Gustave Flaubert ( , ; ; 12 December 1821 – 8 May 1880) was a French novelist. He has been considered the leading exponent of literary realism in his country and abroad. He is known especially for his debut novel Madame Bovary (1857), his Correspondence, and his scrupulous devotion to his style and aesthetics. The celebrated writer Guy de Maupassant was a protégé of Flaubert.

Early life and education

thumb|left|Flaubert's birthplace in [[Rouen, now a museum|267x267px]]

Flaubert was born in Rouen, in the Seine-Maritime department of Upper Normandy, in northern France. He was the second son of Anne Justine Caroline (; 1793–1872) and Achille-Cléophas Flaubert (1784–1846), director and senior surgeon of the major hospital in Rouen. He began writing at an early age, as early as eight according to some sources.

He was educated at the Lycée Pierre-Corneille in Rouen, and did not leave until 1840, whereupon he went to Paris to study law. In Paris, he was an indifferent student and found the city distasteful. He made a few acquaintances, including Victor Hugo. Toward the end of 1840, he traveled in the Pyrenees and Corsica.

In September 1849, Flaubert completed the first version of a novel, The Temptation of Saint Anthony. He read the novel aloud to Louis Bouilhet and Maxime Du Camp over the course of four days, not allowing them to interrupt or give any opinions. At the end of the reading, his friends told him to throw the manuscript in the fire, suggesting instead that he focus on day-to-day life rather than fantastic subjects.

In 1850, after returning from Egypt, Flaubert began work on Madame Bovary. The novel, which took five years to write, was serialized in the Revue de Paris in 1856. The government brought an action against the publisher and author on the charge of immorality,

Drawing on his youth, Flaubert next wrote L'Éducation sentimentale (Sentimental Education), an effort that took seven years. This was his last complete novel, published in the year 1869. The story focuses on the romantic life of a young man named Frédéric Moreau at the time of the French Revolution of 1848 and the founding of the Second French Empire.

In the 1870s, Flaubert wrote an unsuccessful drama, Le Candidat, and he published a reworked version of The Temptation of Saint Anthony, portions of which had been published as early as 1857. He devoted much of his time to an ongoing project, Les Deux Cloportes (The Two Woodlice), which later became Bouvard et Pécuchet, breaking the obsessive project only to write the Three Tales between 1875 and 1877. This book comprises three stories: Un Cœur simple (A Simple Heart), La Légende de Saint-Julien l'Hospitalier (The Legend of St. Julian the Hospitaller), and Hérodias (Herodias). After the publication of the stories, he spent the remainder of his life toiling on Bouvard et Pécuchet, the unfinished version of which was posthumously published in 1881. It was a grand satire on the futility of human knowledge and the ubiquity of mediocrity.

Perfectionist style

Flaubert famously avoided the inexact, the abstract and the vaguely inapt expression, and scrupulously eschewed the cliché.

Flaubert believed in and pursued the principle of finding "le mot juste" ("the right word"), which he considered as the key means to achieve high quality in literary art. Flaubert said he wished to forge a style "that would be rhythmic as verse, precise as the language of the sciences, undulant, deep-voiced as a cello, tipped with flame: a style that would pierce your idea like a dagger, and on which your thought would sail easily ahead over a smooth surface, like a skiff before a good tail wind." He famously said that "an author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere."

This painstaking style of writing is also evident when one compares Flaubert's output over a lifetime to that of his peers (for example Balzac or Zola). Flaubert published much less prolifically than was the norm for his time and never got near the pace of a novel a year, as his peers often achieved during their peaks of activity. Walter Pater famously called Flaubert the "martyr of style".

Personal life

From 1846 to 1854, Flaubert had a relationship with the poet Louise Colet; his letters to her survived. an "enraged liberal" (), a hater of all despotism, and one who celebrated every protest of the individual against power and monopolies.

With his lifelong friend Maxime Du Camp, he traveled in Brittany in 1846. He also engaged in intercourse with male prostitutes in Beirut and Egypt; in one of his letters, he describes a "pockmarked young rascal wearing a white turban".

According to his biographer Émile Faguet, his affair with Louise Colet was his only serious romantic relationship.

Flaubert was a diligent worker and often complained in his letters to friends about the strenuous nature of his work. He was close to his niece, Caroline Commanville, and had a close friendship and correspondence with George Sand. He occasionally visited Parisian acquaintances, including Émile Zola, Alphonse Daudet, Ivan Turgenev, and Edmond and Jules de Goncourt.

The 1870s were a difficult time for Flaubert. Prussian soldiers occupied his house during the War of 1870, and his mother died in 1872. After her death, he fell into financial difficulty due to business failures on the part of his niece's husband. Flaubert lived with venereal diseases most of his life. His health declined and he died at Croisset of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1880 at the age of 58. He was buried in the family vault in the cemetery of Rouen. A monument to him by Henri Chapu was unveiled at the museum of Rouen.

As a writer, other than a pure stylist, Flaubert was nearly equal parts romantic and realist.

<blockquote>The greatest literary influence upon Kafka was Flaubert's. Flaubert who loathed pretty-pretty prose would have applauded Kafka's attitude towards his tool. Kafka liked to draw his terms from the language of law and science, giving them a kind of ironic precision, with no intrusion of the author's private sentiments; this was exactly Flaubert's method through which he achieved a singular poetic effect. The legacy of his work habits can best be described, therefore, as paving the way towards a slower and more introspective manner of writing.

