Pergamon History of European Ideas. Vol. 19, Nos 1-3, pp. 81-92, 1994

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THE SECRECY OF VAUTRIN (THE ‘CRIMINAL AND THE ENEMY’) AND HIS SOCIETY OF TEN THOUSAND IN

BALZAC’S LA COMEDIE HUMAINE

JAYASHREE MADAPUSP

Not only in European society, but in general, in all societies, the criminal is perceived as constituting the ‘Enemy’ who acts against Society. In this study, I will be dealing with one criminal secret organisation, the ‘Secret Society of Ten Thousand’ who initially oppose the external Society and finally turn out to be the promoters of integration within this Society.

This Secret Society of Ten Thousand was constituted by Vautrin, an ex- convict, and is represented in the novels Le P&e Goriot, ~~iusio~s perdues and SF~endeurs et mishes des &ourt~sanes~ of Balzac’s La Corn&die romaine, It is a secret association that resorts to revolutionary and forceful methods to obtain power. Hence the relation of force between this secret group and that of the external Society starts initially as a form of warlike domination,

The ‘Society of Ten Thousand’ is a band of robbers, of rebels who indulge in an open war against society. It is an association ‘of affluent robbers, of people who undertook huge projects, and who did not get involved in a case unless there were at least ten thousand francs togain’(Balzac 3: 190-191). In this manner, the Society of Ten Thousand creates a bank within itself with Vautrin as its head and chief treasurer.

The reason for the constitution of this association by Vautrin as a rebellious organisation is that the State laws prevent the ex-convicts from finding jobs on their departure from prison by marking them with the letters T.F. (Travaux Forces). Hence these exconvicts, forced to find other means of self- defence-other means of surviving outside the constitutional rules, turn rebellious. The Society of Ten Thousand thus resembles the Sicilian secret society, the Mafia, where ‘the brigands having ceased to find employment within the Government, have continued in existence through associations organised for their own profit.. ,‘*

Just like the ‘[Templar] Order [which] dared even to defy the King and . . .constituted an imperium in imperio that threatened not only the royal authority but the whole social system’,j Vautrin’s secret society threatens royal authority and constitutes a menace to the whole social structure. Within the large city of Paris this ‘Enemy’ uproots the whole social system and yet it is this ‘Enemy’ who brings about an integration within the Society. The ironic question we, as readers, put to ourselves is: ‘how is integration possible when Vautrin in his status as Enemy, speaks of warfare which, in general is supposed to orient towards disintegration?’

*76, South Gate Court, San Jose, CA 95138, U.S.A.

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Vautrin’s society resembles the Templars in its role as a military organisation where the leader holds absolute military control. He says to Lucien (a young

novice who establishes a Faustian pact with him):

we are the modern Templars, do you wish to be a soldier, I will be your captain.

(Balzac 5: 703)

His declaration shows the implicit military obedience he expects from Lucien. Everything in Vautrin denotes his revolutionary and military tendancy:

His look was that of a fallen archangel who always wants war (Balzac 3: 219) [and he had] an army of evil doers in a perpetual state of combat with the society. (Balzac

3: 191)

Similar to the Jesuits who under ‘. . . under false names,. . . insinuate themselves into, or maintain themselves in countries where they are prohibited,‘4 Vautrin by changing his identity succeeds in re-integrating himself into the same Society from which he had been rejected as an enemy and as an ‘hors-la-Ioi’. He secretly kills the true Carlos Herrera (who was a priest) in a tight. He comes back to France impersonating this priest (Carlos Herrera) and claiming to have been sent by King Ferdinand II on a political mission.

