In the end, Frédéric decides to leave Rosanette behind and, alleging a civic sense that does not encroach on his private interests, goes back to the embattled capital.

Fontainebleau, the site of a François I castle, offers the lovers a flight into past history. While monarchy is being abolished in Paris, the Fontainebleau domain maintains the “impassiveness of royalty” (p. 359); while the Tuileries are ransacked, the Renaissance palace remains severely sumptuous. Paris is a prey to urgency, in Fontainebleau an “emanation of the centuries, overwhelming and funereal, like the scent of a mummy” prevails (p. 362). Yet the tourists penetrating the remote apartments and scrutinizing the furniture and the portraits with a lascivious titillation are not without a certain similarity to the mob invading the Tuileries and the princesses’ bedrooms, with an obscene and desecrating curiosity.

As a museum, Fontainebleau could complement the pair’s educational trajectory, were it not that the two tend to reduce past history to private, sentimental details. The illiterate Rosanette interprets the deeds of the grandees according to her own petty preoccupations; did Christine of Sweden have her favorite assassinated at Fontainebleau? “ ‘No doubt it was jealousy? Better watch out!’ ” (p. 359). The well-read Frédéric relates more accurately to those who haunted these rooms, Emperor Charles V, the Valois kings, Henri IV, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire. Their trysts arouse him, and the evocation of Diane de Poitiers, mistress of Henri II, fills him with a “mysterious feeling of retrospective lust” (p. 360). In a way, before abandoning Rosanette for the happenings of his time, he is unfaithful to her by his lust for bygone times. In Sentimental Education, history, past and present, is contaminated by the private; conversely, the private is contaminated by history.

Just like Frédéric’s destiny and his great passion, the revolution as reconstructed in the book is tossed off according to chance, sudden inspirations, and weaknesses. Like Frédéric’s destiny and passion, it appears split between the future (here the socialist utopia) and its past references: “ ‘A new ’89 is in preparation” (p. 20). Yet 1789 is a detrimental precedent: “Every person at that time modeled himself after someone, one copied Saint-Just, another Danton, another Marat”; another one “tried to be like Blanqui, who imitated Robespierre” (p. 340). The repetition, noted by Marx, does not end there. Consider, for instance, the mystery of the “calf’s head,” an English import:

In order to parody the ceremony which the Royalists celebrated on the thirtieth of January [anniversary of Charles I’s execution], some Independents threw an annual banquet, at which they ate calves’ heads ... while toasting the extermination of the Stuarts. After Thermidor, some Terrorists organized a brotherhood of a similar description, which proves how contagious stupidity is (pp. 476-477).

Flaubertian “folly,” which amounts to uncontrolled reiteration, does not spare the sequels of revolutions: that of Cromwell, that of the Jacobins, that of 1848, the epigones imitating with reverence what the predecessors imitated as a mockery. And the coup of December 1851 reiterates that of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1799, with a nephew who is but a shadow of his monumental uncle. The course of history also betrays circularity and entropy.

Who is Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte? A Napoleon with a touch of the royal Louis, a prince elected president before usurping power, an adventurer who garners the benefits of autocracy, republic, and military populism. Even though he accepted the new regime, Flaubert shows how this amalgam is in sync with the ideological confusion and the recantations of almost all the characters in Sentimental Education: from Dambreuse, an ex-noble turned speculator who always sides with the victor, to Martinon, an opportunist who sleeps with Madame Dambreuse and marries her husband’s daughter; from Sénécal, a Jacobin with fascistic tendencies, to Regimbart, a protestor and a drunkard; from the self-righteous Madame Dambreuse to la Vatnaz, a procuress and feminist full of envy; and even Dussardier, the honest republican misled into serving the forces of repression. The exasperation of the revolution reduces them all to “an equality of brute beasts, a same level of bloody turpitude; for the fanaticism of self-interest balanced the frenzy of the poor, aristocracy had the same fits of fury as the mob, and the cotton cap did not prove less hideous than the red cap” (pp. 377-378).

This messy history is largely apprehended from a private perspective, that of Frédéric. As a consequence, even though the narrator never intervenes, history is not described in an impartial way. Of course, Frédéric is neutral, and even too much so; yet his is not the neutrality of the historian who is above any partisanship but rather that of the idler, who gets excited briefly and then leaves. The historian scrutinizes the complexity of the situation, the idler sees surfaces; the historian discerns links and proposes syntheses, the idler catches glimpses; the historian looks for reasons, the idler is stopped by a detail or an image.