WRITER

Honoré de Balzac

1799 - 1850

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Honoré de Balzac ( BAL-zak, more commonly US: BAWL-; French: [ɔnɔʁe d(ə) balzak]; born Honoré Balzac; 20 May 1799 – 18 August 1850) was a French novelist and playwright. The novel sequence La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of post-Napoleonic French life, is generally viewed as his magnum opus. Owing to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. Read more on Wikipedia

Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of Honoré de Balzac has received more than 3,559,086 page views. His biography is available in 109 different languages on Wikipedia (up from 107 in 2019). Honoré de Balzac is the 22nd most popular writer (up from 29th in 2019), the 16th most popular biography from France (up from 22nd in 2019) and the 5th most popular French Writer.

Honoré de Balzac is most famous for his novel "La Comédie Humaine," which is a series of novels that depict French society in the early 1800s.

Memorability Metrics

  • 3.6M

    Page Views (PV)

  • 83.46

    Historical Popularity Index (HPI)

  • 109

    Languages Editions (L)

  • 15.10

    Effective Languages (L*)

  • 3.53

    Coefficient of Variation (CV)

Among WRITERS

Among writers, Honoré de Balzac ranks 22 out of 7,302Before him are Jules Verne, Virgil, Albert Camus, Molière, Anton Chekhov, and Petrarch. After him are Aesop, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ovid, Rumi, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and Giovanni Boccaccio.

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Contemporaries

Among people born in 1799, Honoré de Balzac ranks 1After him are Alexander Pushkin, Oscar I of Sweden, Benoît Paul Émile Clapeyron, Mary Anning, William Lassell, Gustav, Prince of Vasa, Friedrich Wilhelm Argelander, Karl Bryullov, Charles II, Duke of Parma, Fromental Halévy, and Anna Atkins. Among people deceased in 1850, Honoré de Balzac ranks 1After him are Louis Philippe I, Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac, William Wordsworth, Zachary Taylor, Daoguang Emperor, Báb, José de San Martín, Marie Tussaud, Frédéric Bastiat, Louise of Orléans, and Johann Heinrich von Thünen.

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In France

Among people born in France, Honoré de Balzac ranks 16 out of 6,770Before him are Claude Monet (1840), Jules Verne (1828), Montesquieu (1689), Louis XV of France (1710), Molière (1622), and Charles de Gaulle (1890). After him are Jean-Paul Sartre (1905), Alain Delon (1935), Henri Matisse (1869), John Calvin (1509), Paul Cézanne (1839), and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900).

Among WRITERS In France

Among writers born in France, Honoré de Balzac ranks 5Before him are Voltaire (1694), Victor Hugo (1802), Jules Verne (1828), and Molière (1622). After him are Jean-Paul Sartre (1905), Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900), Denis Diderot (1713), Alexandre Dumas (1802), Charles Baudelaire (1821), Émile Zola (1840), and Stendhal (1783).