Serial Revolutions has argued that the revolutions of 1848, far from being the failure that Marx claimed them to be, were the powerful response to a remarkable cross-class diagnosis of the political failure of governments across Europe to care for their people. And, crucially, it has argued that this revolutionary response was the result of new forms of representation and mediation: until the ragged and the angry could see themselves represented, and represented as a serial phenomenon, such a political consciousness was impossible. By the 1840s, the developments in printing, transport, and distribution discussed in Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848 had made the social visible in an unprecedented way. This print revolution led to a series of real and bloody revolutions in the streets of European cities. It is because of this breaking open, this new self-visibility, and this sense of extra-national connection that the counter-revolutions which followed 1848 would create a corrosive form of political melancholia in the 1850s and 1860s. This is the source of the peculiarly acrid smell of Gustave Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale: his much revised, highly compressed, and often misunderstood ‘historical novel’ about the Parisian 1848, written during the 1860s.1
On 24 February 1848, Flaubert and his friend Maxime Du Camp had been among the first to enter the Tuileries Palace after its guards were overpowered.2 L’Education sentimentale is often invoked as evidence of the failure of the revolutions, but this is imprecise and fails to take into account the formal radicalism of the novel. With a deliberate yet abstract style that suggests coding, Flaubert works into his text a diffident but profound engagement with the idealism of the 1848 revolution, re-enacting ‘the imaginative proximity of social revolution’ and invoking the enormous political difficulties involved in bringing revolution into a satisfactory shape or finding a consensus for its purpose.3 But difficulty is not the same as failure, and his novel, by its very form, insists on the incompleteness of events, rightly, as it turned out: within a year of its publication, the Paris Commune had been established. As Peter Brooks says of L’Education sentimentale, ‘[t]here is a kind of serial unfolding of the plot, one thing leading to another without a return to any master plot’, and this deliberate formal experiment is Flaubert’s literary response to the seriality of revolution and its challenge to the master plots and conventions of historical theory and political life.4 While he is far from triumphalist about the democratic project, instead gleefully satirizing the idealisms of 1848, Flaubert is nevertheless utterly serious in understanding the deep tectonic shift and the ascendancy of a newly mediated and serialized form of politics, born of that time. The novel knows that there can be no return. The ‘Flaubertization of writing’ after 1848 was described by Roland Barthes:
Between the third person as used by Balzac and that used by Flaubert, there is a world of difference (that of 1848): in the former, we have a view of history which is harsh, but coherent and certain of its principles, the triumph of an order; in the latter, an art which in order to escape its pangs of conscience either exaggerates conventions or frantically attempts to destroy them. Modernism begins with the search for a Literature which is no longer possible.5
But, as I have been suggesting in Serial Revolutions, literature is still entirely possible, and has much to say about 1848 and its aftermath: it just needs to find new ways of saying these things. Flaubert is early to understand the importance and likely future dominance, for better or worse, of an ongoing serialization of experience and a terminally incomplete politics. Crucially, too, he is among the first to develop a method for coding this new rhythm into narrative. In L’Education sentimentale, then, 1848 achieves nothing, but changes everything.
