Following Flaubert's legal battle, Madame Bovary was published as a two-volume novel in 1857. The trial lasted for just one day, and Flaubert and La Revue de Paris were both acquitted a week later. While Emma ultimately gets her comeuppance, Flaubert’s frank descriptions of adultery scandalized French readers and led to an obscenity trial. In pursuit of passionate love and luxurious possessions, Emma engages in extramarital affairs and squanders her husband’s money. Emma swiftly grows disillusioned with both her husband and their provincial ways, especially after she attends a ball thrown by one of her husband’s aristocratic patients. Madame Bovary tells the story of Emma, a peasant who marries an older doctor, Charles Bovary, to escape the dullness of rural life. MADAME BOVARY SHOCKED FRANCE WITH ITS EXPLICIT DESCRIPTIONS OF ADULTERY. Read on to learn more about Flaubert's inspiration for the character of Emma Bovary, his painstaking creative process, and the obscenity trial that threatened the novel's publication. His debut novel Madame Bovary, originally serialized in the French literary magazine La Revue de Paris in late 1856, established Flaubert as a master of French realism.

A diagnosis of epilepsy forced him to abandon his legal education, which conveniently gave him the opportunity to pursue a literary career. Nor did any of his contemporaries.French novelist Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) studied law, but he was born to be a novelist. Despite his private views of artistic freedom, he did not agitate against the laws under which he was prosecuted. Instead, he insisted his book was moral and that he was too bourgeois to be prosecuted.

Despite Flaubert’s refusal to alter the book’s content, says Haynes, he did not protest what amounted to government censorship of his book. These legal norms-themselves relics of pre-revolutionary guild codes-were accepted by authors of the day. Authors, printers, and publishers were expected to serve as moral “sentinels,” notes Haynes, and licenses to print required businesspeople to swear they would control content. That subject matter and Flaubert’s refusal to temper it with moral messages were at the heart of the obscenity trial, as were evolving norms in terms of publication and press freedom in France. Though his publisher did dial down a few passages, the author angrily insisted that a disclaimer appear along with the book, which in turn alerted the authorities to its incendiary content. The book hardly reads as scandalous today, but its depiction of a bored housewife who embarks on a life of infidelity was nothing less than revolutionary 200 years ago. Were Flaubert and his contemporaries afraid to stand up to censorship?įlaubert’s refusal to tone down the sexual passages of his book appears to have been his legal downfall.

Flaubert madame