Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert
Born	(1821-12-12)12 December 1821 Rouen, France
Died	8 May 1880(1880-05-08) (aged 58) Croisset, near Rouen, France
Occupation	Novelist, playwright
Nationality	French
Genre	Novel, short story, play
Literary movement	Realism, Romanticism
Notable works	Madame Bovary (1857) Salammbô (1862) L'Éducation sentimentale (1869) Trois Contes (1877)

Gustave Flaubert (pronounced [ɡystav flobɛːʁ] in French; 12 December 1821 – 8 May 1880) was a French writer. He is best known for his novels. Many people consider him one of the most important French writers of the 19th century. He was born in Rouen, in Normandy, and lived most of his life at Croisset, a small place on the river Seine near Rouen. He died there at the age of fifty-eight.

His first published novel, Madame Bovary (1857), is his most famous book. It tells the story of a doctor's wife in a small town who is unhappy with her life and dreams of love and luxury. In 1857, the French state took Flaubert to court because it said that the novel offended public morals. Flaubert was found not guilty, and the trial helped to make the book famous.

He then wrote Salammbô (1862), a novel about ancient Carthage. L'Éducation sentimentale ("Sentimental Education", 1869) tells the story of a young man in Paris before and during the Revolution of 1848. La Tentation de saint Antoine ("The Temptation of Saint Anthony", 1874) is a long dream-like work written mainly as a dialogue. Trois Contes ("Three Tales", 1877) is a collection of three short stories. His last novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet, was unfinished when he died. It was published in 1881.

Flaubert worked very slowly and carefully. He sometimes spent a whole week writing a single page. He searched for what he called le mot juste, the exact word that best fitted each sentence. He also believed that a writer should not directly show personal feelings or opinions in a story. He said that the author should be like God in the universe, "present everywhere and visible nowhere". His careful style and his ideas about writing strongly influenced the modern novel. His work influenced writers such as Guy de Maupassant, Émile Zola, Henry James, Marcel Proust, James Joyce and Franz Kafka.

Flaubert's letters are also an important part of his writing. He wrote thousands of them, especially to the poet Louise Colet, who was his lover, and to the novelist George Sand, who became a close friend. In these letters, he often explained his ideas about writing and art. From the age of twenty-two, he also had attacks of an illness that most modern researchers identify as epilepsy. He lived quietly at Croisset for much of his life and gave most of his time to writing.

Life

His parents

Flaubert's father, Achille-Cléophas Flaubert, was born in 1784 in the Aube region, south-east of Paris. His family had been animal doctors for several generations. He studied medicine in Paris, where he was the best student of his year. He worked under Guillaume Dupuytren, one of the most famous surgeons in France. A surgeon is a doctor who does operations. Dupuytren sent him to the Hôtel-Dieu, the main hospital of Rouen. In 1812, he married Caroline Fleuriot, and in 1818 he became the chief surgeon of the hospital.

Dr Flaubert became a well-known and respected doctor. A Paris medical directory of 1826 called him one of the leading doctors in France. He treated poor patients for free. He also had liberal political opinions at a time when the French state and the Catholic Church worked closely together. His son later gave many of his qualities to Dr Larivière, the great doctor who appears near the end of Madame Bovary.

Dr Flaubert also became rich. He paid a high tax, which gave him the right to vote at a time when only a small number of Frenchmen could do so. When he died in 1846, he left about 800,000 francs, mostly in land and houses. This property included the house at Croisset. The money later allowed Gustave to live without a job and give all his time to literature.

Flaubert's mother, Anne-Justine-Caroline Fleuriot, had a sad childhood. Her mother died when she was born. Her father was a "health officer", a man who practised medicine without being a full doctor. He died when she was nine. She was then brought up by Dr Laumonier, the chief surgeon of the Hôtel-Dieu, and his wife. She was eighteen when she married Dr Flaubert.

The couple had six children, but three died very young. Three survived: Achille, born in 1813, who became a doctor like his father; Gustave, born in 1821; and Caroline, born in 1824.

Childhood at the hospital (1821–1832)

The wing of the Hôtel-Dieu in Rouen where Flaubert was born. It is now the Musée Flaubert.

Gustave Flaubert was born on 12 December 1821 in his father's apartment at the Hôtel-Dieu in Rouen. The family lived in a wing of the hospital that is now a museum about the Flaubert family and the history of medicine. Patients waited for the doctor downstairs. Upstairs was a billiard room, which Gustave and his sister later turned into a theatre. Above it were the children's rooms.

"I was born in a hospital and I lived there for a quarter of a century," he later wrote. Gustave therefore grew up among sick people, dying people and dead bodies. From the family garden, Gustave could see the room where his father cut open dead bodies to teach his students. Gustave and Caroline climbed on a trellis to watch through the windows. Their father sometimes saw them and told them to go away.

Many readers think these early experiences help explain two parts of Flaubert's work. One is its sadness. The other is his habit of observing human beings closely and without showing much feeling, almost like a scientist.

Gustave was very close to his sister Caroline, who was three years younger. From the age of ten, he wrote and acted in plays with her in the billiard room. Later, when he travelled, he wrote her long and loving letters. His older brother Achille was eight years older and soon left for Paris to study medicine, so the two brothers were never close. His mother taught him to read. The family's servant, Julie, first taught him to love stories.

He had two important childhood friends. The first was Ernest Chevalier, whose grandfather lived opposite the hospital and told the boys stories about the adventures of Don Quixote. The second was Alfred Le Poittevin, who was five years older. The two families were very close: Alfred's father was Gustave's godfather, and Gustave's father was Alfred's godfather. Le Poittevin gave Gustave books to read and made him dream about the East. Much later, Flaubert dedicated La Tentation de saint Antoine to the memory of this friend.

Gustave wanted to write from a very early age. At the age of nine, he told Ernest Chevalier in a letter that a woman who visited his father always said stupid things and that he would write them down. The critic Jonathan Culler later saw this letter as a sign of Flaubert's future interests. Flaubert collected foolish remarks for the rest of his life, and many of them appeared in his later books.

As a boy, he also invented an imaginary character with his friends and his sister. They called him "the Garçon" (the Boy). The Garçon was a loud, vulgar and self-satisfied bourgeois who laughed at everything. The children spoke about him as if he were a real person. Some writers have seen the Garçon as an early version of the pharmacist Homais in Madame Bovary.

The theatre in the billiard room lasted about five years, from 1829 to 1834, but Flaubert loved acting all his life. He imitated people so well that his father forbade him to imitate some of them because he thought it affected his son too strongly. "Whatever people say," Flaubert wrote in 1846, "the essence of my nature is the clown."

School years (1832–1840)

In February 1832, Gustave entered the Collège royal de Rouen, the main school of the city. From May of that year, he was a boarder, which means that he lived at the school. The school was old and famous: the playwright Pierre Corneille had studied there in the 17th century. Only about two per cent of French children went to such schools. Board and lessons cost about 700 francs a year, more than a teacher's yearly salary.

Gustave was not a very good pupil at first. He was bored and later remembered the school as a place of dull lessons and long hours of study. However, he read a great deal and began to write. His first stories date from 1835 and 1836. In 1837, a small Rouen magazine printed two of his texts. He wrote horror stories, historical tales and a story called Rêve d'enfer ("Dream of Hell", 1837). In 1838, he wrote Mémoires d'un fou ("Memoirs of a Madman"), which tells the story of his first love in a Romantic style.

That love was based on a real experience. During the summer of 1836, at the seaside town of Trouville, Gustave, then fourteen, met Élisa Schlésinger. She was twenty-six years old, beautiful, quiet and religious. She had a baby daughter and lived with the music publisher Maurice Schlésinger. She later married him. Gustave never told her how he felt, and no love affair took place. However, he remembered her all his life.

Thirty years later, Élisa became the model for Marie Arnoux, the woman the hero of L'Éducation sentimentale loves without hope. Élisa lived until 1888 and survived Flaubert by eight years. At Trouville, Gustave also met an English family, the Colliers. Their daughters Gertrude and Henriette remained his friends for the rest of his life.

In his last year at school, in December 1839, Gustave was expelled. A popular philosophy teacher had been replaced by a man the pupils disliked. Gustave led a protest by the whole class. He wrote a letter to the headmaster which twelve of his classmates signed. They included Louis Bouilhet, who later became his closest friend, and Émile Hamard, who later married his sister. The school expelled Gustave and two other pupils.

He prepared for the baccalauréat, the final school examination, alone at home. He passed it in August 1840.

His father was pleased and gave him a reward: a long journey from 22 August to 1 November 1840 through the south of France and the island of Corsica. Gustave did not travel alone. His companion was Dr Jules Cloquet, a friend of his father and an easy-going Paris doctor who became an excellent guide for the young man.

Gustave loved the Mediterranean, its light and its warmth. He wrote a travel book about the journey, Pyrénées–Corse. In Marseille, on the way home, he spent a night with Eulalie Foucaud, a woman who ran a hotel with her mother. It was his first sexual relationship. He wrote to her for a few months afterwards and used the memory in his story Novembre ("November", 1842).

Law studies and illness (1841–1844)

By the age of eighteen, Gustave was a tall and handsome young man with broad shoulders, a deep voice, large gestures and a loud laugh. He did not want a profession, but his father expected him to have one. In November 1841, he registered as a law student in Paris.

He hated the subject. He copied textbooks without understanding them and was afraid of becoming a lawyer or a public prosecutor. He preferred to visit the studio of the sculptor James Pradier, where he met artists and writers. In November 1843, he met the great poet Victor Hugo there.

In March 1843, he made a new friend, Maxime Du Camp, a rich young man who wanted to become a writer and loved travelling. At the same time, Flaubert began a first novel called L'Éducation sentimentale. It has the same title as his famous novel of 1869, but it is a different work.

He passed his first law examination in December 1842, but failed the second one in August 1843. Du Camp, who was present, later wrote that Flaubert's mind was so full of art and poetry that it could not take in the dry rules of law. He failed again at the end of the year.

In January 1844, Gustave was returning from Deauville, where his father had bought land. He was driving a small carriage with his brother Achille. Suddenly, he fell to the floor of the carriage as if he had been struck by lightning. For ten minutes, his brother thought he was dead. Achille carried him into a house beside the road and bled him at once. Back in Rouen, doctors bled him again "in three places at once". He had a second attack in February.

The treatments of the time were painful and useless. They included a strict diet, no tobacco, repeated bleeding, leeches and orange-flower water. During one bleeding, hot water was poured on his hand to make the blood flow. It burned him badly.

The attacks returned from time to time for many years. Du Camp described them: Flaubert became very pale, hurried to lie down, and shook all over. Afterwards, he slept deeply and felt stiff and sore for several days.

