22
PARTISAN REVIEW
on Flaubert, as on so many of the other French intellectuals, was to
bring out the class-consciousbourgeois in him. Basically bourgeois his
life had always been, with his mother and his little income. He had,
like Frederic Moreau himself, been "cowardly in his youth," he wrote
George Sand. "I was
afraid
of life." And even moving amongst what
he regarded as the grandeurs of the ancient world, he remains a
moderate modern Frenchman who seems to be indulging in im-
moderation self-consciously and in the hope of horrifying other
Frenchmen. Marcel Proust has pointed out that Flaubert's imagery,
even when he is not dealing with the world of the bourgeois, tends
itself to be rather banal.
It
was the enduring tradition of French
classicism which had saved him from the prevailing cheapness: by
discipline and objectivity, by heroic application to the mastery of
form, he had kept his world at a distance. But now when a working
class government had held Paris for two months and a half and had
wrecked monuments and shot bourgeois hostages, Flaubert found
himself as fierce against the Communards as any respectable "grocer."
"My opinion is," he wrote George Sand, "that the whole Commune
ought to have been sent to the galleys, that those sanguinary idiots
ought to have been made to clean up the ruins of Paris, with chains
around their necks like convicts. That would have wounded
humanity,
though. They treat the mad dogs with tenderness but not the people
who have gotten bitten." He raises his old cry for "justice." Universal
suffrage, that "disgrace to the human spirit," must first of all be done
away with; but among the elements which must be given their due
importance he now includes "race and even money" along with
"intelligence" and "education."
For the rest, certain political ideas emerge-though,
as usual, in
a state of confusion. "The mass, the majority, are always idiotic. I
haven't got many convictions, but that one I hold very strongly. Yet
the mass must be respected, no matter how inept it is, because it con-
tains the germs of an incalculable fecundity. Give it liberty, but not
power. I don't believe in class distinctions any more than you do.
The castes belong to the domain of archaeology. But I do believe
that the poor hate the rich and that the rich are afraid of the poor.
That will go on forever. It is quite useless to preach the gospel of love
to either. The most urgent need is to educate the rich, who are, after
all, the strongest." "The only reasonable thing to do-I always come
back to that-is a government of mandarins, provided that the man-
darins know something and even that they know a great deal. The
people is an eternal minor, and it will always (in the hierarchy of
social elements) occupy the bottom place, because it is unlimited
number, mass.
It
gets us nowhere to have large numbers of peasants
learn to read and no IonISeI'listen to their priest; but it is infinitely
