though it has been published as a novel since 1854 and was serialized in part in periodicals in the 1840s, Balzac’s Deputy for Arcis has rarely been written about in English to this day. Searches of academic journals on JSTOR and of the Internet on Google turn up only passing references to it, as does a search of Balzac biographies and critical literature in print. One of the few exceptions is Scottish historian Christopher Harvie, who was once a member himself of the Scottish Parliament. Harvie compared The Deputy for Arcis to Disraeli’s 1845 Sybil in his own 1991 book on the history of the political novel, The Centre of Things: Political Fiction in Britain from Disraeli to the Present. Harvie makes several interesting contrasts but his commentary is somewhat odd in that he does not mention the fact that Balzac never finished the novel, or that it was finished by Rabou. He seemingly attempts to ignore this fact by implying the novel ended in the first part, the only one Balzac wrote in full. But he gets the ending of even this part wrong. Harvie writes:

“Balzac deals with the 1839 election in Arcis-sur-Aube, birthplace of [French revolutionary Georges] Danton. The republicans are putting up a candidate to oppose the aristocratic nominee, only to hear that [the nominee] has been killed in a colonial war. The centre-right government sends down a failing roue, Maxime de Trailles, to infiltrate a government placeman. But the mayor, a hosier and successful speculator, outmaneuvers both and claims the seat.”

However, the mayor does not win in the novel, either in the version that Balzac published in newspapers serially, or in the part of the book he completed before he died (“Part One: The Election”). Why did Harvie get this wrong? I found two potential reasons. One is that he might have been going on a popular book of synopses of Balzac novels, which includes a very brief entry on this novel that seems to imply that the mayor wins. Another is a document from the Maison de Balzac, Balzac’s home and museum, which says “we learn indirectly and by allusion” that the mayor wins from other Balzac stories. In Cousin Bette, considered one of his masterpieces, Balzac devotes a couple of paragraphs to the mayor, Phileas Beauvisage, saying he eventually became deputy for Arcis: “Crevel and Hulot were announced separately, and then a deputy named Beauvisage,” Balzac writes. “Beauvisage, formerly a stocking manufacturer at Arcis, was anxious to pick up the Paris style.” In another book, Beatrix, the Maison de Balzac points out, Balzac revealed that de Trailles got his way and indeed married the daughter of Beauvisage, an important plot point that the completed Deputy leaves untold.

The Rarity of the Parliamentary Novel

Perhaps Rabou didn’t read these works by Balzac before he started writing, or perhaps Beauvisage wins some other election to the Chamber of Deputies and not the 1839 election depicted in Deputy for Arcis. But in his version, it is Sallenauve that wins the election, and by a landslide. The fact that Rabou had to write at all, after the years and years Balzac tried to finish, speaks to a reason parliamentary novels are so rare. His initial inspiration came as the May 1839 parliamentary election was held in France, the election that the novel depicts. For decades after that he struggled with finishing it. I, and apparently several French critics, wonder if Balzac had trouble finishing the novel because the politics in France kept changing tumultuously. At one point in part one, Balzac’s character Eugene de Rastignac, who appears in several of his novels, says that in France under the so-called July Monarchy the government in parliament is always being overturned as the opposition keeps winning elections:

“In France it is the government that is blamed, the opposition never; it may lose as many battles as it fights, but like the allies in 1814, one victory suffices. With ‘three glorious days’ it overturned and destroyed everything. Therefore, if we are heirs of power, we must cease to govern, and wait.”

In other words, if you don’t like the politics in France just wait five minutes; prepare for the change of government to accomplish your ends in politics.

Disraeli, by contrast, may have been able to finish novels like Coningsby, Sybil and Endymion, which went into detail about the changes in government, because he knew them all so well. He did not need four volumes and 100 characters because unlike Balzac he was not writing a sociological “study” (as Balzac called it) on a local election. Harvie points out that Balzac was writing “sober realism” by contrast to Sybil’s “wild melodrama.” “While Disraeli painted his political colours with a broad brush and simply wiped out all opposition to his cardboard hero and heroine,” Harvie writes, “Balzac’s chief characters notably Rastingac, had matured before his readers over several books of The Human Comedy. Both writers attempted to present a panorama of their societies, but [The Deputy for Arcis] could depict only a small part of the France of the late 1830s.” The Human Comedy is Balzac’s name for his own collected works, totaling more than 90 novels and untold short stories.