‘Je veux faire l’histoire morale des hommes de ma génération; “sentimentale” serait plus vrai’ [I want to write the moral history of the men of my generation; the ‘sentimental’ history would be closer to the truth], wrote Flaubert as he set forth on the consuming five-year project that was to yield this exquisitely uneasy novel.6 ‘I am slaving away at the Revolution of ’48’, he told Bouilet in 1867. ‘Do you know how many books I have read and annotated in the last six weeks? Twenty-seven, old fellow, and in spite of that I have managed to write ten pages.’7 The revolutionary events in the novel are based on close readings of actual accounts and interviews with eyewitnesses, all compressed by Flaubert and peppered through his narrative.8 The cultural politics of 1848 are not merely represented by Flaubert but re-enacted with obsessive accuracy. L’Education sentimentale flutters and rustles with paper and print. Newspapers and periodicals are rarely generic and are introduced with a careful attention to their particularity: Le Siècle, Charivari, La Presse, Revue des deux Mondes, and so on. Topicalities are also harvested from popular prints: for example, Flaubert studied the cartoon discussed in Chapter 2, ‘Apparition du serpent de mer’ [Fig. 2.18], which had appeared in Charivari in December 1848, and dropped an allusion to it into his novel.9 At one point, the aspiring playwright Hussonet says ‘he had just seen Le Chevalier de Maison-Rouge at Dumas’s theatre, and considered it “a dreadful bore” ’, a comment that offends his democratic friends (263); another ‘new play’ by Dumas, La Reine Margot, is also discussed (163).10 Lamartine’s Girondins is referenced (233), as is ‘Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris’(221, 261); and ‘the actor Frédérick Lemaître in Robert Macaire’ (39) is mentioned in close proximity to ‘a rag-picker, who was poking around among some oyster-shells outside a wine-merchant’s shop’ (39), invoking another of Lemaître’s most famous revolutionary roles, discussed in this volume in Chapter 3. The ‘milieu’ of 1848, as Flaubert complained, was ‘tellement copieux et grouillant’ [so copious and teeming] that he could only painstakingly rebuild it from snippets, glimpses, and allusions, all of which are placed deftly in the novel so as to be visible to readers without distracting them.11 All the iconography and popular tat of ’48 is here, the young men frequently overwhelming each other ‘with the commonplaces to be found in every newspaper’ (67). The revolution itself is a media-driven effect, almost a sideshow, while ‘[q]uietly and rapidly, the monarchy was disintegrating all by itself’ (285). The real business of constitutionalism and legislative reform, and the bureaucratization and democratization of the State, is all pushed to one side: ‘[t]hey were talking about votes, amendments, counter-amendments…All this bored Frédéric.’ (237) Flaubert’s ‘refractory style’, as Jonathan Culler has called it, offers the near-perfect expression of post-1848 modernity by offering a ‘challenge…to the easy construction of meaning’.12 To read one’s life as a novel, this novel reveals, is a very stupid thing to do; but it would be equally stupid to read the chaotic politics and events of 1848 through any simple narrative frame of completed ‘history’.
‘ “I am afraid,” Flaubert told Jules Duplan, “that my background will eat up my foreground: that is the trouble with the historical novel…the reader finds Frédéric less interesting than Lamartine.” ’ In a brilliant reverse of background and foreground, then, Flaubert takes Frédéric out of town during the June Days, to Fontainebleau, where he escapes with his lover, Rosanette.13 Deep in the forest, ‘[t]hey thought they were far away from other people, completely alone’ (322) but their leisure is repeatedly interrupted by labour, ‘a band of women in rags dragging along great bundles of faggots on their backs’ (322) or ‘quarrymen striking the rocks on a hillside’ (323).14 What is more, the connection to Paris looms like a threat: ‘far away in the distance a hilltop like a flattened cone could be seen, with a telegraph tower behind’ (321), while ‘[s]ometimes they heard the sound of drums far away in the distance’ (325). This troubled idyll finally collapses altogether when ‘[o]n the Sunday morning Frédéric read [his friend] Dussardier’s name in a newspaper, in a list of wounded’ (329) and he is compelled to return to Paris, suddenly assailed with remorse because ‘[h]is indifference to the country’s misfortunes had something mean and bourgeois about it’ (329). In 1848, newspapers will deliver the revolution to you, wherever you are, making the consequences of historical events inescapable.15
Flaubert creates the same narrative stand-off as Clough had done in Amours de Voyage: in both texts the bourgeois love plot and the political events seem to block, disable, and conceal one another.16 Just as with Clough’s poem, discussed in Chapter 5, mediation is the half-hidden theme of both the romance and the politics.17 Out in the streets during the February Revolution, accidentally stepping on a dead body, ‘lying face down in the gutter’, Frédéric Moreau still ‘felt as if he were watching a play’ (286). He and Mme. Arnoux meet for the last time to perform another kind of play, repeating their many-times-repeated lovers’ lines (‘in the depths of myself I have always had the music of your voice and the splendour of your eyes’ (414)). The novel reveals the serial repetition already at work in both revolutionary and romantic culture.
