Sentimental Education

French novelist Gustave Flaubert was born on December 12, 1821, in Rouen, France, and died on May 8, 1880, in Croisset. The son of a surgeon who worked at the Rouen Hospital, he did his secondary studies in his homeland and enrolled in law at the Sorbonne. In 1844, the first symptoms of nervous illness that were to afflict him all his life led him to abandon the course. His father tried to counter his literary tendencies, but after his death in 1846, Flaubert returned to Rouen and settled in Croisset, on the outskirts of the city. He inherited from his father a reasonable fortune that allowed him to freely devote himself to art. This is where he spends the rest of his life, except for rare stays in Paris and a few trips to France, Italy and North Africa.
His foray into literature began at school and dates back to 1837, when he wrote a student newspaper, Art et Progrès, and then the magazine Le Colibri. He formed a close friendship with the young philosopher Alfred Le Poittevin, who would greatly influence him with his pessimism. From November 1849 to April 1851, he visited Greece, Italy, Syria, Turkey, Egypt and Palestine with his writer friend Maxime du Camp. From these trips comes the book A bord de la Cange. When he had already advanced the writing of La Tentation de Saint Antoine, he interrupted it to write his great novel Madame Bovary, which in 1857 was published in serials in the Revue de Paris. This work, which cost him five years of work, would also take him to court, in 1858, for an attack on good morals. Despite the scandal, the critics consecrate the work for its novelty, perfection and balance, and realistic tendencies. In 1862, four years after his trip to Carthage, Flaubert wrote Salammbô, revealing great creative faculties. In 1869 l'Éducation Sentimentale was published, a work of psychological analysis that was not well appreciated and left the writer very disappointed. It was only in 1874 that he published la Tentation de saint Antoine, which was banned. Flaubert worked on this work for approximately thirty years. In 1877 he published a volume of short stories, Trois Contes.
With Gustave Flaubert's death, Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881), an unfinished work, Par les champs et par les grèves (1885) and four volumes of the Correspondance (1887-93) were published. In addition to these books, it is also worth mentioning an unfinished Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues, and his copious correspondence collected after successive editions in thirteen volumes (1933-59), which contains precious indications on his theory of the novel. Although Flaubert does not fall into Zola's naturalistic scientism, for him all facts matter. He observes, analyzes and extracts from the collected materials a synthesis of the aspects of life he intends to treat, even when in order to escape from the present reality he places them in the past, as is the case of the work Salammbô.
Flaubert's work represents the maximum exponent of the realist novel in France and influenced the Portuguese writer Eça de Queirós.