Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris: The Story of a Friendship, a Novel, and a Terrible Year

by Peter Brooks

From a distinguished literary historian, a look at Gustave Flaubert and his correspondence with George Sand during France's "terrible year" -- summer 1870 through spring 1871

From the summer of 1870 through the spring of 1871, France suffered a humiliating defeat in its war against Prussia and witnessed bloody class warfare that culminated in the crushing of the Paris Commune. In Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris, Peter Brooks examines why Flaubert thought his recently published novel, Sentimental Education, was prophetic of the upheavals in France during this "terrible year," and how Flaubert's life and that of his compatriots were changed forever. Brooks uses letters between Flaubert and his novelist friend and confidante George Sand to tell the story of Flaubert and his work, exploring his political commitments and his understanding of war, occupation, insurrection, and bloody political repression. Interweaving history, art history, and literary criticism-from Flaubert's magnificent novel of historical despair, to the building of the reactionary monument The Sacré-Cœur Basilica on Paris's highest summit, to the emergence of photography as historical witness-Brooks sheds new light on the pivotal moment when France redefined herself for the modern world.

Genres: France, Biography, History, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Biography Memoir

292 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 4, 2017

About the author

Peter Brooks is the author of Henry James Goes to Paris, Realist Vision, Troubling Confessions, Reading for the Plot, The Melodramatic Imagination, and a number of other books, including the historical novel World Elsewhere. He taught for many years at Yale, where he was Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature, and currently is Andrew W. Mellon Scholar at Princeton.

Reviews

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

The solution to the problem of life, as Flaubert would often repeat to those, including Louise Colet and George Sand, who wanted him to become more engaged, is that of withdrawal. But not into the realm of the dandy or the aesthete, two possible response of the time, but rather into the ascesis of art.

The two retreats need distinguishing. Flaubert has too often been seen as fleeing reality. On the contrary, he sees himself engaging reality from the only place that matters: that of understanding. When H claims that Sentimental Education ought to have offered a political lesson to his contemporaries, he was not being frivolous or self-serving. He meant that understanding, intelligence, what he often called science, was the only way to respond to life.

I found Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris immensely rewarding. In a way, it offers a parallel to Alexander Herzen’s contemporaneous explorations about whether one can affect history through extreme action and forced revolution. Both men conclude ‘No.’ The examples of 1825, 1830, 1848, and 1871 in Russian, Poland, Greece, Italy, Spain, France, etc. all showed that the government and the bourgeois establishment, guided by the capitalists and aristocracy, will crack down and return society to the status quo ante, or close to it. All that revolution produces is violence, destruction, and death. Change comes through slow, organic movement.

And yet, Brooks argues, through Flaubert's observation of the Commune and through his deep friendship with Georges Sand, he moved from being a firm believer in rule by the elite to a strong sympathy with Communards based on the justice of their complaints and the severity of their punishment.

Often books that tackle several aspects of a topic end up disorganized and unbalanced. But Brooks has done an excellent job of presenting a small biography of Flaubert, a compact analysis of his works, a history of Commune including its French context, a watercolor portrait of literary France from 1850 to 1875, a mini-lesson on the impact of the photographs of ruined 1871 Paris, and an exploration of two profound artistic friendships: one between a man and woman (Flaubert and Sand) and one between two men who watched from the sidelines (Flaubert and Turgenev). From this, he guides us in understanding Flaubert’s theories of art and history, and how those developed between 1848 and 1875. (I will allow that occasionally it feels like a collection of papers sewn together with some repeated text, but not enough to cause real trouble.)

Brooks tells us that he started working on the book in response to Flaubert’s comment to his friend Maxime Du Camp as they surveyed the burned-out buildings and dead bodies littering the streets a few days after the Commune was broken. Flaubert said “If they had understood L’Education Sentimentale, none of this would have happened.”

Brooks thus undertakes a study of L’Education Sentimentale, addressing such issues as ‘Why him? which was Henry James’s question about the unappealing Fréderic. And, how Flaubert’s protagonist, newly come to Paris from the country, differs from Balzac’s ambitious Rastignac.

For one thing, there is no Olympian narrator to take an overview of events…Flaubert’s camera eye remains resolutely, restlessly, on the level of his persons and things…the distribution of most comments on events and sentiments to his characters, via free indirect discourse, used in a way that often makes it difficult for the reader to tell where a character’s view ends and authorial comment begins…Frédéric is like a Balzacian hero who has lost his ambition…It’s as if the power of the will had become diffused in the world…And then, you might stay that something has happened to history itself. It no longer functions as the explanatory narrative that redeems failure an history in an upward slope of progress.