Doctors today generally think that he had a form of epilepsy. Philippe Hecketsweiler, a doctor who studied Flaubert's illnesses in 2022, concluded that the attacks began with strange visions. Some then led to loss of consciousness and violent shaking. Over his life, Flaubert had thousands of attacks, most of them small. His family kept the illness secret. People outside the family learned about it only after his death.

The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre did not believe that Flaubert had epilepsy. In his very long book about Flaubert, L'Idiot de la famille ("The Family Idiot"), he argued that the illness was a nervous crisis. For Sartre, it was the only way in which the young man could escape from the profession that his father wanted for him.

Whatever the illness was, its effect was the same. Dr Flaubert gave up the idea of making his son a lawyer. Gustave left law school, went home, and became a writer. Flaubert himself later gave a similar explanation of his illness. If his brain had been stronger, he told Louise Colet, boredom and the law would not have made him ill.

In the same year, 1844, his father bought a house at Croisset. The land he had owned at Deauville had been taken by the state for the new railway from Rouen to Le Havre. The house at Croisset was a large 18th-century country house, about four kilometres from Rouen on the right bank of the Seine, in the commune of Canteleu. It had a park, tall trees and a wide view of the river and its sailing boats. The family moved there in June 1844.

Flaubert wrote all his major books in this house. In its garden, a path lined with lime trees became what he called his gueuloir, or "shouting place". There he read his sentences aloud at the top of his voice to test how they sounded. People on passing boats were sometimes surprised to hear him.

Deaths in the family (1845–1846)

The small garden pavilion at Croisset. It is the only part of Flaubert's house that still exists.

On 3 March 1845, Caroline married Émile Hamard. Gustave felt that he was losing her. When Ernest Chevalier asked what he thought of the marriage, he answered with only two letters: "AH!"

The young couple went to Italy and Switzerland for their honeymoon, and the whole family went with them. Gustave disliked travelling in a group, but the journey gave him one of the most important experiences of his life. In Genoa, in the Balbi palace, he saw a painting of The Temptation of Saint Anthony attributed to Pieter Brueghel the Younger. The picture shows the old hermit surrounded by monsters and strange visions. Flaubert could not forget it. During the next thirty years, he wrote three versions of a book on the same subject.

Then came a year of disasters. In January 1846, Dr Flaubert developed a deep abscess in his thigh. His son Achille operated on him, but it was too late. He died of blood poisoning on 15 January.

Six days later, Caroline gave birth to a daughter, also called Caroline. Two months later, in March, Caroline Hamard died of childbed fever, an infection that often followed childbirth at that time. She was twenty-one years old.

Gustave described her funeral in a letter. The grave was too narrow, and the gravediggers had to force the coffin down with a spade and crowbars.

Flaubert now organised the life of the remaining family. He helped his brother Achille obtain their father's position at the hospital. Achille lived in their father's apartment at the Hôtel-Dieu. Gustave and his mother lived at Croisset for most of the year and spent the winter in an apartment in Rouen. They took in the baby Caroline because her father, Hamard, was not able to care for her.

For the next twenty-six years, Gustave lived with his mother and helped to raise his niece. He never married. His mother, who had never been very religious, lost her faith after these two deaths.

Louise Colet (1846–1855)

Louise Colet, the poet who was Flaubert's lover. Most of what we know about their affair comes from his letters to her.

On 28 July 1846, Flaubert went to Pradier's studio in Paris. He wanted the sculptor to make a bust of his dead sister and also wanted to discuss a statue of his father for the city of Rouen.

Among the guests in the studio, he saw a beautiful woman with long fair hair. She was the poet Louise Colet, who was thirty-five years old. She had already published several books and had won prizes from the Académie française. She was married to a musician, Hippolyte Colet, and had been the lover of the philosopher Victor Cousin. Paris knew her as "the Muse". The attraction between Flaubert and Colet was immediate. Flaubert visited her the next day, and within a few days they became lovers.

He returned to Croisset on 4 August. That night, he wrote her his first letter. This was the beginning of one of the most famous exchanges of love letters in French literature.

The new railway between Paris and Rouen made communication very fast. A letter posted in Rouen before eleven in the morning could reach Paris that same afternoon. From the first two years of the affair, 104 of Flaubert's letters survive, but only one of Colet's. He probably burned her letters, or someone destroyed them after his death.

The affair was unusual from the beginning. Flaubert loved Louise, and his early letters are full of desire. However, he refused to change his life for her. He stayed at Croisset with his mother and his work.

During two years, after their first days together, the lovers met only four times. There were three short meetings in Paris and one day at an inn in Mantes, a town halfway between Paris and Rouen. Louise wanted them to live together. She protested, cried and became angry. He answered that love was not the first thing in his life "but the second". The first was the great work that he hoped to write. In August 1848, the affair ended.

Louise came to Rouen in June 1851, soon after Flaubert returned from the East, and the affair began again. This second period lasted until 1855.

During these years, Flaubert was writing Madame Bovary. His letters to Louise became a kind of diary of his work and contain many of his ideas about art. He sent her his last letter on 6 March 1855.

Louise answered him in another way. In 1859, she published a novel called Lui ("Him"), in which Flaubert appears as a cold and selfish man. The critic Albert Thibaudet later suggested why the affair had lasted for several years. It was made almost entirely of letters. Face to face, he said, Flaubert would not have been able to live with Louise for two months.

Friends, Brittany and the Revolution of 1848

Louis Bouilhet, Flaubert's closest friend and first reader. Photograph by Étienne Carjat.

Two friends were now at the centre of Flaubert's life. The first was Louis Bouilhet, a poet and former schoolmate, who was as poor as Flaubert was rich. He came to Croisset every Sunday, read what Gustave had written, and told him directly what was good and what was bad. Flaubert trusted his judgment more than anyone else's. The second was Maxime Du Camp, his friend from his student years.

From May to August 1847, Flaubert and Du Camp walked through Anjou, Brittany and Normandy with bags on their backs. They wrote a travel book together, Par les champs et par les grèves ("Over Fields and Shores"). They took turns: Flaubert wrote one chapter, then Du Camp wrote the next. The book was published only after Flaubert's death.

In February 1848, a revolution in Paris drove out King Louis-Philippe and made France a republic. Flaubert was in Paris with Bouilhet and Du Camp and saw some of the fighting himself. Twenty years later, he used these memories in L'Éducation sentimentale.

Back at Croisset, he had to serve in the National Guard, the citizens' militia. However, he had little faith in politics. He watched the new Republic and the bloody days of June 1848, when the army defeated a rising of Paris workers, with distance and irony.

On 3 April 1848, Alfred Le Poittevin died at the age of thirty-one. Flaubert stayed beside the body for two nights, read Montaigne, and wrapped his friend in his shroud himself. He described these hours in a letter to Du Camp.

The first Temptation and the journey to the East (1848–1851)

The temple of Hathor at Abu Simbel, in Nubia. Maxime Du Camp took this photograph during the journey of 1850.

In May 1848, Flaubert began to write La Tentation de saint Antoine, the book inspired by the painting he had seen in Genoa. He worked on it for sixteen months and finished it on 12 September 1849. It was a very long work, closer to a play than to a novel.

The book shows one night of visions. The old hermit Anthony is tempted by the Devil, the Queen of Sheba, the gods of many religions and the sciences. Flaubert believed that it was his masterpiece.

He read the whole book aloud to Bouilhet and Du Camp at Croisset. The reading lasted four days. After each part, he asked them: "Well?" They did not want to answer. At the end, they told him what they really thought: the book was a failure. They believed that its strong feelings, endless visions and lack of a clear story hid his real talent.

They advised him to choose an ordinary subject from everyday life, in the manner of Balzac. Du Camp later told a famous story. According to him, Bouilhet suggested a piece of local news. A health officer named Delamare, in a village near Rouen, had been ruined by his wife's lovers and debts, and she had poisoned herself.

The story is at least partly a legend. Delphine Delamare, the second wife of Eugène Delamare, a health officer at Ry, did die at twenty-six, and her husband died a year later. However, Delamare died only a few months after Flaubert left for the East. The case therefore cannot have been suggested in exactly this form in 1849. What is certain is that Flaubert chose the subject in the summer of 1851. Du Camp's memory of the scene was probably changed by his knowledge of the later novel.

Flaubert put the Temptation aside, but he never gave it up.

A few weeks later, he left for the East with Du Camp. His mother paid for the journey, a large gift for a son who had never earned any money. The two friends left Croisset on 22 October 1849 and sailed from Marseille in November.

They spent eight months in Egypt. They visited Alexandria and Cairo, climbed the Great Pyramid, and sailed up the Nile as far as the second cataract in Nubia. Du Camp took photographs of the temples, among the first photographs ever made in Egypt. Flaubert wrote notes and long letters to Bouilhet and his mother.

The best-known episode of the journey took place at Esna on 6 March 1850. A servant led the travellers to the house of Kuchuk Hanem, a famous dancer who also sold sex. The servant was followed by a pet sheep with yellow spots painted on its wool and a black velvet covering on its nose. Kuchuk Hanem danced for them, and Flaubert spent the night with her.

He described her in his notes with the same care that he gave to temples and landscapes. He wrote about her clothes, jewels, tattoo, a bad tooth and the bedbugs on the wall. On the journey back down the Nile, he visited her again and felt an "infinite sadness". Louise Colet later told him that the bedbugs disgusted her. He answered that they were the most enchanting detail for him because he wanted some bitterness in everything.

The historian Michel Winock has written openly about the sexual side of the journey. The two friends visited many prostitutes, and Flaubert wrote about these visits to Bouilhet in a crude and proud tone that was common among young men of his time.

However, Flaubert sometimes preferred simply to observe. In the prostitutes' street at Kena, he walked up and down while women in blue, yellow and red dresses called to him. He was strongly impressed by the scene. He then left without touching any of them because he did not want another experience to change the picture in his mind.

From Egypt, the travellers continued to Palestine, Lebanon, Rhodes, Asia Minor and Constantinople. They then travelled to Greece and finally to Italy, where Flaubert's mother joined him.

The journey also left him with a lasting illness. In Beirut, in 1850, he caught syphilis, a serious disease passed on during sex. He joked about it in a letter to Bouilhet, but there was no cure at the time. For years afterwards, he took mercury, the usual treatment, which was itself poisonous.

He returned to Croisset in June 1851. Francis Steegmuller, who translated the travel notes into English, argued that the journey changed Flaubert. In his view, the Romantic who left for Egypt returned as a Realist ready to write Madame Bovary.

Flaubert later became angry with Du Camp, who published his own account of the journey in 1854 without paying much attention to his friend's feelings.

Madame Bovary (1851–1856)

Title page of the first edition of Madame Bovary (1857).

Flaubert began Madame Bovary in September 1851, three months after his return. He worked on it for almost five years. His letters to Louise Colet describe this long struggle.

He had decided to write the opposite of the Temptation. Instead of a noble and fantastic subject, he chose an ordinary provincial story. Instead of a book filled with the author's own feelings, he wanted a book in which the author could not be seen.