What Were Balzac’s Politics?

After the passage above Rastignac goes on to summarize Balzac’s politics perhaps as tightly as anything in his collected works save the preface he wrote to the 1842 edition of The Human Comedy. “I belong by my personal opinions to the aristocracy, and by my public opinions to the royalty of July,” Rastingac says in Deputy. “The house of Orleans served me to raise the fortunes of my family, and I shall ever remain attached to it.” This monologue would seem to be as close as anything in the book to Balzac’s own opinion.  

Not everyone agrees, however, with the majority view that Balzac was a “reactionary legitimist.” (The Legitimists supported the Bourbon monarchy after it fell in 1830 in France.) Biographer Robb says, “a struggle for the political soul” of Balzac “goes on to this day in academic journals.”  In his introduction to Northwestern University Press’ edition of Balzac’s The Bureaucats, Marco Diani writes “The paradoxical scenario that for years cast Balzac as a monarcho-clerical legitimist, political reactionary, and artistic progressive should be discredited once and for all. The legend was born—other than from contradictory statements, as ambiguous as they are innumerable, made by Balzac himself—in the letters of Marx and Engels, from which Marxist scholars have since constructed analytic telescopes so reductive as to eliminate the possibility of any other vision.”  Diani goes on to quote a letter from Engels: “Certainly, Balzac was a political legitimist; his great work is a continuous elegy of the inevitable ruin of decent society. All his sympathies are for the class condemned to fade into the dusk. Nevertheless, his satire is never so pungent, his irony never so bitter, as when he puts into play the very men and women with whom he so profoundly sympathizes—that is, the nobles.”  Diani concludes: “This reading willingly acknowledges the analytical ‘progressivism’ in Balzac's work, while simultaneously pointing out the limitations of his conclusions, drawn in an era of theoretical immaturity.” In other words, in Diani’s view, Balzac was writing in an era before Marx’s analysis was mature and therefore was himself theoretically immature.

Indeed, the critic Georg Lukacs agreed that what made Balzac great was his ability to present viewpoints contrary to his own, writing contradictory characters that reflect reality rather than, one might add, Disraeli’s style of writing characters who are emblematic of one or two ideas throughout each novel. Lukacs writes:

“What makes Balzac a great man is the inexorable veracity with which he depicted reality even if that reality ran counter to his own personal opinions, hopes and wishes. Had he succeeded in deceiving himself, had he been able to take his own Utopian fantasies for facts, had he presented as reality what was merely his own wishful thinking, he would now be of interest to none and would be as deservedly forgotten as the innumerable legitimist pamphleteers and glorifiers of feudalism who had been his contemporaries.”

Balzac’s willingness to write multidimensional characters is one of the ways one can tell the difference between Balzac and Rabou. Rabou never lets Sallenauve’s heroism falter, whether because he sympathizes with the nobility, democracy or republicanism.

Similarity to Disraeli’s Politics

But, Lukacs asserts, Balzac didn’t sympathize so much with the Bourbons as he did with a particular vision of constitutional monarchy: That of the English Tories. Lukacs writes:

“Of course even as a political thinker Balzac had never been a common-place, empty-headed legitimist; nor is his Utopia the fruit of any wish to return to the feudalism of the Middle Ages. On the contrary: what Balzac wanted was that French capitalist development should follow the English pattern, especially in the sphere of agriculture. His social ideal was that compromise between aristocratic landowner and bourgeois capitalist which was achieved in England by the 'glorious revolution’ of 1688 and which was to become the basis of social evolution in England and determine its specific form. When Balzac (in a paper dealing with the tasks facing the royalists after the July revolution and written in 1840, just when he was about to begin The Peasants) severely censured the attitude of the French aristocracy, he based his criticism on an idealized conception of the English Tory nobility.”

In other words, had Balzac known who the young MP named Benjamin Disraeli was, he would have sympathized with his politics. Disraeli, in 1839 when Balzac began work on The Deputy for Arcis, was about to launch a campaign against the Tory leadership that would come at then-prime minister Robert Peel from both the left and the right. Disraeli would adopt an ultra-Tory line endorsing leadership by aristocrats undergirded by a belief in medieval feudalism as a kind of ideal era. But in Sybil and elsewhere he would also propose a sort of entente with what were called the Radicals, who came in various stripes but generally endorsed a move closer to democracy.

