He compiled a spicy Dictionnaire des idées reçues (1913; Dictionary of Received Ideas). And his last and unfinished book, Bouvard et Pecuchet (1881), an encyclopedic satire of contemporary practices and knowledge, ends up with the two false scholars returning to their original jobs, that of copyists.

Flaubert’s major preoccupation transcended any school; he called it “style,” in the larger sense of artistic creation. Style for him was as much behind the words as in the words, as much the soul as the flesh of a work. It was not contingent on a topic: “There are neither beautiful nor ugly subjects, and one could almost establish as an axiom, if one adopts the point of view of pure Art, that there is no subject at all, style being in itself an absolute way of seeing things.” He toyed with the notion of composing “a book about nothing, a book without any exterior attachment, which would hold together by the internal force of its style, like the earth holds up in the air without being supported; a book that would have almost no topic, or at least whose topic would be almost invisible, if that is possible” (January 1852, Correspondance, vol. 2, p. 31).

While Baudelaire searched for the flowers, the beauty of evil, Flaubert assigned himself the task of extracting the beauty of the mediocre, the ordeal of resuscitating ancient Carthage in Salammbô (1862), and the challenge of following two idiots, Bouvard and Pecuchet. A recluse in his house at Croisset, in Normandy, like the saints he liked to describe, he experienced the “throes of style”: the anxiety of cutting all banalities, the painful pursuit of the proper word, the trial of oral recitation, and the endless corrections and accumulated drafts. The final manuscript of Sentimental Education is 500 pages long, but the first drafts comprise no less than 2,350 sheets written front and back.


In 1836, at the age of fifteen, Flaubert, the son of a prestigious surgeon from Rouen, visited the Channel beach at Trouville and met a young lady, Elisa Schlésinger, with whom he fell in love at first sight; the two had a quasi-platonic relationship for many years. Her husband, Maurice Schlésinger, a music publisher in Paris, was an exuberant bon vivant and a womanizer. Such is the anecdotal source of the sentimental—that is, amorous—theme of Sentimental Education. In the years following his meeting Elisa, the young and ultra-Romantic Flaubert composed two autobiographical texts: Memoires dun fou (drafted in 1838; Memoirs of a Madman), which tells of the narrator’s encounter with the brunette angel Maria, and Novembre (drafted in 1842; November), in which the same event is followed by the narrator’s move to Paris to study law—Flaubert and later, his fictional character, Frédéric Moreau, did the same—his affair with a married woman, and finally his death as a result of ennui. In 1845, definitively established in Croisset, Flaubert finished a novel entitled Sentimental Education, which presents two friends—Jules, the artist dear to the author’s heart, and Henry the climber—who are both in love with a married woman. They prefigure the heroes of the present work, a second and quite different Sentimental Education, Moreau and Deslauriers.

Flaubert was in Paris at the onset of the revolution of February 1848. He disapproved both of the popular excesses and of the pitiless repression by the conservatives. He scoffed at the naivete of Lamartine and at the sophisms of Pierre Joseph Proudhon, but was no less disgusted by the vindictive republican Adolphe Thiers and by the opportunists who hailed Bonaparte. In 1849 he left Paris on a journey to Egypt and the Orient in the company of his friend Maxime du Camp (who shared many a trait with Deslauriers). He came back in time to witness the coup of December 2, 1851. Less than two years later he observed in September 1853: “ 89 demolished the royalty and the nobility, ’48 the bourgeoisie and ’51 the people. There is nothing left, but a crooked and stupid rabble.—We have all sunk into the same level of common mediocrity” (Correspondance, vol. 2, p. 437). Yet he too came round to the new regime, and stayed on good terms with the Tuileries court, especially Princess Mathilde, the Emperor’s cousin, until the end of the reign.

Upon his return from Egypt, Flaubert set to work on Madame Bovary, which was issued in book form in 1857. In 1862, after a trip to Algeria and Tunisia to visit the ruins of Carthage, he published Salammbô, a historical novel that takes place in the third century B.C. The writing of the second Sentimental Education lasted from 1864 to 1869, almost until the collapse of the Empire and the upheaval of the Commune, during which Flaubert served in the National Guard. Following the appearance of Sentimental Education, Flaubert went back to a manuscript that he had first completed in 1849 but was never satisfied with, La Tentation de Saint Antoine (1874; The Temptation of Saint Anthony). In 1875 he faced financial ruin while supporting his niece, whom he had raised, and her husband. He published Trois Contes (Three Stories) in 1877. And he had almost wrapped up Bouvard et Pecuchet when he died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1880. Critics have often noted in Flaubert’s fiction an alternation of narratives set in the realistic here and now and narratives set in a distant space or time: After Madame Bovary came the historical novel Salammbo; after Salammbo, Sentimental Education; then Saint Anthony moves into the fantastic mode. Among the tales in Three Stories, “Un Coeur simple” (“A Simple Heart”) takes place in contemporary Normandy, while “La Légende de Saint Julien l’Hospitalier” (“The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaler”) and “Hérodias” cultivate the exotic and anachronistic. Finally, the characters Bouvard and Pécuchet bustle around in dangerously close proximity to their public.

This alternation is one symptom of Flaubert’s perpetual uncertainty in regard to his work. As for Sentimental Education, he was not sure about the title—a title Marcel Proust would admire later for its “solidity” while noting in it a grammatical indeterminacy. About his book, Flaubert explained:

I want to write the moral history of the men of my generation—or, more accurately, the history of their feelings. It’s a book about love, about passion; but passion such as can exist nowadays—that is to say, inactive ...