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Bahadır Türkgeldi
19.04.2021
An Analysis of Society: Old Man Goriot

Honoré de Balzac’s Old Man Goriot is a novel that strongly depicts the post-revolution

French society and points to the corruption and decay of the social system through the tragedy of

Goriot and Eugène de Rastignac. Rastignac is a symbol of virtue and ambition to achieve this

state of life which is open to everybody after the revolution. Rastignac’s discovery of this decay

and corruption of humanity in the Aristocracy is one of the main incidents. Two main settings

and classes of Paris life are seen through the Windows of the pension and the mansions. Balzac

introduces the ultimate analysis of French society.

Start to the finish, the depiction of Goriot’s cloudy and painful face is apparent. Although

how the inhabitants of the pension see him and how he pays attention to his look (when he can at

the start), “His face, upon which suppressed grief had” (Balzac 44) is always there. Until

Rastignac learns the truth, the reader is not in knowledge of the ‘grief’. Goriot is always a

mystery until Rastignac learns his true story. This is important as although he is the title of the

novel, the mystery about him makes the book more interesting. People of the pension try to learn

his story impatiently and they always criticize his actions and theorize around them. Balzac

wants to make the reader think and join the gossip. The paragraphs of gossip about him are long

and many throughout the novel, even after Rastignac learns the truth. Habitants of the pension

are interested in him, as long as they are in the pension. When they go out, they are not talking

about him or thinking about him. For them he is a tool to spend time, having fun. This is a

criticism of the lower class and also of the whole French society of the time. For them, other

people are not human beings that they can empathize with or try to understand. They are tools to

consume, props to their life. Beings that they can suck the life and liveliness out of. The
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intimacy degree doesn’t matter. Neighbors of the same building, son of a mother, children of the

same mother, or daughters of the most giving and selfless father. People never think of each

other but they think of what the others think of themselves and how they can use them as pools

to drain. Rastignac, in that sense, is the only one who develops a change even he uses his mother

and sister to preserve his guilty social pleasures. He comes to Paris, fully ready to be a part of

this cruel and inhumane world but he denies being one of them and criticizes it in his conscience.

“His imagination, soaring among the highest peaks of Parisian society, sowed a

thousand base thoughts in his heart, as it stretched his head and mind. He recognized the

world for what it is – a place where laws and morality have no power over the rich – and

he saw in wealth the ultima ratio mundi.” (Balzac 82)

When Eugene suddenly recognizes the torture and grief that makes these big walls of the

Hôtel de Beauséant alive, he is struck by the lightning of truth for the first time in that scene.

Hôtel de Beauséant symbolizes the society that Eugene tries to climb the ladders of. But in time

he realizes that the price of it is betraying the people that you love and must take care of. He

witnesses this through Goriot.

The cruelty and exploitation between people are not especially for the upper-class. The

whole Parisian society is corrupt. Through Rastignac’s experiences in the upper-class homes and

the lower-class pension, Balzac takes the reader to a museum of people. The young and

ambitious man who has come from the South to reach a state of life in the Parisian World makes

the reader able to behold the scheme of social statuses and relations. The two opposite worlds

that make each other alive. Balzac serves up the pension and the mansion as the symbols of the

two classes of society; two sides of the same card. In this system, Rastignac’s “Southern tenacity

which works wonders when it keeps a straight course.” (Balzac 44) could have led him to a
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marvelous state of life. He has the opportunity and possibility that he holds in his own hands. Yet

he doesn’t choose to act on it in the end.

Goriot’s words in the deathbed are so important for Rastignac as it is like a depiction of

what Rastignac has learned from the adventure. Rastignac thinks “Society now looked much like

an ocean of mud into which a man sank up to his neck if he so much as dipped a toe in.” (Balzac

199) The reader may expect Rastignac as the possible Napoleon representative as he is a

southerner who seeks his possible advancement in the upper-class Parisian society as he can. But

Balzac tricks the reader, and through Goriot, Rastignac’s possible story of climbing the ladder of

the society which he couldn’t even dream of before the Revolution. He could easily be a

character of Stendhal yet Balzac uses him as a tool and changes the topic to a social problem. He

shows the corrupt status of society through Eugene’s innocent and humane eyes. “He had now

seen the three main factions of society: Obedience, Struggle, and Rebellion; the Family, the

World, and Vautrin. And he didn’t know which to join.” (Balzac 199). He is tortured and

afflicted. “‘Madame de Beauséant is leaving, this man is dying,’ he said. ‘A noble soul can’t

abide this world for long. How, indeed, could a lofty sensibility ever be reconciled with this

petty, shallow and mean-spirited society of ours?’” (Balzac 207) Rastignac sees that the true

“nobility” is not accepting the so-called nobility’s laws which devastate the lives of the fathers of

the French society that Goriot says on his death-bed “Everything, society, the whole world,

hinges on fatherhood; and if children no longer love their fathers, everything will fall apart.”

(Balzac 211).

Balzac shows to his fellow countryman through Goriot that how this system denies

humanity and love, and how it chooses “pleasure” as the ultimate goal. Balzac hopes that as

Rastignac does, the society and system can change their perspective and act on humanity to stop
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this wicked process France is going through. From this perspective, the novel is an ultimate

analysis of family relations, social relations, and society. Rastignac has changed through Father

Goriot, and Balzac maybe hopes that society can change through reading Old Man Goriot.
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Bibliography

Balzac, Honoré , Olivia McCannon, and Graham Robb. Old Man Goriot. London: Penguin

Books, 2011. Print.