Thus by taking up the ecclesiastical status of a priest Vautrin puts on an appearance of legality over his true ex-convict form. As in the case of the Jesuits,

this priestly attire becomes ‘a passe-pat-tout uniform15, a cloak of protection that enables him to succeed, even if it were through illegal means without the exterior world being aware of it. As a result, religion becomes for him not an objective or

an end but a means to attain power. Carlos Herrera takes up his ecclesiastical status whenever it suits him, but

abandons it in reality before his accomplices with only these members being aware of his double identity. This disguise not only protects through its outward appearance of a life of sanctity, and of solitude that characterises it, but it also constitutes a secret means of manipulation. The Jesuits, who were in reality

priests, made use of ‘confession’ as a means in the royal domain of discovering the king’s secrets and obtain power:

For a Jesuit, to become a confessor of the king meant that he would be able to manipulate the most secret strings;. . . this task as confessor of the king constitutes a controlling scheme which gives the Jesuits an appreciable political influence,. . .6

Carlos Herrera resorts to the same manipulating strategy. As a priest, he also becomes a confessor and this confers on him a considerable advantage. He is able

to penetrate others’ secrets and gain absolute control of the situation, but unlike the Jesuits he limits himself to a local domain.

As a priest, Carlos Herrera is able to communicate with two of the members of his association, his aunt Jacqueline Collin as well as Theodore Calvi, who come to him in the guise of a person who wishes to confess his sins and receive the priest’s benediction. The policemen could not prevent them as they had no legal right to prohibit a person from ‘seeing his/her confessor’ (Belzac 6: 894). Nor

The Society of Ten Thousand 89

could they interrogate Carlos Herrera who was bound by duty to respect the secret of a confession. Thus the secret of the Ten Thousand is prevented from being revealed and is kept within ‘the conspiratorial sphere’ . . . essentially hermetic.7

Once having taken up Carlos Herrera’s identity and having succeeded in being readmitted within the social circle, Vautrin succeeds in preserving the secrecy of this re-integration. The power that Vautrin holds within his conspiracy is a centralised power, where he holds the strings and directs his group’s collective activities in the pursuit of one goal. While attacking his opponent indirectly, it is only through the members of his association that he acts. Every time the secret of his identity is about to be unveiled, he attempts to fortify the fortress of enclosure within which he is hiding. He can do so only through his ‘double identity’-by continuing his appearance as a priest to the outside world and as a leader to his criminal world. Carlos Herrera’s true identity is undecipherable and becomes an unsolvable mystery for the police, because the secret of his identity is in an enclosure closed from within. By having recourse to a criminal dialect and criminal strategies of delaying the discovery of the truth, together with the outward protection that his ecclesiastical attire confers on him, Carlos Herrera is able to escape from the police.

The criminals, strongly united by solidarity, prohibit entry to non-initiates. To the onlookers Carlos Herrera must always be a priest. The members of the Ten Thousand succeed in keeping up this pretence, because they have understood the military nature of their organization. Carlos Herrera had only to give them the order ‘Don’t arouse suspicions over your master’ (Balzac 6: 841), and this command was implicitly obeyed by them.

The very existence of a secret society depends on a combinatory strategy where the members have to understand (as Vautrin puts it) that ‘we have to lend a helping hand to one another.. . One cannot do anything alone.’ (Balzac 6: 868). But whereas Vautrin understands the application of this code within his secret association, initially he misses out its application within the social system of which his association is a part. His theory of integration is originally conceived with the idea of ensuring success for his Criminal Order alone irrespective of the detrimental results that it brings to the outer Society.

Through Lucien, he wanted to create ‘a brilliant edifice of. . . fortune’ (Balzac 5: 703) and thereby build an economic unification within the society between the poor and the aristocratic elite. But it is too great a task, one which he tinds impossible to accomplish.

Since it is only through secrecy that secrets can be unveiled, the police force decide to launch a battle with this ‘Machiavel of the prison’ through a conspiracy of equal force. They question Lucien secretly and make him confess and reveal Carlos Herrera’s true identity.8 Hence, it is Lucien who’breaks the whole code of solidarity on which the society of Ten Thousand was built. Carlos Herrera fails in his plans as he is not able to hold Lucien in his power (since Lucien is not exactly a member of the Ten Thousand but is only partially initiated into its secrets). At the moment when he had to prove his solidarity as a member of the Ten Thousand would have done so, Lucien recedes as the total ‘de-individualization’ that is required on the part of the members of a secret association is what he is incapable of accomplishing.

