Gustav Flaubert, known in the entire literate world as the author of Madame Bovary and not much beyond that, had a good deal to say about much else. Though hardly read today, his Sentimental Education, which was greeted at the time with bafflement and hostility, has been praised since by dozens of major western writers. Emile Zola was one of the few of Flaubert’s contemporaries to favorably review it, saying it avoided the “dramatic and novelistic” and that “it never lied.” When Baudelaire called it a “tour de force;” Flaubert said he had gotten “into the secret heart of my work.” Georges Sand, one of Flaubert’s closest friends, of course praised it.
Franz Kafka confessed to his fiancée, Felice Bauer, that Sentimental Education “has been as dear to me as are only two or three people.” Ford Madox Ford, the British novelist, claimed that one “had to read it fourteen times,” as he had, to fully appreciate it. Ernest Hemingway wrote William Faulkner that Flaubert was “our most respected, honored master.” Mario Vargas Llosa, Vladimir Nabokov, Milan Kundera, and Marcel Proust all praised his work. Add social theorists such as Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Paul Sartre whose enormous psychoanalytic-dialectical study of Flaubert The Family Idiot appeared in 1971 and you have a sense of the depth and range of the admiration in which he is held.
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Although Madame Bovary was not Flaubert’s first novel it was the one that brought him fame, and notoriety. Published in 1856, court appearances for obscenity and the “corruption of public morals” quickly followed, turning Madame Bovary into a best-seller and Flaubert’s next novel anxiously awaited. Salammbó appeared in 1862, with more lurid scenes, of sex and war. Reverting to the earlier Walter Scott genre of historical novel, it was set in the long-ago and far-away Carthage of the Second Punic war, 241-238 BCE. It too was an enormous best seller driven by expectations and titillation, though not raising the ire Madame Bovary had because, well, after all, the characters were not French, and such behavior might be expected of others.
With Sentimental Education in 1869, Flaubert returned his focus to France and to history and society of not so long before –from 1840 through the Revolutions of 1848 to be exact. The twenty-six year old Flaubert had been a participant-observer of those risings in Paris. The novel, however, was received with “bafflement and hostility.” Henry James, the well-known American-British author and critic said it was an enormous step down from Madame Bovary, which he had loved; it was “like masticating ashes and sawdust.”
What was the problem?
Was it what it was about? Or, how the story was told?
Frédéric Moreau is a young man with a small amount of wealth who moves from the boredom of country life into Paris of 1840 to study Law. He is struck immediately just above the heart by the vision of Madame Arnoux, the pretty wife of a man who makes his living in the unlikely combination of Art and Industry, a man who has a surfeit of mistresses he is not loath to share. Relatively well-off (bourgeoisie) characters meet, have disputes, carry on liaisons, pronounce opinions for two-thirds of the book. The streets of Paris erupt in February of 1848 and again in June with civil riots, and armed suppression. The theme declared in the title, the education of the sentiments, which is to say the sexual awakening, experience, growth of wisdom in a young man. Sex and war, a popular genre around the world. There should be plenty of material for a stirring novel of ideas and change. Why then was it received in its time with bafflement and hostility, and why is it so little read today?
The fun part is sharing with Flaubert his contempt for the bourgeoisie. Throughout, in some sections more than others, is a running play of irony, some of it suitable for Noel Coward drawing-room comedy, some spilling into contempt. A young man from the country treating those more wealthy than he to a dinner complains about everything to show his superior taste. Two rivals appear on the steps leading to the apartment of their shared desire at the same moment. One finds the wit to defuse the situation and both go off together for a shared meal. A husband pleads with his wife’s admirer to visit her, so that he will be free to visit the admirer’s lover. At a dinner party, a young man bares his heart:
“… you know that I love you!”
Madame Arnoux made no reply.
“You know that I love you!”
She still kept silent.
“Well, then, go be hanged!” said Frédéric to himself.
All is not boudoirs and betrayals. The Revolutions of 1848 are erupting all over Europe, Paris included. At a posh dinner party rumors run rife of secret signals from insurgents in the city and “twenty-three thousand convicts on the side of the Socialists— no less!”
