Politics & Power Quote by Honore de Balzac

Balzac goes for the throat with a line that treats politeness not as a social lubricant but as a national alibi. “Manners” usually arrive dressed as virtue: the little rituals that prove we’re civilized. By calling them “the hypocrisy of a nation,” he flips etiquette into evidence of collective bad faith. The bite is in the scale. Hypocrisy isn’t just a personal flaw here; it’s a system, rehearsed until it feels like character.

The intent tracks with Balzac’s larger project in The Human Comedy: exposing how post-Revolutionary France rebuilt hierarchy under bourgeois respectability. In his world, surfaces aren’t decorative; they’re weapons. Manners become a kind of soft power that allows a society to claim refinement while continuing to prize money, inheritance, and status. If everyone knows the script, everyone can pretend the distribution of dignity is fair. Etiquette turns inequality into “taste.”

Subtext: nations don’t merely have manners; they need them. A country’s self-image depends on looking coherent, moral, and unified, especially when its economic and political realities are messy. Manners are the mask that keeps the room from noticing the rot - or, more sharply, keeps the room from having to admit it notices.

Historically, Balzac is writing amid the churn of Restoration and July Monarchy France, when old aristocratic codes and new capitalist ambitions collide. The line lands because it doesn’t romanticize either: refinement can be real, but it’s also a cover story. The more insistently a society performs its politeness, Balzac suggests, the more you should ask what it’s trying not to say out loud.