March 11, 2026 • 45 mins
When Madame Bovary was written in the 1850s, it fell under the accusing eye of the French government for its perceived immorality. Flaubert recognized that the trial would only stoke interest, and that it would set the tone for his career.
Research:
- Barzun, Jacques. “Gustave Flaubert.” Encylopedia Brittanica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Gustave-Flaubert
- Blakemore, Erin. “What Madame Bovary Revealed About the Freedom of the Press.” JSTOR Daily. Dec. 16, 2016. https://daily.jstor.org/what-madame-bovary-revealed-about-the-freedom-of-the-press/
- Brown, Frederick. “Flaubert: A Biography.” Harvard University Press. 2007.
- CREASY, MATTHEW. “INVERTED VOLUMES AND FANTASTIC LIBRARIES: ‘ULYSSES’ AND ‘BOUVARD ET PÉCUCHET.’” European Joyce Studies, vol. 19, 2011, pp. 112–27. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44871308
- Flaubert, Gustave, and Christopher Moncrieff, tr. “Madame Bovary: Newly Translated and Annotated.” Alma Classics. 2010.
- Haynes, Christine. “The Politics of Publishing During The Second Empire: The Trial of Madame Bovary Revisited.” French Politics, Culture & Society. Oxford Journals. June 1, 2005. https://doi.org/10.3167/153763705780980083
- LaCapra, Dominick. “Madame Bovary on Trial.” Cornell University Press. 1982.
- “The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert.” Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10666/pg10666.txt
- Steegmuller, Francis. “Flaubert and Madame Bovary: A Double Portrait.” New York Review of Books. 1966.
- Steegmuller, Francis. “The Letters of Gustave Flaubert.” New York Review of Books. 1980.
- Thurman, Judith. “A Unsimple Heart.” The New Yorker. April 29, 2002. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/05/06/an-unsimple-heart?_sp=0c026da2-f3c5-4709-9ac8-8214e0cc3278.1772403467294
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So, while I was
working on research for our recent episode on Tayefield Steinlen,
(00:23):
I was reminded while I was looking at the history
of French censorship of the trial of Gustave Flaubert during
the French Second Empire, regarding his novel Madame Beauvrie and
I have rather fond memories of studying that book. I
have feelings about it. We'll talk about them on Friday.
(00:43):
Madame Bovarie, as we'll say, because it's a little easier
than saying the French accent every time. Is today considered
a classic, and it's, you know, pretty tame in nature,
But when it was written in the eighteen fifties not
considered tame. It fell under the accusing of the French
government for its sexual content. So for today, first we're
(01:05):
going to talk a bit about Gustave Flaubert himself and
then bring his life story to the point where he
found himself on trial for writing a book that was
accused of being immoral that was really pretty early in
his career as a writer, and then we'll talk a
little bit about the effects of the trial and his
life after it. I feel like I should say this
(01:26):
is for someone like me that's read a lot about
Gustave Flaubert. This feels very much not comprehensive. I'm like, oh,
I lef so much out. Even so it's a little
bit longish. So just know, if you are a Flaubert scholar,
You're going to be like, you left so much out,
and I'm gonna be like, I know, baby, I need
That's what's up. So. Gustave Flaubert was born December twelfth,
(01:49):
eighteen twenty one in Rule France. His father, Aquille Cleofa Flaubert,
was a surgeon. His mother, and Justine Caroline Flurio, was
from a family that could trace its roots back hundreds
of years in the history of Normandy. Doctor Flaubert accumulated
wealth and property, but throughout his career he remained dedicated
(02:12):
to caring for Ruen's poor and indigent. He was known
as an outgoing man who excelled as a teacher to
the students at Hotel Dieu, where he was the head
of surgery. The Flabers also accumulated a lot of wealth
through real estate. A quill Kliophi purchased the land whenever
he could, and then he rented that land out for farming. Yeah,
(02:35):
he really was much wealthier than a doctor in his
particular role would normally be because he was very smart
about investing. So by the time Gustav was born, the
Flobers had welcomed several children, but they had tragically lost
several as well. First, they had a son named Akilla
after his father, and then they had a daughter who
(02:57):
died as an infant. Their seconds so Emil Klopha died
at eight months, and their third son, Jules Alfred, was
born in eighteen nineteen. That was two years before Gustave. Sadly,
Jules died in the autumn of eighteen twenty two, leaving
only Akille and Gustave at that point. And then finally
(03:18):
they had a daughter named Caroline, who was born two
and a half years after Gustave. His mother understandably grieved
deeply for all of these losses, and she also developed
what's described as a pretty high level of anxiety about
her remaining children because she was afraid something would happen
to them, and that anxiety was something those kids were
(03:39):
very much aware of. In addition to that, the family
lived adjacent to the hospital. They were in like an
apartment that was connected directly to the facility, and that
meant that the children that Gustav and his siblings made
friends with were patients, and the Flaubert kids became very
acquainted with loss, as many of those friends died from
their illnesses. Additionally, the children were allowed to freely roam
(04:04):
the hospital, so they often saw the kinds of things
that most parents would probably want to shield their children from,
and they even went with their father on visits to
mental asylums when he made medical visits there, maybe trying
to get a break from all the anxieties and sorrows
of this day to day life. Gustavs said to have
(04:25):
sought out adults around him who were good at telling stories.
One was a young woman named Julie who was hired
to help with the children and to help around the house.
Another was a neighbor named Mignon, and Monsieur Mignon told
him stories of Don Quixote, which left a very strong
impression on the young boy. Flaubert later wrote quote, I
(04:48):
find all my roots in the book I learned by
heart before learning how to read Don Quixote. Apparently it
took him a while to learn how to read because
he preferred to have people just read to him. But
once he did learn, he was a voracious reader. He
also started writing letters to just about everyone he knew
(05:09):
as a child. Yeah, these are also the kinds of
letters that you would not associate with a child's writing.
He wrote like long letters about his inner thoughts and
like what was going on in the world around him.
Like they sound much more informative than many letters that
(05:29):
I would certainly write today. At the age of ten,
Gustave went to boarding school, although that school was still
quite close to his home, but he did board there
and he was there for the next eight years. When
he was still a teenager of sixteen, he published his
first piece in a local literary review titled Le Kolibri
that means the hummingbird. It is unclear to me what
(05:51):
the subject of that early writing was. He also completed
his first novel that year, memoir Don fu or Memoirs
of a Madman. This was about a married woman eleven
years older than him, who he was obsessed with. It
was based on his real life about a woman named
Elisa Slessinger who had no idea. This teenager thought that
(06:15):
he was in love with her. He did not publish
this manuscript or anything else for decades. Yeah, it does
come back in a different way, but that is very fascinating.
I apparently Schlessinger, who he came to know later in life,
did not find out until like thirty five years later
that she was the subject of this book, or that
(06:38):
he had been just obsessed with her as a teenager.
When he was still a teen he also became friends
with the pessimist philosopher Alfred le PoID Vein, and the
two men remained lifelong friends. Early on in his life,
Flaubert developed this very strong sensibility in which he absolutely
loathed things like cliche and what he called yde requieu
(07:02):
preconceived ideas, and he started compiling a list of these things,
basically anything that was often repeated as known wisdom that
he thought was stupid. This may be the thing that
makes me feel the most affinity for Gustafabert. We'll talk
about it on Friday. There was a very real degree
of intellectual snobbery to Flobert even as a child and
(07:23):
as a teen, and he and Le Poitvin came up
with an imaginary character that they named simply le Gesson,
and he kind of became the bourgeois embodiment of every
stupid thing that they heard people saying. Flaubert was thrown
out of school the year he was supposed to graduate.
It's not one hundred percent clear what happened here, but
the prevailing theory is that when the schools well liked
(07:48):
philosophy teacher took a leave due to illness, Gustav and
his friends were just at odds with the substitute, and
things escalated to the point that the boys were removed.
They were allowed to sit for their final exams, though,
and Gustav passed. Flaubert was sent on a trip to
the Mediterranean as a reward. Yeah he went with like
(08:08):
a family friend, and it was a two month trip.
Just before his twentieth birthday, Flaubert began studying law in Paris.
He did not find Paris to his liking, and he
didn't really want to be a lawyer. He had known
from the time that he learned to read and write
that what he wanted was to be a writer, but
his parents wanted him to study for some sort of vocation.
(08:32):
He went along with this, although he said, even if
I graduate, I'm not going to study. I'm not going
to practice law. So whatever, I'm placating you. But by
the time Flaubert was twenty two, he was actually having
a lot of difficulties with his law studies, and he
started having some pretty frightening health issues. He had a
seizure one night in January eighteen forty four while he
(08:54):
was riding in a carriage with his brother, and they
went to his father's house, where he had several more
Years later, he wrote about these attacks this way quote.
