Père Goriot is set in the wake of the Bourbon Restoration, which represented a return to the highly stratified social classes of prerevolutionary France after the turmoil of the French Revolution and Napoleon’s rule. The Paris the novel portrays is one in which the rich and the poor occupy different worlds. The ornate, lavish ballrooms of Madame de Beauséant and Monsieur de Restaud are juxtaposed against the poverty and misery of the Maison Vauquer; where the rich live in opulent, spacious mansions, the poor are crammed into seedy boarding houses. Likewise, the food the characters consume, the products they buy, and the entertainment they enjoy are vastly different depending on whether they are a member of the wealthy elite of Parisian society. Even movement throughout the city, which would seem to reveal the porousness of the physical and figurative boundaries that separate rich from poor, highlights the separation of the social classes: The luxurious carriages of the rich contrast with the muddy roads used by the poor.

The separation of social classes is rigorously policed in a number of quiet, subtle ways. The rules of etiquette, for example, help ensure that anyone not raised in upper-class households remains outside of elite social circles.