Flaubert wants us to understand that no one controls or even understands events in upheavals, so during the 1848 debacle Frédêric wanders through random events and we get only his piecemeal view of the chaos. And afterwards, the ‘leaders’ of the revolution had no ability to plan or manage the change they wanted. For Flaubert, any such radical effort is doomed. After the Commune barricades are evaded and thousands of Communards brutally killed by the invading French army, Flaubert is horrified but not surprised. In letter after letter he writes about the stupidity of everyone on both sides, for thinking it would work, and for putting it down so brutally to return corrupt capitalists to power again.

I could offer dozens more quotes and try to outline more of Brooks’s exposition, but he does it so well that you are much better off reading it yourself. This is the kind of book that you will chew on for some time, and that will inform your reading for a long time. For example:

The [Walter Scott type of] historical novel mattered because it appeared to be a genre in which one could attempt to capture the totality of a historical moment……Lukács comments: ”…For him it means that certain crises in the personal destinies of a number of human beings coincide and interweave within the determining context of an historical crisis.”…the ‘Realist’ novel of the nineteenth century comes about when Balzac shortens the distance between the represented historical moment and the moment of writing….Another way to put this would be to say that in nineteenth-century France, history was simply an inescapable context of life in a way that it wasn’t before the Revolution.

and much much more.

. Highly recommended.

[Gary Inbinder · Rating 5 out of 5]

L’Education sentimentale is a book that for many years has been as dear to me as are only two or three people; whenever and wherever I open it, I am startled and succumb to it completely, and I always feel as if I were the author’s spiritual son, albeit a weak and awkward one. —FRANZ KAFKA, letter to Felice Bauer, November 15, 1912
“Marcel Proust described the novel (Sentimental Education), affectionately, as a kind of ‘moving sidewalk,’ like those in the Paris Métro, that brings the same characters back, again and again, in a way that seems haphazard, due only to chance, but may also reveal the workings of history.”

Brooks skillfully interweaves history, politics, biography, cultural studies and literary criticism to provide a fascinating look into the life, times and work of one the 19th century’s most important, and often misunderstood, literary figures. The title provides both a framework and starting points for discussion.

The Ruins of Paris: “By the end of the Bloody Week in May, probably some 20,000 Communards had been killed, either in the fighting or in the summary executions carried out by the Versaillais. Much of central Paris was set on fire, first by bombardment, then by the retreating Communards, who sought to put a wall of flame between themselves and the attackers. Paris, when the fighting stopped, presented a grim spectacle of ruin as inhabitants and visitors—including Flaubert—came to view the devastated city.”
“Viewing the ruins, he commented to his friend Maxime Du Camp that if only his contemporaries had understood Sentimental Education, this—the devastating denouement of the Terrible Year—never could have happened.”
The ruins became a tourist attraction and a subject for writers, artists, journalists and photographers. Several photographs are included in the appendix to the book. The importance of Paris as a center of Western Culture and Civilization and the profound impact of the Siege, the fall of the Second Empire, the installation of the Third Republic, the Communard Insurrection and its destruction in the Bloody Week has provided a source for numerous books and much controversy over the past 150 years.
Flaubert’s claim that the debacle of 1870-71 could have been avoided “…if only his contemporaries had understood Sentimental Education” is astonishing and the subject of Brook’s detailed explication of the novel’s text and its relationship to several of Flaubert’s other works, which are also analyzed in detail.
“Flaubert’s novel very much participates in the debate about the meanings of history—the national history experienced by Flaubert’s own generation, and how it interweaves with the individual’s life. The retrospective reading of Sentimental Education proposed in Flaubert’s remark to Du Camp in the ruins of Paris suggests that we see that novel not only as the history of the generation that met its rendezvous with destiny in the Revolution of 1848 and its tragic aftermaths, but as a kind of prospective guide to what history will do to your life. Here, Flaubert and Marx join in a kind of strange alliance, the latter claiming that the Commune lighted the way to future proletarian revolution, the former that it confirmed his prediction of savagery and reaction.”

A Friendship: Flaubert and George Sand. “Out of the ruins left by the Terrible Year and its paroxysm in the Bloody Week of May 1871 modern France emerged. Flaubert and Sand wrote incessantly to one another as impassioned witnesses to the unfolding of events.”
They remained close friends until her death, although they were something of an odd couple. Sand was on the Left and Flaubert was on the Right, although his politics were something of a moving target that never seemed to settle in one place. Moreover, their style and approach to literature was very different, so different it’s hard to believe they were able to maintain the friendship.
‘Sand was a long-standing socialist who had played a public role in the Second Republic born of the Revolution of 1848. Flaubert was an anti-democrat who believed in the rule of a mandarin caste of the enlightened who understood the laws of science. In November 1869 he had published Sentimental Education, a novel claiming to be the history of his own generation, including its experience of the Revolution of 1848 and its aftermath. Neither approved of the Commune, but both hated the reactionaries even more and deplored the actions of the “turd-shaped” Thiers. Their correspondence throughout the Terrible Year offers a rich choral commentary on war, politics, insurrection, violence, ruin, and the ineradicable stupidity of their contemporaries.”

