FLAUBERT'S POLITICS
21
hardly conscious of having done so.
Going back to
L'Education Sentimentale,
we come to under-
stand Mr. F. M. Ford's statement that you must read it fourteen
times. Though it is less attractive on the surface than
Madame Bovary
and perhaps others of Flaubert's books, it is certainly the one which
he put the most into. And once we have got the clue to all the im-
mense and complex drama which unrolls itself behind the detachment
and the monotony of the tone, we find it as absorbing and satisfying
as a great play or a great piece of music.
The one conspicuous respect in which Flaubert's criticism of the
events of 1848
diverges
from that of Marx has been thrown into
special relief by the recent events of our own time. For Marx, the
evolution of the socialist into a policeman would have been due to the
bourgeois in Senecal; for Flaubert, it is a natural development of
socialism. Flaubert distrusted, as I have mentioned in quoting from
his letters, the authoritarian aims of the socialists. For him, Senecal,
given his bourgeois hypocrisy, was still carrying out a socialist prin-
ciple-or rather, his behavior as a policeman and his yearnings to-
ward socialist control were both derived from his tyrannical instincts.
Today we must recognize that Flaubert had observed something
of which Marx was not aware. We have had the opportunity to
see how even a socialism which has come to power as the result of
a proletarian revolution has bred a political police of almost un-
precedented ruthlessness and pervasiveness-how the socialism of
Marx himself, with its emphasis on dictatorship rather than on demo-
cratic processes, has contributed to produce this disaster. Here
Flaubert, who believed that the artist should aim to be without social
convictions, has been able to judge the tendencies of political doctrines
as the greatest of doctrinaires could :lot; and here the role chosen by
Flaubert is justified.
The war of 1870 was a terrible shock to Flaubert; the nervous
disorders of his later years have been attributed to it. He had the
Prussians in his house at Croisset and had to bury his manuscripts.
When he made a trip to Paris after the Commune, he came back to
the country deeply shaken. "This would never have happened," he
said when he saw the wreck of the Tuileries, "if they had only under-
stood
L'Education Sentimentale.
What he meant, one supposes, was
that, if they had understood the falsity of their politics, they would
never have wreaked so much havoc for their sake. "Oh, how tired I
am," he writes George Sand, "of the ignoble worker, the inept bour-
geois,the stupid peasant and the odious ecclesiastic."
But in his letters of this period, which are more violent than
ever, we see him taking a new direction. The effect of the Commune