In January 1852, he wrote that he wanted to create "a book about nothing". Such a book would depend on nothing outside itself. Its style alone would hold it together.

This required a new way of writing. The author would not comment on the story or tell the reader how to judge the characters. Style would have to suggest what earlier novelists had explained directly. "Impersonality is the sign of strength," he wrote.

At the same time, he searched for the exact word, removed repetitions and sounds he disliked, and read every page aloud in his gueuloir. The work went very slowly. He sometimes needed a week to write one page and a month to write one chapter. He complained that his characters disgusted him and that the book was a burden that was killing him.

The novel was finished in the spring of 1856. Maxime Du Camp was now one of the editors of the Revue de Paris, a literary magazine. The magazine published the novel in six parts, from 1 October to 15 December 1856.

The editors were afraid of the government, which closely watched the press under the Second Empire. They cut the scene in which Emma and her lover Léon travel around Rouen in a closed cab. Flaubert protested and demanded that the magazine print a note saying that the cuts were not his. When the editors asked for more cuts before the final part, he asked a lawyer, Jules Sénard, for advice. The magazine printed Flaubert's own note to the reader, saying that the text should be considered as fragments rather than as the complete work.

The trial (1857)

Flaubert in the 1850s. Painting by Eugène Giraud.

The cuts did not protect the book. The state prosecutor's office decided to act against Flaubert, the manager of the magazine, Laurent-Pichat, and the printer, Pillet. They were accused of offending public and religious morals. The trial took place on 29 January 1857 before a criminal court in Paris, the sixth correctional chamber of the court of the Seine.

For his judges, Flaubert prepared a document in which he placed the sentences that had been attacked beside similar passages from great writers of the past.

The prosecutor was Ernest Pinard. He summarised the novel and said that a better title would have been "Story of the Adulteries of a Provincial Woman". He called the book "lascivious", meaning full of sexual desire, from beginning to end.

What shocked him was not adultery itself but the way the heroine seemed to sing "a hymn to adultery". He admitted that Flaubert had talent and argued that this talent made the book even more dangerous. Six months later, Pinard prosecuted Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal. In that case, he won.

Flaubert's lawyer, Jules Sénard, knew the family well. In 1848, he had presided over the National Assembly. He defended Emma Bovary almost as if she were a real person and showed how unhappy her story was. He reminded the court that Flaubert was the son of the respected Dr Flaubert of Rouen.

Sénard argued that the novel was moral because it showed the terrible results of Emma's actions. He quoted the poet Lamartine, who had said that Emma's punishment was even too severe for her crime. Flaubert proudly wrote to his brother that the lawyer had "flattened" the prosecution with quotations from religious writers and that the courtroom had been full.

The judgment came on 7 February 1857. All three accused men were found not guilty. However, the court strongly criticised Flaubert. Literature, it said, should improve the mind and morals rather than show vice.

Flaubert was relieved but angry. He wrote to a reader that his heroine had been "dragged like the lowest lost woman into the dock with the criminals" and that he remained "a suspicious author". He dedicated the book to Sénard.

The trial made the novel famous. The publisher Michel Lévy printed it in two volumes in April 1857. He had paid Flaubert only 800 francs for the rights for five years. The first printing sold out quickly, and reprints brought the total to about 30,000 copies.

Flaubert soon felt that the publisher had treated him unfairly. Lévy made a large profit, while Flaubert never knew exactly how many copies had been sold.

Critics were divided. Sainte-Beuve, the most powerful critic in France, praised the novel in the Moniteur. He saw in it the signs of a new generation: science, observation, maturity, strength and some hardness. Flaubert answered that the book was, for him, "an affair of pure art" and nothing more.

In October 1857, Baudelaire wrote an admiring article in L'Artiste. Victor Hugo, writing from exile, told Flaubert that he was one of the leading minds of his generation.

Other critics attacked the coldness and "realism" of the book, although Flaubert always rejected that word. An English translation was even prepared under Flaubert's direction by Juliet Herbert, the English governess of his niece. He called it a masterpiece, but it was never published and has disappeared.

Salammbô and Carthage (1857–1862)

Salammbô as imagined by Alphonse Mucha in 1896.

Flaubert did not rest after Madame Bovary. In September 1857, he began a new novel, which he first called Carthage and later Salammbô.

After the dull world of Yonville, he wanted to write about colour, violence and the ancient world, which had interested him since his school days. He wrote that few people would understand how sad a person had to be to try to bring Carthage back to life. He described the book as a desert into which his dislike of modern life had driven him.

The subject came from the Greek historian Polybius: the war of the mercenaries against Carthage between 241 and 238 BC. Mercenaries are soldiers who fight for money. After the first war between Carthage and Rome, Carthage did not pay its foreign soldiers, and they rose against the city.

Flaubert read hundreds of books about the ancient world. He also wanted to see the places himself. From 16 April to 6 June 1858, he travelled to Tunisia and Algeria and walked over the ruins of Carthage.

When he returned home, he threw away everything he had written and began again. The book took four more years. He finished it in April 1862. Michel Lévy paid him 10,000 francs for the book and promised the same amount for his next novel.

The publisher allowed newspapers to believe that he had paid 30,000 francs, a very large sum. The Goncourt brothers, two writer friends who kept a famous diary, were shocked by the supposed price.

Salammbô was published on 24 November 1862. It was successful with the public and quickly influenced fashion. Flaubert hoped that the Empress Eugénie would wear a Salammbô costume at a court ball, but she was told that it showed too much of the body.

At the ball at the Tuileries palace on 9 February 1863, the Countess of Castiglione, who had been the emperor's mistress, appeared dressed as Salammbô instead.

The first edition sold out in two months, and a second appeared on 10 January 1863. Critics, however, were divided.

Sainte-Beuve wrote three long articles about the book in Le Constitutionnel in December 1862. He respected Flaubert but did not like the novel. He found it cruel, strange and too full of learned detail. Flaubert answered him in a long letter.

He was much harsher with Guillaume Froehner, a German archaeologist who worked in Paris. On 31 December 1862, Froehner published an article in the Revue contemporaine listing mistakes that he believed he had found in the novel. He even made fun of the spelling of the heroine's name.

Flaubert's reply appeared in L'Opinion nationale on 24 January 1863. He answered every point, gave his sources, and explained that the two "m"s in Salammbô were there on purpose so that the name would be pronounced correctly. His letter was sharp and well informed, and the argument ended in his favour.

Other critics repeated some of the ideas used by the prosecutor Pinard. One critic in the Revue des Deux Mondes found the same moral coldness in Salammbô as in Madame Bovary. He described the heroine as suffering from hysteria and as a religious dreamer.

The hermit in white gloves (1862–1869)

George Sand in 1864. Photograph by Nadar.

In 1855, while finishing Madame Bovary, Flaubert had rented an apartment in Paris on the boulevard du Temple. After Salammbô, he spent more and more of each winter in the capital.

People had called him "the hermit of Croisset". Now he dressed in a black suit and white gloves and went to the salon of Princess Mathilde, a cousin of the emperor Napoleon III. He was invited to the Tuileries palace in March 1864 and to the imperial court at Compiègne in November of the same year.

Even there, according to Du Camp, he defended Victor Hugo, who was living in exile and was one of the emperor's strongest enemies. On 15 August 1866, Flaubert received the cross of the Légion d'honneur.

From the end of 1862, he took part in the "Magny dinners", held every two weeks in a private room of a Paris restaurant. The guests were writers and thinkers, including Sainte-Beuve, Théophile Gautier, Hippolyte Taine, Ernest Renan and the Goncourt brothers.

Flaubert came to the second dinner, on 6 December 1862, and attended whenever he was in Paris. The conversation was free and often coarse.

In February 1863, the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev came to a Magny dinner for the first time. He and Flaubert became close friends. Jules de Goncourt called Turgenev a "gentle giant". Turgenev visited Croisset in November 1868.

Another important friendship of these years was with George Sand. She was seventeen years older than Flaubert and was famous both for her novels and for her independent way of life. She had praised Salammbô in an article, and they began to write to each other in 1863.

She joined the Magny dinners in 1866, the only woman among the men. She stayed at Croisset in April and November of that year and again in 1868. Flaubert called her "dear master" and spent Christmas 1869 at her house at Nohant.

Their letters form a long and friendly argument between two very different ideas about life and art. Sand believed in progress, in ordinary people and in the writer's duty to show personal feeling. Flaubert did not share these beliefs.

Two women were also important in his private life. Flaubert had raised his niece Caroline almost like a daughter. On 6 April 1864, she married Ernest Commanville, a timber merchant.

There was also Juliet Herbert, the English governess who had taught Caroline. Flaubert kept his relationship with her so secret that little is known about it. He visited England in 1866 and 1871, probably to see her.

L'Éducation sentimentale (1864–1869)

Flaubert cutting open Madame Bovary. Caricature by Achille Lemot, 1869.

In September 1864, Flaubert began the novel that he called the "moral history of the men of my generation".

It tells the story of Frédéric Moreau, a young man from the provinces who comes to Paris in 1840. He falls in love with a married woman, Madame Arnoux, and wastes much of his life in dreams and plans that he never fully carries out. Behind his story, the novel shows French society in the years before and during the Revolution of 1848.

Flaubert wanted every detail in the book to be accurate. He read large numbers of newspapers and political books from the 1840s. He questioned George Sand, Du Camp, Maurice Schlésinger and other people who had seen the events of 1848.

He also used the history of the revolution written by Marie d'Agoult under the name Daniel Stern. Some sentences in the novel come almost directly from her book.

He went to Paris to discover what people could eat at a fashionable café in 1847 and how a funeral was organised. He wrote to Turgenev that he was looking for "the most stupid information one could imagine".

He finished the book on 16 May 1869. Two months later, on 18 July, Louis Bouilhet died. He had not been able to read the last two chapters. Flaubert had lost his best friend and his first reader.

He gave the manuscript to Du Camp, who checked it for three weeks and found 251 problems of grammar and style. Flaubert accepted most of his suggestions but rejected 87 of them. He argued that style and grammar were two different things and that the main law for a writer was harmony. On 13 October, Sainte-Beuve also died.

L'Éducation sentimentale was published by Michel Lévy on 17 November 1869. Most reviews were negative. Critics found the book flat, vulgar and cruel.

The Catholic writer Barbey d'Aurevilly accused Flaubert of laughing at every ideal and of suggesting that no heroes were left in the world. The feminist journalist Amélie Bosquet, an old friend, attacked the novel from another direction because it made fun of the women's movement.

Only a few friends, such as George Sand and Théodore de Banville, defended the book. Flaubert never understood why it had failed with critics and readers. He was tired, sad and lonely.

War, the Commune and the death of his mother (1870–1872)

On 19 July 1870, France declared war on Prussia. The French armies were defeated in a few weeks. On 4 September, the Empire fell and a republic was proclaimed.

