Honoré de Balzac

About Honoré de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) was a foundational French novelist whose monumental achievement was *La Comédie humaine*, a vast cycle of nearly 100 interconnected novels and stories intended to offer a panoramic, critical survey of French society following the French Revolution. His precise, realistic portrayal of characters and their motivations, often seen as the originator of literary realism, cemented his place as one of the most influential figures in European letters, securing him the #303 rank on the Pantheon historical importance index.

Despite this considerable historical weight, Balzac’s modern internet attention appears modest. He garnered approximately 410K annualized Wikipedia views in 2025. This level of engagement puts his attention ratio at roughly 1x relative to his historical importance, indicating proportional modern visibility. However, his contemporary Mark Twain, also a writer, commands 2.4M views, suggesting a significant differential within the same field. Even writers with lower historical importance, like Kurt Vonnegut (#849 importance), maintain higher attention at 1.0M views.

Interestingly, while his overall traffic is relatively stable, the short-term data shows a +7% momentum shift between Q1 and Q3 of 2025, suggesting a recent, perhaps academic or literary, resurgence in interest that partially offsets a -4.2% year-over-year decline.