Each attack was like a hemorrhage of the nervous system,
seminal losses from the pictorial faculty of the brain, one
hundred thousand images cavorting at once in a kind of fireworks.
(09:17):
It was a snatching of the soul from the body. Excruciating.
I am convinced I died several times. But what constitutes
the personality? The rational essence was present throughout. Had it
not been, the suffering would have been nothing, for I
would have been purely passive, whereas I was always conscious,
even when I could no longer speak. Thus my soul
(09:40):
was turned back entirely on itself, like a hedgehog wounding
itself with its own quills. Because this started at a
time in his life when he was very stressed, it
has sometimes been reported as sort of a nervous breakdown,
although other reads of the situation specifically say he had epilepsy.
To a letter he wrote to his friend La Poitevin,
(10:02):
he was bled in three places at once before he
regained consciousness, But writing to his friend about what had happened,
Flaubert was really astonishingly upbeat. After mentioning that he was
being sent to the seashore for a rest, he notes
that he must sound boring, but that if he's going
to have old men's illnesses quote, I must be allowed
(10:25):
to drivel on the way they do. He did try
to return to school in Paris briefly, but then he
had another seizure which sent him back home to Ruon
and ended his law study. His father purchased a home
in Croisse, outside of Ruon, so he could live at
a more peaceful place. At this point it seemed like
(10:46):
he would be just taken care of by a paid staff.
The family had wealth they could afford to do that,
and that would be the case for the rest of
his life. But it also meant that he could turn
his attention entirely to writing. Coming up, we'll talk about
Flaubert's approach to writing, but first we will have a
quick sponsor break. A recurrent aspect of Flaubert's work is
(11:18):
that he would often revisit earlier writing to try to
make use of it by editing it and shaping it
into something better. And this began right away, early in
this phase of life where he started to write in earnest.
Most of us who did any writing in our teens
probably consider that work to be juvenile and not worth
our time if we did not set it on fire
(11:38):
or throw it out. But that is not how it
worked for Gustav Flaubert. Recall that first manuscript that we
talked about that he wrote about the older woman he
had fixated on. He took that character of the older
woman and his fixation and he retooled them into a
new work called Novembre, which also was not published. One
(11:59):
of the things he is notorious about as being a perfectionist,
he did not want anyone to see any of his
works until he was one hundred percent happy. He often
recopied them over and over, editing as he went. But
he then adapted the story again to drop it into
a larger narrative about the French Revolution that was titled
Legucacion Sentimental. But though he finished the first version of
(12:23):
that in the early eighteen forties, it would be more
than twenty years before he revised it again and finally
published it. And this kind of ongoing revision was something
he did throughout his life, and as we'll see, near
the end of his life, he sometimes went way back
to work that one might not even consider that useful
for such a thing. At the beginning of eighteen forty six,
(12:45):
Flaubert's father died. Then just two months after he lost
his father, his sister Caroline, who was only twenty one, died.
She had spent two months having complications from childbirth before
her death. Gustav and his sister were very close, so
this loss just devastated him. He decided to raise her daughter,
(13:06):
so he took the baby and his widowed mother to
live in his home in Clisse. Yeah, his niece was
also named Caroline, so there's a lot of Caroline's in
this story. The same year that all of those losses
and life changes played out, Flaubert also met the poet
Louise Colet when he was visiting Paris. He was actually
(13:26):
in Paris to have a sculpture made of his sister
and was carrying her death mask to do it, and
when he went to visit the sculptor, he meets Louise
and the two of them began a very intense affair
which lasted eight years. She was married. Her husband, musician
Hippolite Colt, was still alive for the first five years
(13:48):
of this affair. Louise had married him to get away
from life in the country and to move to Paris.
But once she was in Paris, she was definitely not monogamous,
and Flaubert was not her first affair. The relationship between
Luis Colet and Gustave Flaubert was tempestuous, and at one
point they did stop seeing each other completely, kind of
in the middle of their relationship, but they were soon
(14:10):
together again. He spent a lot of time with his
close friend Maxim du Camp. The two men went on
a walking tour together through the Loire Valley and along
the coast of Brittany. The journal that Flaubert wrote during
their days is considered by some to be some of
his finest work. It was not published in his lifetime,
(14:31):
but after his death, with the title Parles Champ at
Parle Greve, which is Through Fields and along Shores. In
eighteen forty nine, Flaubert, his friend du Camp and another friend,
poet Louis Bouiller, met up so that Flaubert could read
the other two a novel that he had been working on,
and he read it aloud to them over the course
(14:53):
of several days a reported thirty two hours of reading,
and the reception to this was not good. His friends
are described as being just utterly brutal in their criticism.
He was, in fact advised to throw the whole thing
in the fire and never speak of it again. This
was the first time he had shared his novel writing
(15:15):
with anyone, and although it must have been incredibly painful
to have his two close friends very harshly criticize it,
he and Ducamp remained very close. The two young men
actually went on a tour of Europe and Northern Africa
right after this. Flaubert is said to have come home
from that trip with syphilis, which he got while visiting
a brothel abroad. Flaubert's next project was the work that
(15:38):
would eventually become Madame Bovarye. It too had roots in
earlier writing, including a piece from eighteen thirty seven called
Passion and Virtue. There appear to have been a lot
of influences that went into the creation of the character
of Emma Bovary, and different accounts of the author's life
and work will cite one or another, or sometimes multiple.
(16:02):
For instance, Flaubert is said to have been pointed at
the true story of doctor Eugene de Lamar and his
wife Veronique Delphine Couturier. Veronique was bored by her life
as the spouse of a country physician, and she engaged
in a life of debauchery and infidelity, which ultimately consumed
her until her death by suicide in her mid twenties.
(16:25):
This is really close to the Madame Bowerie story, but
there are other similar stories that Flaubert also knew, some
of personal acquaintances of women who found their bourgeois lives
stultifying and who longed for more and sought out affairs
to try to bring a spark into their lives that
they had been longing for. As for Flaubert, he always
(16:47):
told anyone who asked who Madame Bowerie was based on
that it was himself, famously quoted almost everywhere you can
find as Madame Beauvarie semoi. And the truth is that
his most famous character is probably an amalgam of all
of these things, as there are pretty keen parallels to
all of them within the story in terms of details.
(17:09):
There were women he knew and knew about who found
that the life of a wife was far less romantic
than the books they had read growing up were leading
them to believe. And Eugene de la march is said
to have been one of Flobert's father's students, so there
may have been a personal connection to that story. And
like his heroine, Flobar lived a life where the main
(17:31):
male figure he knew was a doctor, and the young
Gustave found the average life around him in that scenario
lacking in originality and stimulus. But also who among us
has not had that similar feeling at some point in
their lives right? That really does explain the appeal of
this novel story. A lot of people can relate to
(17:54):
Emma's longing. Flabar himself wrote that there were people just
like Emma Bovarie crying throughout France. He also wrote to
Louise Colais in eighteen fifty two quote, if my book
is good, it will gently caress many a feminine wound.
More than one woman will smile as she recognizes herself
in it. Incidentally, as he was working on the novel
(18:18):
in eighteen fifty five, he broke off his affair with
Louise Colay for the last time, after a period where
the two were clearly falling apart. They had a lot
of conflict, his friends were getting involved. He wrote her
a very definitive letter on March sixth, eighteen fifty five,
which read, in its entirety, Madam, I was told that
(18:39):
you took the trouble to come here to see me
three times last evening I was not in and, fearing
less persistence expose you to humiliation. I am bound by
the rules of politeness to warn you that I shall
never be. In the story of Madame Bovarie, extremely briefly
(19:02):
is that the main character, Emma, who has spent her
teenage years in a convent school, is married off to
Charles Bovary, a country doctor who cares for her but
is not exactly passionate. She's grown up reading romance novels.
She believes she's about to start the life she has
always dreamed of, only to find that her days are
(19:22):
dull and filled with on Wii. She starts trying to
find ways to bring more excitement into her life while
simultaneously pushing her husband to pursue a practice in the
city of Ruon. This begins with reckless spending. A merchant
named Lrux named a ham fistedly offers her a wide
(19:45):
array of expensive luxuries on credit. As she starts getting
a taste of the finer life, she also starts cheating
on her husband, looking unsuccessfully for the thrilling romance she's
always been looking for. In every instance, the men she
turns to let her down, and her dealings with both
(20:06):
the merchant and her lovers, she's left used by them.
But though the reader may initially identify with this longing
that she has, she's revealed not to be a romantic
figure caged in social mores, but a selfish and shallow
person whose actions hurt the people around her. The book
(20:26):
does not end well for her. The coda of this
novel is purposely unsatisfying, showing the undeserving as being rewarded
and that life is not fair or just. As Flobert
was working on the book, his friend Maxim Duchamp had
become a member of the Review de Paris and he
encouraged Flaubert to publish his news story in the literary
(20:50):
journal in installments, and once Flobert was ready, he did
so under the title Madame Beauverie mourd Clovence, beginning on
October first, eighteen fifty six. As we mentioned in our
recent episode on Tea Fieldsteinland, France was going through cycles
in which its laws regarding the press would tighten and
then relax. But by the time the last installment of
(21:13):
Madame Boverie appeared in the Review de Paris on December fifteenth,
Flaubert was in the sights of the French government. His
story was accused of being blasphemous and of offending public morals.
