The Chouans by Honoré de Balzac

*contains spoilers*

The Chouans, the first of Honoré de Balzac’s many contributions to his panoramic narrative world, latterly titled La Comédie Humaine, should have been the text with which I began my likely long adventure through this author’s works. On a whim of sorts, I read Cousin Bette (1847), unaware of its place in the corpus; and then, once cognisant of the galactic extent of La Comédie Humaine, and as a way for me to gain a surer footing going forwards, I moved on to Père Goriot (1835), which appears towards the front end of the narrative arc.

One constraint that exists at the outset for those readers who cannot speak nor indeed read French is that of accessibility to the words on the page in one’s given language. Considering the wealth of material to-hand, examples of translators either willing or able to step forwards to build those bridges over the last two centuries, and thus allow readers of other languages entry into the afterlife of the original texts (Walter Benjamin, ‘Task of the Translator’, 1923), have been rare. It is therefore upon the devotee to do the work necessary to seek out which texts are available in their respective language, and by whom the work has been translated. Typically, and this might owe something to the undulations of literary fashion, English translations of the complete texts will in all likelihood emerge from the 1960s and 70s, as did mine (Marion Ayton Crawford, Penguin Classics, 1978).

I say complete, because a portion of the multitudinous narratives that make up La Comédie Humaine as a whole (if one could adequately conceive of such an enormous beast) remain designated by theorists of Balzac as ‘incomplete’. Aside from these, La Comédie Humaine’s plenitude comes in the form of short stories and plays, as well as the novels, published sporadically throughout the author’s life, and accorded their place within the larger chronological narrative by virtue of the generation of the characters depicted therein. As with all expansive worlds of fiction, it is helpful to step back in order to apprehend the fullest version of the picture-at-large. But one can only step back so far until the constituent works themselves stand at some vast distance to the probing eye.

With all this considered, let us focus in on the aspect currently within our sights: The Chouans! Published in 1829, the matter concerns the counter-revolutionary era of France thirty years previous, in 1799, when, after having established state rule from the monarchy and his aristocratic political beneficiaries, the atheistic and egalitarian ‘Blues’ are tasked with putting down pockets of insurgency in Brittany and Normandy. These insurgents, culturally set apart from the rest of France (especially the cultivated and cultured urban spaces of the likes of Paris) are known as ‘Chouans’, so called because of the owl hoot with which they secretly communicate through doors and hedgerows (‘owl’ translates as ‘chouette’). Executing their planned guerilla tactics only after making their Catholic prayers to their beloved St Anne of Auray, the Chouans, clad in goatskin coverings, hobnail boots, and broad-brimmed hats, undertake their obligations to the king with religious fervour.

One thing that occurred to me as the novel opened, and indeed throughout my reading, was Balzac’s devoted application of establishing location and describing surroundings. Such a devotion serves to not only dress the scene for the sake of the reader’s perception of the situation, but primarily to establish and define tone and a sense of movement of the plot (from the Pelerine Mountains to Ernée to Fougères). This more than likely accounts for my subsequent purchase of a 2021 monograph by Melanie Conroy, titled ‘Literary Geography in Balzac and Proust’. At certain points, Balzac’s description of the pastoral landscapes of Brittany bring to mind Edmund Burke’s hypotheses relating to the sublime (A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757) which also occurred during my reading of Ann Radcliffe’s most famous and capacious work, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). In this work of Radcliffe’s, the protagonist Emily St Aubert’s gaze upon the vast scope of the rural landscapes of France and Italy, which she casts as she flees the chaotic affairs into which she's fallen at the hands of her patriarchal oppressor in Venice, catalyses instances of ecstasy that draw her mind out of and away from corporeal matters of the quotidian and into the realms of the divine and infinite. In The Chouans, however, whilst the energy of Burke’s ideas (especially those concerning the effects of the horizontal breadth and depth of landscapes on the minds of the characters) arise, there is nonetheless something much grittier and more earthy happening than what appears in Udolpho:

‘Here and there the dark slate of scattered rooftops with white smoke rising from their chimneys, and the bright silver dividing lines of the Couësnon’s meandering streams, beguiled and held the eye in the kind of fascination that leads the soul to wander in a vague dream one does not know why.’ (P47)

Contrary to Emily St Aubert’s rediscovery of her personal, immediate connection with God, the Blues of The Chouans instead look out upon the mountains, hills, farmland, lakes, and rivers that are exploited for military advantage by warring factions on both sides – touched also by the agricultural landmarks built from the slate of the earth –  and find their ‘soul[s]… wander[ing] in a vague dream’, which is rather a mental, psychological state which exists somewhere between the corporeal and the heavenly. A sublime purgatory, possibly.