When the ateliers close in June and the workers gather angrily in Paris, Flaubert invokes the familiar biopolitical language of ‘swarms’ alongside the cliché of revolutionary ‘electrification’:
From the Porte Saint-Denis to the Porte Saint-Martin they formed a swarming multitude, a solid mass of dark blue verging on black. All the men one saw had burning eyes, pale complexions, faces drawn with hunger and excited by the thought of injustice…the stormy sky electrified the crowd and it swirled about irresolutely. (317)
The novel takes no sides: it too seems to ‘swirl about irresolutely’, gathering and detonating rhetoric from many sources and many political directions. When Frédéric finds the wounded Dussardier being nursed by the courtesan La Vatnaz, she tells him the second-hand story she has heard of Dussardier’s wounding on the barricades during the June Days, and Frédéric relays it to the reader, so that we hear the account at least at third hand. And Dussardier’s story only serves to reveal the incoherence of an unfolding revolution. He had joined the National Guard in order to defend the Republic, but is haunted by his conscience:
Perhaps he ought to have gone over to the other side and joined the smocks; for after all, they had been promised a great many things which had not been given to them. Their conquerors hated the Republic; and then, they had been savagely treated! No doubt they were in the wrong, but not entirely; and the good fellow was tormented by the idea that he might have been fighting against a just cause. (333)18
Flaubert relives the hapless feeling of being caught inside a revolution, and the concomitant difficulty of finding a representative mode—an appropriate aesthetic form—for a revolution as it unfolds. The painter Pellerin, for example, convinced that he has ‘discovered the secret’ (124) of a truly modern art, produces an absurd allegory of ‘the Republic, or Progress, or Civilization, in the form of Christ driving a locomotive through a virgin forest’ (298). In the exhilaration of the February Revolution, Pellerin imagines ‘a sort of Stock Exchange handling aesthetic interests [where] sublime works of art would be produced’ (294) by workers pooling their talents. This republican ‘Forum of Art’ (294) is later abandoned and Pellerin gives up his painting career to become a photographer, while M. Arnoux exchanges his art shop and journal for a ceramics factory which manufactures religious kitsch. Yet the cliché of Pellerin’s painting remains alive.
The image of the steam train as the techno-avatar of revolutionary modernity powerfully haunts Flaubert’s novel at the level of rhythm and affect. Proust, famously, was to describe the ‘continual, monotonal, sad, indefinite procession’ of Flaubert’s prose, making the scenes in L’Education sentimentale sound like a dull railway journey to nowhere that serves only to dramatize the dreariness and the losses of modernity.19 But the novel does not entirely renounce the idealism of a techno-utopia which will connect and deliver social good to all. It may almost be drowned out by a deluge of contingencies and human inadequacies, but something of the revolutionary potential of the incomplete series endures nonetheless, if only to create the democratic hypothetical which is the hidden engine of the text. Rosa Luxembourg loved Flaubert’s books and Marx’s daughter, Eleanor, translated his work alongside Ibsen’s.20 Perhaps both women recognized what was truly revolutionary in Flaubert: the radicalism of the actual writing and an exciting renovation of form. Barthes’s diagnosis of Flaubert’s guilty conscience manifesting in extreme conventionality or iconoclasm does not take proper account of his finely balanced prose or peculiar tone. Flaubert went to enormous efforts to make his novel bear the weight of so much raw political data without collapsing into formlessness. The desire for a relationship between literature and freedom is expressed through the contradiction between a restless onward narrative drive and the need to keep all sides of the question open. This is what accounts for the ‘continual, monotonal, sad, indefinite procession’ of his prose. It is at the level of the sentence that Flaubert constructs the counterfactual of L’Education Sentimentale: 1848 could have been different and will be different in the future.
