FLAUBERTS POLITICS
19
of journalism, art and drama and of the various political factions of
the time and the remnants of the old nobility, Frederic finds the same
shoddiness and lack of principle which are gradually revealed in
himself-the same qualities which render so odious to him the banker
M. Dambreuse, the type of the rich and powerful class of the age.
M. Dambreuse is always ready to trim his sails to any political party,
monarchist or republican, which seems to have a chance of success.
"Most of the men who were there," Flaubert writes of the guests at
M. Dambreuse's house, "had served at least four governments; and
they would have sold France or the human race in order to guarantee
their fortune, to spare themselves a difficulty or anxiety, or even
merely from baseness, instinctive adoration of force."
"Je me moque
des afJaires!"
cries Frederic when the guests at M. Dambreuse's are
complaining that criticism of the government hurts business; but he
always comes back to hoping to profit by M. Dambreuse's invest-
ments and position.
The only really sympathetic characters in
L'Education Senti-
mentale
are, again, the representatives of the people. Rosanette,
Frederic's mistress, is the daughter of poor workers in the silk mills,
who sold her at fifteen to an old bourgeois. Her liaison with Frederic
is a symbol of the disastrously unenduring union between the prole-
tariat and the bourgeoisie, of which Marx, in
The Eighteenth
Brumaire
had written. After the suppression of the workers' insur-
rection during the June days of '48, Rosanette gives birth to a weakly
child, which dies while Frederic is ;:tlready arranging a love affair
with the dull wife of the banker. Frederic believes that Mme. Dam-
breuse will be able to advance his interests. And bourgeois socialism
gets a very Marxist treatment-save in one respect, which we shall
note in a moment-in the character of Senecal, who is eternally
making himself unpleasant about communism and the welfare of
the masses, for which he is apparently ready to fight to !he last bar-
ricade. When Senecal, however, gets a job as foreman in a pottery
factory, he turns out to be an inexorable little tyrant; and when it
begins to appear, after the putting down of the June riots, that the
reaction is sure to triumph, he begins to decide, like our Fascists to-
day, that the strong centralization of the government is already itself
a kind of communism and that authority is in itself a great thing.
On the other hand, there is the clerk Dussardier, a strapping and
stupid fellow and one of the few honest characters in the book. When
we first see him he has just knocked down a policeman in a political
brawl on the street. Later, when the National Guard, of which Dus-
sardier is a member, turns against the proletariat in the interests of law
and order, Dussardier fells one of the insurgents from the top of a
barricade and gets at the same time a bullet in the leg, thereby be-
