His work includes a large proportion of courtesans and grisettes, alongside admirable and angelic women.

He gives an important place to financiers and notaries, but also to the character of Vautrin, the outlaw with multiple identities. Some of his characters are so vivid that they have become archetypes, such as Rastignac, the ambitious young provincial, Grandet, the miserly domestic tyrant, or Father Goriot, the icon of fatherhood.

Gifted with a genius for observation, Balzac created human types that are strikingly true. But instead of a theological enterprise, the author wanted to be a sociologist and created a non-Manichean universe, where love and friendship hold a great place, and which highlights the complexity of beings and the deep immorality of a social mechanism where the weak are crushed while the crooked banker and the venal politician triumph. The title was chosen in reference to Dante's Divine Comedy. He shows in its various forms the rise of capitalism and the omnipotence of money, leading to the disappearance of nobility and the dissolution of social ties. It does not include Balzac's five theatrical plays or his collection of humorous tales: 'Les Cent Contes drolatiques' (1832–37).Ī pioneer of the modern novel, Balzac aims to describe the totality of reality and is interested in realities hitherto ignored in literature, because they were ugly or vulgar. La Comédie humaine consists of 91 finished works (stories, novels, or analytical essays) and 46 unfinished works (some of which exist only as titles). La Comédie humaine ( French: English: The Human Comedy) is Honoré de Balzac's 1829–48 multi-volume collection of interlinked novels and stories depicting French society in the period of the Restoration (1815–30) and the July Monarchy (1830–48).

The human comedy novel