Flaubert, who had usually shown little interest in politics, became very angry. He said that he wanted "to eat Prussians". He became a lieutenant in the National Guard company of Croisset. He trained his men and went to Rouen to learn how to be a soldier.

At the same time, he hid the manuscript of his Temptation of Saint Anthony in the garden. Relatives who were escaping from the war filled the house.

In December 1870, Prussian soldiers reached Rouen. In the middle of the month, seven soldiers and three officers were placed at Croisset, together with six horses that had to be fed. Flaubert and his mother left the house and took shelter in Rouen.

He wrote to his niece that it was painful to hear the soldiers drag their swords along the path and to have their horses breathe in his face. The Prussians left Croisset after forty-five days, but more came in February 1871.

Flaubert stopped wearing the ribbon of the Légion d'honneur because he felt that the words "honour" and "French" no longer went together.

In March 1871, the people of Paris rose against the new government and created the Paris Commune. The government defeated it in May with great bloodshed. Flaubert watched these events with horror and despair. He told a friend that he was seeing "the end of the Latin world".

From then on, his letters often expressed anger against his time, universal voting rights, the press, the bourgeoisie and crowds. He wrote that he wanted to recognise only "wise men and fools, the innocent and the guilty".

On 8 November 1871, Élisa Schlésinger, the love of his youth and now a widow, visited him at Croisset.

On 6 April 1872, his mother died. Flaubert was fifty years old. He wrote that she had been the person he loved most.

A few months later, he sent Élisa one of his most moving letters. He called her "my old friend, my old tenderness" and invited her to sleep in his mother's room. Of all the people he remembered from his youth, he told her, her face appeared most clearly.

Caroline inherited Croisset, but her uncle was allowed to continue living there. On 20 June, two months after his mother's death, he finished the third and final version of La Tentation de saint Antoine.

In October, Théophile Gautier died. Flaubert felt that the friends of his youth were disappearing one after another.

Saint Anthony, the theatre and ruin (1872–1877)

In 1873, Flaubert changed publishers. Georges Charpentier, a young man who admired his work, became the publisher of his later books.

In the same year, Flaubert sent his first letter to the young Guy de Maupassant. Maupassant was the son of Laure Le Poittevin, the sister of Flaubert's dead friend Alfred. Flaubert took him under his protection, read his early writing, and taught him how to improve it.

A later story claimed that Flaubert was Maupassant's real father. There is no evidence for this. Their connection was literary, not biological.

Flaubert wrote letters of recommendation for the young man, told him to continue asking publishers until they listened to him, and even sent him to his own doctors.

Flaubert had always loved the theatre. In 1873, he finished a play by Bouilhet, Le Sexe faible, and wrote a political comedy of his own, Le Candidat ("The Candidate"). The manager of the Vaudeville theatre, Carvalho, liked it and decided to stage it before Bouilhet's play.

It opened on 11 March 1874 and failed completely. Edmond de Goncourt wrote that the audience slowly became cold and silent. They expected great speeches and clever lines but did not get them.

After four performances, Flaubert removed the play from the stage. He said that he would not allow his actors to be booed. He felt like a criminal when he saw the leading actor leave the stage in tears.

At the end of the same month, Charpentier published La Tentation de saint Antoine. This third version was much shorter than the two earlier ones and had a different structure.

The two thousand copies of the first printing sold within three weeks, and Flaubert won back some readers who had disliked L'Éducation sentimentale. Almost all the reviews, however, were hostile.

Flaubert found comfort in the praise of poets and friends. Villiers de l'Isle-Adam called it a "total work". Banville announced the birth of the modern epic. Daudet said that he knew some passages by heart.

Renan, whose opinion Flaubert had especially wanted, sent a polite but uncertain letter. He said that Flaubert had used a club to drive away his bourgeois readers and should now return to subjects that interested everyone.

In August 1874, Flaubert began to write Bouvard et Pécuchet, a novel that he had been preparing for years.

Then came a serious financial problem. In the spring of 1875, the business of his nephew Ernest Commanville failed. Flaubert had invested part of his money in it and had allowed Commanville to manage his finances.

To save the family from bankruptcy, he sold his farm at Deauville for 200,000 francs and immediately paid 50,000 francs to the main creditor. He gave up his apartment on the rue Murillo and moved to a smaller one on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré.

"My nephew had devoured half my fortune," he told George Sand, and he had used what remained to pay his nephew's debts. From then on, he had little money and worried about it. He even asked friends to find him a paid job in a library.

Unable to continue Bouvard et Pécuchet, he wrote three shorter works. In September 1875, while staying with the scientist Georges Pouchet at Concarneau in Brittany, he began La Légende de saint Julien l'Hospitalier.

In February 1876, he began Un cœur simple ("A Simple Heart"), the story of a servant woman. He wrote it partly to please George Sand, who had asked him to write a story with more feeling. However, Sand died on 7 June 1876, before she could read it.

Louise Colet had also died earlier that year, on 8 March.

Hérodias was finished in February 1877. Charpentier published the three stories together as Trois Contes on 24 April 1877. Friends and critics praised the book, but it did not sell well.

Last years and death (1877–1880)

Guy de Maupassant in 1888. Photograph by Nadar.

In his last years, Flaubert lived mostly at Croisset, alone with his servant and his greyhound Julio. He talked to the dog and admired its calm nature. The name may have been a memory of Juliet Herbert.

In Paris, on Sundays, he received friends such as Turgenev, Edmond de Goncourt, Alphonse Daudet, Émile Zola and the young Maupassant, who considered himself Flaubert's pupil. Flaubert called Maupassant "my disciple" and his "adoptive son".

In January 1880, he read the proofs of Maupassant's story Boule de Suif and wrote to his niece that it was a masterpiece. The writer Paul Morand later said that without Flaubert, Maupassant might never have written it.

Flaubert continued to work on Bouvard et Pécuchet. He read hundreds of books about farming, chemistry, medicine, history, philosophy and religion so that the two main characters could try these subjects and fail at them.

His health was poor. On 27 January 1879, he fell on the ice and broke a bone in his leg. His brother Achille offered him three thousand francs a year.

His friends did more. In 1879, the minister of education, Jules Ferry, made him assistant librarian of the Bibliothèque Mazarine in Paris. The post paid three thousand francs a year, and Flaubert did not have to work there. He accepted the money but felt ashamed. Living on public money, he said, was not something to laugh about.

On 8 May 1880, at Croisset, Flaubert collapsed and died. He was fifty-eight years old.

His servant later told Maupassant what had happened. Flaubert felt an attack coming and said that it was fortunate because it would have been a problem if it had happened the next day on the train. He said that everything around him looked yellow. He rubbed his temples with eau de Cologne and lay down on the sofa. He spoke a few words about Rouen and some friends. Then he fell back, with his face dark and his hands closed tightly.

His friend Dr Pouchet thought that he had died during an epileptic attack. Another doctor thought that he had suffered bleeding in the brain.

He had been working on the tenth and final chapter of Bouvard et Pécuchet. In a drawer, he left 2,515 francs.

The funeral took place on Tuesday, 11 May. Among the mourners were Goncourt, Turgenev, Daudet, Zola, Maupassant, Théodore de Banville, Joris-Karl Huysmans, François Coppée and José-Maria de Hérédia.

After a mass at the church of Canteleu, the funeral procession walked to the Cimetière monumental in Rouen. Witnesses counted about 150 people. Apart from the mayor, almost no official from the city of Rouen came.

Flaubert had always presented himself as an enemy of the bourgeoisie. According to one journalist, bourgeois Rouen had not forgotten this.

He was buried next to his father and mother, not far from the grave of Louis Bouilhet. There was no formal speech because Flaubert had always refused the idea. His friend Lapierre said only a few words and ended in tears.

One story was often repeated after the funeral. Some journalists asked a Rouen cab driver whether he knew the dead man. Of course, he answered: it was Monsieur Flaubert, the doctor's brother. They then asked whether he knew Flaubert's daughter, Madame Salammbô. Yes, said the driver, and she must be very sad.

The house and the papers after 1880

Flaubert's grave in the Cimetière monumental of Rouen.

Bouvard et Pécuchet was published in March 1881. In the months after Flaubert's death, Caroline Commanville sold the house at Croisset to an industrial company. The house was pulled down, the trees were cut, and a factory making alcohol from maize was built on the land. Only the small pavilion in the garden survives.

The manuscripts went to Caroline. In 1914, she gave the manuscripts of Madame Bovary to the library of Rouen.

Charpentier began to publish Flaubert's letters in 1884, starting with his letters to George Sand and a study by Maupassant. Caroline then published four volumes of letters between 1887 and 1893, but she removed many of her uncle's more coarse words. René Descharmes published a fuller edition in 1921.

Between 1910 and 1954, the publisher Conard printed Flaubert's complete works in twenty-six volumes, thirteen of them containing letters. The fifth and final volume of his letters in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade appeared in 2007.

Rouen built a monument to Bouilhet in 1882 and later created a museum about Flaubert in the wing of the Hôtel-Dieu where he was born.

The works

Madame Bovary

The full title of the novel is Madame Bovary. Mœurs de province ("Madame Bovary. Provincial Manners"). It begins in a schoolroom in Rouen, where a clumsy new boy, Charles Bovary, is laughed at by the other pupils.

Charles becomes a health officer, a country doctor without a full medical degree, and marries Emma Rouault, the daughter of a farmer. Emma was educated in a convent, where she secretly read romantic novels. She dreams of passion, luxury and Paris. Her husband is kind but dull, and life in the small town of Yonville makes her deeply unhappy.

She takes two lovers, first the rich landowner Rodolphe and then the young clerk Léon. Both relationships end badly. She borrows more and more money from the merchant Lheureux to pay for her clothes and her dreams. When she can no longer pay her debts, she swallows arsenic and dies slowly and painfully. Charles later dies of grief.

The pharmacist Homais is a vain and talkative man who believes strongly in science and progress. The final words of the novel tell the reader that he has just received the cross of the Légion d'honneur.

Around Emma, Flaubert shows the life of a small town in Normandy: the priest, the tax collector, the innkeeper, and the agricultural show with its prizes and speeches. He also describes a failed operation on a club foot which damages Charles's reputation.

The novel gives a wide picture of what Flaubert saw as the bourgeois world, a world filled with ready-made ideas and empty words. However, the book is not simply a satire. The reader can share Emma's boredom and hopes while also seeing her from the outside. This double point of view is an important part of the novel.

Jean Starobinski has shown how the point of view can move from the narrator to a character. Charles visits the farm and watches dust moving on the floor. The reader then begins to see and feel the scene through Charles. His lowered eyes show his shyness without the narrator having to explain it.

Flaubert is famous for a method called style indirect libre, or free indirect style. The narrator gives a character's thoughts or words without adding expressions such as "she thought" or "he said". The voice of the narrator and the voice of the character can therefore seem to mix together. Sometimes the reader cannot be completely certain whose words or ideas are being expressed. This uncertainty is an important part of the novel's irony.