On the third of the February days of 1948, blood has been spilled, the King has abdicated. Even so, for some
“Nothing could be more amusing than the aspect of Paris during the first days that followed the Revolution. Fredric gave [Rosanette] his arm, and they strolled along through the streets together. She was highly diverted by the display of rosettes in every buttonhole, by the banners hung from every window, and the bills of every colour that were posted upon the walls, and threw some money here and there into the collection-boxes for the wounded, which were placed on chairs in the middle of the pathway.
The euphoria gives way to business. A new government is needed. A wealthy friend persuades Frédéric that he is the ideal person.
“… soon he was dazzled by a kind of dizziness. The great figures of the Convention passed before his mental vision. It seemed to him that a splendid dawn was about to rise. Rome, Vienna and Berlin were in a state of insurrection, and the Austrians had been driven out of Venice. All Europe was agitated. Now was the time to make a plunge into the movement, and perhaps to accelerate it; and then he was fascinated by the costume which it was said the deputies would wear.
Even serious, much-needed, ideas of reform and progress run the mockery of exaggeration:
There should be a jury to examine the works of women, special editors for women, a polytechnic school for women, a National Guard for women, everything for women! And, since the Government ignored their rights, they ought to overcome force by force. Ten thousand citizenesses with good guns ought to make the Hôtel de Ville quake!
The not so fun part of the reading is trying to make sense of the panorama of characters, their changing relationships, their duplicities, the needs for money, the attitudes and even the time-span of events; worse, do we care enough to make the effort? Although Flaubert fanatically researched the evidence available, as he did for all his novels –documents, newspapers, actual testimony– the details spread before us are of subtle social observations, some of them incredibly astute, not interlinked plot points. We get brief flashes, quick impressions. French personalities, Cavaignac and Changarnier orient readers of the day but without explanatory phrases are not much help to us. Flaubert is a novelist, not a historian. Named characters flit in and out of the big events or, in the most telling omission, are not even there. Concern for status and standing is always in the foreground; momentous, nation-changing events are in the wings and background.
” … fascinated and exceedingly amused by the scene around him. The wounded who sank to the ground, the dead lying at his feet, did not seem like persons really wounded or really dead. The impression left on his mind was that he was looking on at a show.
And this was a novel intended to be, Flaubert had said, “a moral history of the men of my generation…” Unfortunately for his anticipating readers, that history was not of great ideals and democratic progress. The truth he told was of “unending lies,” “false politics,” “false literature,” “false credit,” and even “false courtesans.” In novelizing these views, however, he used the flat, presentational style of the French realists, of whom he was a significant member –life as it really is, no embellishments. He did not attack with the delighted ferocity of later social critics such as Tom Wolfe or Gore Vidal, whose slash and verve become entertainments in themselves.
I myself might have put Sentimental Education aside part way through, not being too interested in anthropologies of manners, even if novelized. What pulled me forward was a long interest in the events of 1848 — among the most consequential in European history. Citizen uprisings, and government overthrows occurred in over twenty cities and regions, from Palermo, Italy to Paris, Rome, Vienna, and Berlin. Here was a book, famous at the time, by an author still regarded as a giant, in which I might see how literature responds to, portrays, and reflects on men’s propensity for war.
Frédéric and his friends, –even some capitalists!– get involved in street demonstrations leading to the abdication of Louis Napoleon III and the creation of the Second Republic – as short lived as it was to be. How did Flaubert portray these events, which he himself had been a part of as a twenty-six year old? How does his treatment of war and death compare to those of his contemporary “realist” novelists – Victor Hugo in Les Misérables (1862) and Ninety-Three (about the French Revolution, 1874), Emile Zola in The Downfall/ Le Debacle (about the Franco Prussian War, 1892,) or Stendhal’s much praised Waterloo scenes in The Red and the Black (1830)? In short, which side is he on, of progress or reaction? Why did he, in despair, say to a friend, while surveying the enormous devastation in Paris following the suppression of the Commune in 1871, with over 200,000 deaths, that ‘all this could have been prevented ‘if they had only read my book?’
