Eugène de Rastignac

Eugène de Rastignac (French pronunciation: [øʒɛn də ʁastiɲak]) is a fictional character from La Comédie humaine, a series of novels by Honoré de Balzac. He appears as a main character in Le Père Goriot (1835), and his social advancement in the post-revolutionary French world depicted by Balzac can be followed through Rastignac's various appearances in other books of the series.

Rastignac is initially portrayed as an ambitious young man of noble, albeit poor, extraction who is at times both envious of and naive about high society. Although he is ready to do anything to achieve his goals, he spurns the advice of Vautrin (the series' dark criminal mastermind) and instead uses his own wits and charm (especially through relationships with women, such as his cousin Madame de Beauséant) to arrive at his ends. His eventual social success in the fictional world of the Comédie humaine is frequently contrasted with the tragic failure of another young parvenu in the series: Lucien de Rubempré (who accepts the aid of Vautrin and ends his life by his own hands).

In French today, to refer to someone as a Rastignac is to call him or her an ambitious arriviste or social climber.