FLAUBERT, Gustave. – French writer, b. at Rouen on 12 Dec. 1821, d. at Croisset on 8 May 1880. After a youth devoted to romantic impulses and exotic flights of fancy, which later took shape in a journey to the Orient (Oct. 1849–May 1851) and in vague literary sketches (Mémoires d'un fou, Novembre) subsequently rejected, F. withdrew to his native city, where he lived in seclusion, devoting himself exclusively to the art of writing, which he felt to be a vital necessity for an inner, albeit painful, salvation. One can trace the development of this writing, bearing in mind on the one hand his passionate, dreamy soul, which would never cease to indulge in romantic illusions even in life, and on the other a keen, and at times morbid, awareness of the transient states of mind that lead one away from reality.
A revealing document of Flaubert’s romanticism is the Tentation de St Antoine, rewritten three times and finally published in 1874. But the conflict alluded to took concrete form between 1850 and 1856 in a singular way during the composition of Madame Bovary (completed March 1856). The victory was that of the second F., the realist, as is evident from the portrayal of the heroine, whom the author, while curiously identifying himself with her (Madame Bovary, c’est moi), regards with a disenchanted and pitiless eye. The story concerns a young woman, the wife of a provincial doctor, who seeks to escape a mediocre existence through adultery and ends by committing suicide. Around the heroine and her two lovers are other characters, among whom the pharmacist Homais must not be forgotten—a typical figure of the Voltairean positivist who believes in scientific progress as the sole means of renewing human life. This cruel and banal tale, told with great artistry, earned its author a famous trial for outrage to public decency in French literature.
In 1862 appeared Salammbô: the realistic curse is here applied to an episode from Carthaginian history, relived through ancient sources, yet it does not stray from its aims, which sometimes appear overt when the analysis of events gives way to a relish for scenes of violence and bloodshed. The art of F., which verges on rhetoric, returns to its genuine and limpid form in L’Éducation sentimentale (1869), a novel that is little romantic in the conventional sense, as has been recently noted, whether one considers its rather weak narrative structure or the figure of the protagonist, Frédéric Moreau, whose love remains perpetually unfulfilled and is rekindled without plausible reason; yet it is inwardly complete and highly suggestive for the poetic warmth it conveys within the broad tableau of contemporary events evoked by the author’s direct experience.
After the publication of the final version of the Tentation, it was the Trois contes (Un cœur simple, Hérodias, and La Légende de St Julien l’Hospitalier), published in 1877, that gave definitive measure to the marvelous and humane art of F. Once again, he alternates contemporary themes of modest interest with historical or legendary ones, but the narrative taste is unique, the style unmistakable, raised to a masterly linguistic level worthy of the best classical tradition.
A singular aspect of F. is revealed in his last work, left unfinished (published posthumously in 1887): Bouvard et Pécuchet. It is the caricature of two stubborn ignoramuses who methodically engage in enterprises and actions beyond their capacity, and the revisitations of their love for life and knowledge strike home the lessons of life’s experiences and of science. Here F.’s realism undergoes its most ambitious and cruel test, for in the end the image of man is deformed and irreparably trapped, without the narrative drawing any moral impulse from the errors and bestialities depicted.
Almost by contrast, when one leafs through the vast Correspondance (whose publication began in 1933), one discovers the qualities of the man F.: good, generous, enthusiastic, and so devoted to his work that he alternately humbles and exalts himself in the most exhausting philological and historical researches.
F.’s works placed on the Index: Madame Bovary; Salammbô (decree of 20 June 1868).