By the time he was writing Sentimental Education, the days of ’48 were almost twenty years in the past. The Second Republic had been ended by Napoleon III in a coup three years later in early December, 1851. Men had taken different sides at different times, or on both sides at once, depending on where their always fickle interests lay. How did Flaubert judge this time, his time, indeed, his life? With pride, contempt, anger, sorrow, or exhaustion?
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The chapters concerning the five months, February-June, of 1848 can be divided into three rough sections, though Flaubert does not make it easy for us: the February days, 1848, when King Louis Philippe, who had been in power since 1830, is overthrown; the heady days of spring, when Frédéric among many others, offers himself as a candidate for the Assembly of the new Second Republic; the even more chaotic days of June, 1848 when some 10,000 die and 4,000 are deported to Algeria
“A conflict was going on at Porte Saint-Martin. There was something lively and warlike in the air. Frédéric kept walking on without stopping. The excitement of the great city made him gay.
The streets are alive with the fellowship of danger; the much mocked Louis Philippe is surely about to fall. Frédéric, however, still has the room at his disposal. He remembers his fondness for Rosanette, who responds gladly.
“Near the Arc de Triomphe a dead horse lay on the ground. Behind the gratings groups consisting of five or six persons were chatting.”
Frédéric observes a man arguing with his wife to let him go join in the fighting. He turns to enlist support.
“Citizen, I ask you, is it fair? I have always done my duty, in 1830, ’32, ’34, and ’39! I have to fight!
The streets are in an uproar.
“Men were haranguing the crowd with frenzied eloquence on street corners. Others were ringing church bells for all they were worth. Lead was melted, cartridges were rolled. The trees on the boulevards, the public urinals, the benches, the railings, the gas lamps were all pulled out or turned upside down. By morning Paris was covered in barricades. “
On the other side, things are no better:
“… equality manifested itself triumphantly as an equality of brute beasts, a common level of bloody crimes; for the fanaticism of the rich balanced out the frenzy of the needy, the aristocracy was as furious as the rabble, and the cotton nightcap was just as hideous than the red bonnet.”
Why hostility greeted the novel can be seen. Published not quite twenty years after the events themselves, twenty-year old participants were not yet forty. Those who had fought, whether to bring about the Second Republic, or to defend the monarchy– found themselves treated as minor actors in a novel about dalliances and self-concern. The betrayals in the novel were not of political and communal ideals but of fatuous “let’s not talk politics” parvenus.
In the closing lines of the book, Frédéric and Deslauriers, who we have followed through these tumultuous years, reminisce about “the greatest day of our lives!” It is a youthful visit to a bordello — two years before anything in the book happened!
As Edmund Wilson writes, even if in admiration,
“There are no heroes, no villains, to arouse us, no clowns to amuse us, no scenes to wring our hearts. Yet the effect is deeply moving. It is the tragedy of nobody in particular, but of the poor human race itself reduced to such ineptitude such cowardice and such commonness, such weak irresolution– arriving, with so many fine notions in its head, so many noble words on its lips, at a failure which is all the more miserable because those who have failed are hardly conscious of having done so.”
The issue to my mind, however, seems to be readers’ disappointment with the storytelling itself. Since stories have been told we have expected them to engage us; the surest way to do that is to show us at our best, our most courageous, our most admirable. On the whole, we are not engaged by life’s banalities, even if we recognize them as our own. We want to see these mimetic representation of our lives, to be in a shape and arrangement more concentrated than life itself, more exciting and dangerous, more meaningful. We want to imagine brave deeds, overcoming odds and rising to heights; we want daring on the barricades, not a finger cut while cooking and helplessness in putting on our own band-aid. Flaubert refuses to give us heroes.
As he understood the problem of its poor reception, he told Georges Sand it might have been the lack of traditional novelistic construction. “But Art isn’t nature,” he justified himself. As Peter Brooks has it, he had “de-dramatized the novel.” And we readers want our drama.
