But by the summer, it becomes increasingly clear that while the intellectuals and the middle classes had been revolting over theoretical questions, like the extent of the franchise and the need for a new constitution, the workers were mostly fighting because they wanted everyone else’s stuff. When King Louis-Philippe is overthrown in the uprising of February 1848, the bourgeoisie, the intellectuals, the workers, and even members of the National Guard largely fight against the government together. It’s that so much of what Flaubert dramatizes about 1848 seems relevant to our own day-not least the uneasy relationship between Parisian elites and the country’s working classes. It’s not just that American politics have become unexceptional and European, with the rise of a socialist alternative on the left, blood-and-soil populism on the right, and an unheroic, complacent establishment trying to preserve the center. The young men are failures at love and power, respectively, and France, instead of reclaiming the grand scale of 1789, gets its parody in 1848 and the subsequent dictatorship of Louis Napoleon-events that inspired Marx’s famous spin on Hegel, that history repeats itself 'the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.'įlaubert’s novel, a new translation of which was released this month by the Oxford University Press, makes for uncomfortable reading in the late spring of 2016. And both for him and Deslauriers personally, and for France, the future is very much not great. He stopped talking and then suddenly cried:įrédéric doesn’t invest-he needs his capital to pursue the winsome and very married Madame Arnoux, with whom he is infatuated. Then you were really alive, you could stand up for yourself, prove your strength! Simple lawyers ordered generals about, beggars vanquished kings, whereas nowadays… 'Oh, those were the days, when Camille Desmoulins, standing on a table over there, urged people to the Bastille.

Education sentimental flaubert