SOURCE: Moyal, Gabriel. “Making the Revolution Private: Balzac's Les Chouans and Une épisode sous la Terreur.” Studies in Romanticism 28, no. 4 (winter 1989): 601-22.

In the following essay, Moyal argues that in Les Chouans and Un épisode sous la terreur, two works set during the French Revolution, Balzac deliberately minimizes the changes that took place during the period and depicts the private spheres of characters as limited, full of compromise, and lacking in choice and freedom.

Though, in our time, the restoration of the class system of the ancien régime is no longer entertained as a possibility, the narrations in Balzac's Comédie humaine which tell of its last attempts to prevail, and of its ultimate downfall, still hold some fascination for us despite their apparent irrelevance to the representations we entertain of our own political and historical situation. The tales of passions and ambitions which tell how a...