The formal charge was having committed the misdemeanor of an
outrage against public and religious morals and established customs. There's
(21:36):
actually an interesting element to this in that the Review
de Paris had actually edited out one of the seamier
parts of the book because they were afraid of being
shut down or punished if they ran it. The author
had told the editors that if something had to be suppressed,
which he wasn't wild about, he wanted that to be
noted on the page, and they acquiesced. So there was
(21:56):
a note on that page that read quote, the directors
have seen the necessity of suppressing a passage here which
did not seem fitting to the review de parie. We
give notice of it to the author. Had the original
version run, things may have been even more problematic for
Gustave Flaubert. The trial was set for January twenty ninth,
(22:17):
eighteen fifty seven. On January twentieth, Gustav wrote a letter
to his brother Akille with an absolutely delicious passage that
gives a great insight into where his head was at.
With this quote, the police have blundered. They thought they
were attacking a run of the mill novel and some
ordinary little scribbler. Whereas now, in part thanks to the prosecution,
(22:42):
my novel is looked on as a masterpiece. And for
the author he has for defenders a number of what
used to be called grand Dams. The Empress, among others,
has twice spoken in my favor. The Emperor said the
first time they should leave him alone. And despite all that,
the case was taken up again. Why there begins the mystery.
(23:05):
While waiting, I am preparing my statement, which is simply
my novel itself. But I am cramming the margins next
to the incriminated passages with embarrassing quotations drawn from the classics,
to show, by means of that simple parallel, that for
the last three hundred years there hasn't been a line
in French literature that couldn't be indicted as undermining morality
(23:29):
and religion. Have no fear, I shall be quite calm.
As for not appearing at the trial. That would be
a retreat. I shan't say anything, but we'll stand next
to Senrod, who will need me there. Besides, I can't
afford not to display my criminal countenance to the populace. No, no,
that's a great letter. We will get to the details
(23:52):
of the one day trial after we hear from the
sponsors that keep the show going. The lead prosecutor in
the Madame Bovarie case, Ernespnaw, opened the proceedings and he
talked for a very long time. He explained early on
(24:16):
that that was going to be the case, and why,
stating quote, The difficulty is not in arousing a prejudice.
It is far more in explaining the work of which
you are to judge. It deals entirely with romance. If
it were a newspaper article which we were bringing before you,
it could be seen at once where the fault began
and where it ended. It would simply be read by
(24:38):
the Ministry and submitted to you for judgment. Here we
are not concerned with a newspaper article, but entirely with
a romance which begins the first of October, finishes the
fifteenth of December, and is composed of six numbers in
the Review de Paris, eighteen fifty six. What is to
be done in such a case? What is the duty
(24:59):
of the public ministry to read the whole romance? That
is impossible. On the other hand, to read only the
incriminating texts would expose us to deep reproach. They could
say to us, if you do not show the case
in all its parts, if you pass over that which
proceeds in that which follows the incriminating passages, it is
(25:20):
evident that you wish to suppress the debate by restricting
the ground of discussion. In order to avoid this two
full difficulty, there is but one course to follow, and
that is to relate to you the whole story of
the romance without reading any of it or pointing out
any incriminating passage. Then to cite incriminating texts, and finally
(25:42):
to answer the objections that may arise against the general
method of indictment. So Pinard then began to tell the
entire story of Madame Bovary, and in English language translation
it took almost seven thousand words, so probably around fifty
minutes to an hour when spoken aloud. When he was done,
(26:06):
he stated that the book glorified adultery and insulted religion.
Did not seem to matter to him that Emma Bovary
gets serious come uppance in the book. No moral lesson
could validate the offending passages. Pinard then pointed the finger
at Flaubert and his publisher, quote, you have before you, gentlemen,
(26:28):
three guilty ones. Monsieur Flaubert, the author of the book,
Monsieur Pshaw, who accepted it, and Monsieur Pilet who printed it.
In this matter. There is no misdemeanor without publicity, and
all those concerned in the publicity should be equally blamed.
But we hastened to say that the manager of the
(26:48):
review and the printer are only in the second rank.
The principal offender is the author, Monsieur Flaubert. Monsieur Flaubert,
who admonished by a note from his editor, protested against
the suppression which had been made in his work. The
opening of the defense by Flaubert's attorney, Monsieur Sinard, began quote, gentlemen,
(27:11):
Monsieur Gustave Flaubert has been accused before you of making
a bad book, of having in this book outraged public
morals and religion. Monsieur Gustave Flaubert is beside me and
affirms before you that he has made an honest book.
He affirms before you that the thought in his book,
from the first line to the last, is a moral thought,
(27:33):
and that if it were not perverted. And you have
seen during the last hour how great a talent one
may have for perverting a thought, it would be and
will become again presently for you, as it has been
already for the readers of the book, an eminently moral
and religious thought capable of being translated into these words
(27:53):
the excitation of virtue through the horror of vice. The
rest of the defense invoked the good name of the
Flaubert family and Gustav's serious and thoughtful nature, but it
also managed to get some misogyny into the mix by
showing that Flaubert was warning against women trying to rise
above their station in life. Quote. I have here stated
(28:16):
that Monsieur Flaubert wished to paint a woman who, instead
of trying to adapt herself to the conditions in which
she was placed, to her position and her birth, instead
of seeking to make herself a part of the life
to which she belonged, was occupied with a thousand foreign
aspirations drawn from an education too far above her Instead
(28:38):
of accommodating herself to the duties of her position, of
being the tranquil wife of a country doctor with whom
she should pass her days, in place of seeking her
happiness and her house and her marriage, sought it in
interminable fancies. Yeah. In case it's not obvious from that passage,
what he's getting at is this is a woman who
(29:00):
had a little too much education, and that's dangerous. Yeah,
she should not have wanted things. Don't want things, don't
learn things that might make you want a life other
than your own. SNAr insisted on reading the portion of
the story that had been cut by the editors. If
you've read the book, you know which one this is.
It's a scene in which Madame Bowerie and her lover
(29:21):
are having a clandestine sexual meeting in a carriage as
the driver is instructed to continue to drive around. And
this particular passage he wanted to read because it concludes
with the line quote in her heart, she felt already
that cowardly docility that is for some women at once,
the chastisement and atonement of adultery, and Sinnar drew attention
(29:43):
to that line. One of the reasons this is so
funny to me is that when I was in college
and we studied this book, our whole class did not
really grasp, like, how what was happening in the catch? Yeah,
professor like read it out loud to us, dramatically, intoning
(30:06):
the important bits. Yeah, we similar. But I read it
in high school and I don't remember whether it was
me or one of my friends that was trying to
explain it to kids. That were not getting it. That
was like, if this carriage is a rocket, right, yeah.
So the defense also appealed to the court on the
(30:29):
basis of the way Charles Bovary is represented in the
book's danu mal declaring quote. There is not a man who,
having read this, would not say that Monsieur Flaubert is
not only a great artist, but a man of heart,
for having in the last six pages turned all the
horror and scorn upon the woman and all the interest
(30:49):
towards the husband. He is a great artist, as has
been said, because he has left the husband as he was,
he has not transformed him. And to the end he
is the same, good man, commonplace, mediocre, full of the
duties of his profession, loving his wife well, but destitute
of education or elevation of thought. He is the same
(31:13):
at the deathbed of his wife. And nevertheless, there is
not an individual to whom the memory returns with more interest.
Why because he has kept to the end his simplicity
and uprightness of heart. Because to the end he has
fulfilled his duty while his wife was led astray. So
here's the important point that I would just personally like
(31:35):
to make regarding the way this book was both attacked
and defended because it's always made me a little bit irate.
All of the firestorm around it regarding morality was based
on the idea that the wife of an upstanding husband
would dare to commit adultery. There is never ever introduced
(31:56):
in any of this discussion any moral red flag regarding
them male characters who were perfectly happy to seduce Sema
Bovary even though they knew she was married and in
fact had social relationships with her husband. All of the
blame and shame is given to the woman, Madame Bovary.