Indeed, France finds Herself in a similar position, as those citizens who once treasured the faith of old are encouraged to give way to enlightenment-era sceptical materialism – and that is a lot to ask of an entire people caught in the terror of political upheaval. The divine, then, must be substituted for an appreciation for a more concrete majesty of nature’s enduring power. Nonetheless, in the cases of both Udolpho and The Chouans, profound contact with the divine/nature’s enduring power, engendering experiences of sublimity, cannot exist alone in the mind without the necessary external social functions in which the characters find themselves trapped. Emily St Aubert of Udolpho sees and knows God in the vast landscapes because she flees a very present and dangerous patriarchal oppressor seeking to exploit her for financial gain; and the Blues of The Chouans momentarily escape the visceral horror of the war, where the carnage of beheadings and dismemberment are common practices, because the landscape allows them to see something greater and more beautiful at work above, below, and around themselves in the elements of nature. Whether set against the divine or the majesty of nature, the quotidian struggle is required as a basis from which experiences of the sublime can function.

Moreover, as the tumult of human affairs leaves those operating within its choking grasp at the very point of death on the daily, it is remarkable how even the most banal of exchanges continue, though they are backgrounded by ulterior political motive and thus mortal danger:

‘A lively conversation followed, on subjects of interest only to the three travellers. In such circumstances, people endowed with wit give platitudes fresh point; and the apparently frivolous exchanges in which these strangers entertained themselves by sounding each other was a cover for the desires, passions, and hopes that stirred them.’ (P150)

Sat in a carriage on their journey to Fougères, the as-yet-unknown political allegiances of its passengers, the Marquis de Montauran, Madame de Gua, and Mademoiselle de Veneuil remain relatively mysterious, and so they pass the time by politely probing for information through the prism of discussing nothing in particular. To know whether one can feel safe and relax or discern threat and remain alert is the foundation of one’s existence during Revolution-era France, as it is in many instances of civil strife, and the freely given commerce of conversation can achieve the ends of both acquiring vital information whilst also being of no outward consequence. Indeed, whether in times of peace or war, in any age or circumstance, some semblance of normal, casual conversation must endure – and, should a remark of no political consequence arise in that particular moment, wit (acquired either by learning or social standing) is surely a welcome flavour so as to provide amusement and entertainment to the respective interlocutors. Participants of conversation are, above all else, human beings with pasts, presents, futures, and no-doubt experiences of love and pain stored away in their hearts. However, as the Marquis de Montauran and Mademoiselle de Verneuil establish a rapport that possesses around either its platitudinous or consequential content the elusive air that’s conducive to falling in love, the normative procedure of political intrigue gives way to reckless but necessary honesty:

‘“Have you noticed, Mademoiselle,” he said, “how feelings no longer follow their ordinary course, in the times of terror we live in? Everything around us seems to happen with inexplicable precipitation. People nowadays love or hate one another on sight. They instantly make up their minds to unite for life or part, and go to their death with the same celerity. Everything has quickened its pace to match the Nation’s turmoil.”’ (Pages 151-2)

In line with the confluence of the divine-seeming landscape and troublesome human activity, where the human mind experiences moments of heightened bliss amidst the tumult of quotidian troubles, the potential for love between those with misaligned political or religious ideologies happens both because of and in spite of their respective allegiances. The question is asked: could such a profound interest between the two have been conceived were the state of the nation, and of course the suspicions of their respective positions within it, not in such a way?

One of the chief joys of reading Balzac, which I believe will lead me yet further into the galactic proportions of La Comédie Humaine, is the uncertainty with which the reader might apprehend the narrator’s tone. Sometimes sincere, often sarcastic, always playful, Balzac’s writing – at least through the filter of Marion Ayton Crawford’s translation, itself coloured with artistry and vision – walks the precipice of post-enlightenment secularist precision with a confidence and wisdom that seems in parts something more God-given. Somewhere between the corporeal and the divine, Balzac writes of people, events, and places that emanates from some fantastical concrete and abstract realm floating between the head and the heart. And, as with the sublime, the one requires its other in order to function.