French Literature · 1 books
Gustave Flaubert was born on December 12, 1821, in Rouen, Normandy, and died on May 8, 1880, in Croisset, the house near Rouen where he had lived and worked for most of his adult life. He published relatively few books — his collected fiction amounts to a handful of novels and a short story collection — but his influence on subsequent prose fiction has been so pervasive that any list of writers who have been shaped by him would include most of the major novelists of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He changed what people expected of the novel, and more importantly, what they expected of themselves as writers.
His father, Achille-Cléophas Flaubert, was the chief surgeon and medical director at the Hôtel-Dieu hospital in Rouen, a man of high professional standing whose scientific precision his son would internalize and redirect toward literature. His mother came from a Norman family and was the central figure of Flaubert’s emotional life for most of his adult years. He grew up in the hospital building — the family apartment was adjacent to the dissecting room — and in the Norman landscape that would appear throughout his fiction: the grey light, the bourgeois interiors, the slow provincial rivers.
He was sent to Paris to study law but had no interest in the profession. In 1844 he suffered what appears to have been a neurological episode — a sudden seizure or convulsive attack, possibly the onset of an epileptic condition — while travelling with his brother, and the event effectively ended his legal studies and provided the justification for withdrawing from public life to Croisset, where he spent most of the following decades writing. The episode has been much discussed: some have suggested it was also a psychological event, a kind of enforced crisis that permitted him to become what he already knew he needed to be. Whatever its cause, after 1844 he lived as a writer.
The writing was extraordinarily slow by the standards of the literary marketplace. He drafted, revised, discarded, and redrafted with an obsessiveness that he documented extensively in his correspondence — particularly his letters to Louise Colet, with whom he had a long relationship and to whom he wrote extensively about the agonies of literary composition. He sought the mot juste — the exactly right word — as a guiding principle, and believed that a sentence was not finished until no word in it could be changed for the better. He tested his sentences by reading them aloud, listening for rhythmic imprecision, for redundancy, for anything that would not bear the weight he was placing on it.
Madame Bovary, his first published novel, appeared in 1857, serialized in the Revue de Paris, and immediately generated a prosecution for offenses against public morality. The trial was significant: the state argued that the novel glorified adultery and undermined the institutions of marriage and religion; Flaubert and his publisher were acquitted, and the acquittal and the publicity transformed the book’s reception. Emma Bovary — a doctor’s wife in provincial Normandy who feeds herself on Romantic fiction and finds real provincial life unbearably coarse and limiting, who conducts affairs that are as disappointing as her marriage, and who destroys herself and her family — became one of the most discussed characters in nineteenth-century fiction. Flaubert’s often-quoted remark, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” may be apocryphal in the exact form in which it is usually cited, but the identification is substantively real: he understood Emma’s hunger for something more than the available world, and he also understood her stupidity about how to pursue it.
Salammbô, published in 1862, was a deliberate departure: a historical novel set in ancient Carthage during the mercenary war that followed the First Punic War, written with ferocious archaeological precision and a sensory density that aimed to recover a vanished world through meticulous research. L’Éducation sentimentale, published in 1869, returned to modern France and to a subject close to his own experience — the education of a young man through disappointment, failure, and the recognition that the idealized loves and ambitions of youth cannot survive contact with the real. It was not well received on publication; it has come to be regarded as one of the most honest accounts of how adult life actually proceeds.
The short story collection Trois Contes, published in 1877, contains three works of very different kinds: A Simple Heart, a quiet and devastating story of a servant woman’s faith and solitude; The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitalier, a medieval tale told in the manner of a stained glass window; and Hérodias, a biblical story. Together they show a range that his novel-focused reputation sometimes obscures.
He was working on Bouvard et Pécuchet — an encyclopedic novel about two copy-clerks who retire and systematically investigate every field of human knowledge, finding each one incoherent or useless — when he died in 1880. It was published unfinished. The project was also a satirical index of received ideas, cataloguing the clichéd formulations through which people avoid thinking: an enterprise that might stand as an emblem of the lifelong war Flaubert conducted against imprecision in every form.
His influence on the fiction that followed him was pervasive and often unacknowledged, in the way that foundational influences tend to be. Henry James, who met him in Paris in the 1870s, absorbed his doctrine of narrative point of view and the suppression of the author’s direct presence. Maupassant, his most devoted pupil, made the economy of observation into a career. James Joyce, developing the stream-of-consciousness novel in the early twentieth century, acknowledged the importance of Flaubert’s work in establishing the principle that the author should be invisible, absent behind the work, indifferent, paring his fingernails. The phrase is Joyce’s, from a character in A Portrait of the Artist, but the idea is Flaubert’s.
At Classics Retold, we have published new translations of Flaubert’s major works, beginning with Madame Bovary — a translation that aims to carry his controlled, precise, devastatingly ironic prose into English without softening its edges or losing its rhythmic character. These editions are designed for readers who want to understand why so many subsequent writers regarded him as the model of what literary seriousness required.