Though the court proceedings were brief, Flaubert and his publisher
(32:19):
waited a week for the verdict. It's lengthy, were not
going to try to read the whole thing, But the
ending reads quote be it known that the work of
which Flaubert is the author is a work which appears
to be long and seriously elaborated from a literary point
of view, as a study of character. That the passages
(32:39):
coming under the ordinance for dismissal, as reprehensible as they
may be, are few in number as compared with the
extent of the work. That these passages either in the
ideas they expose, or in the situations they represent, bring
out as a whole the characters which the author wished
to paint, although exaggerated and impregnated with a vulgar realism,
(33:04):
often shocking. That Gustave Flaubert affirms his respect for good
manners and all that attaches itself to religious morals, that
it does not appear that his book has been written,
like certain other books, with the sole aim of giving
satisfaction to the sensual passions, to a spirit of license
(33:24):
and debauch, or of ridiculing things which would be held
in the respect of all that he has done wrong
only in losing sight of the rules which every writer
who respects himself ought never to lose sight of or forget.
That literature, like art, in order to accomplish the good
(33:45):
which it is expected to produce, ought only to be
chaste and pure in its form and expression. And the
circumstances be it known that it is not sufficiently proven
that Peshac, Gustave Flaubert, and Pilas are guilty of the
misdemeanor with which they are charged. The court acquits them
(34:05):
of the indictment brought against them, and decrees a dismissal
without costs, so the court had, as Flaubert predicted, found
him innocent. Madame Boverie was printed as a two volume
novel just a few months later in April of eighteen
fifty seven, and it was an instant bestseller. Had the
French government not accused Flaubert of immorality, it probably never
(34:28):
would have gained that level of popularity. Following on the
runaway success of Madame Bouverie, Flaubert turned back to his project,
The Temptation of Saint Anthony, but as one of the
main points of the novel was a saint tempted by
sexual desire, he reconsidered he did not want to risk
another trial, so he then moved on to working on
(34:51):
a historical novel, and this story, titled Salambo, was set
in Carthage during the third century, when the Mercenary Revolt
was taking place. This was based vaguely on the writings
of the Greek historian Polybius, but Flaubert created fictional characters
and a fictional story that sort of dropped into that
historical information. He wasn't rewriting it as a fiction. This book,
(35:15):
published in eighteen sixty two, benefited from the attention that
Madame Bovari had drawn to Gustave Flaubert's name, and while
it was very different in tone, it was also a bestseller,
although it did get some critique, some of which was hilarious.
That was regarding its historical accuracy. But the years in
which he was writing Salambo, Gustave once again had some
(35:37):
serious health problems. He had a number of seizures and
during some of these he injured himself as his body
collapsed and he hit the ground without a cushion, so
he actually had injuries to his head in his arms.
In eighteen seventy, Flaubert finally published Leducascion Sentimental, but it
was not the success that Bouvery was. After having worked
(36:01):
on it over the course of decades, he was just
completely deflated by its poor reception, and that same year,
during France's conflict with Prussia, Flaubert, who was not in
great health, was conscripted as a lieutenant in the Rue
Home Guard. As things went very poorly for France in
this conflict, Flaubert had Prussian soldiers billeted in his home
(36:24):
as eighteen seventy ended, and they stayed there all the
way up until spring of eighteen seventy one. The writer
did not stay at his home during this time. He
went to Dieppe, where he lived with his then adult niece.
This was merely the beginning of a very rough period
for Flaubert. In eighteen seventy two, his mother died. It
(36:45):
was expected that he would inherit the Quisse home, but
his mother had, as a surprise to everyone, willed it
instead to his niece Caroline. And Caroline allowed him to
remain in the home, but that was not an automatic situation.
A whole lot of discussion to settle the matter to
the point where that was okay. In eighteen seventy four
(37:06):
he published The Temptation of Saint Anthony. This was yet
another instance of a book that he wrote many times
in different versions before he was happy enough with it
to publish. It was inspired by a visit to Italy
in which he saw one of the many paintings of
this biblical story. His earliest version of it actually began
(37:26):
in the late nineteen thirties before he saw the painting.
At that time he was endeavoring to create a Faustian novel,
but then he incorporated that work into his Saint Anthony's
story in the late eighteen forties. Then he put it aside.
That was the novel that his friends had mocked when
they were all traveling together in eighteen forty nine. He
(37:46):
didn't revisit it until the late eighteen fifties, when he
wrote a third version, and then finally he went back
a fourth time and landed at the one that he
published in the eighteen seventies. These evolutions reflected Flaubert's changing
attitudes toward religion and science. Yeah, one of those times
was the moment Tracy mentioned earlier whereafter Madame Bowerie he
(38:07):
was like, I'm going to go back to St. Anthony. Wait, no,
that will really get me arrested. In his later years,
Flaubert really struggled financially. He had used up his personal
fortune to help Caroline's husband, Ernest Commaville, get out of
debt when his company failed. This was a lot of money.
It has been reported to have been close to a
(38:29):
million francs, so a very serious sum. Flaubert had had
to sell off a lot of real estate to make
up that amount of money, and the whole thing had
left him without enough money personally to keep his home Crossay.
Heated when it was cold, so in the winter he
moved to Paris to try to generate income. He turned
(38:49):
to one of his oldest pieces of writing, and that
was his catalog of cliches. This was eventually reworked into
a novel titled Bouvar and Picochet, about two clerks who
come into money and move to the country to retire
and indulge their curiosity with experiments in various endeavors. While
(39:10):
they know plenty of axioms and popular ideas about the
workings of the world, they lack the judgment and critical
thinking to actually do or understand anything with any depth.
Their experiments in farming, gardening, medicine, and science are all failures,
and eventually they go back to clerking. This is a
satire on pretense and the middle class, but in a
(39:33):
way that shows that the author actually has a great
deal of love for these bumbling protagonists. That list of cliches,
he started as a teenager, came in handy because he
could just slot those right in while he was working
on Bouvar and Pecuchet, Flaubert published instead. He kind of
paused working on that and published a trio of short stories.
(39:55):
He was hoping that that work would move a little
more quickly and that he could generate some money. These
were published in the spring of eighteen seventy seven, and
after that he immediately returned to work on Bouvard and Pecuchet.
Flaubert was back at Cliss for the warmer months in
the spring of eighteen eighty. On April twentieth, he wrote
to his niece, quote ten days from now, well, I
(40:18):
have reached the point I'd like to attain before leaving
my dear old Croisse. I doubt it. And when will
the book be finished? That's the question. If it's to
appear in winter, I haven't a minute to lose between
now and then. But there are moments when I feel
I'm liquefying, like an old Camembert. I'm so tired. And
(40:39):
ten days later, on May eighth, Flaubert suddenly died. He
was literally in the middle of a page of writing
when he had a stroke. He was working on Bouvert
and Pecuchet. It was not finished. He was buried in Rue.
This unfinished novel was published the following year. The reviews
were not great, and debates and analysis about how critics
(41:03):
interpreted the work versus what the writer intended with it
continue all the way to today Augustav Lobert. I can't
wait for Friday discussion, Okay, but in the meantime, I
have a cool sewing email. I'm so excited. I love
a little sewing email. This is from our listener Barbara,
who writes, Hello, Holly and Tracy. I've been listening for
(41:25):
years and usually can listen to two episodes during my commute,
one on the way in and one on the way home. However,
I currently have a backlog as I was off for
a maternity leave and am slowly making my way through Congratulations.
By the way, the new to Me two parter about
paper patterns inspired me to write in. When I lived
in Congo, wax print fabric, the history of which would
(41:46):
make a great episode, was commonly given as presents for birthdays, weddings,
Women's Day, very popular, etc. But also different communities would
create special prints for events, for example, the anniversary of
a church, university, or other organization. Women and men who
were part of the community would have outfits made from
the special fabric for this event. I have many outfits
(42:09):
from my years of living there, and all were made
for me by various tailors quturiers as they were called.
These women would come to my house, take my measurements,
and I would show them a picture of what style
I wanted. About a week later, they would come back
with an outfit that would then get fitted and adjusted.
Within two weeks or sometimes less, I had a completely
(42:31):
customized garment. I didn't fully appreciate the skill that it
took to make a garment based off of photo with
no pattern, But now I'm in awe and incredibly grateful
for my beautiful clothes. I also wish that more of
them fit me, but postpartum plus an American diet means
that I have to admire many of them as they
hang in my closet instead of wearing them out. My
(42:52):
husband is Congolese and my in laws have continued to
give me various bolts of fabric, so now that we
have a baby, I've been wanting to make some customized
clothes for him to represent his heritage. However, I have
basic sewing skills and a secondhand machine that I haven't
figured out how to thread yet, so it'll be a
minute before that happens. Anyway, Thanks for the entertainment on
(43:12):
the ride and the inspiration to break out the sewing machine,
and then includes some cool potential future episodes and writes
thanks for all you do in helping shed light on
some little known but fascinating topics. All the best, Barbara.
I love everything about the seat mail. I love the
idea of like community fabric designs. I love the idea
(43:32):
of custom designs, custom fabric prints made for given events.
I love to design fabrics, So this is one of
my favorite topics in the whole world. And I love, love,
love Barbara, that you are starting to delve into sewing yourself. Listen,
I have great news. Sewing is not secret. You can
learn all these things. It might take time and patience,
(43:54):
but you'll learn and you'll get better and better, and
then your kid will have amazing clothes and I can't wait.
