Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert and literary realism

Gustave Flaubert was a French novelist born on 12 December 1821 in Rouen, in Upper Normandy, and he died on 8 May 1880. He has been considered the leading exponent of literary realism in France and abroad, known above all for Madame Bovary, first published in book form in 1857, for his wide-ranging correspondence, and for his exacting devotion to literary style. The writer Guy de Maupassant was his protégé.

Flaubert grew up in a medical household. His father, Achille-Cléophas Flaubert, was director and senior surgeon of the major hospital in Rouen, and his mother was Anne Justine Caroline Fleuriot. He began writing early, as young as eight according to some sources, and was educated at the Lycée Pierre-Corneille in Rouen. In 1840 he went to Paris to study law, but he was an indifferent student and disliked the city, though he made a few acquaintances there, including Victor Hugo. After an attack of epilepsy in 1846, he left Paris and abandoned law.

His first finished work was the novella November, completed in 1842. In 1849 he finished a first version of The Temptation of Saint Anthony and read it aloud to Louis Bouilhet and Maxime Du Camp over four days; they advised him to abandon the manuscript and turn from fantastic subjects toward day-to-day life. After returning from Egypt in 1850, he began Madame Bovary, a novel that took five years to write. It was serialized in the Revue de Paris in 1856, then became the subject of a government action against the publisher and author on a charge of immorality. Both were acquitted, and the book received a warm reception.

Flaubert’s later work kept the same slow, demanding pace. He traveled to Carthage in 1858 to gather material for Salammbô, completed in 1862 after four years of work. Drawing on his youth, he wrote Sentimental Education, published in 1869, about Frédéric Moreau’s romantic life at the time of the French Revolution of 1848 and the founding of the Second French Empire. In the 1870s he wrote the unsuccessful drama Le Candidat, published a reworked The Temptation of Saint Anthony, and worked on Bouvard et Pécuchet. He interrupted that project to write Three Tales between 1875 and 1877. The unfinished Bouvard et Pécuchet appeared after his death in 1881.

The right word

What most shaped Flaubert’s writing was his belief in le mot juste, “the right word.” He avoided vague expression and cliché, and in a letter to George Sand said he spent his time “trying to write harmonious sentences, avoiding assonances.” He worked in solitude, sometimes spending a week on a single page, and his correspondence shows how much labor and revision stood behind his prose. He once said that “an author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.” That ideal helps explain why his sentences still invite close attention: they are built to seem effortless, but behind them is a mind refusing to settle for less than precision.