The narrator does not disappear completely. In some places, he still makes judgments, for example by calling a girl's songs silly or by making a general comment about human nature.

Another important feature is Flaubert's use of the imperfect tense, the French tense often used for actions that continued or happened repeatedly in the past. Proust spoke of Flaubert's "eternal imperfect". For Albert Thibaudet, this tense creates the feeling of ordinary life continuing day after day.

Emma speaks and thinks in clichés, phrases that have been repeated so often that they have lost much of their meaning. Her language comes from the novels and songs she has read. Léon and Rodolphe use much the same kind of language. Emma cannot escape from it, even when she sometimes notices how empty it is.

Charles, however, cannot speak this language at all. For this reason, Emma never understands that he loves her much more deeply than her lovers do.

Victor Brombert has studied the way the images in the novel are connected. The chapter about Emma's education already uses many images of being shut in: the convent, the closed room and the quiet afternoon. It also uses images of escape, such as windows, roads and the wish to be somewhere else.

Emma tells Léon that when people read, "one moves motionless through countries one imagines one sees". For Brombert, this sentence expresses an important part of her tragedy.

Brombert also warns against reading the novel as only a satire. He finds a deep feeling of pity and sadness in it, which is difficult to explain if the book is seen only as an attack on Romantic dreams and the bourgeois world.

Diana Knight also argues that the novel does not simply make fun of Emma. However, Emma cannot accept imagination as imagination. She wants her dreams to become real, and this helps to destroy her.

Flaubert is said to have answered a woman who asked him where he had found Emma: "Madame Bovary is me." The sentence became famous, but there is no written record that Flaubert said it. To another reader, he wrote almost the opposite. He said that the book was "totally invented" and that he had put none of his own feelings or life into it.

Salammbô

Salammbô takes place in Carthage in the third century BC. It begins with a feast in the gardens of the general Hamilcar, where unpaid mercenary soldiers become drunk and destroy things.

Salammbô, Hamilcar's daughter and a priestess of the moon goddess Tanit, appears on the steps of the palace. Mâtho, a Libyan soldier, falls in love with her immediately. The mercenaries rise against Carthage.

Mâtho steals the sacred veil of Tanit, the zaïmph, from the temple. Salammbô goes to his tent to take it back and gives herself to him. The war is long and violent. The Carthaginians sacrifice their children to the god Moloch. The mercenaries are trapped in a mountain pass and die of hunger.

At the end, Mâtho is tortured to death before the people of Carthage, and Salammbô dies at the same moment. The last sentence of the novel says that Hamilcar's daughter died because she had touched the veil of Tanit.

Françoise Gaillard has described the sacrifice of the children to Moloch as a "sacrifice without the sacred". The god continues to receive victims, but his hunger is never satisfied.

Flaubert wanted to make the ancient world seem alive in every detail: the clothes, weapons, food, religions and smells of the streets. He used the work of Polybius and hundreds of scholarly books, and he travelled to Tunisia to see the places himself.

The result is a strange and violent novel, full of colour and cruelty. Sainte-Beuve, who did not like it, asked whether all this learning was useful and whether the book contained too many horrors. Other readers have admired the novel for the same qualities.

Victor Brombert called it "an epic of immobility". He argued that beneath all the movement and noise, the novel is always moving towards stone, statues and death. For him, this mixture of movement and stillness was one of Flaubert's deepest interests.

The novel soon interested composers. Flaubert himself thought about an opera as early as 1862, with Gautier writing the words and Ernest Reyer the music. For a short time, Verdi seemed interested, but Gautier never wrote the text and died in 1872.

Mussorgsky began an opera but never finished it. Reyer's Salammbô, with words by Camille Du Locle, was finally performed in Brussels in February 1890 and in Paris on 16 May 1892, ten years after Flaubert's death. It was very successful. A silent film based on the novel was made in Italy in 1911.

L'Éducation sentimentale

The title means "sentimental education", or the education of the feelings. The novel follows Frédéric Moreau from 1840 to 1851 and then jumps forward to 1867.

On a river boat, Frédéric sees Marie Arnoux, the wife of an art dealer, and falls in love with her. He loves her for the rest of his life but never has a complete relationship with her.

He spends his years between Madame Arnoux, whom he loves and respects; Rosanette, a woman supported by rich men; and Madame Dambreuse, the wife of a rich banker. He almost marries Madame Dambreuse.

His friend Deslauriers wants political power. The clerk Sénécal wants a socialist revolution. The shop assistant Dussardier is one of the few honest characters in the novel. Around them, the Revolution of 1848 begins and fails. Dussardier dies on a barricade in December 1851, killed by Sénécal, who has become a policeman.

At the end of the novel, Frédéric and Deslauriers are old men. They remember a visit to a brothel when they were boys. They became frightened and ran away without doing anything. "That was the best we ever had," they agree. This ending surprised many readers in 1869 and can still surprise readers today.

Flaubert called the book the moral history of the men of his generation. A novel about love becomes a novel about the failure of love, while the story of a generation becomes the story of its failure.

Flaubert treats historical events much as he treats his characters. He does not openly take one side. He shows republicans and conservatives, workers and bankers, with the same irony.

As with Salammbô, Flaubert collected a very large amount of information for the novel because he wanted its dates and facts to be correct. Jacques Arnoux, a dealer in "industrial art" who moves between art and business, was partly based on Maurice Schlésinger, the husband of Élisa.

Brombert reads the novel as a story about pure things being damaged. Frédéric wastes or spoils almost everything he touches. Yet the pure image of Madame Arnoux is never completely destroyed. Brombert therefore argues that, strangely, the loss and failure in the book help to preserve this idea of purity.

More recent critics have studied the novel in other ways. Barbara Vinken reads it as a novel about civil war, in which the private conflicts of the characters repeat the divisions of French society.

Other critics have studied the scenes at Fontainebleau, where Frédéric and Rosanette walk through the forest and the castle while fighting continues in Paris. They see these scenes as a kind of imaginary museum inside the novel.

The book is often described as one of the first modern novels because it does not follow the usual form of a story. The hero fails to achieve most of what he wants, and time passes without leading to a clear final success.

La Tentation de saint Antoine

One of the pictures that Odilon Redon made for The Temptation of Saint Anthony in 1888.

The Temptation of Saint Anthony is not a novel. It is written like a play, with speeches and stage directions, but Flaubert did not intend it to be performed.

The work shows a single night in the life of Anthony the Great, the Egyptian hermit of the fourth century who is often called the father of Christian monks.

Anthony is alone in the desert, hungry and tired, when he begins to see visions. The Queen of Sheba offers him her love. Hilarion, his former pupil, is really the Devil in disguise. He shows Anthony the arguments between early Christian groups, then the gods of different religions dying one after another, and finally the universe described by science.

In the final scene, Anthony wishes to become matter itself, and the face of Christ appears in the rising sun.

Gisèle Séginger, who edited the work, notes that the painting Flaubert saw in Genoa was by Pieter Brueghel the Younger and that Flaubert described it in his travel notebook. What especially interested him was its grotesque side, the mixture of horror and comedy that Hugo had praised.

Flaubert wrote three versions of the work, in 1849, 1856 and 1874. The first was the version that Bouilhet and Du Camp strongly rejected. Parts of the second version were printed in the magazine L'Artiste in 1856 and 1857. The prosecutor later used them against Flaubert during the trial of Madame Bovary.

The third and much shorter version was published in 1874. Flaubert dedicated it to the memory of Alfred Le Poittevin, who had first spoken to him about Saint Anthony.

The scholar Mary Orr notes that Flaubert's long work on the book was marked by two family deaths: that of his father in 1846 and that of his mother in 1872.

For many years, critics found the book difficult and obscure. Orr has argued that it is Flaubert's most serious work about two of the great forces of his century, religion and science.

Anthony is not simply the saint of popular religious pictures. He is also a man who questions ideas and refuses to accept a belief before examining it.

The religious arguments of fourth-century Alexandria are connected with the arguments of 19th-century France about faith, evolution and the origin of life. Orr suggests that religion and science can begin to look strangely similar in the book. Both have authorities, laws and claims to possess the truth.

The ending of the 1874 version was also connected with a scientific argument. Félix-Archimède Pouchet, a naturalist from Rouen who had taught Flaubert, defended the idea that life could appear by itself from matter. Pasteur argued against him.

Michelet supported Pouchet in his poetic book La Mer (1861), and Flaubert had dinner with both men at the natural history museum in Rouen. In the final scene of the Temptation, Flaubert shows life appearing at the bottom of the sea, as Michelet had done. He used this scientific argument against what he called the Catholic "party of the priest".

Flaubert also read medical writers of his time about visions and hallucinations. During the 1860s, he became a friend of Alfred Maury, a scholar who studied religious visions in a scientific and medical way.

Séginger has read the book as a study of mysticism, the desire to become one with all existence. In the final version, Anthony first loses his sense of his separate self. At the end of the night, he wants to "be matter" and to enter every form of life.

For Séginger, this wish is close to Flaubert's own idea of the writer, who should be everywhere in a work while remaining invisible.

The book also influenced artists. Cézanne painted several Temptations of Saint Anthony in the 1870s. Sigmund Freud saw in the work "the real riddles of life". Maurice Béjart, a choreographer, turned it into a dance work in 1967.

Trois Contes

The window of Saint Julian in Rouen Cathedral. It gave Flaubert the idea for his story.

Three Tales brings together three very different stories set in three different periods.

Un cœur simple ("A Simple Heart") tells the whole life of Félicité, a servant in a small Norman town in Flaubert's own century. She gives her love, one after another, to a young man who leaves her, her mistress's children, her nephew who dies at sea, and finally a parrot called Loulou.

When the parrot dies, she has its body preserved. As Félicité dies, she thinks she sees a huge parrot above her head, like the Holy Spirit. The story is written with tenderness and very little irony. Flaubert said that he wanted to make readers cry. To help him write it, he borrowed a preserved parrot from the museum in Rouen and kept it on his desk.

La Légende de saint Julien l'Hospitalier ("The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller") retells a medieval legend that Flaubert had seen in a stained-glass window in Rouen Cathedral.

Julian is a young lord who loves hunting and kills very large numbers of animals. A stag tells him that one day he will kill his own parents. Julian runs away, but the prophecy comes true.

He then spends the rest of his life as a poor man and a ferryman. At the end, he carries a leper across a river and is taken up to heaven.

Hérodias tells the story of the last day of John the Baptist, called Iaokanann in the story, in the palace of Herod Antipas. It ends with the dance of Salome and the prophet's head being carried away on a dish.

Flaubert read the story aloud at the home of Princess Mathilde, where his friends praised it. The book was published in April 1877 and received good reviews, although sales were poor.