And I hope as you develop as a stitcher you
share some of those pictures of some of those projects
with us. Also, ditto goes for your beautiful clothes that
you had made that maybe don't fit anymore. Listen, fabric
can get reworked in a lot of interesting ways. I'm
(44:15):
just saying, once your creativity pops off in this way,
then you're in trouble because you have so many things
that you want to do. But I love this so
much and I just I love the idea of community
and marking important events with fabric. Like to me, that's
just perfect, perfect, So thank you for sharing this with us.
(44:35):
And like I said, I want pictures as you go,
And if you have any sewing questions send us another email.
I'll help if I can. We absolutely love hearing from
our listeners, so if you would like to write to us,
you can do so at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
We will have a brand new episode on Monday. You
can also expect a classic episode tomorrow. Stuff you Missed
(45:02):
in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So, while I was
working on research for our recent episode on Tayefield Steinlen,
(00:23):
I was reminded while I was looking at the history
of French censorship of the trial of Gustave Flaubert during
the French Second Empire, regarding his novel Madame Beauvrie and
I have rather fond memories of studying that book. I
have feelings about it. We'll talk about them on Friday.
(00:43):
Madame Bovarie, as we'll say, because it's a little easier
than saying the French accent every time. Is today considered
a classic, and it's, you know, pretty tame in nature,
But when it was written in the eighteen fifties not
considered tame. It fell under the accusing of the French
government for its sexual content. So for today, first we're
(01:05):
going to talk a bit about Gustave Flaubert himself and
then bring his life story to the point where he
found himself on trial for writing a book that was
accused of being immoral that was really pretty early in
his career as a writer, and then we'll talk a
little bit about the effects of the trial and his
life after it. I feel like I should say this
(01:26):
is for someone like me that's read a lot about
Gustave Flaubert. This feels very much not comprehensive. I'm like, oh,
I lef so much out. Even so it's a little
bit longish. So just know, if you are a Flaubert scholar,
You're going to be like, you left so much out,
and I'm gonna be like, I know, baby, I need
That's what's up. So. Gustave Flaubert was born December twelfth,
(01:49):
eighteen twenty one in Rule France. His father, Aquille Cleofa Flaubert,
was a surgeon. His mother, and Justine Caroline Flurio, was
from a family that could trace its roots back hundreds
of years in the history of Normandy. Doctor Flaubert accumulated
wealth and property, but throughout his career he remained dedicated
(02:12):
to caring for Ruen's poor and indigent. He was known
as an outgoing man who excelled as a teacher to
the students at Hotel Dieu, where he was the head
of surgery. The Flabers also accumulated a lot of wealth
through real estate. A quill Kliophi purchased the land whenever
he could, and then he rented that land out for farming. Yeah,
(02:35):
he really was much wealthier than a doctor in his
particular role would normally be because he was very smart
about investing. So by the time Gustav was born, the
Flobers had welcomed several children, but they had tragically lost
several as well. First, they had a son named Akilla
after his father, and then they had a daughter who
(02:57):
died as an infant. Their seconds so Emil Klopha died
at eight months, and their third son, Jules Alfred, was
born in eighteen nineteen. That was two years before Gustave. Sadly,
Jules died in the autumn of eighteen twenty two, leaving
only Akille and Gustave at that point. And then finally
(03:18):
they had a daughter named Caroline, who was born two
and a half years after Gustave. His mother understandably grieved
deeply for all of these losses, and she also developed
what's described as a pretty high level of anxiety about
her remaining children because she was afraid something would happen
to them, and that anxiety was something those kids were
(03:39):
very much aware of. In addition to that, the family
lived adjacent to the hospital. They were in like an
apartment that was connected directly to the facility, and that
meant that the children that Gustav and his siblings made
friends with were patients, and the Flaubert kids became very
acquainted with loss, as many of those friends died from
their illnesses. Additionally, the children were allowed to freely roam
(04:04):
the hospital, so they often saw the kinds of things
that most parents would probably want to shield their children from,
and they even went with their father on visits to
mental asylums when he made medical visits there, maybe trying
to get a break from all the anxieties and sorrows
of this day to day life. Gustavs said to have
(04:25):
sought out adults around him who were good at telling stories.
One was a young woman named Julie who was hired
to help with the children and to help around the house.
Another was a neighbor named Mignon, and Monsieur Mignon told
him stories of Don Quixote, which left a very strong
impression on the young boy. Flaubert later wrote quote, I
(04:48):
find all my roots in the book I learned by
heart before learning how to read Don Quixote. Apparently it
took him a while to learn how to read because
he preferred to have people just read to him. But
once he did learn, he was a voracious reader. He
also started writing letters to just about everyone he knew
(05:09):
as a child. Yeah, these are also the kinds of
letters that you would not associate with a child's writing.
He wrote like long letters about his inner thoughts and
like what was going on in the world around him.
Like they sound much more informative than many letters that
(05:29):
I would certainly write today. At the age of ten,
Gustave went to boarding school, although that school was still
quite close to his home, but he did board there
and he was there for the next eight years. When
he was still a teenager of sixteen, he published his
first piece in a local literary review titled Le Kolibri
that means the hummingbird. It is unclear to me what
(05:51):
the subject of that early writing was. He also completed
his first novel that year, memoir Don fu or Memoirs
of a Madman. This was about a married woman eleven
years older than him, who he was obsessed with. It
was based on his real life about a woman named
Elisa Slessinger who had no idea. This teenager thought that
(06:15):
he was in love with her. He did not publish
this manuscript or anything else for decades. Yeah, it does
come back in a different way, but that is very fascinating.
I apparently Schlessinger, who he came to know later in life,
did not find out until like thirty five years later
that she was the subject of this book, or that
(06:38):
he had been just obsessed with her as a teenager.
When he was still a teen he also became friends
with the pessimist philosopher Alfred le PoID Vein, and the
two men remained lifelong friends. Early on in his life,
Flaubert developed this very strong sensibility in which he absolutely
loathed things like cliche and what he called yde requieu
(07:02):
preconceived ideas, and he started compiling a list of these things,
basically anything that was often repeated as known wisdom that
he thought was stupid. This may be the thing that
makes me feel the most affinity for Gustafabert. We'll talk
about it on Friday. There was a very real degree
of intellectual snobbery to Flobert even as a child and
(07:23):
as a teen, and he and Le Poitvin came up
with an imaginary character that they named simply le Gesson,
and he kind of became the bourgeois embodiment of every
stupid thing that they heard people saying. Flaubert was thrown
out of school the year he was supposed to graduate.
It's not one hundred percent clear what happened here, but
the prevailing theory is that when the schools well liked
(07:48):
philosophy teacher took a leave due to illness, Gustav and
his friends were just at odds with the substitute, and
things escalated to the point that the boys were removed.
They were allowed to sit for their final exams, though,
and Gustav passed. Flaubert was sent on a trip to
the Mediterranean as a reward. Yeah he went with like
(08:08):
a family friend, and it was a two month trip.
Just before his twentieth birthday, Flaubert began studying law in Paris.
He did not find Paris to his liking, and he
didn't really want to be a lawyer. He had known
from the time that he learned to read and write
that what he wanted was to be a writer, but
his parents wanted him to study for some sort of vocation.
(08:32):
He went along with this, although he said, even if
I graduate, I'm not going to study. I'm not going
to practice law. So whatever, I'm placating you. But by
the time Flaubert was twenty two, he was actually having
a lot of difficulties with his law studies, and he
started having some pretty frightening health issues. He had a
seizure one night in January eighteen forty four while he
(08:54):
was riding in a carriage with his brother, and they
went to his father's house, where he had several more
Years later, he wrote about these attacks this way quote.
Each attack was like a hemorrhage of the nervous system,
seminal losses from the pictorial faculty of the brain, one
hundred thousand images cavorting at once in a kind of fireworks.
(09:17):
It was a snatching of the soul from the body. Excruciating.
I am convinced I died several times. But what constitutes
the personality? The rational essence was present throughout. Had it
not been, the suffering would have been nothing, for I
would have been purely passive, whereas I was always conscious,
even when I could no longer speak. Thus my soul
(09:40):
was turned back entirely on itself, like a hedgehog wounding
itself with its own quills. Because this started at a
time in his life when he was very stressed, it
has sometimes been reported as sort of a nervous breakdown,
although other reads of the situation specifically say he had epilepsy.
To a letter he wrote to his friend La Poitevin,
(10:02):
he was bled in three places at once before he
regained consciousness, But writing to his friend about what had happened,
Flaubert was really astonishingly upbeat. After mentioning that he was
being sent to the seashore for a rest, he notes
that he must sound boring, but that if he's going
to have old men's illnesses quote, I must be allowed
(10:25):
to drivel on the way they do. He did try
to return to school in Paris briefly, but then he
had another seizure which sent him back home to Ruon
and ended his law study. His father purchased a home
in Croisse, outside of Ruon, so he could live at
a more peaceful place. At this point it seemed like
(10:46):
he would be just taken care of by a paid staff.
