FLAUBERT, GUSTAVE. — French writer, born in Rouen on 12 December 1821, died at Croisset on 8 May 1880. After a youth devoted to romantic impulses and exotic flights of the imagination, which later found expression in a journey to the East (October 1849–May 1851) and in vague literary sketches (Mémoires d'un fou, Novembre) subsequently rejected, F. withdrew to his native city, where he came to live in seclusion, devoting himself exclusively to the art of writing, which he experienced as a vital necessity and as a means of intimate, albeit painful, salvation. The course of this writer may be followed by bearing in mind, on the one hand, his passionate and dreamy soul, which would never cease, even in life, to surrender itself to romantic illusions, and, on the other, an acute and at times morbid awareness
of such provisional states of mind, which lead away from reality.
A revealing document of Flaubertian Romanticism is the Tentation de st Antoine, rewritten no fewer than three times and finally published in 1874. But the conflict mentioned above took shape in a singular manner between 1850 and 1856, during the composition of the novel Madame Bovary. The victory went to the second F., the realist, as is evident from the figure of the heroine, whom the author, despite strangely identifying her with himself (« madame Bovary, c'est moi »), views with a disenchanted and pitiless eye. She is a young woman, the wife of a provincial doctor, who seeks to escape a mediocre life through adultery and ends by committing suicide. Around the heroine and her two lovers are other characters, among whom one must not forget the pharmacist Homaïa, a characteristic figure of a Voltairian and positivist who believes in scientific progress as the sole instrument for renewing human life. This cruel and banal story, told with great artistry, earned the author a trial for outraging public decency that has remained famous in French literature. In 1863 Salambé appeared: the realistic method is here applied to an episode in Carthaginian history, relived through the ancient histories, but it does not depart from its aims, which at times appear exposed when the analysis of events is replaced by the complacent depiction of scenes of violence and bloodshed. F.’s art, on the verge of touching rhetoric, becomes genuine and limpid again in the Education sentimentale (1869), a novel recently defined as scarcely novelistic, if one considers its rather weak narrative construction or the figure of the principal character, Frédéric Moreau, dominated by a love that can never be fulfilled and drifts through time without a plausible reason; yet it is an inwardly complete and highly evocative novel because of the poetic warmth it radiates, within the broad framework of contemporary events summoned to memory by the author’s direct experience. After the publication of the final version of the Tentation, it was the Trois contes (Un coeur simple, Hérodius and La légende de st Julieu l'Hospitalier), which appeared in 1877, that gave the definitive measure of F.’s marvelous and human art. Once again, he alternates contemporary themes of modest interest with historical or legendary themes, but the taste for storytelling is unified, and the style unmistakable, carried to a linguistic and representational mastery worthy of the finest classical tradition. A highly singular aspect of F. is finally revealed in his last work, left unfinished (and published posthumously in 1881): Bouvard et Pécuchet. It is the caricature of two stubborn ignoramuses who methodically undertake works and actions greater than themselves and, inwardly deprived of any love of life and knowledge, compile collections of experiences in life and science. Here F.’s realism undergoes its most ambitious and cruel test, since in the end the image of man is deformed and rendered sterile beyond remedy, without the narrative deriving any moral impetus from the errors and absurdities represented. Almost by contrast, leafing through the extensive Correspondance (9 vols.; published in 1933), one discovers the qualities of the man F.—good, generous, enthusiastic—and so committed to his work that he alternately humbled and exalted himself in the most exhausting philological and historical investigations. The following works by F. are on the Index: Madame Bovary and Salambé (decree of 20 June 1864).