Balzac published The Physiology of the Employee in 1841, to wide amusement. This was the year before he unveiled the preface to his Comédie Humaine, at once announcing his future life’s work, and giving an order and purpose to his writing so far. Balzac’s plan was for fiction set in the present, yet inspired by the historical novels of Walter Scott. The governing concept was to come from zoology—a discipline that, nearly two decades before Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) proposed the theory of natural selection, had already developed a rich body of evolutionary conjecture. “An animal,” Balzac wrote, “takes its exterior form … in the settings where it is called upon to develop itself. … There have thus existed, and will exist for all time, human species just as there are zoological species.” The Physiology of the Employee reads like a trial run of this idea, ostensibly in the form of more explicit social theory: “The office is the employee’s natural habitat. Employees cannot exist without an office and an office cannot exist without employees.”
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