ruination of his daughter, to their disastrous marriages and finally to his alarming end. He would have been horrified to have been compared to Vautrin and yet his words to Delphine: "Money is life itself" echo those which the criminal tells Rastignac. According to Lucienne Frappier-Mazur: "Money is the great leveller in this novel." He goes on to explain how its ubiquitous presence in the story causes everyone to quantify their actions and emotions, and to... ... middle of paper ...
The Profound Ideas of Honore de Balzac's Pere Goriot Honore de Balzac published Pere Goriot in 1834 (1), one of the outstanding novels in his panoramic study of Parisian life, the Human Comedy. Throughout Pere Goriot, Balzac's narrator oscillates between the roles of social historian and moralist. Although the presence of both observer and commentator may initially seem mutually exclusive, it also is a large part of what makes this novel interesting and entertaining. Balzac's readers, as flesh-and-blood
Honore de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert's Writings on Capitalism The Revolution in France, during the 19th century, gave power to the people for the first time in France. French citizens now had faith that they could form a strong, independent country; but what they did not realize was that there must be some form of financial or monetary backbone present for a country to excel on its own in the modern world. This gave way to the rise of capitalism and all its follies, debaucheries, and mainly