</blockquote>

The publication of Madame Bovary in 1856 was followed by more scandal than admiration; it was not understood at first that this novel was the beginning of something new: the scrupulously truthful portraiture of life. Gradually, this aspect of his genius was accepted, and it began to crowd out all others. At the time of his death, he was widely regarded as the most influential French Realist. Under this aspect Flaubert exercised an extraordinary influence over Guy de Maupassant, Edmond de Goncourt, Alphonse Daudet, and Émile Zola.

He has been admired or written about by almost every major literary personality of the 20th century, including philosophers and sociologists such as Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jean-Paul Sartre, the latter of whose partially psychoanalytic portrait of Flaubert in The Family Idiot was published in 1971. Georges Perec named Sentimental Education as one of his favourite novels. The Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa was another great admirer of Flaubert. Apart from Perpetual Orgy, which is solely devoted to Flaubert's art, one can find lucid discussions in Vargas Llosa's Letters to a Young Novelist (published 2003). In a public lecture in May 1966 at the Kaufmann Art Gallery in New York, Marshall McLuhan claimed: "I derived all my knowledge of media from people like Flaubert and Rimbaud and Baudelaire."

On the occasion of Flaubert's 198th birthday (12 December 2019), a group of researchers at CNRS published a neural language model under his name.

Bibliography

Prose fiction

  • November (1842) - novella published posthumously (1928)
  • The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1849, 1856, 1872, and 1874) - prose poem
  • Madame Bovary (1857)
  • Salammbô (1862)
  • Sentimental Education (1869)
  • Three Tales (1877) - short story collection
  • Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881) - unfinished novel, posthumously published

Other works

  • La Peste à Florence (1836)
  • Rêve d'enfer (1837)
  • Memoirs of a Madman (1838)
  • Le Candidat (1874)
  • Le Château des cœurs (1880)
  • Dictionary of Received Ideas (1911)
  • Souvenirs, notes et pensées intimes (1965)

Adaptations

  • The opera Hérodiade by Jules Massenet, based on Flaubert's novella Hérodias
  • The opera Madame Bovary by Emmanuel Bondeville, based on Flaubert's novel
  • The unfinished opera Salammbo by Modest Mussorgsky, orchestrated by Zoltán Peskó, based on Flaubert's novel.
  • A number of films and television series based on Madame Bovary.
  • La légende de Saint-Julien l'Hospitalier (1888), an opera by Camille Erlanger

Correspondence (in English)

  • Selections:
  • Selected Letters (ed. Francis Steegmuller, 1953, 2001)
  • Selected Letters (ed. Geoffrey Wall, 1997)
  • Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour (1972)
  • Flaubert and Turgenev, a Friendship in Letters: The Complete Correspondence (ed. Barbara Beaumont, 1985)
  • Correspondence with George Sand:
  • The George Sand–Gustave Flaubert Letters, translated by Aimée G. Leffingwell McKenzie (A. L. McKenzie), introduced by Stuart Sherman (1921), available at the Gutenberg website as E-text No. 5115
  • Flaubert–Sand: The Correspondence (1993)
  • Allen, James Sloan, Worldly Wisdom: Great Books and the Meanings of Life, Frederic C. Beil, 2008.
  • Baldick, Robert, Dinner at Magny's, Victor Gollancz, 1971.
  • Brown, Frederick, Flaubert: a Biography, Little, Brown; 2006.
  • Hennequin, Émile, Quelques écrivains français Flaubert, Zola, Hugo, Goncourt, Huysmans, etc., available at the Gutenberg website as E-text No. 12289
  • Barnes, Julian, Flaubert's Parrot, London: J. Cape; 1984
  • Fleming, Bruce, Saving Madame Bovary: Being Happy With What We Have, Frederic C. Beil, 2017.
  • Max, Gerry, "Gustave Flaubert: The Book As Artifact and Idea: Bibliomane and Bibliology," Dalhousie French Studies, Spring-Summer, 1992.
  • Patton, Susannah, A Journey into Flaubert's Normandy, Roaring Forties Press, 2007.
  • Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, 1821–1857, Volumes 1–5. University of Chicago Press, 1987.
  • Steegmuller, Francis, Flaubert and Madame Bovary: a Double Portrait, New York: Viking Press; 1939.
  • Tooke, Adrianne, Flaubert and the Pictorial Arts: from image to text, Oxford University Press; 2000.
  • Troyat, Henri, Flaubert, Viking, 1992.
  • Wall, Geoffrey, Flaubert: a Life, Faber and Faber; 2001.
  • Various authors, The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert, available at the Gutenberg website as E-text No. 10666.

References

  • Audiobook (MP3): La femme du monde (taken from Flaubert's early works)
  • Flaubert's works: text, concordances and frequency list
  • Gustave Flaubert, his work in audio version
  • Site of the Centre Flaubert at Rouen
  • Flaubert entry at the Johns Hopkins University Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism
  • Bibliomania page
  • A comprehensive site in French
  • Flaubert 'Bookweb' on literary website The Ledge, with suggestions for further reading
  • "The Martyr of Letters", essay on The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, F. L. Lucas, Studies French and English (1934), pp.&nbsp;242–266