Pellerin’s clichéd revolutionary locomotive still had much work to do. During the First World War, late at night on 16 April 1917, the steam train that had carried Lenin, his wife Krúpskaya, and thirty Russian exiles in a sealed carriage through enemy Germany drew into the Finland Station in Petrograd (now St Petersburg). The February Revolution had delivered a Provisional Government, but Lenin was arriving with an even more radical message: ‘Dear comrades, soldiers, sailors and workers, I am happy to greet in you the victorious Russian Revolution, to greet you as the advance guard of the international proletarian army…The war of imperialist brigandage is the beginning of civil war in Europe…Long live the international Social Revolution!’21 When he stepped onto the platform, a band was playing—what else?—the Marseillaise. The deterritorialization of 1848 created this international lexicon of revolutionary practice and performance through techno-cultural means.
In his satirical Dictionnaire des idées reçues [Dictionary of Accepted Ideas], Flaubert pokes fun at the tired platitudes repeated by the bourgeois citizens of the Second Empire about the railways, which had once been understood, by the Saint-Simonians, Flaubert’s Pellerin, and others, as revolutionary symbols:
RAILWAYS. If Napoleon had had them, he would have been invincible. Talk about them ecstatically, saying ‘I, my dear Sir, who am speaking to you now—this morning I was at X; I had taken the X train, I transacted my business there, and by X o’clock I was back here.’
RAILWAY STATIONS: Gape with admiration; cite them as architectural wonders.22
Railways under Napoléon III had been commodified and put to work in the service of national commerce. But there were some, even after 1848, who continued to believe in their revolutionary potential. In his 1855 Chants modernes, Maxime Du Camp remained faithful to Saint-Simon’s proto-socialist vision of a techno-utopian future and ‘saw the locomotive as the saint of the future’.23 And Benjamin Gastineau, briefly discussed in Chapter 4, agreed. Gastineau was a very different kind of writer from Flaubert. His growing popularity in the 1870s is confirmed by Flaubert’s inclusion of Gastineau in his ‘extraits d’auteurs célèbres’ [extracts from famous writers], which he compiled alongside his dictionary.24 Gastineau had started life as an ouvrier [workman], and had been as much a revolutionary traveller as others discussed in Serial Revolutions, although his travels were not like those of the tourists in Chapter 1, nor like those of Frédéric who leaves France at the end of L’Education sentimentale on a gentlemanly Grand Tour.25 Described during his lifetime as the ‘incarnation du juif-errant politique, touriste malgré lui’ [the incarnation of the political Wandering Jew and a tourist against his will], Gastineau was arrested in 1848 for his revolutionary activities and transported to Algeria in 1852.26 When he returned to France, he became editor-in-chief of the Guetteur [Watchman] de Saint-Quentin and moved to the provinces, but in February 1858 his newspaper was banned because it ‘excites the working class against the established order’, and he was arrested once more and forcibly returned to Algeria.27 Gastineau’s post-revolutionary experience of mobility left him remarkably politically optimistic: he wrote a couple of popular books about his experience with his ‘Arab brothers’ and came to believe that mobility would ultimately create universal peace ‘en croisant les races humaines’ [by crossing human races].28 If he is remembered at all today, it is because Walter Benjamin noticed a curious series of newspaper articles by him, later collected into a volume, Les Romans du voyage. La Vie en chemin de fer (1861) [Life on the Railway]. Gastineau thoroughly understood that by 1861 the railway had inaugurated a newly serial way of experiencing the world, ‘[d]évorant un espace de quinze lieues à l’heure, le vapeur…change à chaque instant les points de vue’ [Devouring space at fifteen leagues an hour, steam changes one’s view at every moment].29 And Benjamin copied out chunks of Gastineau into the notebooks that would become his Arcades Project:
A remarkable apotheosis of the traveler—to some extent a counterpart, in the realm of sheer banality, to Baudelaire’s ‘Le Voyage’—can be found in Benjamin Gastineau, La Vie en chemin de fer (Paris, 1861). The second chapter of the book is called ‘Le Voyageur du XIXe siècle (The Nineteenth-Century Traveler) (p. 65). This voyageur is an apotheosis of the traveler in which, in quite peculiar fashion, the traits of the Wandering Jew are mingled with those of a pioneer of progress. Samples: ‘Everywhere along his path, the traveler has sown the riches of his heart and his imagination: giving a good word to all and sundry,…encouraging the laborer; rescuing the ignorant from their gutter,…and raising up the humiliated.’30
