Lucien de Rubempré successively discovers camaraderie, and what distinguishes it from friendship. He makes a mistake by mistaking for friendship what is really his comedy. Camaraderie remains an order where strategy must reign; it always involves a desire to outdo comrades, a logic of confrontation. Hence the need not to stand out unnecessarily, or risk being punished. Lucien thus rewrote his article on Raoul Nathan twice, once on Lousteau's advice, to avoid needlessly upsetting a friend, the second time to give himself a sense of perspective and establish the authority of his own pen.
Lucien had another negative experience of camaraderie when he switched parties and moved to the ministerial press. He became the sworn enemy of Lousteau's group, and even offered them an opportunity to unite against him. Sainte-Beuve calls this "drinking and singing solidarity" of the trade sodality, which cuts across political divisions, bringing together the enemies of the day before in confraternal orgies, before they themselves end in a duel. Behind the partisan and commercial logic, there is the reality of a concrete community, of lived connivance, which led Hugo, who had become a scholar of quarrels, to say: "There are no real hatreds except literary hatreds, political hatreds are nothing". The literature of the period records a number of such moments of confraternity of arms between writers of opposing persuasions, which sometimes leads us to doubt the sincerity of the quarrels, which appear to be a purely theatrical device.
Balzac, publishing Illusions perdues (Lost Illusions) around 1840, whose plot dates back to 1821, the start of the Romantic quarrel, lamented the days when greater frankness prevailed in literary combat. Jules Janin, his great adversary, responds to this critical description of the press - animated by a ferocious anthropophagic tendency - with an article entitled Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, in which he insists, on the contrary, on the solidarity of body that unites enemies, including Carlists and Republicans. To Balzac's cruel vision, he would like to contrast the image of the honor of the profession, of a chivalrous war, the remnant of an Ancien Régime spirit in a democratic world that knows only how to let its children devour each other. As for Baudelaire, in his Salon of 1845, he sought to position himself beyond the opposition of friends and enemies, through a more modest ideal than that of Janin or the Goncourts: he opted for strict critical impartiality, rejecting both friends and enemies, and proudly acknowledging that Delacroix and Ingres could be equally good painters.
