Le Réalisme

work by Champfleury

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July 13, 2026

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Le Réalisme (1857) was a critical work by French novelist and journalist Champfleury, who was a key theoretician of the Realist movement in art and literature. Champfleury advocated for novels to be like "daguerreotypes" of everyday life, focusing on ordinary people rather than exceptional figures. This approach aimed for a truthful and accurate depiction of contemporary life, rejecting the idealization found in Classicism and Romanticism. Champfleury's theories helped popularize the work of painter Gustave Courbet, known for his frank portrayals of common life. The Realist movement, which gained prominence in France between 1850 and 1880, sought to represent the lives, problems, and customs of the middle and lower classes with close observation and unembellished detail.123

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realism
The novel
…latter’s theories to literature in Le Réalisme (1857). In this influential critical manifesto Champfleury asserted that the hero of a novel should be an ordinary man rather than an exceptional figure. In 1857 Gustave Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary was published. This unrelentingly objective portrait of the bourgeois mentality, with its…
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…latter’s theories to literature in Le Réalisme (1857). In this influential critical manifesto Champfleury asserted that the hero of a novel should be an ordinary man rather than an exceptional figure. In 1857 Gustave Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary was published. This unrelentingly objective portrait of the bourgeois mentality, with its…
Read More