FLAUBERT'S POLITICS
23
important that there should be a great many men like Renan and
Littre who can live and be li~tened to. Our salvation now is in a
legitimate aristocracy,
by which I mean a majority which will be
made up of something other than numerals." Renan himself and
Taine were having recourse to similar ideas of the salvation of society
through an elite. In Flaubert's case, it never seems to have occurred
to him that the hierarchy of mandarins he is proposing and his project
for educating the rich are identical with the ideas of Saint-Simon,
which he had rejected years before with such scorn on the ground
that they were too authoritarian. The Commune has stimulated in
Flaubert a demand for his own kind of despotism.
He had already written in 1869: " ... politics will remain idiotic
forever so long as it does not derive from science. The government
of a country ought to be a department of the Institute, and the least
important of all." "Politics," he reiterated in 1871, "must become a
positive science, as war has already become"; and, "The French
Revolution must cease to be a dogma and become part of the domain
of science, like all the rest of human affairs." Marx and Engels were
not reasoning otherwise; but they believed, as Flaubert could not do,
in a coming of age of the proletariat which would make possible the
application of social science. For Flaubert, the proletariat had been
pathetic but too stupid to do anything effective; the Commune threw
him into such a panic that he talked about them as criminale; and
brutes.At one moment he writes to George Sand, "The International
may end by winning out, but not in the way that it hopes, not in the
way that people are afraid of"; and then, two days later, "the Inter-
national will collapse, because it is on the wrong path. No ideas, no-
thingbut envy!" Finally, he wrote her in 1875: "The words 'religion'
or 'Catholicism,' on the one hand, 'progress,' 'fraternity,' 'democracy,'
on the other, no longer answer the spiritual needs of the day. The
dogma of equality-a new thing-which the radicals have been
crying up, has been proved false by the experiments of physiology
and by history. I do not at the present time see any way of setting up
a new principle, any more than of still respecting the old ones. So I
search,without finding it, for the central idea on which all the rest
oughtto depend."
In the meantime, his work becomes more misanthropic. "Never,
my dear old chap," he had written Ernest Feydeau, "have I felt so
colossala disgust for mankind. I'd like to drown the human race
under my vomit." He writes a political comedy,
Le Candidat,
the
onlypiece that he has yet composed which has not a single even faintly
sympatheticcharacter. The rich parvenu who is running for deputy
sacrificeshis daughter's happiness and allows himself to be cuckolded
by his wife as well as degrades himself by every form of truckling
