Unfinished at Balzac’s death in 1850, The Human Comedy in its published form contains over a hundred novels, short stories and studies of human behaviour. He defined its scope while working on Old Man Goriot: ‘all social effects, including every situation of human life, every physiognomy, male or female personality, way of life, profession, social zone, region of France, and anything to do with childhood, old age, middle age, politics, justice and war’.11

As he explained in the preface to The Human Comedy (1842), he wanted to produce the epic, eye-witness social history that was missing for earlier civilizations. He would do for nineteenth-century France what no historian had done for Ancient Rome, Greece or Egypt. Old Man Goriot was the first big test of this scheme. Like a preview of the whole Human Comedy, it opens doors into almost every layer of Parisian society: the salons of aristocrats – both those whose noble ancestors predate the Revolution and those who owe their ennoblement to money; the halfway house of the middle class – tradesmen, civil servants, students and retired people; and some shadowy figures from the criminal underworld. There are glimpses of theatres, casinos, government offices, the fashionable fortress-mansions of the extremely rich, defended by etiquette and liveried servants, and the semi-rural plots that lay behind the squalid house fronts of the Latin Quarter.

Balzac would have been delighted, but not surprised, to learn that historians still plunder his novel for documentary evidence. A reader of Old Man Goriot acquires, almost by accident, a vast amount of information about daily life in Restoration Paris. Thanks to Balzac, we know the muddled human contents of a typical Latin Quarter boarding house; we know what the boarders kept in their wardrobes and drawers, and how they talked to one another. We know that city-dwellers missed appointments when fog prevented them from correctly guessing the time of day, that tailors gave credit while hatters did not and that some of the dazzling young dandies who sat in theatre boxes sporting spectacular waistcoats were too deeply in debt to afford a pair of socks. We even know how much a grave-digger might have expected as a tip.

Balzac’s aim, however, was not just to document but also to diagnose the ills of the modern world. Old Man Goriot takes place between November 1819 and February 1820. It depicts Parisian society a generation after the French Revolution and Louis XVI’s ‘little accident’ (as Madame Vauquer calls the King’s decapitation, p. 195) and five years after the fall of Napoleon. The economy was still recovering from the Napoleonic Wars. The restoration of the monarchy in 1815 gave a misleading impression of stability. It suggested that France would now return to those ‘eternal truths’ which Balzac saw as the basis of civilized society and the twin pillars of his Human Comedy: Catholicism and Royalty.

Balzac’s political conservatism may reflect a desire to flatter his aristocratic friends, but it also reflects his view of human nature. The human race, in Balzac’s view, is directly analogous to the animal kingdom (Old Man Goriot is dedicated to a zoologist, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire). Like all species, the various types of human animal have a common origin, but they evolve and diversify according to their environment. The leafy calm of the provinces is the natural habitat of the virtuous Rastignac family. The city of Paris ‘is like a forest in the New World’, infested with ‘savage tribes’ (p. 101), where rapacious individuals, unchecked by religion and monarchy, thrive at the expense of the weak. Humans, of course, are more sophisticated than beasts: ‘In the animal kingdom, there are few dramas and little confusion: animals simply attack one another. Humans attack one another too, but the intelligence that they possess to varying degrees makes the struggle more complex.’12 Humans have arts and sciences; they surround themselves with furniture, and their behaviour changes from one period to the next.

In the urban jungle, a few remarkable individuals rise above the mass by exercising the mysterious power of will. For Balzac, as for Vautrin, thought or will-power (volonté) was a material substance which, at a sufficient degree of intensity, could have a visible effect on physical reality. Wielded by a monomaniac, volonté could be more destructive than an army. The ‘thin lips’ and ‘greedy teeth’ around the table at the Maison Vauquer (p. 11) are examples of the individual human animal focusing its will-power on a particular, petty object to the detriment of the community. A monarchical system of government, in Balzac’s view, prevents the mass of ravenous individuals from imposing the tyranny of its animal desires, while Christianity – whether or not a god exists – has a civilizing effect on behaviour. ‘Christianity, and especially Catholicism,’ he wrote in the preface to The Human Comedy, ‘is a complete system of repression of the depraved tendencies of man.’

In Old Man Goriot, the fixed, feudal society, which the French Revolution had weakened but not destroyed, is being further undermined by poorly regulated capitalism. Baron Nucingen, the husband of Goriot’s younger daughter, is able to make a killing, quite legally, by bankrupting the entrepreneurs who build houses on his land.