There is something else that matters, deeply. Flaubert hated the class he was writing about –the Parisian bourgeois– with a passion. All during the writing of Sentimental Education, he communicated his distaste in letters.
To one he wrote,
“To paint the modern French bourgeois gives me a strange stink in the nose”
To another,
“What distresses me is the conviction I have that I am doing something useless, that is something which is contrary to the purpose of Art, which is a vague exaltation.”
Raymond Giraud has written,
“[the novel] is his judgement of his time, his condemnation of the entire bourgeois civilization of the late July Monarchy and early Empire … Frederic Moreaus’ s life ends in failure …. he submits to and participates in his own corruption … becoming a “bourgeois” in Flaubert’s own special unfavorable sense of the word. The study of this degradation made Flaubert’s gorge rise; but it was necessary he thought if he were going to write the moral –or sentimental– history of his generation.”
The question remains, however, if the novel was greeted with bafflement and hatred because readers could see his contempt for them, or because they could not see anything of themselves in a book they had looked forward to and what’s more, paid good money for?
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Regardless of the reception at the time, something of his obsessive focus on “the real” took hold in writers who followed. As the years of the Franco-Prussian war gave way the Spanish American war, and the Greco-Turkish war and to World War I, the style of novelized reporting with which he had had so much to do became the norm. One modern commentator has written:
“Flaubert’s descriptions of revolutionary urban violence in Sentimental Education might be said to have influenced war-writing and the way novelists write about war. “Frédéric felt something soft under his foot; it was the hand of a sergeant in a grey overcoat who was lying face down in the gutter.” When Roque fires into a crowd of prisoners and shoots someone, Flaubert marshals that cold discipline we think of as a twentieth-century invention: “There was a tremendous howl, then nothing. Something white remained on the edge of the grating.” His prose, like a good doctor, does not get emotionally involved; it refuses to follow the anarchy of its subject-matter—and thus, in one respect, denies its own subject-matter, acts as if the subject is not there.
Flaubert’s treatment of war then, at least in this novel, is that seen over the shoulders of the Paris bourgeois. Personal concerns block out communal acts; transactions — sexual or commercial– are more vital than gunfire through the barricaded streets. With the exception of several strong condemnatory paragraphs about prisoners held in a dank prisons by the Seine, Flaubert’s descriptions of the fighting in the streets is as of objects, unadorned with anger or sympathy. As if, disputes over governance or distribution of wealth were fungi on the carapace of social life.
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My question as to if and how literature affects people’s views of, support for, or resistance to, wars, finds a partial answer in this. If many would argue there is little or no connection between war, stories of war and our participation in war, Flaubert, in the negative, disagreed. Standing in the city-wide ruins in Paris of 1871, after the suppression of the Commune and three years after the publication of Sentimental Education, he wished to his friend Maxime Du Camp, that if people had read and understood his novel, this would not have happened. He believed that novels had the power to influence human behavior.
“When Flaubert claims the force of his novel as predictive of events that unfolded shortly after its publication, he summons us to think about how the novel as genre can shape our understanding of events.” … it is “among other things a meditation on the role of human agency in the making of history… a reflection of the capacity of human action to inflect event.” Peter Brooks
The contrary might be adduced by our own, modern, reaction to the novel: null.
Yet Flaubert’s innovation of non-adjectival descriptions of flames, dead bodies and looted buildings has taken hold in much contemporary war writing. Seldom do we anymore see war and those who fight them, held up with the pure, innocent, admiration of Sir Walter Scott, or the Book of Joshua or John Wayne movies. The novels of WWI describe the daily life of soldiers, as often of boredom and routine details as of fighting in the trenches. Those descriptions, far from the celebratory as were their predecessors, are conscious of, if not condemnatory, of the human waste. WWII novels, often using the tension of battle as their propulsive mechanism, are rich in psychological and sociological observations, of all aspects of human behavior, from cowardice to dumb-luck to self-doubt turning into heroic actions, attentive to the reality that if there is exuberant excitement in battle, there is also wide and deep fear and failure.