Financial troubles beset him late in his life, and he spent his final years somewhat isolated and impoverished. Gustave Flaubert died on May 8, 1880, in Croisset.

THE WORLD OF GUSTAVE FLAUBERT AND MADAME BOVARY


1821   Gustave Flaubert is born on December 12 in Rouen, France. His father is a surgeon and medical professor; his mother is from a distinguished provincial bourgeois family. 
1824   Flaubert’s sister, Caroline, is born. 
1829   Honoré de Balzac publishes Les Chouans, his first literary success and the earliest of his works to be included in what he later will call La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy). 
1830   Victor Hugo’s Hernani appears, as does Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black).  The July Revolution results in the abdication of King Charles X and the establishment of the “citizen king” Louis-Philippe.
1831   Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame)  is published.
1832   Gustave enters school at the College Royal in Rouen; he studies the ancient Greeks and Romans, and favors such Ro mantic writers as Goethe, Byron, Chateaubriand, and Hugo. 
1833   George Sand’s Lelia appears. Jules Michelet publishes the first volume of his monumental Histoire de France (History of France);  the seventeen-volume work will be completed in 1867.
1836   Flaubert falls deeply in love with Elisa Schlésinger, eleven years his senior; he later will take her as his model for several of his literary heroines. 
1837   An avid writer from an early age, Flaubert publishes two stories. 
1840—1841   He begins studying law in Paris. 
1844   Flaubert has his first “nervous” attack, probably an epileptic seizure. The resulting coma and further illness cause him to 
   abandon his legal studies for the life of a writer at his estate in Croisset, on the River Seine between Paris and Rouen. Le Comte de Monte Cristo (The Count of Monte Cristo),  by Alexandre Dumas (père), is published.
1845   Flaubert completes the first version of L‘Éducation sentimen tale (A Sentimental Education).  His beloved sister, Caroline, marries.
1846   Flaubert’s father dies in January, and Caroline dies in March. Devastated, Flaubert sets up house in Croisset with his mother and Caroline’s infant daughter—a living arrange ment that will persist for the next twenty-five years. During a visit to Paris, Flaubert meets the poet Louise Colet, who becomes his mistress. 
1847   Flaubert and writer and photographer Maxime du Camp take a walking tour along the River Loire and the Brittany coast. The journal Flaubert keeps during this tour will be published posthumously (1886) as Par les champs et par les grèves (Over the Fields and Over the Shores). 
1848   In Paris, Flaubert witnesses the Revolution and the estab lishment of the French Second Republic. After some months of political turmoil, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte is elected president. 
1849   The manuscript of La Tentation de Saint Antoine (The Temptation of Saint Anthony)  is criticized by Flaubert’s friends for its overly Romantic style. Later in the year, Flaubert journeys to the Near East with du Camp.
1850   Eugène Delacroix paints the ceiling of the Louvre’s Galerie d’Apollon (Gallery of Apollo). 
1851   Back in Croisset, Flaubert begins writing Madame Bovary—a painstaking process that will last almost five years. Gérard de Nerval’s Voyage en Orient (Voyage to the East)  is published.
1852   Having staged a coup late in 1851, Louis-Napoleon Bona parte seizes the monarchy as Napoleon III and establishes the French Second Empire. 
1853   Georges Haussmann begins redesigning the streets, parks, and other physical aspects of Paris. 
1855   Flaubert and Louise Colet end their relationship. 
1856   Late in the year, Madame Bovary appears in installments in the Revue de Paris. 
1857   Flaubert is brought to trial for the novel’s alleged moral indecency but is exonerated. Madame Bovary is published in book form. Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil ) is published; Baudelaire is tried and fined for the content of his work.
1858   A trip to Tunisia provides Flaubert with inspiration for Salammbô,  a novel about ancient Carthage.
1862  Salammbô is published. Flaubert begins to spend more time in Paris, cultivating friendships with George Sand, Emile Zola, and Ivan Turgenev. Hugo’s Les Miserables  is published.
1866   Respected by the court of Napoleon III, Flaubert is made a knight in the French Legion of Honor. 
1867   The mother of the young Guy de Maupassant is a friend of Flaubert and introduces her son to the author. 
1869  L‘Education sentimentale  is published.
1870 1871   The Franco-Prussian War leads to the end of the French Second Empire and establishment of the Third Republic. When de Maupassant returns from military service in the war, he begins a literary apprenticeship with Flaubert, who coaches him in his writing and introduces him to other lead ing writers. 
1872   Flaubert’s mother dies. 
1873   Arthur Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell) and Jules Verne’s Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingt jours (Around the World in Eighty Days)  are published.
1874   The production of Flaubert’s play Le Candidat (The Candi date) is a failure. La Tentation de Saint Antoine  is published.
1877  Trois Contes (Three Stories) is published. Émile Zola’s L’Assommoir (The Dram Shop or The Drunkard)  is published.
1880   Gustave Flaubert dies, suddenly and unexpectedly, in Crois set on May 8. 
1881   The novel Bouvard et Pécuchet,  unfinished when Flaubert died, is published.

INTRODUCTION

A joke is the most powerful thing there is, the most terrible: it is irresistible... Great pity for people who believe in the seriousness of life.

—Gustave Flaubert, Intimate Notebooks

What Is Reality?

Flaubert has often been credited as being the Father of Realism. Madame Bovary, his first and most classically plot-driven novel, has been labeled as “realist” because of—as many critics would have it—the author’s choice to depict “mediocre” and “vulgar” protagonists circling around a subject as “trite” as adultery. Like much criticism, these readings tell us a great deal more about the critics than the novel. Implicit in such statements are the assumptions (a) that there is anything “trite” about the conflict between human desire and the social demand for monogamy—which, as we will see, was applied selectively in Flaubert’s time to the lower reaches of the French middle class; and (b) that the author himself was immune to the trashy and fickle illusions embraced by his characters.

Writing in 1964, critic and novelist Mary McCarthy describes Emma Bovary as “a very ordinary middle-class woman with banal expectations of life and an urge to dominate her surroundings. Her character is remarkable only for an unusual deficiency of human feeling” (“Foreword”; see “For Further Reading”). Sensing, perhaps, a need to distance herself from the proto-feminist implications of Emma’s dilemma, the brilliant, prolific McCarthy could only describe her as “trite.” Instead, she chooses to valorize Charles for his unfailing love of his wife—a love that is no less misguided and false than Emma’s romantic illusions.

Except for the brief deathbed appearance of Dr. Lariviere, a man who “disdainful of honours, of titles, and of academies ... generous, fatherly to the poor, and practising virtue without believing in it, ... would almost have passed for a saint if the keenness of his intellect had not caused him to be feared as a demon” (p. 295), all of Flaubert’s characters are equally flawed and deluded. There is the rapacious, progressive pharmacist Homais and the dull-witted Charles, who loves his young wife for all the wrong reasons.