Jonathan Culler has observed that in all three stories, something becomes sacred because people decide to set it apart, without needing a logical reason. He argues that this allows the stories to move away from the irony found in Flaubert's novels.

Bouvard et Pécuchet

Bouvard and Pécuchet, drawn by Bernard Naudin.

Flaubert's last novel tells the story of two copy clerks, Bouvard and Pécuchet. They meet on a bench in Paris on a hot summer day and immediately become friends.

Bouvard inherits some money. The two men buy a farm at Chavignolles, a village in Normandy, and decide to study every subject they can.

They try farming, gardening, chemistry, medicine, geology, history, literature, politics, gymnastics, spiritualism, philosophy, religion and education. In every subject, they read books, discover that experts disagree with one another, try to put the ideas into practice, and fail.

According to Flaubert's plan, which he did not live to complete, they finally decide to return to copying. They begin copying the foolish things they have found in their books.

Flaubert read about 1,500 books while preparing the novel. In August 1873, he told a friend that he had "swallowed" 194 volumes since the previous September.

The ninth chapter, about religion, took him five months to write and was finished in January 1880. At the end of the chapter about philosophy, the two men have tried to kill themselves. A Christmas mass then moves them deeply. They go on a pilgrimage and take communion. However, religious faith does not last, and their doubts return.

The scholar Norioki Sugaya has studied Flaubert's notes about medicine. They contain 136 sheets, or 233 pages, based on medical books.

As the son and brother of surgeons, Flaubert knew a great deal about medicine. He was interested in the way medical theories had changed from century to century and in how famous doctors disagreed with one another.

The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas gives a short example: "Hippocrates says yes, Galen says no."

In the novel, Pécuchet argues with the village doctor beside a patient with typhoid fever. Each man supports a different medical theory.

For Sugaya, Flaubert was thinking about knowledge itself: how people create knowledge, how they use it, and where it can fail.

Laurence Porter has described Bouvard and Pécuchet as modern Saint Anthonys without grace. Saint Anthony is tempted by sins and visions, while the two clerks are tempted by the claims made by every branch of human knowledge.

Jacques-Louis Douchin sees the novel as the last stage of a long process in which Flaubert turned against his own early Romantic ideas. According to Douchin, this process began after the failure of the first Temptation and continued throughout Flaubert's career. He calls Flaubert "the executioner of himself".

Flaubert had other plans for books. In 1879, he told his niece that he dreamed of writing about the battle of Thermopylae. Du Camp later said that this was probably the work Flaubert would have written next.

The planned second volume of the novel was to contain the Dictionnaire des idées reçues ("Dictionary of Accepted Ideas") and the Sottisier, a collection of foolish quotations.

The Dictionary is an alphabetical list of things that a respectable bourgeois person was expected to say about different subjects. Examples include: "Architects: all fools; always forget the stairs." "Diploma: proves nothing."

Flaubert had begun collecting these entries in the 1840s. He planned a preface that would leave readers uncertain about whether the author was laughing at them or agreeing with them. The Dictionary was published only in the 20th century, long after Flaubert's death.

The letters

Flaubert did not write his letters for publication, but they are now widely read. The Pléiade edition fills five volumes.

His letters to Louise Colet from 1852 to 1854, written while he was working on Madame Bovary, contain many of his ideas about impersonality, style and the "book about nothing".

His letters to George Sand from the 1860s and 1870s form a long and friendly argument about art, politics and ordinary people. His letters to Bouilhet from Egypt are direct, humorous and sometimes shocking.

Rosemary Lloyd has described the letters as a kind of diary, often written late at night after Flaubert had finished his day's work. The difference is that Flaubert always had a particular reader in mind.

The personality that he tried so carefully to keep out of his novels is fully present in the letters.

Some early readers, including Proust, thought that the letters were weak compared with the novels. Later critics judged them more highly.

The collection Flaubert. Miroir de la critique notes that the letters are now read as an important work in themselves. Together, they form something like Flaubert's own theory of art, although his ideas sometimes change or contradict one another from one letter to another.

The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges even said that there was a reasonable case for considering the letters Flaubert's most important work.

Early writings and plays

Flaubert's early writings were published long after his death. They include Mémoires d'un fou (1838), Smar (1839), Novembre (1842), the first Éducation sentimentale (1845), and the travel books Pyrénées–Corse (1840) and Par les champs et par les grèves (1847).

Novembre is a story about the desire and despair of a young man. The first Éducation sentimentale already contains many themes that appear in Flaubert's later work. However, its narrator says "I", judges the characters and speaks directly to the reader. Flaubert avoided these methods in his later novels.

Flaubert loved the theatre throughout his life. He once said that if someone had trained him properly, he would have become an excellent actor.

For the stage, he wrote Le Candidat (1874). He also wrote Le Château des cœurs ("The Castle of Hearts"), a fairy play, in 1862 and 1863 with Bouilhet and Count d'Osmoy. No theatre agreed to perform it. It was printed in the magazine La Vie moderne in 1880.

His travel writings form another part of his work. They include Pyrénées–Corse (1840) and Par les champs et par les grèves (1847). There are also notes from the family journey to Italy in 1845, the journey to the East, and the journey to Carthage in 1858. Most of these texts were published only in the 20th century.

His ideas

Two ideas appear throughout Flaubert's life and work. The first is his dislike of what he called la bêtise, or human stupidity. He often attacked the "bourgeois" for the same reason. By this word, he did not simply mean a social class. He meant a lazy and self-satisfied way of thinking. The second idea is the great importance that he gave to art. For much of his life, he treated writing as the most important part of his existence. This section explains these ideas and some of the rules that guided his work.

The right word and the gueuloir

Flaubert believed that there was a best way to express an idea. He called this search le mot juste, the exact word. A sentence had to be accurate, but it also had to sound right. He disliked repeated words, awkward sounds, and sentences with too many words such as "which" and "that".

He read his sentences aloud in his gueuloir to test their rhythm. He rewrote them until they sounded right to him. This helps to explain why he wrote so slowly. His manuscripts show how much he rewrote: about 4,500 pages of drafts for Madame Bovary became a finished book of about 400 pages. When Du Camp criticised his grammar, Flaubert answered that the only laws he had to obey were the laws of harmony.

Flaubert saw himself as a man who lived through writing. "I am a man of the pen," he wrote. "I feel through it, because of it, in relation to it, and much more with it." He did not trust sudden inspiration. He thought that it came from nervous excitement rather than from real artistic strength.

He believed that the novel was still a young art form and was "waiting for its Homer". In a letter of 1852, he dreamed of a style that would be "as rhythmical as verse, as precise as the language of science". Prose, he said, had been born only recently, while writers had already tried almost every form of verse.

The critic Roland Barthes saw in Flaubert a new idea of writing as a craft, something made through hard and patient work. He compared Flaubert with Binet, the tax collector in Madame Bovary, who spends his time making napkin rings on a lathe.

Gérard Genette called Flaubert "the first of modern writers". By this, he meant that writing itself became a problem for Flaubert. For Balzac, literature was a profession that could be learned and practised. For Flaubert, writing was something he felt that he had to do, but it was also something that he always found difficult.

Genette compared this with Kafka, who later described a similar conflict when he said that God did not want him to write, but that he knew he had to.

Lawrence Schehr has also noted that failure appears again and again in Flaubert's letters. Every new version made the earlier version seem wrong. When a whole day's work produced no finished sentence, Flaubert sometimes fell on his sofa and could do nothing more. For him, failure as a writer could feel like failure as a human being.

For Flaubert, style was not simply decoration. It was a way of seeing the world. In a famous letter, he called style "an absolute way of seeing things".

He thought that a book should be held together by the strength of its style, almost as a building stands through its own structure. He did not believe that some subjects were naturally more artistic than others. A provincial case of adultery and the wars of Carthage could both become works of art. What mattered was the way the writer treated the subject.

Impersonality

Another important rule for Flaubert was impersonality. This means that the author should not openly place himself inside the book.

Earlier novelists such as Balzac, Stendhal and Hugo often spoke in their own voices. They explained their characters and sometimes told the reader what to think. Flaubert tried to avoid this. "The author in his work must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere," he wrote to Louise Colet in December 1852.

For Flaubert, art should not preach. The writer should show people and events rather than directly explain what lesson the reader should learn. He also believed that a writer should not simply write about his own feelings. "It is a principle of mine," he told a reader, "that a writer must not be his own theme."

This does not mean that his novels contain nothing from his own life. Winock has pointed out that impersonality had limits and that Madame Bovary contains many details connected with Flaubert's own experiences.

One famous sentence in the novel compares human speech to a cracked kettle on which people beat out tunes for bears to dance to while they wish to move the stars. Many readers have heard Flaubert's own feelings behind this image.

Even so, his idea of impersonality strongly influenced later fiction. Writers such as Maupassant and Joyce developed different ways of making the author less visible inside the story.

The novelist Mario Vargas Llosa has explained why he thought this was important. In many earlier novels, the narrator often interrupted the story to give opinions, as Hugo sometimes does in Les Misérables. According to Vargas Llosa, Flaubert understood that a story becomes more convincing when it seems to have a life of its own. He helped to develop methods that make the narrator less visible.

Michael Tilby adds that Flaubert's irony does not leave anyone completely safe, including the reader and the author himself. His books often refuse to tell the reader exactly which position is correct. Tilby connects this with Flaubert's belief that opposite ideas can sometimes meet.

Stupidity and irony

Flaubert's great enemy was what he called la bêtise, or stupidity. "We suffer from only one thing," he wrote, "Stupidity, but it is formidable and universal."

By stupidity, Flaubert did not simply mean low intelligence. He often meant ready-made ideas: opinions that people repeat without thinking about them. Examples include the confident speeches of Homais, Emma's clichés, and the empty language of politicians.

In this sense, much of Flaubert's writing studies different forms of stupidity. He wrote that Madame Bovary had surrounded him with the dreams of young girls and that the stupidity of Bouvard and Pécuchet was beginning to fill his own mind.

Jonathan Culler has shown that stupidity was not only something Flaubert hated. It could also fascinate and amuse him. A perfect example of foolishness sometimes gave him a kind of surprised pleasure. He wrote that even a very ordinary word could sometimes seem strange and wonderful, almost like a word from a foreign language that he did not understand.

Culler connects this with Flaubert's irony. Irony often creates a distance between what is said and what is meant. In some novels by Balzac, when a bad person receives a fitting punishment, the world can seem ordered and just.

Flaubert usually gives the reader less comfort. His calm sentences and unexpected details often leave the reader uncertain about how to judge a person or an event. He does not always provide a clear final answer.

This is why Culler called his book on Flaubert The Uses of Uncertainty. In his view, this uncertainty is not a weakness. It is one of the main effects that Flaubert wanted to create.

The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas uses a similar method. Its motto comes from the writer Chamfort, who said that an idea accepted by everyone is probably foolish because it has pleased the greatest number of people.

