Bel Ami or the History of a Scoundrel

Bel Ami, or The History of a Scoundrel is a novel by Guy de Maupassant, published in 1885. It is his second novel and the one that most readers consider his best long work. The book is a cold and brilliant study of the rise of an ambitious and unscrupulous young man through the Parisian newspaper and political world of the early Third Republic, and it is one of the great satirical novels of the nineteenth century.

Georges Duroy is a former cavalry NCO recently returned from service in Algeria, with no money and no prospects beyond his looks and his willingness to do whatever the situation requires. A chance meeting with an old army friend who is now a successful journalist gets him a small position on the staff of a Paris newspaper. From that start Duroy works his way upward through a sequence of seductions, betrayals, and well timed marriages, each one calculated to bring him closer to power and money. By the end of the novel he has become a wealthy and influential man, with a noble title and a high social position, all of it acquired through the systematic exploitation of the women in his life and the willing dishonesty of the political and journalistic world that has used him as much as he has used it.

What makes the book extraordinary is the absolute clarity with which Maupassant presents Duroy’s progress. There is no moralising. The narration is cool, almost clinical, and lets the reader see exactly what Duroy is doing without ever stepping aside to condemn him. The cumulative effect is more powerful than any direct denunciation would have been. The newspaper scenes are some of the sharpest fictional portrayals of journalism in the period and are still recognisable today, when the technology has changed but the basic moral economy has not.

The novel runs about four hundred pages and reads quickly because the plot moves so steadily. For readers who only know Maupassant through the short stories, Bel Ami is the obvious next step and is the book that shows what he could do across a longer span. It pairs naturally with Pierre and Jean, his other major novel, and with the various stories about Parisian journalism scattered through his short fiction.