THE FRENCH INTELLECTUAL
499
ing from all the privations and humiliations of a
declasse,
Marc
froment is an exalted and frequently naive portrait of a type
that nonetheless did exist in real life.
No less important to literature than the survival of the
esprit encyclopedique
and the emergence of a selflessly devoted
body of schoolteachers, is another social phenomenon of far–
reaching consequences: the incredible fascination that Paris
holds for the young men of the period, the attraction to the
metropolis of countless talented and not so talented provincials
-in short, the extraordinary intellectual centralization that
takes place in the capital. "The French have hoarded all their
ideas in one enclosure," complains Paul Valery's Monsieur
Teste, who abhors this paradise of oratory. This centralization
is one of the main symptoms of the contagious fever of
arrivisme
racking the young men of the first half of the nine–
teenth century. This fever spreads through the entire work of
Balzac, particularly in
Les Illusions perdues
which describes the
flight to Paris of an uprooted generation, losing itself in the
sordid mire of journalism, or forming
cenacles
which express the
idealism of the epoch. In this urge to conquer Paris, Balzac
saw one of the evil results of the Revolution. To some extent,
his bitterness can be explained by his own vexatious experiences
with the world of Parisian journalism (". . . the journalists in
France, the most infamous men I know," he expostulates to
Madame Hanska.) Balzac moreover remarked wryly that all
sorts of mediocrities were now attracted to literature: "When
one does not know how to do anything, one becomes a man
with a pen," he writes to Zulma Carraud. But though personal
bitterness explains the reaction it does not eliminate the fact
that ever increasing numbers of young men of humble birth
and without money embark on literary and artistic careers–
a phenomenon which can be attributed to political and social
changes, the victory of Romanticism, the spread of socialistic
ideas, and more generally to the "democratization" of literature.
Many novels since the middle of the nineteenth century--