Tilby points out a difficulty in Flaubert's attacks on the bourgeoisie. The people who read his books often belonged to the same social world that he mocked. Homais, one of the most foolish characters in Madame Bovary, calls himself a follower of Voltaire, a writer Flaubert also admired. At the same time, the simple-minded Félicité in Un cœur simple can be understood as a kind of saint.

Politics and religion

Flaubert did not belong to a political party. He disliked the bourgeoisie, but he also distrusted crowds. At different times, he mocked monarchists, Bonapartists and socialists.

After the war of 1870 and the Commune, his political opinions became especially bitter. He wrote against universal male suffrage, the right of all adult men to vote. He believed that government by numbers could place ignorance above knowledge.

He sometimes imagined a government of "mandarins", meaning highly educated people. George Sand strongly disagreed with him because she trusted ordinary people and democratic politics more than he did. They continued to argue about this until the end of her life.

However, Flaubert's political views do not fit easily into one simple label. He respected Victor Hugo while Hugo was in exile, refused to stand for the Académie française, and often spoke with contempt about honours and public success.

Flaubert did not have religious faith, but religion interested him deeply. He read early Christian writers, the history of heresies, and sacred texts from India. The Temptation of Saint Anthony, Hérodias and Un cœur simple all deal with religious belief and feeling.

Mary Orr has argued that critics have too often treated Flaubert's religious subjects as decoration or simple mockery. In her view, the problem of belief is important throughout his work.

For Jacques-Louis Douchin, writing itself became something like a religion for Flaubert. His quiet life at Croisset could be compared with the life of a hermit in the desert. Douchin sees Flaubert's "religion of style" as his answer to a modern world of money, machines and mass society that he strongly disliked.

In 1870, Flaubert wrote: "A mandarin like me no longer has his place in the world." In 1872, he told Turgenev that he felt "an irremediable barbarism" rising from society. In January 1880, he told his niece that art was a torture but that, in the end, it was the only good thing.

Jonathan Culler has suggested that the sacred is one of the few things in Flaubert's novels that gives life a positive meaning. In his reading, it gives meaning to a world that is otherwise mostly negative. He adds that Flaubert's own name for this highest value was simply "style".

Flaubert and pictures

Flaubert refused to allow illustrations in his books. In 1862, he wrote that no one would illustrate his work while he was alive. He believed that even a poor drawing could limit the effect of a literary description.

A picture of a woman, he argued, shows one particular woman. A written description allows each reader to imagine a different one.

He also disliked being photographed, and only a few photographs of him are known.

The scholar Bernard Vouilloux has described Flaubert as an "iconoclast", or a person who breaks or rejects images. In Flaubert's novels, pictures are often poor or commercial ones: cheap prints on hotel walls, official portraits of the royal family, or paintings made only for sale.

The painter Pellerin in L'Éducation sentimentale is full of theories about art but cannot produce good paintings.

In the Dictionary of Accepted Ideas, Flaubert first wrote that the arts were useless because machines could now do the work better. He also wrote that the daguerreotype, an early type of photograph, would replace painting. He later crossed out both entries.

French and German scholars have studied the importance of images in Flaubert's work in two collections of essays. They argue that Flaubert often sets writing against images, and reading against seeing. In their view, he wanted writing to show how images could mislead people at a time when industry was beginning to produce them in very large numbers.

At the same time, Flaubert's own writing is often highly visual. A painting by Bruegel gave him the idea for Saint Anthony, and a stained-glass window helped inspire Saint Julien.

Barbara Vinken has argued that Realist novels were not created only from direct observation and from books. Writers also used the paintings and sculptures that they saw in museums, churches and art exhibitions.

Other scholars have studied images from natural science in Flaubert's writing, such as the corals and polyps in the Temptation.

Aimée Israel-Pelletier notes that Flaubert's characters often learn about the world through sight. Balzac's characters often listen to stories and tell them. Emma Bovary, by contrast, learns about life by looking at pictures in books, paintings and magazines.

Some objects in Flaubert's novels, such as Charles's cap or Emma's wedding cake, are described in great detail. Israel-Pelletier says that these objects seem to "say too little with too much".

Despite Flaubert's dislike of illustrations, many later artists have made pictures from his books. They include Odilon Redon, Auguste Rodin, Alphonse Mucha and David Hockney.

Was Flaubert a realist?

Flaubert is often described as one of the great writers of Realism, and Madame Bovary was called a "realist" novel from the time it first appeared. Flaubert himself disliked the word.

In 1876, he wrote to George Sand that people thought he loved reality when in fact he hated it. He said that he had begun Madame Bovary because of his dislike of realism.

"Do not speak to me of realism," he told Maupassant. "I am fed up with it. What empty nonsense."

Victor Brombert begins his study of Flaubert with these statements. He argues that literary history gave a false picture of Flaubert when it made him the founder and main representative of a single literary school.

Flaubert did not simply want to copy the world. He wanted to transform even an ordinary or ugly subject into a carefully made work of art. Zola and the Naturalists later saw him as an important earlier model, but Flaubert disliked many of their theories and thought that their choice of subjects was too narrow.

Critics often place Flaubert between two traditions in literature. By education and taste, he had much in common with Romanticism. He loved Hugo, Byron and the East, and he wrote lyrical and fantastic works such as the Temptation.

At the same time, he trained himself to write in a controlled, exact and ironic style. This style made him an important model for later novelists.

Brombert describes these two sides by saying that Flaubert's "pessimism feeds his poetic vision". He also says that Flaubert criticised Romanticism but still followed much of its tradition.

Douchin also sees two sides in Flaubert. One trusted reason, while the other was guided by feeling.

Barbara Vinken has suggested an older historical source for Flaubert's Realism. Following Erich Auerbach, she connects the simple style of Realist writing with the humble style of the Gospels. The Gospels told the story of a god born among poor people. "The realism of the poor," she writes, "was a Christian invention from the beginning."

The introduction to Flaubert. Miroir de la critique points out another difficulty in placing him in a literary movement. Flaubert refused literary fashion and did not try to appear modern. However, later generations have repeatedly found new and modern qualities in his work.

His illness

The exact nature of Flaubert's illness was discussed for more than a century. His friend Du Camp described attacks that began with Flaubert becoming very pale. His whole body then shook, and afterwards he fell into a deep sleep. Doctors of the time spoke of "nervous attacks" of an epileptic kind. The attacks became less frequent after his youth. Dr Pouchet believed that Flaubert had had none for sixteen years before his death.

The illness was kept secret inside the family. At the time, many people believed that epilepsy passed from parents to children and considered it shameful. A man with epilepsy was often not expected to marry. Flaubert never spoke publicly about his illness. Even after his death, his niece wrote only about "an illness" that had placed a shadow over his life and darkened his happiest days.

Du Camp was the first person close to Flaubert to speak openly of epilepsy. He did so in his memoirs, published in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1881 and 1882. Flaubert's friends were angry with him for revealing the secret. Soon afterwards, in 1881, Maupassant wrote that Flaubert had suffered from "a horrible illness, epilepsy", and that he had died from it.

Doctors began to study Flaubert's case around 1900. Charles Binet-Sanglé described the illness as epilepsy in 1900. René Dumesnil, a doctor from Rouen who later became a well-known Flaubert scholar, disagreed. In 1905 and 1906, he argued that Flaubert had suffered not from epilepsy but from hysteria. At the time, doctors used this word for a nervous disorder that they believed came mainly from the mind rather than from the body. Dumesnil was influenced by the ideas of Charcot and Freud, which were important at the time.

Sartre later used a similar psychological explanation and made it an important part of his study of Flaubert. For Sartre, the illness of 1844 was the young man's answer to a father who wanted him to become a lawyer.

Du Camp had a very different explanation. He believed that the illness was responsible for Flaubert's slow way of writing. Without it, he said, Flaubert would have been a man of genius. Winock believes that jealousy influenced this judgment.

In 2022, the doctor and historian of medicine Philippe Hecketsweiler published a new study of Flaubert's illness. He concluded that Flaubert had a form of epilepsy from the age of twenty-two. According to Hecketsweiler, the attacks began in one part of the brain, probably near the back, and sometimes spread to the whole brain and body.

These attacks could begin with strange sights or visions, which may explain some of the experiences that Flaubert described in his letters. They were very frequent at first and later became less common, but Hecketsweiler argues that they never stopped completely.

Hecketsweiler also disagrees with the traditional account of Flaubert's death. Many biographers had said that Flaubert died from bleeding in the brain. Hecketsweiler instead argues that he died suddenly during an epileptic attack, when his breathing and heart stopped.

Flaubert had other health problems. He caught syphilis in Beirut in 1850 and was treated with mercury for years. Mercury was a common treatment at the time, but it was itself poisonous. It could cause a very large flow of saliva and serious damage to the mouth. By the end of his life, Flaubert had lost almost all his teeth.

He also smoked heavily, drank strong coffee, ate a great deal, and took little exercise. Around 1870, he weighed about 240 French pounds, or about 120 kilograms. This was a very high weight even for a tall man. By the age of fifty, he looked much older.

Whatever its exact nature, the illness changed Flaubert's life. It allowed him to leave his law studies and helped keep him at home for long periods. It may also have contributed to the quiet and isolated life that gave him the name "the hermit of Croisset".

Some critics have also looked for signs of the illness in his writing, for example in the visions of Saint Anthony and in Emma Bovary's attacks. Hecketsweiler believes that the illness, Flaubert's fear of it, and the medicines he took all influenced both his way of working and some parts of his writing.

After his death

The first readers

During his lifetime, Flaubert was famous but was not always well understood. Madame Bovary attracted many readers partly because of its trial. Salammbô became fashionable. L'Éducation sentimentale was not successful when it first appeared, and Saint Anthony was mocked by some critics. When Flaubert died, however, newspapers generally agreed that France had lost a great writer.

Zola wrote an essay in which he presented Flaubert as one of the fathers of the Naturalist novel. Maupassant wrote about him with great affection and explained his methods of writing. Henry James, who had visited Flaubert's Sunday gatherings in Paris in 1875 and 1876, later called him "the novelist's novelist".

Zola also remembered the "nervous crises" after which Flaubert lost consciousness and slept deeply. Du Camp's memoirs told the public about the epilepsy that Flaubert's family had kept secret.

Among the people of Flaubert's time, some of the writers who understood him best were themselves poets and novelists, such as Baudelaire, Banville and George Sand. Sainte-Beuve and Taine, two of the most important critics of the period, were more interested in the society and historical conditions behind a book. Flaubert complained about this approach. He asked when criticism would study the work itself, especially its structure and style.

The 20th century

This kind of criticism developed after Flaubert's death. In 1920, one year before the hundredth anniversary of his birth, Marcel Proust published an article about Flaubert's style. He showed how strongly Flaubert had changed the French sentence. He discussed his use of the imperfect tense, his sentences beginning with "and", and the blank spaces that allow the story to move forward by several years in a single line.

