The Poetry of Violence in L'Education sentimentale

The pleasure that Flaubert took in the spectacle of rioting was decisive in the determination and the fictional representation of his sense of history. The various forms of collective violence that marked the course of the Revolution of 1842 appear in his novel as episodes in the life of a "flaneur," a spectator whose leisure time happens to parallel and eventually to intersect historical time. The poetry that the novelist associated with rioting assumed a theatrical form that allowed him to place his protagonist in the foreground, to grant him spatial priority over the event in question, and thus to distance fiction from history. The distance from the facts that Frédéric Moreau initially enjoys is gradually eliminated by the evolution of violence and of the crowd itself. As the mob disappears from the scene of action, history ceases to function as an entertainment in the young man's life and becomes increasingly a form of terror that promotes the loss of illusion. This trauma culminates on 2 December 1851, a day that Flaubert imagistically transforms into an aesthetic commentary on 1848. (DDA)