Status Updates From Flaubert in the Ruins of Pa...

The terrible year is 1870-1871, when France lost the Franco-Prussian War and when the Paris Commune was formed and crushed; the friendship is a platonic one between Flaubert and George Sand' and the novel is Flaubert's Sentimental Education (1869), which Flaubert said would have prevented the horrors of the "terrible year," if only more people had understood it. Incredbly readable so far.

Amid the stench of corpses and extinguished fires in Paris in June 1871, he could only lay a curse on all his countrymen for having given up on intelligence, on reading in a profound sense. Though Flaubert and the Commune stood at opposite ends of any kind of spectrum, they met in the ruins of Paris.

Brooks, Peter. Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris (p. 209). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

The notion that the Second Empire needed another novel that would pick up following the coup d’état of December 2, 1851, that stands as climax of Sentimental Education, in what was to be explicitly Sous Napoléon III, demonstrates again that it is only within historical and political time that the individual can make sense of life.


Brooks, Peter. Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris (p. 208). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

(Flaubert) was disappointed that his contemporaries didn’t understand the historical lessons implicit in Sentimental Education. But that did not mean giving up on the historical enterprise. What was needed, as he said in that letter to Du Camp revisiting the story of the Commune, was a scientific basis for the study of society.

Brooks, Peter. Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris (p. 206). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

The great French novels of the nineteenth century are all historical novels in some manner, in that they are largely concerned with the struggle to say to whom France belongs in the wake of Revolution, Napoleonic epic, Restoration, and then repeated insurrections.

Brooks, Peter. Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris (p. 188). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

The solution of Bouvard and Pécuchet, after the failure of all their self-educative projects, and their attempts to educate Victor and Victorine and their fellow townspeople, is to return to copying... regurgitating the already said and already written, without visible intention other than keeping language going.


Brooks, Peter. Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris (p. 178). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

In the aftermath of the Commune, Flaubert—perhaps without quite realizing it—became a republican. For all his belief in rule by intellectual elites—“mandarins,” as he liked to call them—his horror and disgust at what reactionaries and monarchists were up to drove him into alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie.

Brooks, Peter. Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris (p. 161). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

With Saint Anthony finished (it would be published in 1874), he began taking notes for the book in which, he said, “I will try to vomit my bile on my contemporaries”—Bouvard and Pécuchet.



Brooks, Peter. Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris (p. 138). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

Henry James’s question, “Why, why him?” (Frederic Moreau in Sentimental Education) may be answered by noting Frédéric’s quasi-anthropological role as someone who exists to witness and annotate history. A more active person with more of his own life might have served less well.

Brooks, Peter. Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris (p. 133). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

The absolutes of political faith result in such a meeting of the extremes. If you put your faith exclusively in politics, you inevitably end up pursuing strange gods and killing in their name.

Brooks, Peter. Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris (p. 129). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

How often had he run errands in the ministries, made calculations, been a fixer, listened to reports! How many sales pitches, smiles, fawnings! ..he had acclaimed Napoleon, then the invading Cossacks, then Louis XVIII, 1830, the workers, all regimes, cherishing Power with such a love that he would have paid...to sell himself.”

Brooks, Peter. Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris (p. 127). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

It’s not that history is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing. It’s that the eyes and ears to which history is addressed are incapable of seeing and hearing.



Brooks, Peter. Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris (p. 127). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.