The Terrible Year: “The story I have to tell bears witness to the Terrible Year and its bloody climax* through the eyes of Flaubert and Sand. As they emerged from its horrors, they confronted an aftermath of warring commemorations of the event, including the improbable building of the Basilique du Sacré-Coeur (Basilica of the Sacred Heart) on the heights of Montmartre, where the National Guard’s cannon park stood, in “expiation” of the sins of secular France during the Terrible Year, and Victor Hugo’s novel Ninety-Three (Quatrevingt-treize), an attempt to reconcile the contending forces of the nation that reaches back to the year of the Terror during the first French Revolution to dramatize the clash of ideologies and persons that continued throughout the nineteenth century.”
*May 21-28 1871
Highly recommended for those interested in Flaubert, the development of the modern novel, and the sociological, political and cultural history of the West for the past two centuries. Quite a lot for one relatively short book.

[Numidica · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author, an academic, has thought deeply about the meaning of Flaubert's work, and what we can deduce about Flaubert's political thinking, how it changed after the calamity of the Commune, and whether Flaubert changed, or was on the verge of changing his approach to writing as a result of being witness to the collapse of Napoleon III's regime. There is much to like about this book, particularly the letters between Flaubert and George Sand, whose relationship was arguably the most touching intellectual relationship of the 19th Century, built as it was on such mutual esteem and platonic love. The author's description of the events that led to the Franco-Prussian War, and then to the Paris Commune, and then to the violent reaction to the Commune has helped me understand this part of French history much more clearly. Helpfully, the Epilogue summarizes and clarifies many points that are worked through much more laboriously in the book.

While I respect Peter Brooks' thoroughness, which reflects his deep interest in his subject, some of his arguments are either a bit strained, or there is just more information presented than is really necessary. His defense of Flaubert's statement that the catastrophe of the Commune, the Terrible Year of 1871, could have been avoided if only the French people had carefully read his book, Sentimental Education, is not credible; it doesn't pass the common sense test. It's not even clear that Flaubert believed his own statement. Likewise, Brooks' extensive exposition in contrasting and comparing Flaubert's books to those of other French, English, and Italian authors is engaging at times, but is generally a bit too much. I was, however, interested in the warm relationship between Flaubert and Turgenev; Turgenev was the one person other than Sand with whom Flaubert could be really free.

I enjoyed reading Brooks' take on Flaubert's style, which Flaubert famously described by saying the author in his work should be like god in his universe, present everywhere, but visible nowhere ("L’auteur dans son oeuvre doit être comme Dieu dans l’univers, présent partout et visible nulle part."). Brooks believes Flaubert was moving toward a style in two of his unfinished works that would violate this maxim by taking a position on moral or even political issues. His unfinished Sous Napoleon III, in particular, appears from Flaubert's notes to have been headed in the direction of passing judgment on the "fakery" of that regime. His Bouvard et Pecuchet had already moved slightly in the direction of the author being a little bit visible in his work, with Flaubert's growing pro-republican sentiments informing his writing. More generally, Flaubert seemed finally, after her death, to be moved by Sand's exhortation to be plainer with his reader, not to make the reader work quite so hard to understand his books.

Sadly, Flaubert was such a slow, careful writer that his changed political philosophy, made more compassionate both by his witness of the aftermath of the Commune's destruction, and by Sand's long, gentle influence on him, never made it into print. But one cannot read this book without coming to regard him at least a bit as Sand did, as a man who hid his emotions almost always, but who was in fact, "good from head to toe".

[Keith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a fascinatingly ambitious book. The starting point is a remark Flaubert made to
his friend Maxime Du Camp as they were viewing the destruction wrought by the 1870 revolt, known as the Terrible Year. Flaubert says that if only his contemporaries had understood A Sentimental Education, this—the devastating dénouement of the Terrible Year—never could have happened. As author Brooks notes “His remark claims an exceptional role for the novel in the writing and understanding of history: the novel as truer to grasping the meaning of historical action than what usually passes as history.” The book then investigates the import of Flaubert’s claim for Sentimental Education. The friendship of the subtitle is Flaubert’s for George Sand. By the end of this inquiry one will have examined the novel, in both content and creation, the nature of his relationship with Sand (strictly Platonic) and the sources for the revolt of the Communards. (2017)

[john callahan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book discusses the friendship of George Sand and Gustave Flaubert, carried out it seems by correspondence. Flaubert was seen as a reactionary who supported rule by the most intelligent (whom he called "the mandarins"); the author writes that Sand was able to perceive in him more than a dyspeptic conservative who railed against the "stupidity" of the bourgeoisie, the French governments, monarchists, and radicals. Brooks shows how by then end of this period Flaubert had become a republican.

