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Who really said it

Behind every great fortune there is a crime

Not Balzac’s wording — a simplified paraphrase Honoré de Balzac 1799–1850 · French novelist · wrote a narrower version of this line
Disputed Rights unconfirmed

Balzac did write about fortunes and crime, but not this sentence: in Le Père Goriot (serialized 1834–35) the escaped convict Vautrin tells a broke law student that a great fortune with no visible cause conceals a crime committed neatly — a claim about a subset, not about every fortune. Quote Investigator ↗ could not locate the compressed maxim in any work Balzac wrote and concludes it evolved through decades of retelling, with no single author.

Last verified 17 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed wording — copy with the correction

“Behind every great fortune there is a crime” is not Balzac's wording and appears in none of his works. In Le Pere Goriot (serialized 1834-35) the criminal Vautrin says, in Ellen Marriage's 1896 translation: "The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed." A compressed form was already in print by 1912, credited only to an unnamed French writer, and Mario Puzo's 1969 epigraph to The Godfather fixed the modern wording under Balzac's name. — Quotle.info

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In context

Evoking the themes of success, power and justice. Theme: "Behind every great fortune there is a crime". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

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Provenance

What Balzac actually wrote

Work
Le Père Goriot
First published
Serialized in the Revue de Paris, December 1834 – February 1835; published as a book in March 1835
Speaker
Vautrin, the escaped convict, addressing the student Rastignac
Translation
Ellen Marriage, 1896 (J. M. Dent, London), p. 124

Despise mankind and find out the meshes that you can slip through in the net of the Code. The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed.”

“Silence, sir! I will not hear any more; you make me doubt myself. Vautrin’s temptation speech

The French original reads: Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu’il a été proprement fait. Note the qualifier — sans cause apparente, without apparent cause. No translation of Balzac renders this as “Behind every great fortune there is a crime.”

Scanned French edition
Le Père Goriot, 1910 edition, page 145
Father Goriot, translated by Ellen Marriage — full text at Project Gutenberg

How the line got shorter

  • 1834–35 — Balzac gives Vautrin the sentence in Le Père Goriot, immediately after a rant about how the Code punishes the crude thief and spares the polished one. Read it in the French original ↗.
  • 1896 and 1900 — the two standard English translations, by Ellen Marriage and by Katharine Prescott Wormeley, both keep the qualifier about fortunes with no apparent cause; neither produces the popular slogan. Both are transcribed by Quote Investigator ↗, and Marriage’s is free at Project Gutenberg ↗.
  • 1912 to 1958 — the maxim circulates in shrinking forms: an unnamed “French writer” in 1912, a hedged “I think it was Balzac” from Sir James Henry Yoxall in 1925, then C. Wright Mills’s The Power Elite in 1956 attaching it firmly to Balzac — all dated and sourced by QI ↗.
  • 1969 — Mario Puzo prints the wording we use today as the epigraph to The Godfather, signed simply “—Balzac,” per Wikipedia ↗. After that the paraphrase is unstoppable.

The two texts shown here are safely out of copyright: Balzac’s French original was published in 1834–35, and Ellen Marriage’s English translation dates from 1896 — Project Gutenberg ↗ hosts it as public domain in the USA. The famous one-liner is a different matter: it is not from either text, has no identifiable author or first publication to attach rights to, and its best-known appearance — the epigraph to The Godfather (1969) — sits in a book that remains in copyright. We therefore assert no rights status for the popular wording.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

Who really said it

Almost every printing of this line carries Balzac’s name, and the name is not baseless — but the sentence is not a translation of anything he wrote. It is the end point of a long compression, and the people who did the compressing are mostly anonymous.

Honoré de Balzac paraphrase

Balzac’s sentence is narrower and conditional — it concerns great fortunes sans cause apparente, those with no visible source. Quote Investigator ↗ states plainly that Balzac did not pronounce a general rule, and that it could not find the compressed maxim in any work he wrote.

An unidentified “French writer” 1912

A Paris dispatch by Pierre Mille, printed in the Charleston News and Courier on 18 May 1912, has a dinner guest at London’s Carlton Hotel quoting “At the base of every great fortune there is a great crime” and crediting only an unnamed French writer — documented by QI ↗. Balzac’s name is absent.

C. Wright Mills, then Mario Puzo 1956 / 1969

Mills’s The Power Elite (1956) credited Balzac with “behind every great fortune there lies a crime,” and Puzo used the exact modern wording as the epigraph of The Godfather — Wikipedia ↗ notes he “opened his 1969 novel with an epigraph popularly attributed to Balzac.”

