Bureaucracy

By Honoré de Balzac

This fascinating novel from French master Honore de Balzac was published just as the age of bureaucracy was kicking into high gear in the mid-nineteenth century. Balzac delves deeply into the labyrinthine workings of a French agency, conveying the machinations, political alliances, and complex characters with astonishing texture and detail.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sheba Blake Publishing
• Release date: Jul 25, 2015
• ISBN: 9781329574526

Honoré de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) was a French novelist, short story writer, and playwright. Regarded as one of the key figures of French and European literature, Balzac’s realist approach to writing would influence Charles Dickens, Émile Zola, Henry James, Gustave Flaubert, and Karl Marx. With a precocious attitude and fierce intellect, Balzac struggled first in school and then in business before dedicating himself to the pursuit of writing as both an art and a profession. His distinctly industrious work routine—he spent hours each day writing furiously by hand and made extensive edits during the publication process—led to a prodigious output of dozens of novels, stories, plays, and novellas. La Comédie humaine, Balzac’s most famous work, is a sequence of 91 finished and 46 unfinished stories, novels, and essays with which he attempted to realistically and exhaustively portray every aspect of French society during the early-nineteenth century.

Reviews for Bureaucracy

[jasonlf · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A strange creation. Part study, part Platonic dialogue, part novel, it all adds up to a fascinating, but uneven, literary artifact.The Bureaucrats is Balzac's study of the French bureaucracy under the reign of Charles X in the 1920s. It begins with about 100 pages of essentially prefatory material that serially introduces the dozens of characters that populate this novel, explaining where they came from, what role they play in the bureaucracy, and what their plans for the future contain. There are little bits of storytelling in the first part, but mostly Balzac is setting up the story--which takes up the next 150 pages of the book.It can be hard to keep track of all of the kaleidoscope of characters, bureaucratic positions, and machinations, but the basic story comes through increasingly clearly. The division director dies and needs to be replaced. Two bureau chiefs are jockeying for the position. The Minister has to make the decision, but mostly delegates it to his fixer, the Secretary-General, who himself is mostly focused on sleeping with one of the bureau chief's wives, getting out of debt, and becoming a Deputy. A large cast of bureaucratic underlings play an important role in the adroit and impressive machinations of the two camps. Ultimately, the good bureau chief loses out and the one who it would be overly generous to describe as a mediocrity ascends one rung up the ladder to become Division Director.All of the characters are recognizable and are presented as much as types as they are as individuals, but all of them are also unique and come to feel like individuals, albeit ones that generally do not evolve over the course of the book. In that way, it is typical Balzac, although the ratio of "types" in a study to characters in a story is higher in the case of The Bureaucrats", which has no one, for example, that approaches Lucien de Rubempré of Lost Illusions and A Harlot High and Low.Much of the book feels strikingly modern, including the discussions of tax reform (the reformist division chief favors a broader base with lower rates),government reform (he favors consolidating departments, although interestingly dramatically reducing staffing and dramatically raising salaries--which is not a view I associate with anyone today), and bureaucratic infighting.I would not recommend this as the place to start with Balzac or even as a particularly great work, but it has a lot of greatness in it and makes for an interesting addition to Balzac's universe.

[nosajeel · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A strange creation. Part study, part Platonic dialogue, part novel, it all adds up to a fascinating, but uneven, literary artifact.

The Bureaucrats is Balzac's study of the French bureaucracy under the reign of Charles X in the 1920s. It begins with about 100 pages of essentially prefatory material that serially introduces the dozens of characters that populate this novel, explaining where they came from, what role they play in the bureaucracy, and what their plans for the future contain. There are little bits of storytelling in the first part, but mostly Balzac is setting up the story--which takes up the next 150 pages of the book.

It can be hard to keep track of all of the kaleidoscope of characters, bureaucratic positions, and machinations, but the basic story comes through increasingly clearly. The division director dies and needs to be replaced. Two bureau chiefs are jockeying for the position. The Minister has to make the decision, but mostly delegates it to his fixer, the Secretary-General, who himself is mostly focused on sleeping with one of the bureau chief's wives, getting out of debt, and becoming a Deputy. A large cast of bureaucratic underlings play an important role in the adroit and impressive machinations of the two camps. Ultimately, the good bureau chief loses out and the one who it would be overly generous to describe as a mediocrity ascends one rung up the ladder to become Division Director.

All of the characters are recognizable and are presented as much as types as they are as individuals, but all of them are also unique and come to feel like individuals, albeit ones that generally do not evolve over the course of the book. In that way, it is typical Balzac, although the ratio of "types" in a study to characters in a story is higher in the case of The Bureaucrats", which has no one, for example, that approaches Lucien de Rubempr̩ of Lost Illusions and A Harlot High and Low.

Much of the book feels strikingly modern, including the discussions of tax reform (the reformist division chief favors a broader base with lower rates),government reform (he favors consolidating departments, although interestingly dramatically reducing staffing and dramatically raising salaries--which is not a view I associate with anyone today), and bureaucratic infighting.

I would not recommend this as the place to start with Balzac or even as a particularly great work, but it has a lot of greatness in it and makes for an interesting addition to Balzac's universe.