Rules of Art

Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field

Pierre Bourdieu

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781509534012
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

This is Bourdieu's long-awaited study of Flaubert and the formation of the modern literary field, it is an important contribution to the study of the social and historical conditions of literary works.

Appendix 1
Summary of Sentimental Education

Frédéric Moreau, a student in Paris around 1840, meets Madame Arnoux, the wife of the editor of an art magazine, who has a gallery of paintings and engravings in Montmartre. He falls in love with her. He nourishes vague desires simultaneously literary, artistic and worldly. He tries to introduce himself into the household of Dambreuse, a worldly banker, but disappointed by the welcome he receives falls back into uncertainty, idleness, solitude and daydreams. He frequents a whole group of young people who will gravitate around him: Martinon, Cisy, Sénécal, Dussardier, and Hussonnet. He is invited to the Arnoux’ home and his passion for Mme Arnoux is renewed. On holiday at his mother’s in Nogent, he learns of the precarious situation of his fortune and meets the young Louise Roque, who falls in love with him. As soon as an unexpected legacy makes him rich, he leaves again for Paris.

He finds Mme Arnoux, whose welcome disappoints him. He meets Rosanette, a demi-mondaine, mistress of Monsieur Arnoux. He is torn between diverse temptations, tossed from one to another: on the one hand, Rosanette and the charms of the luxurious life; on the other, Mme Arnoux, whom he tries in vain to seduce; and finally, the rich Mme Dambreuse, who could help him to realize his worldly ambitions. After a long series of hesitations and procrastinations, he returns to Nogent, having decided to marry M. Roque’s daughter. But he leaves again for Paris: Marie Arnoux agrees to a rendez-vous. He waits in vain while fighting goes on in the streets (it is 22 February 1848). Disappointed and angry, he will console himself in Rosanette’s arms.

A witness to the revolution, Frédéric visits Rosanette assiduously: he has a son by her who soons dies. He also frequents the salon of the Dambreuses. He becomes the lover of Mme Dambreuse, and after the death of her husband, she proposes marriage to him. But, in a sudden outburst, he breaks off first with Rosanette and then with Mme Dambreuse, but not to run to Mme Arnoux again – after the bankruptcy of her husband, she has left Paris. He returns to Nogent, having decided to marry the Roque girl. But in the meanwhile she has married his friend Deslauriers.

Fifteen years later, in March 1867, Mme Arnoux visits him. They confess their love for each other, recalling the past. They separate for ever.

Two years later, Frédéric and Deslauriers review their failure. All they have left is the memories of their youth; the most precious one, that of a visit to the house of the Turkish woman, is the story of a rout: Frédéric, who had the money, fled the brothel, frightened by the sight of so many women on offer; and Deslauriers had been forced to follow him. They conclude: ‘Yes, that was our best time!’

Appendix 2
Four Readings of Sentimental Education

This is a time when one is gladly revolutionary in art and in literature, or at least believes oneself so, since one takes for daring gestures and immense progress everything which contradicts the accepted ideas of the two generations which preceded the one which is reaching maturity. Then, as now and in every age, one is duped by words, one gets enthusiastic about empty phrases, one lives on illusions. In politics, a Regimbart or a Sénécal are types we still find and we will continue to see as long as men continue to frequent brasseries and clubs; in the world of business and finance, there have always been people like Dambreuse and Arnoux; among painters, Pellerins; Hussonnets are still the plagues of editors’ offices; and yet, all the above are of their own time and not of today. But they have such humanity that we perceive in them enduring characters who each constitute, instead of a novelistic personage destined to die with his contemporaries, a type which survives his century. And what can we say of the protagonists, Frédéric, Deslauriers, Mme Arnoux, Rosanette, Mme Dambreuse, Louise Roque? No larger novel has ever offered to the reader such a quantity of figures so marked by characteristic traits.

R. Dumesnil, En marge de Flaubert (Paris: Librairie de France, 1928), pp. 22–3

The three loves of Frédéric, Mme Arnoux, Rosanette, Mme Dambreuse, could be, by sleight of hand, characterized under the three names of beauty, nature and civilization […]. At the centre of the picture there are light values. At the edges, dark values, more secondary figures; on the one hand there is the group of revolutionaries, on the other the group of bourgeois, in other words, people of progress and people of order. Right and left, these political realities are here considered as the values pertaining to the artist, and Flaubert sees in them an opportunity to dramatize once more, as in Homais and Bournisien,¹³⁵ the two alternate masks of human folly. […] These figures cluster together in the manner in which they recall and complement each other, but they do not belong to the core and the subject of the novel, and one could detach them without appreciably altering the principal design.