In at least one of his handful of political novels (“Scenes From the Political Life,” he called them) Balzac had a character argue for an English system of government. In The Bureaucrats, which takes place in 1820s under the ruling Bourbons, Madame Celestine Rabourdin argues with her husband, the novel’s leading bureaucrat, when he expresses his plan to cut civil service jobs in order to make the government more efficient. She points to Britain as a counterexample:

"The thing to do is to increase jobs instead of cutting them. Instead of redeeming bonds, you should multiply the number of bondholders. If the Bourbons want to reign in peace, let them create creditors in every last town and village, and above all keep foreigners from touching French interests, for someday they will ask us for the capital. Whereas if all the bonds are in France, neither France nor credit will perish. That's what saved England. Your plan is that of a petit bourgeois. An ambitious man should only approach his minister picking up where Law left off, except for his bad luck, explaining the power of credit, demonstrating that we simply mustn't reduce the principal but interest, as the English do."

In this instance, Madame Rabourdin appears to be written sympathetically. But by the end of the novel her husband wins the argument, and she embraces him joyfully to congratulate him on doing so. This conclusion might signal Balzac was not in sympathy with English ultra-Toryism, or Disraeli’s brand of Radical-Tory collaboration. However, Lukacs says Balzac was looking for an “English Utopia” that does sound somewhat like that collaboration:

“Balzac's English Utopia was based on the illusion that a traditional but nevertheless progressive leadership could mitigate the evils of capitalism and the class antagonisms resulting from them. Such leadership could in his opinion be given by none save throne and altar. The English land-owning nobility was the most important intermediate link in such a system. Balzac saw with merciless clarity the class antagonisms engendered by capitalism in France. He saw that the period of revolutions had by no means come to an end in July, 1830. His Utopia, his idealization of English conditions, his romantic conception of the supposed harmony existing between the great English landowners and their tenants, together with other ideas of a similar nature, all had their origin in the fact that Balzac despaired of the future of capitalist society because he saw with pitiless clarity the direction in which social evolution was moving.”

Balzac Versus Capitalism and Democracy

Indeed, Balzac was “obsessed with money,” as Rebecca Terese Powers puts it in her 2024 Balzac on the Barricades: The Literary Origins of an Economic Revolution. “He gave such reliable numbers in his texts that the economist Thomas Piketty even used them to estimates the rates of income from capital in the 19^th century,” Powers writes. This hyper-specific style of writing is another of the ways one can tell the difference between Balzac’s and Rabou’s writing in The Deputy for Arcis. In a passage that could only be by Balzac, Deputy delves at length into the economic particulars of the hosiery market in rural France during the Napoleonic Wars. Beauvisage, not yet mayor, gets himself into a sort of hoarding race with Napoleon himself, as each attempts to buy up the dwindling supply of stockings left under a blockade of British ships that would otherwise import stockings. Such crises of supply were a reality in the first Empire, though Balzac’s choice of hosiery is in large measure satirical. This kind of sociological detail recalls the first page of the novel that is often considered his greatest masterpiece, Lost Illusions (made in 2021 into one of the best movies in recent years by French director Xavier Gianolli). That page leaps not into character or plot development but instead into a fascinating treatise on the difference between printing methodology in the big city and Angouleme.

Balzac, though he dreamed for decades of becoming a deputy, was largely resistant to democracy. The entirety of The Deputy of Arcis, with or without Rabou, can be read as a criticism of rule by election. From Simon Giguet’s exposure of the weakness of a moderate republican from the seat of Arcis, to his vision of the ruling party sweeping into town to prop up a competing candidate, Balzac critiques democracy more than he endorses it. “Election,” Balzac wrote in his 1842 preface to The Human Comedy, “extended to everything, gives us government by the masses, the only form of government that is not accountable, and where tyranny knows no bounds, for it is called law.” Balzac once compared Georges de Buffon's attempt to study and name all of the animals on earth to the Human Comedy, which attempted to dissect a few thousand of the most pivotal people in French history, as Balzac said. The study of a local election in this manner, Balzac said, would require 100 characters and four volumes. It is no wonder he did not finish the book. Naturally Disraeli gets the title of progenitor of the parliamentary novel, as he finished his works. Thus Deputy’s broken status, borne of the difficulties of depicting democracy itself, stands as an emblem of what makes the parliamentary novel so difficult: It must cover thousands of characters to encapsulate the full grandeur of the system, not just a handful of royals or nobles at the top. It must, to paraphrase Walt Whitman, contain multitudes.