In the context of the controversial emergence of insurance companies in France after 1815, and their provision of subject matter for the popular stage and for contemporary visual caricature, this article examines some of the ways in which the fictions comprising Balzac's ComSdie humaine incorporate a response to changing perceptions of risk. The sale of insurance is placed at the heart of L'Illustre Gaudissart (1833), but Balzac was led to allude to insurance, both literally and metaphorically, in a range of other fictional and non-fictional writings. Insurance was promoted by Utopian thinkers, but Balzacian realism, in contrast, issued an ironic challenge to its idealist tenets, thereby developing a new kind of fictional plot that broke with Gothic notions of danger and aligned the novel with radically different notions of catastrophe encouraged by the new socio-economic order.