Benjamin was fascinated by the reverberations of the idealised revolutionary railway, reflecting that ‘ “[r]ailroad tracks” with the peculiar and unmistakeable dream world that attaches to them, are a very impressive example of just how great the natural symbolic power of technological innovation can be’.31 The new technologies of transport and communication had not fully revealed themselves in 1848, making the present indeterminate and the political future unpredictable. But even after 1848 Gastineau did not forsake the techno-utopian dream, and in his later work he wrote of a world globalized not by capital, but by radically extended consanguinity and the end of race:
Mark my words, a new moral universe dates from the inception of the railways; man’s nature has changed; he has become the Proteus of the universe, betrothed to movement—a liberated, winged, radiant being! Steam will create a new humanity and trace a new map of the globe by crossing human races and mingling the interests and blood of all peoples.—Hail, beautiful races of the future, fathered by the railway!”32
For German Jews in the 1940s railways no longer signified utopia.33 But the terrible historical irony of Benjamin’s fascination with Gastineau’s (Jewish) version of the utopian railway that will automatically erase race has gone unnoticed.34
Gastineau’s race-dissolving globalization has not yet come to pass. Nevertheless, historians have been too swift to forget the popular culture of 1848 and to write off its importance and long-term effects. Intellectual historian John Burrow is typical in his scepticism about the importance of 1848: ‘[h]ow far the events of 1848–51 may be thought of as a cultural watershed generally is debatable’, he writes, adding that the rapid switch from the universal humanitarianism of Feuerbach to the pessimism of Schopenhauer proves the point.35 But this idea of ‘culture’ and of 1848 is narrower than Flaubert’s; and narrower than mine. Literary and cultural historians have not fully appreciated the importance of the revolutions either, although Fredric Jameson traces ‘a transformation of the sensorium’ around the middle of the nineteenth century, and clings to ‘realism’ as a diagnostic term because ‘literary representation furnish[es] the most comprehensive evidence as to a momentous yet impossibly hypothetical historical transformation’.36 Serial Revolutions has argued that 1848 both was and was not ‘hypothetical’. The events of 1847–9 certainly rearranged European understandings of the relationship of the ragged body to the body politic and laid open new possibilities for human social life. Jameson is right to point to literature as the seismograph of historical transformations that have not yet fully entered the historical record. Serial Revolutions has attempted to look again at some of those literary records of these extraordinary years, a brief period when the world became present to itself in a way which was utterly unprecedented.
The significance of the European revolutions of 1848–9 was unclear at the time and has been contested ever since: in this sense, their repercussions have not yet ended. This extraordinary sequence of events was to continue to exert a strong hold on the political and literary imagination, delivering new forms of expression in the second half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, as I will show in the third and final book in this series. The multiple and contradictory legacies of the revolutions remain difficult to disentangle: they worked to put a permanent end to a certain kind of despotic government in Europe, but they inaugurated a nationalism that, even by the 1860s, was being used as an alibi for racism and imperialist violence. They brought forth a techno-idealist model of telecommunications and a connected world, but this would not withstand the onslaught of capitalism and globalizing markets, and these technologies were soon working to divide, rather than unite, the people along geopolitical, economic, and racial lines. The revolutionaries of 1848 demanded full employment, but accelerating economic cycles were to deliver ever greater labour precarity into the twentieth century. As discussed in Chapters 6 and 7, the revolutions urged the necessity of political equality for women and for people of colour. And they also drew attention to the plight of children, to child poverty, and to intergenerational injustice, as we saw in Chapter 4. Marx continued into the 1850s to insist that ‘[t]he so-called revolutions of 1848 were but poor incidents’, just ‘small fractures and fissures in the dry crust of European society’.37 But the revolutionaries of 1848 had the temerity to imagine universal human rights and a world in which everyone could live without fear, hunger, or humiliation. If looked at like this, the events of 1848 do not seem such ‘poor incidents’ nor such an embarrassing failure after all.