A. Thibaudet, Gustave Flaubert (Paris: Gallimard, 1935), pp. 161, 166, 170

What does the title signify? The sentimental education of Frédéric Moreau is his education by sentiment. He learns to live, or more exactly, he learns what existence is, by experiencing love, love affairs, friendship, ambition … And this experience ends in total failure. Why? First, because Frédéric is, above all, an imaginative person in the bad sense of the word, who daydreams existence instead of lucidly grasping its necessities and limits; then because he is, to a large extent, the masculine replica of Emma Bovary; and finally, and as a consequence, Frédéric is a waverer, most of the time incapable of taking a decision, except for excessive and extreme decisions made on impulse.

Does this lead one to say that Sentimental Education ends in nothingness? I don’t think so. Because there is Marie Arnoux. This pure figure redeems, so to speak, the whole novel. Marie Arnoux is, we may be certain, Elisa Schlesinger, but one cannot help thinking that she is an Elisa singularly idealized. While Mme Schlesinger was in many respects a very respectable woman, nevertheless what one knows of her, despite everything – her attitude, at the very least equivocal, during her liaison with Schlesinger, and the fact (at least probable) that she had been, at some moment, the mistress of Flaubert – leaves us to think that ultimately Marie Arnoux is undoubtedly the feminine ideal of Flaubert rather than a faithful and authentic image of his ‘grand passion’. That does not prevent Marie Arnoux such as she is from remaining – in the middle of a world teeming with arrivistes, with the vain, the sensual, the high living, the daydreamers, or the oblivious – a profoundly human figure, composed of tenderness, of resignation, of firmness, of silent suffering and of goodness.

J.-L. Douchin, Foreword to L’Éducation sentimentale (Paris: Larousse, coli. ‘Nouveaux Classiques Larousse’, 1969), pp. 15–17.

To what extent is the love he bears him homosexual? In his excellent article ‘Le Double Pupitre’, Roger Kempf has very ably and judiciously established the ‘androgyny’ of Flaubert. He is man and woman; I have specified above that he wants to be a woman in the hands of women, but it could well be that he may have experienced this avatar of vassality as an abandonment of his body to the desires of the lord. Kempf gives some disturbing citations, the following in particular, which he finds in the second Education: ‘The day of Deslauriers’s arrival, Frédéric allowed himself to be invited by Arnoux …’; perceiving his friend, ‘he began to tremble like an adulterous woman under the gaze of her husband.’ And: ‘Then Deslauriers thought of Frédéric’s person itself. It had always exercised on him “a nearly feminine charm.”’ Here we have a pair of friends between whom, ‘by a tacit consent, one would play the wife and the other the husband.’ Rightly, the critic adds that ‘this distribution of rôles is very subtly demanded’ by Frédéric’s femininity. And Frédéric in the Education is the chief incarnation of Haubert. Conscious of this femininity, we may say he internalizes it by making himself Deslauriers’s wife. Gustave very skillfully shows us how Deslauriers is excited by his wife Frédéric, but we never see Frédéric enraptured with the virility of his husband.

J.-P. Sartre, The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert 1821–1857, trans. Carol Cosman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), vol. 2, p. 380.

Appendix 3
The Paris of Sentimental Education

In the geographical triangle whose corners are represented by the world of business (IV on the map, the ‘Chaussée d’Antin’, the Dambreuse residence), the world of art and of successful artists (V, the ‘Faubourg Montmartre’, with L’Art Industriel and the successive residences of Rosanette) and the student milieu (II, the ‘Quarrier Latin’, the initial residence of Frédéric and of Martinon) can be seen a structure which is quite simply that of the social space of Sentimental Education. This universe as a whole is objectively defined in its turn by a double relation of opposition, though one never evoked in the work itself, on the one hand to the old aristocracy of the ‘Faubourg St-Germain’ (III), often mentioned by Balzac and totally absent from Sentimental Education, and on the other to the ‘classes populaires’, the working classes (1): in fact, the zones of Paris which were the site of the decisive revolutionary events of 1848 are excluded from Flaubert’s novel (the descriptions of the first incidents in the Latin Quarter^13...