Book Bearings
Bel-Ami
- 412 pages · about 7 hours
- First published 1893
- 138 editions
- Free to read
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1 About this book
Maupassant's second novel, Bel-Ami (1885), is the story of a ruthlessly ambitious young man (Georges Duroy, christened "Bel-Ami" by his female admirers) making it to the top in fin-de-siecle Paris. It is a novel about money, sex, and power, set against the background of the politics of the French colonization of North Africa.
It explores the dynamics of an urban society uncomfortably close to our own and is a devastating satire of the sleaziness of contemporary journalism. Bel-Ami enjoys the status of an authentic record of the apotheosis of bourgeois capitalism under the Third Republic.
But the creative tension between its analysis of modern behavior and its identifiably late nineteenth-century fabric is one of the reasons why Bel-Ami remains one of the finest French novels of its time, as well as being recognized as Maupassant's greatest achievement as a novelist.
Good for readers who want: a classic and a book they can read free online.
- Classics
- Politics and government
- Relationships
- Colonies
- Wealth
- Journalists
- Social classes
- Seduction
2 Read it free, right here
A free scan from the Internet Archive opens right here on the page, with no sign-up.
Read it on the Internet Archive3 About Guy de Maupassant
Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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