1 Flaubert had written the first ‘version’ of L’Education sentimentale in 1845, in which the protagonist Henry in his detachment somewhat prefigures Frédéric Moreau in the 1869 version. For an assessment of the similarities and differences between the two novels, see Leah Anderst, ‘Reading Flaubert’s First and Second L’Education sentimentale’, Orbis Litterarum 67:4 (2012): 332–50.
2 For an account of Flaubert’s experience of the revolution, see Frederick Brown, ‘Flaubert in 1848’, Hudson Review 58:2 (Summer 2005): 195–219.
3 The phrase is Perry Anderson’s, reviewing Marshall Berman’s now classic All that is Solid Melts into Air (1982). He continues, ‘[t]he extent of hope or apprehension that the prospect of such revolution aroused varied widely: but over most of Europe, it was “in the air” during the Belle Epoque itself.’ Perry Anderson, ‘Modernity and Revolution’, New Left Review 1:144 (March/April 1984): 96–113, p. 104.
4 Peter Brooks, Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris: The Story of a Friendship, A Novel and a Terrible Year (New York: Basic Books, 2017), p. 94.
5 Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, pp. 66, 38.
6 Gustave Flaubert to Mlle. Leroyer de Chantepie (6 October 1864), Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance, 9 vols (Paris: Louis Conard, 1926–33), vol. 5, p. 158 (emphasis original). All subsequent long quotations from Flaubert will be given in English. Tony Williams argues that Flaubert takes this idea of his ‘generation’ very seriously: Tony Williams, ‘Dussardier on the Barricades: History and Fiction in L’Éducation sentimentale’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies 28: 3–4 (Spring/Summer 2000): 284–300, pp. 287, 288. See my discussion of the growing purchase of the concept of generation through the 1840s in Pettitt, Serial Forms, pp. 254–9. Flaubert edited this section of the novel on the June Days intensively. Williams includes an appendix showing all seven variants of the account of Dussardier’s wounding at the barricade and his subsequent political confusion: Williams, ‘Dussardier on the Barricades’, pp. 298–300.
7 Quoted in Robert Baldick, ‘Introduction’, Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education, trans. Robert Baldick (London: Penguin, 1964), p. 10. All subsequent references to L’Education sentimentale are to this edition and are given in parentheses in the text.
8 Pierre Bourdieu argues similarly that Flaubert’s ‘Sentimental Education reconstitutes in an extraordinarily exact manner the structure of the social world in which it was produced and even the mental structures which, fashioned by these social structures, form the generative principle of the work in which these structures are revealed’: Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Prologue: Flaubert, Analyst of Flaubert: A Reading of Sentimental Education’, in The Rules of Art, pp. 3–34, pp. 31–2. Michael Lucey remarks that ‘Flaubert has often had a troubling effect on the category of realism’, and offers a useful paraphrase of Bourdieu’s argument in The Rules of Art: ‘[Bourdieu argues that L’Education sentimentale is] not an attempt to offer any kind of simple reflection of the material world, but an attempt to objectify the immanent structures of the social world, the structures that produce our sense of the material world even as they shape our strategies and life histories within it.’ Michael Lucey, ‘Realism’, in William Burgwinkle, Nicholas Hammond, and Emma Wilson, The Cambridge History of French Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 461–70, pp. 467, 469.
9 He alludes to the sighting of the sea monster which inspired the cartoon (145). See Takashi Kinouchi, ‘La mémoire des images dans L’Éducation sentimentale’, Flaubert: revue critique et génétique, https://journals.openedition.org/flaubert/2256 and Cécile Guinand, ‘La Caricature littéraire: L’Éducation sentimentale de Flaubert’, Quêtes Littéraires 5 (décembre 2015): 65–77.
10 On 20 February 1847, Alexandre Dumas inaugurated the Théâtre-Historique with this adaptation of the novel.
11 Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance, vol. 3, p. 518.
12 Jonathan Culler, Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty [1974] (Aurora, CO: Davies Group Publishers, 2006), pp. 234, 235.
13 Many critics have attempted to read these forest scenes as symbolic of wider themes in the novel. For example, Victor Brombert suggests that ‘[t]he political revolution is measured against the geological “revolutions”. The “immobilized Titans” remind us, in their angry pose, of the revolutionary fervour. But they also point up the insignificance of all human endeavor in the face of eternal change and death.’ Victor Brombert, The Novels of Flaubert (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 177–8.
