Dear all,

This week, on Wednesday 28 May, Patrice Babeau will be presenting at the HPPE seminar on the topic: 'A sketch of Samuelson's model in Balzac? A tentative reading of "The Girl with the Golden Eyes"'
The seminar will take place as usual at 1 pm in room EAS E 168 (East Building) at the LSE.

The translation of the short story in English, as well as Patrice's comments and discussion can be found in attachment.


Abstract:

"The Girl with the Golden Eyes" (La Fille aux Yeux d'Or), short novel written in 1834-1835, and the third volume of the History of the Thirteen, opens with a chapter essentially distinct from the plot proper. Entitled “Parisian Physionomies”, this preamble, which echoes several other texts Balzac published around the same time, supposedly sets the stage of the following story. However this text presents a very high degree of abstraction and generality that cannot be found again in the following text, and that remains unique in the History of the Thirteen, despite numerous similar digressions.
Although this preamble is considered marginal in Balzac’s work, it raises some questions about the conceptualisation of the economy in his literary production. Indeed three movements of mainly social and economic nature, feature in the text: a urban dynamics, a circulation of wealth and a circulation of sexes. This triple traffic is not only simultaneous but interwoven as these circulatory forms compensate, combine or replace each other in hierarchized fashion. Furthermore, this movement does not take place in one period, but in three phases: the short period of consumption and production, the medium period of individual ambition, and the long period of reproduction and transmission between generations.
Although the characters are sketched somehow as ‘ideal types’, thus resonating with a central concept in sociology, since the text seems to take ‘gold and pleasure’ as its main engines, it is also possible to reconcile it with political economy, which was already firmly established in France by 1830. Indeed we can then try to read the preamble as an economic model, a certainly imperfect and too complex one to be packed into rigorous equations, even though this parallel might seem anachronistic for the period.
To infer from the text the existence of an actual model, however, is a little trickier than this very general presentation might suggest. Balzac alternates general and specific examples by following a few archetypal characters – including one who appears to move in the midst of all the social hierarchies, which allows him to browse the whole social range – in order to combine the power of drama and comic effects. At the same time, he somehow hides the more intellectual ‘nuts and bolts’ of his analysis. So should we deconstruct and maybe violate Balzac's novel economy to enter the economic model of Balzac? Are not the comic exaggerations that help him magnify his ideas also ‘stylized facts’ worthy of a model? In the presentation we will try first to describe the main aspects of the circulations described in the FYO. The second part will aim at articulating together these circulations to estimate whether Balzac’s analysis can be likened to an economic model. In conclusion, we will examine both the modernity of the model and its faithfulness to Balzac’s ideas.

Patrice Baubeau is Associate Professor at the Université Paris Ouest Nanterre and Sciences Po. His research focuses on financial and monetary history, hosiery industry,and more generally 19th and 20th century history. His recent publications  include (with A. Ögren (ed.),) 'Convergence and Divergence of National Financial Systems: Evidence from the Gold Standards', 1871-1971' Pickering & Chatto, 2010,    'La BIRD, la France et le dollar gap – 1946-1947 ' (2013) Histoire@Politique, and  'L’histoire de France en « vignettes » : deux siècles de circulation fiduciaire' to be published in Revue Numismatique in 2015.


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