Balzac, Jean-Louis Guez de (1594-1654). French prose writer and critic whose influence on his contemporaries was more considerable than the lasting impact of his published writings, but who contributed greatly to the creation of the paradoxically formal colloquial style which still holds sway in French literary and academic circles.
As a young man he spent some time in Rome as the agent of cardinal de Valette, and the experience marked him, not only with a taste for the virtues and style of classical antiquity, but with a conviction that France was the modern heir of Rome. There is a parallel with the career of Du Bellay 70 years earlier; but whereas the poet had sought to enrich the French language by introducing the vocabulary of foreign models, Balzac wished above all to impose order, regularity, and gravity in prose, ignoring the risk of impoverishing the lexicon. The closer parallel is thus with Malherbe.
At 30 he retired to a country estate in the southwest. Thereafter a stream of advice and censure issued from the Angoumois to the Parisian classicists such as Chapelain, Conrart, or Perrot d'Ablancourt. Balzac admired the latinity of Scaliger and Barclay; if he is to be considered a Ciceronian, it is because he imitates the elegant urbanity of Cicero's letters to Atticus in his own Epistolœ. And it is a transposition of that style into French which marks his formal Lettres, collections of which he published regularly from 1624. His Entretiens, which he envisaged as a modern version of Montaigne's essay form and which were published posthumously (1657), maintain a similarly formal urbanity. His major prose works, though doubtless primarily written as exercices de style, attempt to build a bridge between antiquity and modernity in dealing with the burning issues of government (Le Prince, 1631) and religion (Socrate chrétien, 1652). The former may also have been composed in the hope of attracting royal patronage, but roused Richelieu's suspicions and had to be reissued in an amended version. The latter attempts to temper Augustinianism with gentlemanly reasonableness. Aristippe (1658) applies the same deliberate reasonableness to questions of public administration. He began the work in the 1630s and returned to it repeatedly until his death.
[Peter Bayley]
Bibliography
- R. Zuber, Les ‘Belles Infidèles’ et la formation du goût classique: Perrot d'Ablancourt et Guez de Balzac (1968)
- J. Jehasse, Guez de Balzac et le génie romain (1977)