14 It is explicit, too, that Frédéric and Rosanette stay very much on the tourist beaten track. They are taken to see all the usual beauty spots, and they stop off at tourist restaurants. In one of the taverns, Rosanette is delighted to buy a wood carving as a souvenir of their trip (321). Flaubert makes the tourist banality of the trip clear, even as he allows Frédéric to fashion it as an idyll. Rosanette’s horrifying revelations of her sexual abuse as a child also threaten Frédéric’s attempt to feel certain ‘that he was going to be happy for the rest of his days’ (325).
15 Marc Redfield also argues that ‘the question of Flaubert’s formalism is bound up with the question of what history is’: Marc Redfield, Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the ‘Bildungsroman’ (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 174.
16 John Rignall in passing suggests a likeness between Clough and Flaubert, although he concludes that there is ‘no direct parallel [for Flaubert] in English fiction of the nineteenth century’: John Rignall, Realist Fiction and the Strolling Spectator (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 80–98, pp. 94, 98. Marc Redfield gives a psychoanalytic reading of L’Education sentimentale that conflates the love plot and the historical plot: ‘[s]uspended between futurity and anteriority, the historical event, in L’Education sentimentale, becomes the aporetic narrative of love’. Redfield, Phantom Formations, p. 198.
17 Christopher Prendergast agrees that ‘“mediation”—the mediated nature of our desires and actions—is the continuing theme of Flaubert’s novels’, but he does not connect this to 1848: Christopher Prendergast, ‘Flaubert: The Stupidity of Mimesis’, in The Order of Mimesis: Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, Nerval (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 180–211, p. 184.
18 Flaubert himself joined the Republican Guard.
19 Marcel Proust, ‘A propos du “style” de Flaubert’, in Marcel Proust, Chroniques (Paris: Gallimard, 1927), pp. 193–211, p. 194. Barthes also suggests of Flaubert that ‘[t]he interrupted flow of the new poetic language initiates a discontinuous Nature, which is revealed only piecemeal’: Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, pp. 49–50. Dolf Oehler reflects that ‘Il faut ici constater, ce qui est étrange et qu’à coup sûr la censure à elle seule n’explique pas, que l’intensité du débat littéraire sur le traumatisme de Juin n’a cessé de croître, entre 1848 et 1871, à mesure même que les événements s’éloignaient’ [It is necessary to note here, it is strange, and is certainly not explained by censorship alone, that the intensity of the literary debate on the trauma of June did not stop growing, between 1848 and 1871, even as the events receded]: Dolf Oehler, Le Spleen contre l’oubli. Juin 1848 (Paris: Payot, 1996), p. 9 (emphasis original).
20 In twelve months between the summers of 1885 and 1886, Eleanor Marx started and finished the first English translation of Madame Bovary and revised a new edition of Lissagaray’s History of the Paris Commune: Rachel Holmes, Eleanor Marx: A Life (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 249.
21 Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (London: Fontana, 1970), p. 473.
22 Gustave Flaubert, Dictionary of Accepted Ideas, trans. Jacques Barzun (New York: New Directions Books, 1968), p. 76. The ‘Dictionary’ was collected and published in 1911–13 from notes compiled by Gustave Flaubert during the 1870s. Anne Green also notes that Flaubert himself was nearly run over by a locomotive in 1859 and that he advised his friend Eugène Delattre about a section on railway accidents to be included in Delattre’s manual, Tribulations des voyageurs et des expediteurs en chemin de fer: Conseils pratiques [Tribulations of Railway Passengers and Dispatchers: Practical Advice] (1858): Anne Green, Changing France: Literature and Material Culture in the Second Empire (London: Anthem Press, 2013), p. 47. See also Anne Green, ‘La contribution inattendue de Flaubert à un manuel de chemin de fer’, Bulletin des Amis de Flaubert et de Maupassant 8 (2000): 13–21.
23 Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: New Left Books, 1979), p. 358.
