Quand le « rêve asiatique » de l’amour rencontre le rêve autocratique : le creuset de "La Fille aux yeux d’or"

This paper analyses the ideological dimension of Balzac’s La Fille aux yeux d’or (Girl with the Golden Eyes). First of all, erotic and political themes are both articulated by the image of the Orient. Then, the attraction for a brutal form of absolutism, which lies beneath the pages of the novel, is linked to the initial portrait of Paris, which carries the author’s social anxieties. In this portrait, Balzac shows how an autonomous system of concentration of capital functions so as to dispossess man of his initiative and of his possibilities of bettering himself. This can explain the seduction autocratic power exercises in the novel as a means of reinstating the individual’s power over the system, as well as the paradoxical dynamic between omnipotence and powerlessness characteristic of the Thirteen. The deep relationship between the novel’s prologue and the rest is demonstrated anew and more surely still.