Balzac et les géographes: reconversion d’un discours scientifique
Balzac and geographers: re-use of a scientific discurse

Summary/Abstract: The paper is an attempt at showing how the mentions and quotations of contemporary geographic discourses inserted in the Balzacian texts and paratexts are there to outline the features of a new novelistic æsthetic. We will start from the following observation: the Balzacian novel and its encyclopedic ambition are contemporaneous with the first attempts of some geographers to found a unified science from a diversified set of knowledges and practices. Therefore, modern geography may appear as an adversary of Balzac’s own ambition of totalization and we will show that geographic discourse, rather than being a model for him as other scientific discourses are, is distorted in his novels, deprived of its epistemological value and reduced to a science without knowledge.

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