Géographie de Balzac. Portrait impressionniste de la France ?

• Main Authors: Christophe Morhange, Nathanaël Gobenceaux, Patrick Pentsch
• Format: Article
• Language: Spanish
• Published: OpenEdition 2018-07-01
• Series: M@ppemonde
• Subjects: Balzac; cartography; France; Human Comedy (The); literature
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/mappemonde/333

This paper offers a cartography of the geography of Balzac’s France. The corpus comes from Hoffman's (1968) geographical repertoire. Balzac’s geography depends on its era and highlights the diversity of places the author visited. The author’s opus is primarily Parisian and after, for the most part, it spans the northwest half of France. His territories are sharply fragmented, reflecting his realist aesthetics that are characterised by modest spatial spheres at the level of geographic milieux. Such fragmentation is his response to the literary depictions of “social types”. The chorematic sketch sheds light on how French space was organised during the first half of the 19th century.