Facts, drama, are a bit lacking; and then the action is spread over a too extended period (October 1864; The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, translated by Steegmuller, p. 80).

In October 1867 he confessed to George Sand: “I am afraid the conception is faulty, which is irremediable. Will such flabby characters interest anybody?” (Correspondance, vol. 3, p. 697). And in July 1868: “The patriots won’t forgive me this book, nor the reactionaries either! So much the worse: I write things as I feel them—that is, as I believe they exist” (The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, translated by Steegmuller, p.116).

Indeed, Sentimental Education was unfavorably received by the press. The book was deemed unreadable because of the thinness of plot and the lack of defined personalities of its characters: Was this still a novel? One of the most virulent journalists, the Catholic and Decadent Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, attacked it as a perfect example of Realism, deprived of heroes and panache; others criticized the impassiveness of the narrator in the face of the immorality of his subject. The book was simply a faithful depiction of the times, retorted Taine and Sand. A few years later, the Naturalists, Zola foremost among them, extolled Sentimental Education as Flaubert’s masterpiece, precisely for its avoidance of romance and for the impartiality of the author. After Flaubert’s death, Proust and Franz Kafka were equally enthusiastic, but on very different grounds: They liked Flaubert’s style. While Henry James and Jean-Paul Sartre rather preferred Madame Bovary, the Nouveaux Romanciers (New Novelists) of the 1960s, led by Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute, saw in this book a forerunner of their own deconstruction of traditional novelistic character, time, structure, and rhetoric.


Here is how Karl Marx characterized the atmosphere in France around 1848: “passions without truth, truths without passion; heroes without heroic deeds, history without events; development, whose sole driving force seems to be the calendar, wearying with constant repetition of the same tensions and relaxations” (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, p. 43). On the triple plane of “passions,” “heroes,” and “history,” Marx says the “development” gets bogged down in the reiteration of the same phenomena and gives the impression of going round in circles, implying an enormous loss of energy, an entropy. Flaubert would agree. Circularity and entropy affect the three elements that, following Marx’s suggestion, I will successively examine in Flaubert’s novel: the hero’s evolution, his passions, and France’s turmoil. For Sentimental Education is at once an educational novel, a sentimental novel, and a political novel.

The Story of a Young Man, as the book is subtitled, is an educational novel, or more specifically a bildungsroman, a subgenre that depicts a generally masculine hero on the threshold of adulthood, whose development results in the acquisition not only of knowledge and skills, but of a certain wisdom. This genre had been popular since the eighteenth century, with the rise of a bourgeoisie that aspired to grow through personal improvement (the nobility only “took the pain of being born,” and the lower classes had no hope to get on in life). Noteworthy examples of the genre include Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-1796; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship); Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir (1830; The Red and the Black); Balzac’s Le Père Goriot (1834; Father Goriot), in which Rastignac starts his social climbing through the influence of women; and Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860-1861). “Education” presupposes something to learn, several masters or models, a malleable and fecund recepient, a regularity of practice, and unimpeded continuity of time: All these factors are problematic in Sentimental Education. Consequently, at the book’s end, no success has been achieved nor experience gained—and yet, contrary to what happens in Balzac’s bildungsroman Les Illusions perdues (1837; Lost Illusions), Flaubert’s characters, illusions lost, nevertheless endure.

The novel comprises three parts, the first two divided into six chapters each, and the third one into seven. The first part, which starts in medias res, covers the span of time from September 1840 to December 1845. It opens with Frédéric Moreau’s return to his hometown of Nogent-sur-Seine and ends with his move to Paris—a necessary step for all provincials who intended to “make it” in France. In Paris, Frédéric hopes to study law, become a writer or an artist, and conquer his sweetheart Madame Arnoux. The second part takes us from December 1845 to the beginning of February 1848; in addition to his debut in life and his sexual initiation, Frédéric also has a political experience, in the ferment preceding the riots. The third part runs from February 1848 to December 2,1851, the date of Bonaparte’s coup: This event puts an end to the protagonist’s political ambitions. The last two chapters form an epilogue; in the first, dated 1867, we witness the unhappy end of Frédéric’s love story with Madame Arnoux; in the second, dated 1869 (the year of the narration), we measure the impasse of his existential trajectory.

As Flaubert was well aware, the unfolding of narrative time provides no plot advancement, no character development, no building of effect. Frédéric’s career, which suffers from “not having kept to a ready course” (p. 477), is like a journey that goes nowhere. In the introductory chapter, the young man embarks on a boat trip back home to his mother and his high-school friend Deslauriers, in a regressive move up the Seine from Paris to Nogent; in the second-to-last chapter, he wanders, over the course of a few lines, through exotic places before coming back, a little more blase, to his point of departure. In between these two expeditions, he roams endlessly in the capital, to the rhythm of his mediocre law studies, diminishing fortune, and abandoned ideas and aborted projects. Circularity and entropy frame his whole biography.