The Literature Book

160

R

omanticism, with its focus

on emotion, nature, and the

heroic, dominated French

literature from the end of the 18th

century, but by the 1830s a new

literary genre was gathering force:

realism. Although the genre went

on to spread throughout Europe

and beyond, its beginnings and

its development are particularly

associated with France.

Emerging partly as a reaction

to Romanticism, and reflecting

the evolution of science and the

social sciences, this new genre

sought to depict contemporary

life and society with detail and

precision, in an unadorned and

unromantic way. Realist writers

put familiar situations and events

under the literary microscope,

representing them realistically

rather than idealistically, even if

some of the subject matter might

have been considered banal when

compared with the Romantics.

Realism gathers force

One of the first French novelists

of the period to take this approach

was Stendhal, who incorporated

both Romanticism and realism in

his novels The Red and the Black

and The Charterhouse of Parma

(1839). Honoré de Balzac was a key

pioneer of French realism, creating

a keenly observed and realistic

portrayal of ordinary life in his

masterpiece, La Comédie humaine,

which incorporated a vast series

of more than 100 novels and stories.

However, Gustave Flaubert’s

Madame Bovary moved much

further along the path of realistic

depiction, and it is considered to

be the finest and most influential

example of French realism.

On the surface, Madame Bovary

has a fairly simple plot. A young

woman, Emma Bovary, is unhappily

Gustave Flaubert Gustave Flaubert was born in

Rouen, France, on December 12,

1821. His father was chief surgeon
      at the main hospital in Rouen.
      Flaubert began writing while still
      at school, but in 1841 he went to
      Paris to study law. At age 22 he
      developed a nervous disorder, and
      he left the law to devote himself
      to writing. In 1846 his father and
      his sister Caroline died; with his
      mother and niece, Flaubert moved
      to Croisset, near Rouen, where
      he lived for the rest of his life. He
      never married, but between 1846
      and 1855 he carried on an affair
      with poet Louise Colet.

Flaubert began to work on his

novel Madame Bovary in 1851,

completing it five years later.

In 1857 he traveled to Tunisia,

collecting material for his next

novel, Salammbô (1862), which

was set in ancient Carthage.

Other works would follow, but

none ever achieved the acclaim

of his first novel. Flaubert died

on May 8, 1880 and was buried

in Rouen cemetery.

Other key works

1869 Sentimental Education

1877 Three Tales

MADAME BOVARY

IN CONTEXT

FOCUS

French realism

BEFORE

1830 With its detailed

analysis of French society

and psychological depth,

Stendha l’s The Red and the

Black marks a definitive shift

from Romanticism to realism.

1830–56 The interlocking

novels and stories of Honoré

de Balzac’s monumental La

Comédie humaine provide a

panoramic view of French

society from 1815 to 1848.

AFTER

1869 Flaubert’s A Sentimental

Education adds to the body of

French realism with its vast

presentation of France under

Louis-Philippe.

1885 Guy de Maupassant

portrays the rise to power of

a ruthless social climber in

Bel Ami, a realist novel set

in fin-de-siècle Paris.

Her heart was just like that:

contact with the rich had left

it smeared with something

that would never fade away.

Madame Bovary

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