Civil Servants (Foreign Language Research Press Bilingual Reading Library)

Balzac's "The Civil Servant" profoundly reveals a huge, bloated bureaucracy "created for mediocrity and to please mediocrity". In this kind of place, some talents are in high positions and low status, while others are in low-level positions. I don't know how much talent is wasted and destroyed. It takes the bureaucracy, a monster that has long tortured human civilized society, as the object of analysis; this theme alone has demonstrated the author's unique vision as a master of realism. The plot of the story is very simple. A government department has a vacancy due to the death of its director, and a intrigue begins around the issue of who of the two division chiefs will fill the vacancy. Through this competition, the shortcomings of the bureaucratic politics during the Restoration Dynasty of Charles X in France were vividly exposed. It is not only a genre painting of Parisian society in the 19th century, but also a bitter and ruthless account of officialdom.