Albert Thibaudet published an important book about Flaubert in 1922. In Germany, Erich Auerbach used a single paragraph from Madame Bovary in his book Mimesis to study the way the modern novel represents reality.

The introduction to Flaubert. Miroir de la critique notes that the studies written for the centenary marked an important change. Critics were now paying much more attention to Flaubert's writing itself.

After 1945, French critics studied Flaubert in many new ways. Jean Rousset wrote about Madame Bovary as "the book about nothing". Gérard Genette studied the importance of silence and absence in his writing. Michel Foucault, in an essay about the Temptation, described it as a work born from other books, a "fantastic library".

In 1983, Genette and Tzvetan Todorov brought together important studies of Flaubert in a volume called Travail de Flaubert. Roland Barthes saw Flaubert as an important writer in the history of literature. He believed that Flaubert helped writers become more aware of language and of the methods they used.

Sartre devoted three large volumes to him in L'Idiot de la famille (1971–1972). The work tries to explain how the boy Sartre described as the "idiot" of his family became the author of Madame Bovary. It is more than 2,800 pages long and was never finished.

The book is neither a normal biography nor an ordinary work of literary criticism. Sartre uses Flaubert's life to examine a larger question: how much can people know about another human being at a particular moment in history?

Sartre's work became an important part of Flaubert studies. However, Winock and other biographers have argued that Sartre's picture of Flaubert's father as cold and hostile does not agree with the surviving letters. In these letters, Gustave shows love and admiration for his father.

Biographies by Philip Spencer (1952), Herbert Lottman (1989), Geoffrey Wall (2001), Michel Winock (2013) and Anne Green (2017) give different accounts of Flaubert's life and family.

In the English-speaking world, Jonathan Culler's Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty (1974) studied the novels as works that test the reader's effort to understand people and events. Diana Knight's Flaubert's Characters (1985) argued that Flaubert's characters should be understood as people inside the fictional world and not only as effects of language.

Since the 1980s, scholars have studied the thousands of pages of drafts and notes that Flaubert left behind. Their aim is to understand how each work developed from its first notes to its final form. This method is called "genetic criticism", from the word "genesis", meaning origin or beginning.

The manuscripts of Madame Bovary, kept in Rouen, have been transcribed and placed online by the University of Rouen with the help of volunteers from many countries.

Recent books have also studied the medical notes for Bouvard et Pécuchet, Flaubert's relation to the visual arts, and the meaning of his "realism". The Cambridge Companion to Flaubert (2004) includes essays about his early writings, travel books, letters, characters, style and theatre.

His influence

Flaubert had a very strong influence on the later novel. In France, Maupassant, Zola and the Naturalists followed many of his methods. Proust, Gide and Sartre later studied, discussed and sometimes argued against his ideas.

Outside France, writers such as Henry James, Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford developed similar ideas about the less visible narrator and the carefully constructed scene. Critics have also connected James Joyce with Flaubert's use of free indirect style and with the idea of the artist standing behind the work while remaining separate from it.

Franz Kafka read L'Éducation sentimentale many times and described Flaubert as a kind of spiritual relative. Vladimir Nabokov taught Madame Bovary to his American students as an example of a carefully constructed novel.

Timothy Unwin also names Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino and Milan Kundera among the writers influenced by Flaubert.

The Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa wrote an entire book about his admiration for Madame Bovary. The English novelist Julian Barnes built his novel Flaubert's Parrot (1984) around the stuffed parrot in Un cœur simple. In his own way, Barnes returns to a question similar to Sartre's: how much can one person really know about another?

Anne Green notes that in France Michel Houellebecq has sometimes been called Flaubert's most gifted literary great-grandson. She also notes that the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk declared: "Monsieur Flaubert, c'est moi!"

Madame Bovary has been made into movies many times. Jean Renoir directed a version in 1934, Vincente Minnelli one in 1949, Claude Chabrol another in 1991 with Isabelle Huppert, and Sophie Barthes another in 2014.

Salammbô became a silent movie in 1911 and a French-Italian movie in 1960. The later version changed the story and gave it a happy ending. A special "Salammbô" aria, or opera song, was written for a scene in Orson Welles's movie Citizen Kane (1941).

Philippe Druillet turned Salammbô into three volumes of comics between 1980 and 1986, and the comics later became a video game. Un cœur simple was made into a movie in 2008 with Sandrine Bonnaire.

The word "bovarysme" entered the French language. It describes the habit of imagining oneself and one's life as different or better than they really are. Flaubert's face has appeared on stamps and on a ten-euro coin. Streets, schools and cafés in many places have also been named after him.

In Rouen, the Musée Flaubert et d'histoire de la médecine occupies part of the old hospital where Flaubert was born. At Croisset, only the garden pavilion of his house remains, and it contains a small museum. His grave is in the Cimetière monumental in Rouen, next to those of his parents. The Université de Rouen also has a research centre devoted to Flaubert.

Main works

The years given are the years of first publication. Many works can be read in French at Wikisource.

• Rêve d'enfer (1837), an early story.
• Mémoires d'un fou (written 1838, published 1901).
• Novembre (written 1842, published 1910).
• L'Éducation sentimentale, first version (written 1843–1845, published 1910).
• Par les champs et par les grèves (written 1847 with Maxime Du Camp, published 1886). French text
• Madame Bovary (1857). French text
• Salammbô (1862). French text
• L'Éducation sentimentale (1869). French text
• Le Candidat (1874), a play. French text
• La Tentation de saint Antoine (1874). French text
• Trois Contes (1877): Un cœur simple, La Légende de saint Julien l'Hospitalier and Hérodias. French text
• Le Château des cœurs (1880), a fairy play.
• Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881), unfinished. French text
• Dictionnaire des idées reçues, published after his death. French text
• Correspondance, letters, published from 1884; five volumes in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (1973–2007).
• Voyage en Orient (the notes of 1849–1851) and other travel notes, published after his death.
• Souvenirs, notes et pensées intimes (1838–1841) (1965) and Bibliomanie et autres textes 1836–1839 (1982), early writings.

Notes and references

Books used to write this article

• Adam, Colette-Chantal (1989). Analyses et réflexions sur Flaubert, L'Éducation sentimentale : l'histoire (in French). with Pierre Aurégan and others. Paris: Ellipses. ISBN 2-7298-8952-3.
• Ajac, Bernard, ed. (2014) [First published 1986]. Madame Bovary. Mœurs de province, suivi des Actes du procès. GF (in French). by Gustave Flaubert, with a dossier. Paris: Flammarion. ISBN 978-2-08-133723-7.
• Brombert, Victor (1966). The Novels of Flaubert: A Study of Themes and Techniques. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Culler, Jonathan (2006) [First published 1974]. Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty. Critical Studies in the Humanities (Revised ed.). Aurora, Colorado: The Davies Group. ISBN 978-1-888570-40-3.
• Culler, Jonathan (2009). "The real Madame Bovary". In Vinken, Barbara; Fröhlicher, Peter (eds.). Le Flaubert réel. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. ISBN 978-3-484-60496-4.
• de Biasi, Pierre-Marc; Herschberg Pierrot, Anne; Vinken, Barbara, eds. (2015). Voir, croire, savoir. Les épistémologies de la création chez Gustave Flaubert (in French). Berlin, Munich and Boston: De Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-029479-8.
• Debray-Genette, Raymonde, ed. (1970). Flaubert. Miroir de la critique (in French). Paris: Didier. An anthology of critical texts by George Sand, Émile Zola, Marcel Proust, Charles Du Bos, Percy Lubbock, Erich Auerbach, Jean-Pierre Richard, Georges Poulet, Jean Rousset, Maurice Blanchot, Gérard Genette, Jean-Paul Sartre, Victor Brombert and Michel Foucault.
• Douchin, Jacques-Louis (1984). Le Bourreau de soi-même. Essai sur l'itinéraire intellectuel de Gustave Flaubert. Archives des lettres modernes, 213 (in French). Paris: Lettres modernes. ISBN 2-256-90405-9.
• Finch, Alison (2004). "The stylistic achievements of Flaubert's fiction". In Unwin, Timothy (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Flaubert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-81551-2.
• Gaillard, Françoise (2015). "Les Dieux ont faim, les Dieux ont soif. Flaubert ou le sacrifice sans sacré". In de Biasi, Pierre-Marc; Herschberg Pierrot, Anne; Vinken, Barbara (eds.). Voir, croire, savoir. Les épistémologies de la création chez Gustave Flaubert (in French). Berlin, Munich and Boston: De Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-029479-8.
• Genette, Gérard (1983). "Présentation". In Genette, Gérard; Todorov, Tzvetan (eds.). Travail de Flaubert. Points (in French). Paris: Seuil. ISBN 2-02-006565-7.
• Green, Anne (2017). Gustave Flaubert. Critical Lives. London: Reaktion Books. ISBN 978-1-78023-820-3.
• Hecketsweiler, Philippe (2022). Les Maladies et la mort de Gustave Flaubert. Rouen 1821–1880. Médecine à travers les siècles (in French). Paris: L'Harmattan. ISBN 978-2-343-25734-1.
• Herschberg Pierrot, Anne (2015). "Bouvard et Pécuchet et la critique rationaliste". In de Biasi, Pierre-Marc; Herschberg Pierrot, Anne; Vinken, Barbara (eds.). Voir, croire, savoir. Les épistémologies de la création chez Gustave Flaubert (in French). Berlin, Munich and Boston: De Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-029479-8.
• Israel-Pelletier, Aimée (2004). "Flaubert and the visual". In Unwin, Timothy (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Flaubert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-81551-2.
• Knight, Diana (1985). Flaubert's Characters: The Language of Illusion. Cambridge Studies in French. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-11058-7.
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• Orr, Mary (2008). Flaubert's Tentation: Remapping Nineteenth-Century French Histories of Religion and Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-925858-1.
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• Porter, Laurence M. (2004). "The art of characterisation in Flaubert's fiction". In Unwin, Timothy (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Flaubert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-81551-2.
• Poyet, Thierry (2000). L'Héritage Flaubert-Maupassant (in French). Paris: Kimé. ISBN 2-84174-197-4.
• Raitt, Alan (2004). "The theatre in the work of Flaubert". In Unwin, Timothy (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Flaubert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-81551-2.
• Schehr, Lawrence R. (2004). "Flaubert's failure". In Unwin, Timothy (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Flaubert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-81551-2.
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Related pages

• Madame Bovary
• Novel
• Realism
• Romanticism
• Charles Baudelaire
• George Sand
• Guy de Maupassant

Other websites

• Works of Gustave Flaubert in French at French Wikisource
• Centre Flaubert, the research site of the Université de Rouen Normandie (in French)
• Les manuscrits de Madame Bovary, all the drafts of the novel with transcriptions (in French)