Généalogie des personnages de La Comédie humaine • Anne-Marie Meininger, Michel Pastoureau

One of the greatest, most influential—and, moreover, one of my favorite—authors is Honoré de Balzac. His life’s work is unparalleled; his influence on literature, on the writers of his time, and on the ensuing literary eras up to the present is undeniable. His oeuvre is gigantic; his novels, then and now, fascinate, entertain, and brim with philosophical wisdom. With a farsightedness and a relevance that fit both his own era—the French Restoration—and the present day, he portrays human thought and action in an abstracting way that carries something general and universal. As an absolute Balzac fan, today I’m presenting something very special to you. In today’s terms, you might call it a very chic infographic—an add-on to his complete works—something you’d fish out of a pre-order collector’s edition alongside a tiny Balzac figurine.

Born in 1799 in Tours (France), he experienced firsthand the aftermath of the Revolution and the era of the Restoration. He spent a joyless, loveless childhood in boarding school and was then pushed by his parents to study law. Fortunately, he gave that up rather quickly and convinced his father to support him financially for two years, giving him the chance to establish himself as a writer. His early years were quite lean and marked only by modest success. His career reads at times like a novel and reveals a lively and varied life. In the early 1830s he achieved his breakthrough and created a work that remains unmatched: his novel project is called The Human Comedy, named in allusion to Dante’s Divine Comedy, and it aims to provide a comprehensive portrait of the morals of his time, the French society of the Restoration. Across all strata—from the small-town bourgeois to provincial dwellers up to the high nobility—everything can be found in his novels. 137 novels were to comprise his Human Comedy, but by the time of his death he had completed only 91.

At first glance, that doesn’t exactly sound enticing. Ninety-one novels is quite a lot, and “manners” hardly sounds thrilling. But Balzac’s novels are anything but dull. He writes about people in a truly exciting way—their stories, the backgrounds of the individual figures, and especially the circumstances, the social framework, and the characters themselves. His books always begin with a rather chatty description of the setting and the people, and sometimes he simply inserts a person’s biography and interrupts the current plot. Or he describes several people before the actual story gets going. He does this so deftly, in such a pleasant style, with a profound, expansive, philosophical, and worldly gaze that is simply fascinating and wonderfully entertaining.

He arranges his figures—their inner worlds, their ways of acting, their development, and the entire social framework—so skillfully, so vividly and realistically, that you feel you’re reading real biographies. Of course he also often exaggerates, which makes his novels tremendously exciting. Old Grandet, the miser, will always remain in my memory. Or Father Goriot with his ungrateful daughters; Lucien, the dandy and daredevil from Lost Illusions; or Carlos Herrera—and not least Esther the courtesan. Balzac brought all these protagonists to life for me; they’ve become real people in my mind.

He is said to have created over 3,000 characters in his novels. In any case, there are an extraordinary number of them, and what’s fascinating is that they reappear again and again—sometimes only in passing, sometimes in a significant supporting role, and sometimes as central figures. Eugène de Rastignac, Count Henri de Marsay, Baron Frédéric de Nucingen—these are examples of characters who recur throughout. For Balzac, people and their actions are always the result of their environment, their social “species,” which he compares to the species of the animal kingdom shaped by their surroundings. His Human Comedy is thus more than a collection of novels; it describes an interacting social system in all its comprehensive complexity.

Once you start reading all these novels and novellas, you quite quickly reach a point where it becomes difficult to keep track of all the figures. You can, of course, read each novel on its own and ignore the overarching context, but Balzac only unfolds his full fascination when you keep both levels in view. A helpful tool is the list of characters in my edition, appended at the end of each novel. What’s missing, however, is an overview of all the families and people and how they relate to one another. Balzac repeatedly describes kinship ties and the origins of the individual figures in great detail.

I quickly searched the web to see what was out there—especially infographics, because a project like this practically cries out for them, and I love well-done visualizations. I finally came across an interesting-looking family tree on the website of the Maison de Balzac in Paris. The museum is located in one of Balzac’s former workplaces and offers numerous insights into the author’s life and work. If I ever get back to Paris, it will be an absolute must-visit. In 2005, Anne-Marie Meininger created a family tree of the characters in The Human Comedy for this museum. On the Maison de Balzac website you can admire a small excerpt of this tree titled Généalogie des personnages de La Comédie humaine. This little snippet was certainly enough to get me thoroughly hooked. I then scoured the entire internet for the full tree. I dove into the deepest depths of the web—and even the darknet had nothing on it. Credit card numbers in packs of a thousand, Kalashnikovs, and drugs—everything was on offer, just not a Balzac family tree. Okay, I’m exaggerating, but after some more searching I wrote to the museum and received no reply there either. Only on AbeBooks did I find a copy from a French antiquarian bookseller for 120 euros.

In the end, I did track it down—at a place that, for many, seems as inscrutable as the darknet: the Bavarian State Library. According to the OPAC, there was a single copy. So I went into the grand, palatial, boxy building and got myself a library card. Then I was finally able to order the family tree, though it took a week for them to pull the coveted item from the farthest corner of their stacks. And I wasn’t allowed to take it with me—only to view it in the reading room. Fortunately, there are book scanners there, so I scanned each page and saved them to a USB stick. The whole thing cost me 50 cents; the card is free, and you pay only for scanning—which is basically nothing for such excellent scanners.

At home I stitched the individual images together, did some retouching, removed scan seams, and created three huge posters measuring 120 × 30 cm. PosterXXL happened to be running some promotion weeks, so I had the three prints made. The result is impressive—elegant and finely prepared. The coats of arms were drawn by Michel Pastoureau, and together with the carefully constructed family tree, it’s an absolute delight for any Balzac fan.

Anne-Marie Meininger compiled the actual family tree, and it must have been an enormous task to extract and organize all this information from the texts. She has also written a few French-language books on Balzac and seems to be something of a specialist. Unfortunately, you can’t really find her online; otherwise I would have written to her and tried to get the family tree directly from its creator.

All the big fish from the novels are here. Smaller, less networked families are listed in a separate section—Eugénie Grandet’s family, for instance. But you’ll also find characters from Lost Illusions, A Harlot High and Low, and numerous novellas I’ve read. I can’t say exactly how many figures are actually recorded on the tree—only that there are very, very many.

Update September 7, 2025: The family tree is now available for free download.

Conclusion: This family tree is a successful visualization in which you can clearly see the amount of work involved. Extracting all this information from the novels must have been extremely time-consuming. I’m not yet sure how often, as a reader of this wonderful work, I’ll use the family tree as a reference. With respect to the books I’ve already read, it certainly offers a helpful overview—especially when you encounter characters you only vaguely remember. In that case, this family tree provides excellent orientation. Behind all those names, though, there are often detailed biographies, and it helps to have a good edition in which the most important people are introduced again. My complete edition from Goldmann Verlag does this very well, and together with the beautiful family tree, it leaves nothing to be desired.