90 Jayashree Madapusi

Vautrin finds that after having sacrificed everything for Lucien he had failed in creating in him, his double: ‘Despite his extraordinary acumen in the reading of codes, Vautrin is no more capable than his pupils of understanding something essential about the determining mechanism of codes themselves.. . . [It is] Balzac who conceives the logic of this failure of control, and with it he locates a contradiction at the heart of the initiatory paradigm.. .r9

Although he had negated all other laws, Vautrin realizes that he could not negate the law of social integration. His failure makes him realise that it is not through military force that one can reduce the social differences between classes. He had wanted to impose his individual will and his tyrannical and military nature not only on Lucien, but on the whole social system and fails. When he realises that he had failed in his rebellious objective of ‘power against power’, he accepts the society’s paradigms of exchange. His defeat with Lucien makes him realise that ‘a secret society is as dependant for its existence upon its non- members as it is upon its members.“O

Vautrin’s failure makes him decide to choose blackmail to obtain the power that he had been fighting for. M. de Granville, the magistrate and Camusot, the judge for fear of seeing the reputation of three aristocratic families at stake” submit to his blackmail, while at the same time knowing that they are giving in to injustice to the detriment of justice that they are supposed to represent. Herrera through his action shows how the ‘so-called judicial* representatives themselves, by yielding to blackmail transgress the laws they have made. Vautrin proves that if his secret society resorts to underhand means to survive, so does the external society.

Vautrin accomplishes what no law legally permits. In spite of being guilty, not only is he able to prove that ‘the guilty person was innocent,. . .’ (Balzac 6: 903) but he is also able to assume charge of the police force. His change of status from a criminal to a police is kept a secret from the rest of the world. This was accomplished not only in fiction, but in reality itself by Vidocq, who turned from a criminal to a police officer in Paris.

While in Goriot, Vautrin brings in the idea of a similarity between all groups or classes of society through his philosophical statement: ‘. . . man is the same everywhere be it at the uppermost, lower or middle levels’ (Balzac 3: 141), it is at the end of Splendeurs (which is the third of the series of novels containing the Society of Ten Thousand) that he puts this resemblance to a useful purpose. The fact that the Criminal Order itself does not widely differ from that of the Police Order leads Vautrin to point out the idea of integration between the criminals and the police since they resort to same methods of blackmail to further their interests. He points out that the similarity between two diametrically opposing groups such as the Police Force and the Criminal Order can lead to integration, fusion and as a result progress within Society by a concentration of the strengths of individuals in one collective power.

Georg Simmel was exactly right in pointing out that the secret society constitutes ‘a second world alongside [my italics] the manifest world; . . . [where] the latter is decisively influenced by the former.‘12 Vautrin’s secret organization by pointing out the truth or defects about the external society shows the need for reformulating the laws of society.

The Society of Ten Thousand 91

Vautrin escapes as an innocent in the eyes of the rest of the world in spite of being guilty, he becomes a ‘representative of law’ in spite of being an ‘hors-la-loi’, he becomes a revealer of Truth in spite of being a dissembler: ‘he creates by himself an assimilation between clarity and law. . .‘I3 Although living in the dark as a criminal, it is he who has been able to bring about this integration. Vautrin’s revolutionary secret society has succeeded in its revolutionary objective in the sense that their leader has succeeded in seeking vengeance and in bringing about a transformation within society. But in this warfare, the leader himself as the criminal has undergone a personal transformation and he decides to make use of his conspiratorial and criminal strategies to work not against butfor the good of the community. The ‘revolutionary’ objective of the Criminal turns into a ‘reformatory’ objective.

Starting from a state of antagonism or warfare with the external society, Vautrin’s Secret Society of Ten Thousand ends up pointing out that a state of combined interdependence could bring about a regularisation, socialisation or normalisation of the society.

The Society of Ten Thousand constitutes a secret organisation that preserves a political objective behind its false non-political mask. It takes a ‘Criminal and Enemy’ along with his elite group of bandits to point out what could be achieved through mutually beneficial interactions. It has been this ‘Criminal and Enemy’ who brings about an Integration between the secret underworld of criminals and the world of detectives and policemen, between order and disorder, between justice and injustice, between individual and society.

