Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published year or two ago.

     “THE CHOUANS” by Honore de Balzac ( first published in 1829; revised in 1845 to become a “scene from the military life” in Balzac’s “Human Comedy”)

            Anybody who had read this blog regularly will be aware that Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) is one of my literary idols. In fact on this blog I have, over the years, written reviews of eight of his novels and a review of a collection of his short stories. To put them in the order in which I would judge his best and his second best, you can find on this blog his very best Le Pere Goriot [Old Goriot],  La Rabouilleuse [known in English as The Black Sheep], Le Cousin Pons [Cousin Pons], and La Cousine Bette [Cousin Betty].  Second best – in my humble opinion -  are Eugenie Grandet , La Peau de Chagrin [The Wild Ass’s Skin], and the disjointed Les Illusions Perdues [Lost Illusions]. And, as I have often declared, if you really want to be turned away from reading Balzac, then torture yourself by reading his dullest and most tiresome novel Cesar Birotteau . As for the volume of Balzac’s Selected Short Stories it contains some of the Master’s best work.

            All this is by telling you that I am about to inaugurate a series of other novels by Balzac that I have not yet covered. I begin with Les Chouans [The Chouans] because it was the first novel Balzac wrote under his own name  -   hitherto he had been churning out pot-boilers under various pseudonyms, which he himself regarded as rubbish (even now, learned professors have not been able to track down all the pot-boilers he wrote under false names). Les Chouans is an historical fiction – a genre that Balzac rarely wrote. He preferred to write about his own times. Many have suggested that the thirty-year-old was inspired to write Les Chouans by the success Walter Scott had in writing his Waverley (published in 1814). Scott’s novel was a very romanticised version of the mid-18^thcentury Jacobite Rebellion – in which the romantic Scots were defeated. Les Chouans (first published in 1829) is also about an uprising that ended in defeat, replete with romantic asides. Yet in some ways, romantic moments and all, Balzac is more realist than Scott. First, his tale in set in recent times, Brittany in 1799-1800, when Balzac would have been a baby. Second, when he deals with soldiers and battles, he does not glamourise. 

            Here’s the general historical situation. The French Revolution has happened. The king has been executed and many émigrés have fled from France. The new regime is unstable and Napoleon carries out his coup (Brumaire), making himself the First Consul. France is a republic. But in much of the countryside, including Brittany, there are still many royalists and some aristocrats who want to bring back the Ancien Regime. So there are uprisings. In Brittany, the insurgents are called Chouans. Marie de Verneuil, the beautiful bastard daughter of an aristocrat, is sent by Fouche (Napoleon’s master spy and general thug) from Paris to Brittany in the hope that she will penetrate the Breton royalist conspiracy and possibly capture the “Gars” (Breton slang for the royalist leader). The Gars is the young returned émigré, the Marquis Alphonse de Montauran. The novel opens with a relatively realistic account of Chouans ambushing Republican troops (whom the Bretons call “Blues” because of their uniforms) and freeing Bretons who had been pressed into Republican service. This is all very credible with the soldiers on both sides calling insults and curses at one another.  But then the melodrama steps up. Marie de Verneuil and Marquis Alphonse de Montauran fall in love with each other. This often puts Marie in conflict with Corentin, the agent of Fouche who is supposedly at her command. Early in the romantic tale, Marie helps Montauran to evade arrest when he has entered France under disguise. Later, Republican troops march into a trap on Montauran’s old estate, but they are slaughtered by Chouans. After this atrocity, Marie is denounced by Montauran’s mentor, who reveals that Marie is spying for Fouche. But this time Montauran lets Marie go. There is much suspense (and further meetings) where Marie is not sure whether she wants to unite with Montauran and marry him or to betray him – her mixed feeling because part of her really believes in the Republic. Eventually she leads the Republican troops to where Montauran is hiding… but at the last moment she realizes that her true love is Montauran. She marries him in secret… and the two lovers die romantically when they are about to escape.

            Horribly melodramatic isn’t it? The shadow of Walter Scott hangs over him. Here is a doomed rebellion on behalf of a dying regime. Elements of the Marquis de Montauran are very like Scott’s version of Bonny Prince Charlie – a personally brave man but too weakened by his amorous interests. Like Scott, Balzac lays on the minute descriptions of the landscape (in the case of Brittany, hedgerows  and scrub, just right for ambushes and guerrilla warfare). After its lively and realistic start, Les Chouans becomes melodrama, filled with oaths, vows, declarations of love, curses, vengeance etc. The major improbability of the novel is Marie de Verneuil’s ability to go anywhere (Chouan side or Republican side) without ever being challenged or questioned until the last moments, simply because Balzac wants her to be in the right place to witness various events. Grotesque minor characters are also in the spirit of Scott, especially the Chouans with their noms de guerre (March-a-Terre, Mille-Piche, Galop-Chapine). Incidental grotesqueries  in action flavour the romantic melodrama with Grand Guignol, such as the miser D’Orgemont, with his secret cell and his brother walled up in it; Galop-Chapine decapitated on his own table by other Chouans who believe he has betrayed them, his head then being hung up as a warning. Unlike Scott, however, there is a relative frankness about sexual matters and some sophistication in analysing the passions of women and man. Frankly, after all this I think young Balzac was straining a picturesque style he was soon to outgrow.

            Les Chouans seems to be a case of romantic-but-irresponsible rebellion pitted against a realistic-but-dour authority – rusticism versus advanced “enlightenment” civilisation – or at least that is what the Republicans believe.

Balzac’s sympathies seem mainly on the side of the “Blues” – the Republican soldiers – with a French pride in their achievements regardless of their politics. Thus the professional soldier, Commandant (i.e. Colonel) Hulot, and the salty Sergeant Beau-Pied, with his sneer shouted out at a speech made by a royalist in the midst of battle: “Less talking gentlemen – one can hardly hear oneself kill.” Yet to balance this, there is the Republican police spy Corentin who is presented as devious, cold and heartless, which was the popular idea of spy-master Fouche (who does not appear in the novel, though he is much talked about.)

By contrast, the Chouan guerrillas, clad in their sheepskins and goatskins, are rural barbarians – superstitious, constantly crossing themselves and swearing oaths by Saint Anne of Auray, led by a fanatical clergy like the Jesuit Abbe Gudan with his fake miracles. Of course Balzac [who was more-or-less Catholic] balances this image by creating the  pious Breton girl Francine (Marie de Verneuil’s maid) and the self-sacrificing priest who appears in the last pages marrying Marie de Verneuil and the Marquis Alphonse de Montauran. But the abiding impression is of a backward people.

Balzac’s constant theme is that the Chouans were being led on by émigré place-getters who were merely seeking their own advancement and the restoration of privileges, should the Republic come crashing down. On the last page, the Marquis’ final wish is that his younger brother “should not bear arms against France, although I hope I will never cease to serve the king”. The ambiguity is Balzac’s own. He was the liberal monarchist opposed to both Chouan fanaticism and the Republican coldness, but a patriot withal. Remember, too, that when Balzac was writing, France once again had a king.

Les Chouans has been translated into English a number of times, but is not regarded as one of Balzac’s more important novels. Tastes have changed, and the scenario of - essentially – lovers dying heroically seems more appropriate for a bel canto opera than a hard-headed account of a rural uprising. A little research tells me that Les Chouans has a couple of times been turned into a movie, but it seems never to have been seen outside France.