Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert (born December 12, 1821, Rouen, France—died May 8, 1880, Croisset) was a novelist regarded as the prime mover of the realist school of French literature and best known for his masterpiece, Madame Bovary (1857), a realistic portrayal of bourgeois life, which led to a trial on charges of the novel’s alleged immorality.

Early life and works

Flaubert’s father, Achille Cléophas Flaubert, who was from Champagne, was chief surgeon and clinical professor at the Hôtel-Dieu hospital in Rouen. His mother, a doctor’s daughter from Pont l’Évêque, belonged to a family of distinguished magistrates typical of the great provincial bourgeoisie.

Gustave Flaubert began his literary career at school, his first published work appearing in a little review, Le Colibri, in 1837. He early formed a close friendship with the young philosopher Alfred Le Poittevin, whose pessimistic outlook had a strong influence on him. No less strong was the impression made by the company of great surgeons and the environment of hospitals, operating theatres, and anatomy classes, with which his father’s profession brought him into contact.

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Flaubert’s intelligence, moreover, was sharpened in a general sense. He conceived a strong dislike of accepted ideas (idées reçues), of which he was to compile a “dictionary” for his amusement. He and Le Poittevin invented a grotesque imaginary character, called “le Garçon” (the Boy), to whom they attributed whatever sort of remark seemed to them most degrading. Flaubert came to detest the “bourgeois,” by which he meant anyone who “has a low way of thinking.”

In November 1841 Flaubert was enrolled as a student at the Faculty of Law in Paris. At age 22, however, he was recognized to be suffering from a nervous disease that was taken to be epilepsy, although the essential symptoms were absent. This made him give up the study of law, with the result that henceforth he could devote all his time to literature. His father died in January 1846, and his beloved sister Caroline died in the following March after giving birth to a daughter. Flaubert then retired with his mother and his infant niece to his estate at Croisset, near Rouen, on the Seine. He was to spend nearly all the rest of his life there.

On a visit to Paris in July 1846, at the sculptor James Pradier’s studio, Flaubert met the poet Louise Colet. She became his mistress, but their relationship did not run smoothly. His self-protecting independence and her jealousy made separation inevitable, and they parted in 1855.

In 1847 Flaubert went on a walking tour along the Loire and the coast of Brittany with the writer Maxime du Camp, whose acquaintance he had made as a law student. The pages written by Flaubert in their journal of this tour “over fields and shores” were published after his death under that title, Par les champs et par les grèves. This book contains some of his best writing—e.g., his description of a visit to Chateaubriand’s family estate, Combourg.

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Mature career

Some of the works of Flaubert’s maturity dealt with subjects on which he had tried to write earlier. At age 16, for instance, he completed the manuscript of Mémoires d’un fou (“Memoirs of a Mad Man”), which recounted his devastating passion for Elisa Schlésinger, 11 years his senior and the wife of a music publisher, whom he had met in 1836. This passion was only revealed to her 35 years later when she was a widow. Elisa provided the model for the character Marie Arnoux in the novel L’Education sentimentale. Before receiving its definitive form, however, this work was to be rewritten in two distinct intermediate versions in manuscript: Novembre (1842) and a preliminary draft entitled L’Éducation sentimentale (1843–45). Stage by stage it was expanded into a vast panorama of France under the July Monarchy—indispensable reading, according to Georges Sorel, for any historian studying the period that preceded the coup d’etat of 1851.

The composition of La Tentation de Saint Antoine provides another example of that tenacity in the pursuit of perfection that made Flaubert go back constantly to work on subjects without ever being satisfied with the results. In 1839 he was writing Smarh, the first product of his bold ambition to give French literature its Faust. He resumed the task in 1846–49, in 1856, and in 1870, and finally published the book as La Tentation de Saint Antoine in 1874. The four versions show how the author’s ideas changed in the course of time. The version of 1849, influenced by Spinoza’s philosophy, is nihilistic in its conclusion. In the second version the writing is less diffuse, but the substance remains the same. The third version shows a respect for religious feeling that was not present in the earlier ones, since in the interval Flaubert had read Herbert Spencer and reconciled the Spencerian notion of the Unknown with his Spinozism. He had come to believe that science and religion, instead of conflicting, are rather the two poles of thought. The published version incorporated a catalog of errors in the field of the Unknown (just as Bouvard et Pécuchet was to contain a list of errors in the field of science).

From November 1849 to April 1851 Flaubert was travelling in Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Turkey, Greece, and Italy with Maxime du Camp. Before leaving, however, he wanted to finish La Tentation and to submit it to his friend the poet Louis Bouilhet and to du Camp for their sincere opinion. For three days in September 1849 he read his manuscript to them, and they then condemned it mercilessly. “Throw it all into the fire, and let’s never mention it again.” Bouilhet gave further advice: “Your Muse must be kept on bread and water or lyricism will kill her. Write a down-to-earth novel like Balzac’s Parents pauvres. The story of Delamare, for instance. . . .”

Eugéne Delamare was a country doctor in Normandy who died of grief after being deceived and ruined by his wife, Delphine (née Couturier). The story, in fact that of Madame Bovary, is not the only source of that novel. Another was the manuscript Mémoires de Mme Ludovica, discovered by Gabrielle Leleu in the library of Rouen in 1946. This is an account of the adventures and misfortunes of Louise Pradier (née d’Arcet), the wife of the sculptor James Pradier, as dictated by herself, and, apart from the suicide, it bears a strong resemblance to the story of Emma Bovary. Flaubert, out of kindness as well as out of professional curiosity, had continued to see Louise Pradier when the “bourgeois” were ostracizing her as a fallen woman, and she must have given him her strange document. Even so, when inquisitive people asked him who served as model for his heroine, Flaubert replied, “Madame Bovary is myself.” As early as 1837 he had written Passion et vertu, a short and pointed story with a heroine, Mazza, resembling Emma Bovary. For Madame Bovary he took a commonplace story of adultery and made of it a book that will always be read because of its profound humanity. While working on his novel Flaubert wrote: “My poor Bovary suffers and cries in more than a score of villages in France at this very moment.” Madame Bovary, with its unrelenting objectivity—by which Flaubert meant the dispassionate recording of every trait or incident that could illuminate the psychology of his characters and their role in the logical development of his story—marks the beginning of a new age in literature.

Madame Bovary cost the author five years of hard work. Du Camp, who had founded the periodical Revue de Paris, urged him to make haste, but he would not. The novel, with the subtitle Moeurs de province (“Provincial Customs”), eventually appeared in installments in the Revue from October 1 to December 15, 1856. The French government then brought the author to trial on the ground of his novel’s alleged immorality, and he narrowly escaped conviction (January–February 1857). The same tribunal found the poet Charles Baudelaire guilty on the same charge six months later.

To refresh himself after his long application to the dull world of the bourgeoisie in Madame Bovary, Flaubert immediately began work on Salammbô, a novel about ancient Carthage, in which he set his sombre story of Hamilcar’s daughter Salammbô, an entirely fictitious character, against the authentic historical background of the revolt of the mercenaries against Carthage in 240–237 bc. His transformation of the dry record of Polybius into richly poetic prose is comparable to Shakespeare’s treatment of Plutarch’s narrative in the lyrical descriptions in Antony and Cleopatra. A play, Le Château des coeurs (The Castle of Hearts, 1904), written in 1863, was not printed until 1880.