FLAUBERT'S POLITICS
17
bourgeois society. Emma Bovary, the wife of a small country doctor,
is always seeing herself in some other setting, imagining herself some-
one else. She will never face her situation as it is, with the result
that she is eventually undone by the realities she has been trying to
ignore. The upshot of all Emma's yearnings for a larger and more
glamorous life is that her poor little daughter, left an orphan by
Emma's suicide and the death of her father, is sent to work in a cot-
ton mill.
The socialist of Flaubert's time might perfectly have approved
of this: while the romantic individualist deludes himself with dreams
in the attempt to evade bourgeois society and only succeeds in des-
troying himself, he lets humanity fall a victim to the industrial-
commercial processes, which, unimpeded by his dreaming, go on.
Flaubert had more in common and had perhaps been influenced
more by the socialist thought of his day than he would ever have
allowed himself to confess. In his novels, it is never the nobility, who
are indistinguishable for mediocrity from the bourgeoisie, but the
peasants and working people whom he habitually uses as touchstones
to bring out the meanness and speciousness of the bourgeois. One of
the most memorable scenes in
Madame Bovary
is the agricultural
exhibition at which the pompous local dignitaries award a medal to an
old farm servant for forty-five years of service on the same farm.
Flaubert has told us about the bourgeois at length, made us listen
to a long speech by a town councilor on the flourishing state of
France; and now he describes the peasant-scared by the flags and
the drums and by the gentlemen in black coats and not understanding
what is wanted of her. Her long and bony hands, with which she
has worked all her life in greasy wool, stable dust and lye, still seem
dirty, although she has just wa~hed them, and they hang half open,
as if to present the testimony of her toil. There is no tenderness or
sadness in her face: it has a rigidity almost monastic. And her long
association with animals has given her something of their placidity
and dumbness. "So she stood before those florid bourgeois, that half-
century of servitude." And the heroine of
Un Coeur Simple,
a
domestic servant who devotes her whole life to the service of a
provincial family and gets not one ray of love in return, has a similar
dignity and pathos.
But it is in
L' Education Sentimentale
that Flaubert's account of
society comes closest to socialist theory. Indeed, his presentation here
of the Revolution of 1848 parallels in so striking a manner Marx's
analysis of the same events in
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Napoleon
that it is worth while to bring together into the same focus
the diverse figures of Flaubert and Marx in order to see how two
great minds of the last century, pursuing courses so apparently