The family had wealth they could afford to do that,
and that would be the case for the rest of
his life. But it also meant that he could turn
his attention entirely to writing. Coming up, we'll talk about
Flaubert's approach to writing, but first we will have a
quick sponsor break. A recurrent aspect of Flaubert's work is
(11:18):
that he would often revisit earlier writing to try to
make use of it by editing it and shaping it
into something better. And this began right away, early in
this phase of life where he started to write in earnest.
Most of us who did any writing in our teens
probably consider that work to be juvenile and not worth
our time if we did not set it on fire
(11:38):
or throw it out. But that is not how it
worked for Gustav Flaubert. Recall that first manuscript that we
talked about that he wrote about the older woman he
had fixated on. He took that character of the older
woman and his fixation and he retooled them into a
new work called Novembre, which also was not published. One
(11:59):
of the things he is notorious about as being a perfectionist,
he did not want anyone to see any of his
works until he was one hundred percent happy. He often
recopied them over and over, editing as he went. But
he then adapted the story again to drop it into
a larger narrative about the French Revolution that was titled
Legucacion Sentimental. But though he finished the first version of
(12:23):
that in the early eighteen forties, it would be more
than twenty years before he revised it again and finally
published it. And this kind of ongoing revision was something
he did throughout his life, and as we'll see, near
the end of his life, he sometimes went way back
to work that one might not even consider that useful
for such a thing. At the beginning of eighteen forty six,
(12:45):
Flaubert's father died. Then just two months after he lost
his father, his sister Caroline, who was only twenty one, died.
She had spent two months having complications from childbirth before
her death. Gustav and his sister were very close, so
this loss just devastated him. He decided to raise her daughter,
(13:06):
so he took the baby and his widowed mother to
live in his home in Clisse. Yeah, his niece was
also named Caroline, so there's a lot of Caroline's in
this story. The same year that all of those losses
and life changes played out, Flaubert also met the poet
Louise Colet when he was visiting Paris. He was actually
(13:26):
in Paris to have a sculpture made of his sister
and was carrying her death mask to do it, and
when he went to visit the sculptor, he meets Louise
and the two of them began a very intense affair
which lasted eight years. She was married. Her husband, musician
Hippolite Colt, was still alive for the first five years
(13:48):
of this affair. Louise had married him to get away
from life in the country and to move to Paris.
But once she was in Paris, she was definitely not monogamous,
and Flaubert was not her first affair. The relationship between
Luis Colet and Gustave Flaubert was tempestuous, and at one
point they did stop seeing each other completely, kind of
in the middle of their relationship, but they were soon
(14:10):
together again. He spent a lot of time with his
close friend Maxim du Camp. The two men went on
a walking tour together through the Loire Valley and along
the coast of Brittany. The journal that Flaubert wrote during
their days is considered by some to be some of
his finest work. It was not published in his lifetime,
(14:31):
but after his death, with the title Parles Champ at
Parle Greve, which is Through Fields and along Shores. In
eighteen forty nine, Flaubert, his friend du Camp and another friend,
poet Louis Bouiller, met up so that Flaubert could read
the other two a novel that he had been working on,
and he read it aloud to them over the course
(14:53):
of several days a reported thirty two hours of reading,
and the reception to this was not good. His friends
are described as being just utterly brutal in their criticism.
He was, in fact advised to throw the whole thing
in the fire and never speak of it again. This
was the first time he had shared his novel writing
(15:15):
with anyone, and although it must have been incredibly painful
to have his two close friends very harshly criticize it,
he and Ducamp remained very close. The two young men
actually went on a tour of Europe and Northern Africa
right after this. Flaubert is said to have come home
from that trip with syphilis, which he got while visiting
a brothel abroad. Flaubert's next project was the work that
(15:38):
would eventually become Madame Bovarye. It too had roots in
earlier writing, including a piece from eighteen thirty seven called
Passion and Virtue. There appear to have been a lot
of influences that went into the creation of the character
of Emma Bovary, and different accounts of the author's life
and work will cite one or another, or sometimes multiple.
(16:02):
For instance, Flaubert is said to have been pointed at
the true story of doctor Eugene de Lamar and his
wife Veronique Delphine Couturier. Veronique was bored by her life
as the spouse of a country physician, and she engaged
in a life of debauchery and infidelity, which ultimately consumed
her until her death by suicide in her mid twenties.
(16:25):
This is really close to the Madame Bowerie story, but
there are other similar stories that Flaubert also knew, some
of personal acquaintances of women who found their bourgeois lives
stultifying and who longed for more and sought out affairs
to try to bring a spark into their lives that
they had been longing for. As for Flaubert, he always
(16:47):
told anyone who asked who Madame Bowerie was based on
that it was himself, famously quoted almost everywhere you can
find as Madame Beauvarie semoi. And the truth is that
his most famous character is probably an amalgam of all
of these things, as there are pretty keen parallels to
all of them within the story in terms of details.
(17:09):
There were women he knew and knew about who found
that the life of a wife was far less romantic
than the books they had read growing up were leading
them to believe. And Eugene de la march is said
to have been one of Flobert's father's students, so there
may have been a personal connection to that story. And
like his heroine, Flobar lived a life where the main
(17:31):
male figure he knew was a doctor, and the young
Gustave found the average life around him in that scenario
lacking in originality and stimulus. But also who among us
has not had that similar feeling at some point in
their lives right? That really does explain the appeal of
this novel story. A lot of people can relate to
(17:54):
Emma's longing. Flabar himself wrote that there were people just
like Emma Bovarie crying throughout France. He also wrote to
Louise Colais in eighteen fifty two quote, if my book
is good, it will gently caress many a feminine wound.
More than one woman will smile as she recognizes herself
in it. Incidentally, as he was working on the novel
(18:18):
in eighteen fifty five, he broke off his affair with
Louise Colay for the last time, after a period where
the two were clearly falling apart. They had a lot
of conflict, his friends were getting involved. He wrote her
a very definitive letter on March sixth, eighteen fifty five,
which read, in its entirety, Madam, I was told that
(18:39):
you took the trouble to come here to see me
three times last evening I was not in and, fearing
less persistence expose you to humiliation. I am bound by
the rules of politeness to warn you that I shall
never be. In the story of Madame Bovarie, extremely briefly
(19:02):
is that the main character, Emma, who has spent her
teenage years in a convent school, is married off to
Charles Bovary, a country doctor who cares for her but
is not exactly passionate. She's grown up reading romance novels.
She believes she's about to start the life she has
always dreamed of, only to find that her days are
(19:22):
dull and filled with on Wii. She starts trying to
find ways to bring more excitement into her life while
simultaneously pushing her husband to pursue a practice in the
city of Ruon. This begins with reckless spending. A merchant
named Lrux named a ham fistedly offers her a wide
(19:45):
array of expensive luxuries on credit. As she starts getting
a taste of the finer life, she also starts cheating
on her husband, looking unsuccessfully for the thrilling romance she's
always been looking for. In every instance, the men she
turns to let her down, and her dealings with both
(20:06):
the merchant and her lovers, she's left used by them.
But though the reader may initially identify with this longing
that she has, she's revealed not to be a romantic
figure caged in social mores, but a selfish and shallow
person whose actions hurt the people around her. The book
(20:26):
does not end well for her. The coda of this
novel is purposely unsatisfying, showing the undeserving as being rewarded
and that life is not fair or just. As Flobert
was working on the book, his friend Maxim Duchamp had
become a member of the Review de Paris and he
encouraged Flaubert to publish his news story in the literary
(20:50):
journal in installments, and once Flobert was ready, he did
so under the title Madame Beauverie mourd Clovence, beginning on
October first, eighteen fifty six. As we mentioned in our
recent episode on Tea Fieldsteinland, France was going through cycles
in which its laws regarding the press would tighten and
then relax. But by the time the last installment of
(21:13):
Madame Boverie appeared in the Review de Paris on December fifteenth,
Flaubert was in the sights of the French government. His
story was accused of being blasphemous and of offending public morals.
The formal charge was having committed the misdemeanor of an
outrage against public and religious morals and established customs. There's
(21:36):
actually an interesting element to this in that the Review
de Paris had actually edited out one of the seamier
parts of the book because they were afraid of being
shut down or punished if they ran it. The author
had told the editors that if something had to be suppressed,
which he wasn't wild about, he wanted that to be
noted on the page, and they acquiesced. So there was
(21:56):
a note on that page that read quote, the directors
have seen the necessity of suppressing a passage here which
did not seem fitting to the review de parie. We
give notice of it to the author. Had the original
version run, things may have been even more problematic for
Gustave Flaubert. The trial was set for January twenty ninth,
(22:17):
eighteen fifty seven. On January twentieth, Gustav wrote a letter
to his brother Akille with an absolutely delicious passage that
gives a great insight into where his head was at.