The book interrogates Flaubert's statement in 1871, when he was walking through the corpse-filled ruins of Paris -- damaged in the Franco-Prussian War and burned by the Communards during the bloody suppression of the Paris Commune -- and by the location where the French army had massacred thousands of Communard prisoners, that if people had understood his 1869 novel Sentimental Education this destruction would not have occurred. Of course, that is an arrogant statement, and the author describes it as such in the epilogue. But one can see some truth in it: Flaubert intended it as history of his generation, whose political life was dominated by the revolutions of 1848 in Paris and its suppression. Flaubert very carefully kept his point of view on who is acting well and who is acting poorly in the novel, so readers were largely baffled by it. It shows the kind of things men of his generation did, whether virtuous or shabby, and their reaction to or attempts to avoid the events of 1848.

Brooks discusses at length the events of 1870-1871 and Flaubert and Sand's comments on them. He discusses the reactionary tenor of those years in the government's support for clerical projects, especially the building of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart on Montmartre. The most literary critical portion of the book is the discussion of Flaubert's novel as a historical novel, and compares types of historical novel back to Scott, Manzoni, Balzac, and others. (No, I didn't know who Manzoni was.)

The author describes his aim as "to see" the novel "for what it is: an important foray into the novelistic writing of history as it is experienced by an individual and a generation -- the kind of history that matters to us who live in it without controlling it." That is the best summary!

I read Sentimental Education a year or two ago, and this book would probably make most sense to people who have read it. It helps if the reader knows a lot about the revolution of 1848, but it is not necessary; I knew very little about the events of 1870-1871 and still understood the discussion, as Brooks provides sufficient background.

So I wouldn't recommend it to just anyone, but if you like Flaubert, French literature, or French history, I would highly suggest that you read it.

Brooks is an excellent and very clear writer, which made the book was a joy to read.

[Peter Corrigan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this up owing mainly to recent interest in the Franco-Prussian War and it promised to be a different take on the proceedings. Flaubert, well I read Madame Bovary many years back but other than that could not have named a thing he wrote. And the so-called 'friendship' with George Sand, well I don't think I heard of her either but she is moderately well-known apparently. So I learned a lot about Flaubert and his other books 'Sentimental Education' (1869) and 'Salammbo' (1862). According to Professor Brooks (Yale, etc.), Flaubert believed that the former book, if read and understood might have prevented the disaster of the Paris Commune in 1871. That novel dealt with the failed 1848 Revolution in France and it's aftermath. The book seemed more like some graduate school lectures thrown together, interesting but somewhat disjointed. The friendship with Sand aspect seems a bit overblown but perhaps just a vehicle for filling out the pages of this somewhat thin volume. Perhaps the most interesting thing were the photographs of Paris in the wake of the suppression of the Commune and the discussion of how that destruction was viewed back in 1871 and after. That and his ruminations on the development and role of historical novels in French literature, with sidebar discussions on Hugo, Zola and Stendahl. Flaubert apparently did massive reading and research for these two novels, especially 'Salammbo', which was set within an uprising in ancient Carthage. But altogether this was an underwhelming but still somewhat interesting discussion, more like a seminar than a fully developed book.

[David C Ward · Rating 4 out of 5]

The novel as history; history as a novel. The intersection of two developing ways of conceiving the works in the 19th century though the work of Flaubert, especially through his Sentimental Education - a novel about the revolution of 1848 that he maintained would have prevented the cataclysm of 1871 if his countrymen had understood it. It's not that we forget history and therefore are doomed to repeat it but that we don't understand it to begin with - we're idiots. The subtext of the book has to be read against the current administration and its blunt stupidity.
Anyway, this is quite good as a reading of Flaubert, an argument for his political engagement and a discussion of ways of thinking about the intersection of individual lives and History in the evolution of the historical novel. A bit stretched out, there is a bit of repetition of anecdote and quotation.

[Susanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

To be revisited when reading Flaubert's novels, esp Sentimental Education--which apparently should be read 14 times before it can truly be understood--that appears somewhere in this book. Remarkable photographs of the destruction of Paris in 1870.

[Ian · Rating 3 out of 5]

An excellent read for a Flaubert aficionado.