The Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau

"I have a friend in his 80s who has included on his bucket list the goal of reading all of Balzac. I have not (and do not plan to) read all of Balzac. But it’s a worthy objective, particularly if you want to understand what Marx would have called “bourgeois capitalism.” There are a lot of Balzac novels but César Birotteau is the only one I know of that directly addresses our topic. Birotteau is everything you might want in a bourgeois hero: vain and puffed up and almost absurdly proud of his success in the perfume game. Then he gets swept up in what we can call ‘the speculative mania.’ Balzac seems to appreciate him with a kind of wry but affectionate irony. I have known bankruptcy lawyers who think of their clients in pretty much the same way. Birotteau did indeed hold bankrupts in contempt, until he became one himself. Ι think it is part of Balzac’s greatness that he recognized and knew how to convey the all-too-human ambivalence—even schizophrenia—about the process and its place. Indeed. And I think these various points help us to understand why Marx thought so highly of Balzac—and why both Marx and Balzac might have countenanced César Birotteau with a mixture of compassion and amused contempt. US bankruptcy filings ran a bit under 800,000 cases in the most recent reported year. That’s a bit under half the peak, which was achieved back in 2010. An interesting question is how far that decline bespeaks a better economy, how much it’s about debtors with problems so severe that bankruptcy can’t help, or cases where debtors and creditors agree that it is more cost effective to cut a deal outside of bankruptcy than to submit to the rigours of the process itself."