Richard O’Connor 1971

Wikiquote ↗ suggests the “great crime” variant may have originated in The Oil Barons: Men of Greed and Grandeur (1971) by Richard O’Connor, p. 47. That cannot be where it began: QI ↗ prints the same compressed phrasing from 1912, and Wikiquote itself notes the line was already in The Godfather two years earlier.

Balzac wrote something narrower, sharper and better — and gave it to a criminal to say. The absolute version everyone quotes is an anonymous compression that Quote Investigator ↗ credits to no single person.

Context

What Vautrin was actually arguing

The line lands very differently once you know who says it. In Le Père Goriot the speaker is Vautrin — a master criminal living under a false name in a shabby Paris boarding house — and he is mid-seduction, trying to talk the impoverished student Rastignac into a scheme that ends in a duel and a dead man. His point is not a law of economics. It is: the law punishes the poor thief and lets the polished one alone, so look for the gaps in the net. The French text ↗ puts the sentence at the end of that pitch, and Rastignac’s reply is to beg him to stop talking.

Balzac’s version is also carefully hedged: it is about fortunes sans cause apparente — the ones with no visible source. The compressed maxim drops that qualifier and turns a novelist’s observation into a universal indictment. Wikipedia ↗ calls the popular form a somewhat inaccurate paraphrase, which is about right: it is more quotable and less true.

…a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed.

How the sentence got shorter, decade by decade

1834–35 — Balzac publishes the original in Le Père Goriot: a forgotten crime behind fortunes without apparent cause.

1912 — a newspaper account by Pierre Mille of a London dinner quotes a guest citing an unnamed “French writer”: “At the base of every great fortune there is a great crime.” Balzac is not named. Documented by Quote Investigator ↗.

1925 — Sir James Henry Yoxall writes “Somebody said—I think it was Balzac—that at the root of every great fortune there was a crime,” a hedge that shows the attribution was still loose.

1956 — C. Wright Mills’s The Power Elite credits Balzac with “behind every great fortune there lies a crime,” giving the maxim academic weight.

1969 — Mario Puzo prints “Behind every great fortune there is a crime. —Balzac” as the epigraph of The Godfather. That is the earliest instance of this exact wording in QI’s chronology, and the form everyone now repeats.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Success Power Justice Truth

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Origin: Behind Every Great Fortune There Is a Crimequoteinvestigator.com

The definitive investigation: Balzac’s 1834 original, two early translations, and a dated chronology from 1912 through Puzo’s 1969 epigraph.
Honoré de Balzac — Father Goriot (1835)en.wikiquote.org

Lists the genuine French sentence with a translation, and flags the “great crime” variant as possibly a 1971 paraphrase by Richard O’Connor.
Father Goriot, translated by Ellen Marriagegutenberg.org

Free full text of the 1896 English translation; Vautrin’s speech and the real sentence can be read in context.
Le Père Goriot, 1910 edition — page 145fr.wikisource.org

The French original as printed, showing the sentence at the close of Vautrin’s pitch to Rastignac.
Père Gorioten.wikipedia.org

Publication history (Revue de Paris, December 1834 – February 1835; book March 1835) and a note that the famous paraphrase is inaccurate.
The Godfather (novel)en.wikipedia.org

Confirms Puzo opened his 1969 novel with the epigraph “popularly attributed to Balzac” — the printing that made the wording standard.

The writer behind the idea

Honoré de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac

1799–1850 · French novelist · author of La Comédie humaine

Balzac (born in Tours on 20 May 1799, died in Paris on 18 August 1850) built La Comédie humaine, a linked sequence of novels and stories that Wikipedia ↗ describes as a panorama of post-Napoleonic French life. He is regarded as one of the founders of European literary realism, and his trick of letting the same characters reappear across books — Vautrin and Rastignac among them — is part of why his lines circulate detached from their speakers. The sentence people quote as his was never his; the sharper, narrower one he actually wrote is put in the mouth of a criminal who is trying to corrupt someone.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source

Honoré de Balzac, “Le Père Goriot,” Revue de Paris 12 (1834): 258; English as Father Goriot, trans. Ellen Marriage (London: J. M. Dent, 1896), 124. The popular wording “Behind every great fortune there is a crime” appears in no work by Balzac; see Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: Behind Every Great Fortune There Is a Crime,” 9 September 2013.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Behind every great fortune there is a crime’?” Last verified 17 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/behind-every-great-fortune-there-is-a-crime/

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