Realism Revisited: Familial Discourse and Narrative in Balzac's Les Paysans

Abstract

At a critical juncture in General Montcornet's struggle to defend the woods and pastures of his great estate against unchecked devastation by the local peasantry, Sibilet, Montcornet's overseer, advises the former Napoleonic officer to crack down on his enemies; he adds by way of justification that peuple, les femmes et les enfants se gouvernent de meme, par la terreur. Ce fut la' le grand secret de la Convention et de l'Empereur.' This sweeping political axiom bears all the cultural markings of what is presumably masculine discourse: the viril vigor of its terse, aphoristic style connotes the stereotype of the active, male mind engaged in what was taken at the time to be the preeminently masculine sphere of politics. The only agency qualified to carry out a mandate which subsumes social, gender, and familial relations under identical political imperatives is similarly a patriarchal one: the chef de famille, whose most energetic institutional embodiment in recent history is to be found in Robespierre's Revolutionary Government and Napoleon's Empire, both known for their strident call for a return to family life and a renewed public morality. This much said, a casual reader might be tempted to pass over Sibilet's remards as yet another example of the cultural codes and