24 ‘Je mijote à l’étuvée la cuisine de mon âme. BENJAMIN GASTINEAU.’
25 Like Frédéric, Flaubert himself travelled after 1848: between 1849 and 1851 he visited Greece, Egypt, the Lebanon, and Turkey in the company of his close friend, the writer and photographer Maxime Du Camp. Du Camp was later to serve as a volunteer with Garibaldi on his Expedition of the Thousand in 1860. Charles Baudelaire dedicated his poem of travel, ‘Le Voyage’, in the 1857 collection Les Fleurs du Mal, to Maxime Du Camp.
26 Eduard Plouvier, ‘Benjamin Gastineau’, Panthéon parisien, album des célébrités contemporaines, photographies par Et. Carjat (n.d. but library-stamped 1882). Gastineau had been one of the contributors in 1864 to the Panthéon and had recently returned to Paris in 1880.
27 Amnestied in 1859, Benjamin Gastineau continued his activities as a journalist in provincial Northern France until the fall of the Second Empire, when he moved back to Paris, joined the Commune, and became involved in newspapers and revolutionary clubs. On 3 May 1871, he was appointed Inspector of Municipal Libraries and Director of the Mazarine Library. At the fall of the Commune he escaped to Belgium, only returning to France after the amnesty of 1880. He died in Paris in 1904, having published a large number of popular books and histories, including Les Femmes et les Moeurs de l’Algérie (1861) and Les Romans du voyage. La vie en chemin de fer (1861); Les Génies de la Liberté: Avec Des Lettres de George Sand, Victor Hugo et Louis Blanc (1865); Voltaire in exile (1878) and a biography of Proudhon, P. J. Proudhon, sa vie et son œuvre (1865).
28 Benjamin Gastineau, Les Romans du voyage. La vie en chemin de fer (Paris: Editions Dentu, 1861), p. 112. His Algerian-inspired books are Les Femmes et les Moeurs de l’Algérie (1861) and La France en Afrique et l’Orient à Paris: voyage, colonisation, exposition, Egypte, Inde (1864).
29 Benjamin Gastineau, Les Romans du Voyage, p. 31. Gastineau, via Walter Benjamin, was an inspiration for Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s now classic 1977 The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in Nineteenth Century, in which Schivelbusch reiterates Gastineau’s point about the changes to perception caused by ‘gazing through the compartment window at successive scenes’: Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (London: Urizen, 1979), p. 63.
30 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, pp. 587–8.
31 Ibid., p. 156.
32 Gastineau, Les Romans du voyage, p. 112.
33 See Wojciech Tomasik, ‘Driverless Trains in Zola and Borowski’ in Matthew Beaumont and Michael J. Freeman (eds.), The Railway and Modernity: Time, Space and the Machine Ensemble (Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 191–200.
34 Benjamin Noyes also argues for ‘Benjamin’s strange cosmic phantasmagoria’ in his encomia to technology, although he suggests Benjamin had problematized this position by the onset of World War II: Benjamin Noyes, ‘War Machines’, in Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism (Winchester: Zero Books, 2014), n.p.
35 J. W. Burrow, The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848–1914 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 28.
36 Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism, p. 32. Jameson takes a broadly Marxist approach, which may explain his underplaying of 1848.
37 Karl Marx speaking in London in 1856 in slightly wobbly English, ‘Speech at the Anniversary of the People’s Paper’, in Robert C. Tucker (ed.), The Marx–Engels Reader, 2nd edn (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978), pp. 577–8. In the same speech Marx goes on to concede that the 1848 revolutions ‘denounced [sic] the abyss. Beneath the apparently solid surface, they betrayed oceans of liquid matter, only needing expansion to rend into fragments continents of hard rock”: pp. 577–8. Marx had studied geological science at the Trier gymnasium under Johann Steininger, a follower of Abraham Gottlob Werner, considered the ‘father of historical geology.’ Before Werner, geologists had categorized rocks according to location or constituent minerals. Werner suggested the long-term origins of geological succession and argued for the need to see the development of the earth from origins of ‘perhaps a 1,000,000 years.’ See John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Review Press, 2000), pp. 117–21.