With this quote, the police have blundered. They thought they
were attacking a run of the mill novel and some
ordinary little scribbler. Whereas now, in part thanks to the prosecution,
(22:42):
my novel is looked on as a masterpiece. And for
the author he has for defenders a number of what
used to be called grand Dams. The Empress, among others,
has twice spoken in my favor. The Emperor said the
first time they should leave him alone. And despite all that,
the case was taken up again. Why there begins the mystery.
(23:05):
While waiting, I am preparing my statement, which is simply
my novel itself. But I am cramming the margins next
to the incriminated passages with embarrassing quotations drawn from the classics,
to show, by means of that simple parallel, that for
the last three hundred years there hasn't been a line
in French literature that couldn't be indicted as undermining morality
(23:29):
and religion. Have no fear, I shall be quite calm.
As for not appearing at the trial. That would be
a retreat. I shan't say anything, but we'll stand next
to Senrod, who will need me there. Besides, I can't
afford not to display my criminal countenance to the populace. No, no,
that's a great letter. We will get to the details
(23:52):
of the one day trial after we hear from the
sponsors that keep the show going. The lead prosecutor in
the Madame Bovarie case, Ernespnaw, opened the proceedings and he
talked for a very long time. He explained early on
(24:16):
that that was going to be the case, and why,
stating quote, The difficulty is not in arousing a prejudice.
It is far more in explaining the work of which
you are to judge. It deals entirely with romance. If
it were a newspaper article which we were bringing before you,
it could be seen at once where the fault began
and where it ended. It would simply be read by
(24:38):
the Ministry and submitted to you for judgment. Here we
are not concerned with a newspaper article, but entirely with
a romance which begins the first of October, finishes the
fifteenth of December, and is composed of six numbers in
the Review de Paris, eighteen fifty six. What is to
be done in such a case? What is the duty
(24:59):
of the public ministry to read the whole romance? That
is impossible. On the other hand, to read only the
incriminating texts would expose us to deep reproach. They could
say to us, if you do not show the case
in all its parts, if you pass over that which
proceeds in that which follows the incriminating passages, it is
(25:20):
evident that you wish to suppress the debate by restricting
the ground of discussion. In order to avoid this two
full difficulty, there is but one course to follow, and
that is to relate to you the whole story of
the romance without reading any of it or pointing out
any incriminating passage. Then to cite incriminating texts, and finally
(25:42):
to answer the objections that may arise against the general
method of indictment. So Pinard then began to tell the
entire story of Madame Bovary, and in English language translation
it took almost seven thousand words, so probably around fifty
minutes to an hour when spoken aloud. When he was done,
(26:06):
he stated that the book glorified adultery and insulted religion.
Did not seem to matter to him that Emma Bovary
gets serious come uppance in the book. No moral lesson
could validate the offending passages. Pinard then pointed the finger
at Flaubert and his publisher, quote, you have before you, gentlemen,
(26:28):
three guilty ones. Monsieur Flaubert, the author of the book,
Monsieur Pshaw, who accepted it, and Monsieur Pilet who printed it.
In this matter. There is no misdemeanor without publicity, and
all those concerned in the publicity should be equally blamed.
But we hastened to say that the manager of the
(26:48):
review and the printer are only in the second rank.
The principal offender is the author, Monsieur Flaubert. Monsieur Flaubert,
who admonished by a note from his editor, protested against
the suppression which had been made in his work. The
opening of the defense by Flaubert's attorney, Monsieur Sinard, began quote, gentlemen,
(27:11):
Monsieur Gustave Flaubert has been accused before you of making
a bad book, of having in this book outraged public
morals and religion. Monsieur Gustave Flaubert is beside me and
affirms before you that he has made an honest book.
He affirms before you that the thought in his book,
from the first line to the last, is a moral thought,
(27:33):
and that if it were not perverted. And you have
seen during the last hour how great a talent one
may have for perverting a thought, it would be and
will become again presently for you, as it has been
already for the readers of the book, an eminently moral
and religious thought capable of being translated into these words
(27:53):
the excitation of virtue through the horror of vice. The
rest of the defense invoked the good name of the
Flaubert family and Gustav's serious and thoughtful nature, but it
also managed to get some misogyny into the mix by
showing that Flaubert was warning against women trying to rise
above their station in life. Quote. I have here stated
(28:16):
that Monsieur Flaubert wished to paint a woman who, instead
of trying to adapt herself to the conditions in which
she was placed, to her position and her birth, instead
of seeking to make herself a part of the life
to which she belonged, was occupied with a thousand foreign
aspirations drawn from an education too far above her Instead
(28:38):
of accommodating herself to the duties of her position, of
being the tranquil wife of a country doctor with whom
she should pass her days, in place of seeking her
happiness and her house and her marriage, sought it in
interminable fancies. Yeah. In case it's not obvious from that passage,
what he's getting at is this is a woman who
(29:00):
had a little too much education, and that's dangerous. Yeah,
she should not have wanted things. Don't want things, don't
learn things that might make you want a life other
than your own. SNAr insisted on reading the portion of
the story that had been cut by the editors. If
you've read the book, you know which one this is.
It's a scene in which Madame Bowerie and her lover
(29:21):
are having a clandestine sexual meeting in a carriage as
the driver is instructed to continue to drive around. And
this particular passage he wanted to read because it concludes
with the line quote in her heart, she felt already
that cowardly docility that is for some women at once,
the chastisement and atonement of adultery, and Sinnar drew attention
(29:43):
to that line. One of the reasons this is so
funny to me is that when I was in college
and we studied this book, our whole class did not
really grasp, like, how what was happening in the catch? Yeah,
professor like read it out loud to us, dramatically, intoning
(30:06):
the important bits. Yeah, we similar. But I read it
in high school and I don't remember whether it was
me or one of my friends that was trying to
explain it to kids. That were not getting it. That
was like, if this carriage is a rocket, right, yeah.
So the defense also appealed to the court on the
(30:29):
basis of the way Charles Bovary is represented in the
book's danu mal declaring quote. There is not a man who,
having read this, would not say that Monsieur Flaubert is
not only a great artist, but a man of heart,
for having in the last six pages turned all the
horror and scorn upon the woman and all the interest
(30:49):
towards the husband. He is a great artist, as has
been said, because he has left the husband as he was,
he has not transformed him. And to the end he
is the same, good man, commonplace, mediocre, full of the
duties of his profession, loving his wife well, but destitute
of education or elevation of thought. He is the same
(31:13):
at the deathbed of his wife. And nevertheless, there is
not an individual to whom the memory returns with more interest.
Why because he has kept to the end his simplicity
and uprightness of heart. Because to the end he has
fulfilled his duty while his wife was led astray. So
here's the important point that I would just personally like
(31:35):
to make regarding the way this book was both attacked
and defended because it's always made me a little bit irate.
All of the firestorm around it regarding morality was based
on the idea that the wife of an upstanding husband
would dare to commit adultery. There is never ever introduced
(31:56):
in any of this discussion any moral red flag regarding
them male characters who were perfectly happy to seduce Sema
Bovary even though they knew she was married and in
fact had social relationships with her husband. All of the
blame and shame is given to the woman, Madame Bovary.
Though the court proceedings were brief, Flaubert and his publisher
(32:19):
waited a week for the verdict. It's lengthy, were not
going to try to read the whole thing, But the
ending reads quote be it known that the work of
which Flaubert is the author is a work which appears
to be long and seriously elaborated from a literary point
of view, as a study of character. That the passages
(32:39):
coming under the ordinance for dismissal, as reprehensible as they
may be, are few in number as compared with the
extent of the work. That these passages either in the
ideas they expose, or in the situations they represent, bring
out as a whole the characters which the author wished
to paint, although exaggerated and impregnated with a vulgar realism,
(33:04):
often shocking. That Gustave Flaubert affirms his respect for good
manners and all that attaches itself to religious morals, that
it does not appear that his book has been written,
like certain other books, with the sole aim of giving
satisfaction to the sensual passions, to a spirit of license
(33:24):
and debauch, or of ridiculing things which would be held
in the respect of all that he has done wrong
only in losing sight of the rules which every writer
who respects himself ought never to lose sight of or forget.