Among the various propositions put forth by analysts with regard to the ‘Theoritical approaches to European Integration’ what caught my attention was Donald Puchala’s Draft of an Integration model. The changes listed out in this model as bringing about Integration such as ‘the pursuit of cooperation rather than competition, amplification of communications, the replacement of suspicion by trust, similarity of interpretations and reactions in respect of regional and international problems, and the progressive elimination of the possibility of using force to resolve potential conflicts’14 are exactly the conclusions to which Vautrin arrives when he defects towards the side of the Police Force. Instead of using his criminal strategies and intelligence to combat the Society, he decides to use them for the progress of the Society.

This brings me back to the topic of this conference which is “‘The Enemy” in the European Mind and European Integration.’ What Balzac, the novelist points out here is that ‘Integration’ is a process of social assimilation, where the word ‘ . . social assimilation, . . . means a collection of mechanisms leading to a transnational society, . . . united by links of mutual understanding and trust.‘*s Since the history of European thought brings in the concept of internationalism, what the novelist aims at showing through his idealistic literary representation of a secret society is that the Integration achieved within the city of Paris, although limiting itself to a regional integration, is what could be similarly attained at the level of international politics.

University of California Jayashree Madapusi

92 Jayashree Madapusi

Acknowledgements-Since my Doctoral dissertation deals with the topic of secret societies in Balzac’s La ComPdie humaine, I would like to thank my professors Dr Eric Gans and Dr Andrea Loselle for their guidance and comments.

NOTES

I. All quotations in this paper with regard to Le P&e Goriot, Illusions perdues and Splendeurs et miseres des courtisanes refer to the Edition “Bibliothbque de la Pleiade”. (Refer to Honor& de Balzac’s Z.Q Comedie humaine 12 vols (Paris: Gatlimard, 1977). Of these 12 volumes, the three novels mentioned above are a part of Volume 3, Volume 5 and Volume 6 respectively.) These three novels will henceforth be destgnated under the abbreviated form of Goriot, Illusions and Splendeurs, respectively.

2. John Heron Lepper, Famous Secret Societies (London: Sampson Low Marston & Col., Ltd), 212.

3. Nesta H. Webster, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., n.d.), 60.

4. Charles Wilfiam Heckethorn, The Secret Socieries ofAiI Ages and Countries, Vol. 1 (New York: University Books Inc., 1965), 285.

5. Pierre Dominique, La Politique des J6suite.s (Paris: Grasset, 1955), 39, 6. Dominique, 138. 7. James W. Mileham, The Conspiracy Novel-Structure and Metaphor in Balrac’s La

Corn&die humaine (Kentucky: French Forum Publishers, 1982) 53. 8. Nicolla Machiavelli [in his work The Discourses, Vol. 1 (Routledge and Kegan Paul:

London and Boston, 1975), 4771, speaking of conspiracies informs us: ‘should more than one of the conspirators be arrested, it is impossible to prevent its coming out, because two cannot possibly agree as to every detail in the explanations they give. If only one man is arrested and he be a man of resolution, he may have sufficient strength of mind to be silent about his fellow conspirators. It may well happen, however, that the other conspirators have less courage than he has, and that, instead of standing their ground, they may reveal the plot.. .’ It is this strategy that the police adopt in Lucien’s case.

9. Richard Terdiman, Discourse/Counter Discourse-The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in nineteenth Century Frame (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), 105-106.

10. Camilia H. Wedgewood, ‘The Nature and Functions of Secret Societies,’ Oceania 1 (1930), 129-145.

II. Carlos Herrera holds in his possession the letters written by the women of three aristoratic families to Lucien. He agrees to give back these letters without spoiling the reputation of these families in exchange for being made a police officer.

12. Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmei, trans. Kurt H. Wolff(New York: The Free Press, 1964), 330.

13. Jean-Louis Bory, Pour Baizac et que~ques autres (Paris: Rent Julliard, 1960), 29. 14. Marie-Elisabeth De Bussy, Helene Delorme and Francoise de la Serre, ‘Theoritical

approaches to European Integration,’ European Integration, ed. F. Roy Willis (New York: New Viewpoints, 1975), 109-l 10.

15. De Bussy, 109-l 10.