Balzac and England. Tea and opium trade

Résumé 0

Some twenty years before Hugo, Balzac denounced the exactions of England in China in the press. In 1842, in his article on Borget’s illustrated album China and the Chinese, the novelist takes a stand for the Chinese against the English in the conflict of the First Opium War. He protests against the immorality of the English tea trade in exchange for a deadly drug, and the laissez-faire attitude of the French government. However, this political engagement is less indicative of a real Sinophilia than of his desire to safeguard his phantasmatic perception of China as the powerful “Middle Kingdom,” governed by an autocrat, similar in this regard to another Eastern empire for whom tea is the most popular beverage: the Russian empire. Balzac’s diatribe against English expansionism in the opium and tea trade serves both his fantasy of China and his desire to defend the interests of Great Russia.