That literature, like art, in order to accomplish the good
(33:45):
which it is expected to produce, ought only to be
chaste and pure in its form and expression. And the
circumstances be it known that it is not sufficiently proven
that Peshac, Gustave Flaubert, and Pilas are guilty of the
misdemeanor with which they are charged. The court acquits them
(34:05):
of the indictment brought against them, and decrees a dismissal
without costs, so the court had, as Flaubert predicted, found
him innocent. Madame Boverie was printed as a two volume
novel just a few months later in April of eighteen
fifty seven, and it was an instant bestseller. Had the
French government not accused Flaubert of immorality, it probably never
(34:28):
would have gained that level of popularity. Following on the
runaway success of Madame Bouverie, Flaubert turned back to his project,
The Temptation of Saint Anthony, but as one of the
main points of the novel was a saint tempted by
sexual desire, he reconsidered he did not want to risk
another trial, so he then moved on to working on
(34:51):
a historical novel, and this story, titled Salambo, was set
in Carthage during the third century, when the Mercenary Revolt
was taking place. This was based vaguely on the writings
of the Greek historian Polybius, but Flaubert created fictional characters
and a fictional story that sort of dropped into that
historical information. He wasn't rewriting it as a fiction. This book,
(35:15):
published in eighteen sixty two, benefited from the attention that
Madame Bovari had drawn to Gustave Flaubert's name, and while
it was very different in tone, it was also a bestseller,
although it did get some critique, some of which was hilarious.
That was regarding its historical accuracy. But the years in
which he was writing Salambo, Gustave once again had some
(35:37):
serious health problems. He had a number of seizures and
during some of these he injured himself as his body
collapsed and he hit the ground without a cushion, so
he actually had injuries to his head in his arms.
In eighteen seventy, Flaubert finally published Leducascion Sentimental, but it
was not the success that Bouvery was. After having worked
(36:01):
on it over the course of decades, he was just
completely deflated by its poor reception, and that same year,
during France's conflict with Prussia, Flaubert, who was not in
great health, was conscripted as a lieutenant in the Rue
Home Guard. As things went very poorly for France in
this conflict, Flaubert had Prussian soldiers billeted in his home
(36:24):
as eighteen seventy ended, and they stayed there all the
way up until spring of eighteen seventy one. The writer
did not stay at his home during this time. He
went to Dieppe, where he lived with his then adult niece.
This was merely the beginning of a very rough period
for Flaubert. In eighteen seventy two, his mother died. It
(36:45):
was expected that he would inherit the Quisse home, but
his mother had, as a surprise to everyone, willed it
instead to his niece Caroline. And Caroline allowed him to
remain in the home, but that was not an automatic situation.
A whole lot of discussion to settle the matter to
the point where that was okay. In eighteen seventy four
(37:06):
he published The Temptation of Saint Anthony. This was yet
another instance of a book that he wrote many times
in different versions before he was happy enough with it
to publish. It was inspired by a visit to Italy
in which he saw one of the many paintings of
this biblical story. His earliest version of it actually began
(37:26):
in the late nineteen thirties before he saw the painting.
At that time he was endeavoring to create a Faustian novel,
but then he incorporated that work into his Saint Anthony's
story in the late eighteen forties. Then he put it aside.
That was the novel that his friends had mocked when
they were all traveling together in eighteen forty nine. He
(37:46):
didn't revisit it until the late eighteen fifties, when he
wrote a third version, and then finally he went back
a fourth time and landed at the one that he
published in the eighteen seventies. These evolutions reflected Flaubert's changing
attitudes toward religion and science. Yeah, one of those times
was the moment Tracy mentioned earlier whereafter Madame Bowerie he
(38:07):
was like, I'm going to go back to St. Anthony. Wait, no,
that will really get me arrested. In his later years,
Flaubert really struggled financially. He had used up his personal
fortune to help Caroline's husband, Ernest Commaville, get out of
debt when his company failed. This was a lot of money.
It has been reported to have been close to a
(38:29):
million francs, so a very serious sum. Flaubert had had
to sell off a lot of real estate to make
up that amount of money, and the whole thing had
left him without enough money personally to keep his home Crossay.
Heated when it was cold, so in the winter he
moved to Paris to try to generate income. He turned
(38:49):
to one of his oldest pieces of writing, and that
was his catalog of cliches. This was eventually reworked into
a novel titled Bouvar and Picochet, about two clerks who
come into money and move to the country to retire
and indulge their curiosity with experiments in various endeavors. While
(39:10):
they know plenty of axioms and popular ideas about the
workings of the world, they lack the judgment and critical
thinking to actually do or understand anything with any depth.
Their experiments in farming, gardening, medicine, and science are all failures,
and eventually they go back to clerking. This is a
satire on pretense and the middle class, but in a
(39:33):
way that shows that the author actually has a great
deal of love for these bumbling protagonists. That list of cliches,
he started as a teenager, came in handy because he
could just slot those right in while he was working
on Bouvar and Pecuchet, Flaubert published instead. He kind of
paused working on that and published a trio of short stories.
(39:55):
He was hoping that that work would move a little
more quickly and that he could generate some money. These
were published in the spring of eighteen seventy seven, and
after that he immediately returned to work on Bouvard and Pecuchet.
Flaubert was back at Cliss for the warmer months in
the spring of eighteen eighty. On April twentieth, he wrote
to his niece, quote ten days from now, well, I
(40:18):
have reached the point I'd like to attain before leaving
my dear old Croisse. I doubt it. And when will
the book be finished? That's the question. If it's to
appear in winter, I haven't a minute to lose between
now and then. But there are moments when I feel
I'm liquefying, like an old Camembert. I'm so tired. And
(40:39):
ten days later, on May eighth, Flaubert suddenly died. He
was literally in the middle of a page of writing
when he had a stroke. He was working on Bouvert
and Pecuchet. It was not finished. He was buried in Rue.
This unfinished novel was published the following year. The reviews
were not great, and debates and analysis about how critics
(41:03):
interpreted the work versus what the writer intended with it
continue all the way to today Augustav Lobert. I can't
wait for Friday discussion, Okay, but in the meantime, I
have a cool sewing email. I'm so excited. I love
a little sewing email. This is from our listener Barbara,
who writes, Hello, Holly and Tracy. I've been listening for
(41:25):
years and usually can listen to two episodes during my commute,
one on the way in and one on the way home. However,
I currently have a backlog as I was off for
a maternity leave and am slowly making my way through Congratulations.
By the way, the new to Me two parter about
paper patterns inspired me to write in. When I lived
in Congo, wax print fabric, the history of which would
(41:46):
make a great episode, was commonly given as presents for birthdays, weddings,
Women's Day, very popular, etc. But also different communities would
create special prints for events, for example, the anniversary of
a church, university, or other organization. Women and men who
were part of the community would have outfits made from
the special fabric for this event. I have many outfits
(42:09):
from my years of living there, and all were made
for me by various tailors quturiers as they were called.
These women would come to my house, take my measurements,
and I would show them a picture of what style
I wanted. About a week later, they would come back
with an outfit that would then get fitted and adjusted.
Within two weeks or sometimes less, I had a completely
(42:31):
customized garment. I didn't fully appreciate the skill that it
took to make a garment based off of photo with
no pattern, But now I'm in awe and incredibly grateful
for my beautiful clothes. I also wish that more of
them fit me, but postpartum plus an American diet means
that I have to admire many of them as they
hang in my closet instead of wearing them out. My
(42:52):
husband is Congolese and my in laws have continued to
give me various bolts of fabric, so now that we
have a baby, I've been wanting to make some customized
clothes for him to represent his heritage. However, I have
basic sewing skills and a secondhand machine that I haven't
figured out how to thread yet, so it'll be a
minute before that happens. Anyway, Thanks for the entertainment on
(43:12):
the ride and the inspiration to break out the sewing machine,
and then includes some cool potential future episodes and writes
thanks for all you do in helping shed light on
some little known but fascinating topics. All the best, Barbara.
I love everything about the seat mail. I love the
idea of like community fabric designs. I love the idea
(43:32):
of custom designs, custom fabric prints made for given events.
I love to design fabrics, So this is one of
my favorite topics in the whole world. And I love, love,
love Barbara, that you are starting to delve into sewing yourself. Listen,
I have great news. Sewing is not secret. You can
learn all these things. It might take time and patience,
(43:54):
but you'll learn and you'll get better and better, and
then your kid will have amazing clothes and I can't wait.
And I hope as you develop as a stitcher you
share some of those pictures of some of those projects
with us. Also, ditto goes for your beautiful clothes that
you had made that maybe don't fit anymore. Listen, fabric
can get reworked in a lot of interesting ways. I'm
(44:15):
just saying, once your creativity pops off in this way,
then you're in trouble because you have so many things
that you want to do. But I love this so
much and I just I love the idea of community
and marking important events with fabric. Like to me, that's
just perfect, perfect, So thank you for sharing this with us.
(44:35):
And like I said, I want pictures as you go,
And if you have any sewing questions send us another email.
I'll help if I can. We absolutely love hearing from
our listeners, so if you would like to write to us,
you can do so at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
We will have a brand new episode on Monday. You
can also expect a classic episode tomorrow. Stuff you Missed
(45:02):
in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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