A short life of the author
Gustave Flaubert (12 December 1821 – 8 May 1880) was a French novelist whose fanatical dedication to prose style, whose refusal to separate literary art from literary craft, and whose masterpiece Madame Bovary (1857) fundamentally redefined what the novel could do and how it should be written. More than any other single writer, Flaubert established the modern conception of the novelist as an artist whose medium is language itself — not story, not character, not moral instruction, but the precise arrangement of words on a page.
Early Life
Flaubert was born in Rouen, the son of Achille-Cléophas Flaubert, chief surgeon at the Hôtel-Dieu hospital, and grew up in an apartment within the hospital precincts — a circumstance that gave him an early, unsentimental familiarity with the physical realities of human existence. He was an indifferent student, passionate about literature from childhood, and began writing prolifically in adolescence. At eighteen he went to Paris to study law, found it intolerable, suffered an epileptic seizure in 1844 that gave him the medical excuse he needed to abandon his legal career, and retreated to the family property at Croisset, on the Seine near Rouen, where he lived for the rest of his life.
Croisset became Flaubert’s monastery. He lived with his mother, saw few visitors, maintained a voluminous correspondence, and devoted himself entirely to writing. His social life was conducted largely through letters — his correspondence with George Sand, Ivan Turgenev, and his mistress Louise Colet constitutes one of the great literary correspondences, and his letters contain some of his most penetrating observations about the craft of fiction.
Madame Bovary (1856–1857)
Flaubert worked on Madame Bovary for nearly five years, writing with agonising slowness — sometimes spending an entire week on a single page — in pursuit of absolute precision. The novel tells the story of Emma Bovary, the wife of a dull provincial doctor, whose romantic fantasies, fed by sentimental novels, lead her into adultery, debt, and suicide. The subject matter was deliberately banal: Flaubert chose a mediocre provincial life precisely because it offered the greatest challenge to the art of prose. “Yvetot is worth as much as Constantinople,” he wrote — any subject could be made compelling through sufficiently rigorous style.
The novel was serialised in the Revue de Paris in 1856 and immediately prosecuted for obscenity — a trial that made Flaubert famous and that he won, in part because his defence argued that the novel’s relentless irony constituted a moral judgment on its protagonist. The acquittal established an important precedent for artistic freedom in French law.
What made Madame Bovary revolutionary was not its subject but its method. Flaubert’s narrative technique — the free indirect style (style indirect libre), in which the narrator’s voice merges imperceptibly with the character’s consciousness — allowed the reader to inhabit Emma’s perspective while simultaneously seeing its limitations. The famous agricultural-show scene, in which Rodolphe’s seduction of Emma is intercut with the speeches of local politicians, is a masterpiece of ironic counterpoint that prefigures cinematic montage by half a century. Henry James called Flaubert’s technique “the first thing in the art of fiction.”
Salammbô (1862)
Flaubert’s second published novel was a deliberate swerve away from contemporary realism. Set in ancient Carthage during the Mercenary War (241–238 BC), Salammbô is a historical spectacle — violent, exotic, archaeologically obsessive — that bewildered readers who expected another Madame Bovary. Flaubert researched the novel with the same intensity he brought to style, travelling to Tunisia and reading every available ancient source. The result is a novel of overwhelming sensory detail: battles, religious ceremonies, siege warfare, human sacrifice, and the doomed love between the Carthaginian princess Salammbô and the Libyan mercenary Mâtho.
Critics were divided — Sainte-Beuve found it excessive, while Théophile Gautier praised its grandeur — and the novel has never achieved the canonical status of Madame Bovary. But it remains a remarkable achievement in historical fiction and influenced writers from Anatole France to Thomas Mann.
L’Éducation sentimentale (1869)
Flaubert’s most autobiographical novel follows Frédéric Moreau, a young man of moderate talent and uncertain ambition, through the political upheavals of 1840s Paris — the Revolution of 1848, the June Days, the coup of Louis-Napoleon — as he fails to achieve anything of significance in either love or career. The novel was a commercial and critical failure on publication, and many readers found its protagonist maddeningly passive and its plot formless.
History has reversed this judgment. L’Éducation sentimentale is now widely regarded as one of the greatest novels of the nineteenth century and perhaps Flaubert’s supreme achievement — a novel about the failure of an entire generation to live up to its ideals, told with an irony so pervasive that it becomes a form of compassion. Its influence on Proust, Joyce, and the twentieth-century novel is immense.
Trois Contes (1877)
Flaubert’s final completed work consists of three stories — “Un cœur simple,” “La Légende de saint Julien l’Hospitalier,” and “Hérodias” — that represent three historical periods and three prose registers. “Un cœur simple,” the story of Félicité, an illiterate servant who devotes her life to others and whose emotional world gradually contracts to a single object — a stuffed parrot that she confuses with the Holy Ghost — is widely considered one of the most perfect short stories ever written.
Bouvard et Pécuchet (unfinished, 1881)
Flaubert’s last novel, left unfinished at his death, follows two retired clerks who attempt to master every branch of human knowledge — agriculture, chemistry, archaeology, medicine, philosophy, religion — and fail at each one. The novel is simultaneously a comedy of human stupidity, an encyclopedia of received ideas, and a monument to Flaubert’s own encyclopedic despair at the futility of knowledge.
Le Mot Juste and the Craft of Fiction
Flaubert’s obsession with finding le mot juste — the exactly right word — was not aesthetic vanity but a philosophical conviction that imprecise language produces imprecise thought, and that the novelist’s obligation is to see clearly and render exactly what is seen. His working method — reading sentences aloud, testing their rhythm, rewriting obsessively — established a standard of literary craftsmanship that subsequent writers have either emulated or rebelled against.
Collecting Flaubert
Madame Bovary (1857, Michel Lévy) in the original two-volume first edition is a major collectible, typically bringing $5,000–$20,000. The serialisation in Revue de Paris (1856) is rarer and more valuable. Salammbô and L’Éducation sentimentale first editions are also significant. Flaubert’s letters, published in various editions, are collected both as literature and as documents of literary craft.