Madame Bovary on Trial

Dominick LaCapra

• Verlag: Cornell University Press
• Jahr: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501720024
• Thema: Literatur
• Thema: Französische Literaturkritik

In 1857, following the publication of Madame Bovary, Flaubert was charged with having committed an "outrage to public morality and religion." Dominick LaCapra, an intellectual historian with wide-ranging literary interests, here examines this remarkable trial. LaCapra draws on material from Flaubert's correspondence, the work of literary critics, and Jean-Paul Sartre's analysis of Flaubert. LaCapra maintains that Madame Bovary is at the intersection of the traditional and the modern novel, simultaneously invoking conventional expectations and subverting them.

1

A Problem in Reading

The police have blundered. They thought they were attacking a run-of-the-mill novel and some ordinary little scribbler; whereas now (in part thanks to the prosecution) my novel is looked on as a masterpiece; as for the author, he has for defenders a number of what used to be called “grandes dames’; the Empress, among others, has twice spoken in my favor; the Emperor said, the first time, “They should leave him alone”; and despite all that the case was taken up again. Why? There begins the mystery. . . . It’s all so stupid that I have come to enjoy it greatly.

Flaubert, Letter of January 20, 1857

Flaubert wrote the letter from which the above excerpt is taken ten days before his trial. Over a hundred years after the trial, the mystery still remains. Little has been done to dispel or even to understand this mystery, for the trial of Flaubert has in the interim received relatively scant historical and critical attention. Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, despite the fact that he devotes an entire volume of his Idiot de la famille to the historical context of Flaubert, curiously omits any significant discussion of the trial.

The relative neglect of Flaubert’s trial is unfortunate given its status as an important event in its own right and as a crucial instance of the reception of a major text: Madame Bovary. Trials in general are of course noteworthy instances of the social reception of cultural phenomena. They attest to the way these phenomena are read or interpreted in a decisive social institution and to the hermeneutic conventions operative therein. They tell us something about the way lawyers and judges are trained to read. And, to the extent that forensic rhetoric is based upon an accurate appreciation of the expectations of an audience that lawyers attempt to convince or to persuade, a trial may also be an index of conventions or norms of reading in the larger public, at least on an “official” level of consciousness. At times there are even remarkable congruences between the conventions or unspoken assumptions operative in a trial and those at work in important approaches to interpretation in literary criticism itself. In any event, a trial enables one to be somewhat more precise in investigating a “mentalité” or “climate of opinion.” It is also a telling case of the way in which the reading or interpretation of a text has real or material consequences for the “ordinary” and the “literary” life of an author. A trial indicates not only the manner in which an author is held responsible for what he or she has written; it also affects how he or she shall approach later works, for it crystallizes risks and, in the event of a first conviction, it may involve even greater penalties to come. At the very least, a trial is a force for intimidation and perhaps, in the case of a very self-conscious writer, it may be the occasion for a qualified experience of Schadenfreude. All these factors were at play in Flaubert’s trial, where the author was not permitted to speak but was made to listen to the prosecution, the defense, and the judgment of the court. Indeed one of the more disquieting features of this trial was that the author did not speak in his own “voice” or behalf but had to defer to others’ views of what he meant to say. Thus he was placed in the position in which authors generally find themselves only after their death.

The immediate reasons why Flaubert was brought to trial are not my principal concern. Rather I focus upon an analysis of the trial and upon a critical reading of Madame Bovary that attempts to explore the tension between the trial and the text. In this way, I think, one may get at more fundamental issues of interpretation and perhaps of motivation. But the immediate and explicit reasons for the judicial proceedings have some relation to the modes of reading employed during the trial. It is especially significant that these reasons are not altogether clear. One can bring together a number of plausible or possible reasons, but they do not add up to a fully convincing explanation of why Flaubert was tried for what he had written. There even seemed to have been forceful grounds for the dismissal of the case. I would suggest that this lack of conclusive reasons of a more apparent type is one sign that factors were operative at the trial that were not fully conscious, and may even have been repressed, at the trial itself. In other words, Madame Bovary was experienced as somehow unsettling or disorienting by its readers, but the reasons explicitly given for discomfort do not adequately account for the unsettling, even uncanny, effect of the text. A number of seemingly anomalous aspects of the pretrial and posttrial context help to lend credence to this point, notably in the case of the prosecuting attorney, Ernest Pinard.

The trial has most often been seen by commentators as it was seen at the time by Flaubert and others—as a simple pretext for the government to attack the Revue de Paris, the periodical in which Madame Bovary first appeared in serial form. Flaubert himself commented: “I am a pretext. The government is out to destroy the Revue de Paris, and I have been chosen as its instrument” (December 31, 1856). This understanding of the trial as a pretext is one reason why the trial has not been accorded greater importance and more extended treatment in the Flaubert literature. No doubt, the trial was in part a pretext for the government to exercise authority over an unruly periodical. But this more narrowly Realpolitik function of the trial hardly exhausts its meaning and significance. Indeed Flaubert’s own conception of the trial as a pretext for a governmental attack upon the Revue de Paris was itself related to his firm belief, as much as two weeks before the trial, that his case would never come to court. In a letter whose probable date is January 16, 1857, he changed his mind about his role as a pretext and indicated his puzzlement over the course of events:

have not written to you, my dear Achille [Flaubert’s brother] because I believed the affair to be completely ended. . . . There is in all this something, someone invisible and relentless [acharné]. At first I was only a pretext, and now I believe that the Revue de Paris is itself only a pretext. Perhaps there is a grudge against one of my protectors? They have been considerable, even more in terms of their quality than of their quantity.

Everyone passes the buck and says: “It is not me; it is not me.” What is certain is that the prosecution was stopped, then taken up again. Where does this turn-about come from?

Censorship was formally strict but often haphazardly administered during the Second Empire. As F. W. J. Hemmings observes: “If the Second Empire provided a discouraging climate for literature and the arts, this was more because of the philistinism of the general public than in consequence of the repressive measures that were put into force after the coup d’état.”1 Works of a manifestly pornographic or “lascivious” nature were not the objects of prosecution, as Sénard, Flaubert’s defense attorney, himself pointed out at the trial. The fact that a work of the highest artistic merit, such as Madame Bovary, was brought to trial was a cause of some surprise at the time, and more recent reactions have often been similar. Yet this fact should not, at least in one sense, occasion surprise. For a “great” work of art may be a contestatory and partially subversive force in ways that cannot be fully accounted for in terms of its presumed deviance from existing moral or legal norms. I shall try to argue that the trial attempts to process exclusively as ordinary crime—crime involving standard forms of deviation from established norms or values—what may in some sense be “ideological” or political crime—“crime” that places in question the very grounds of the trial itself. In other words, the text may raise radical doubts about the validity of important norms and categories in the context which is common to its world and the ordinary world which is the setting for the trial of its author. It must, however, be acknowledged that the nature of “ideological crime” conveyed by a novel is difficult to define even outside the context of a trial, for the political and social protest at issue does not fall squarely within established categories of either ordinary deviance (for example, theft) or subversion (for example, treason or armed rebellion).

The type of “ideological crime” in which a novel may be implicated involves the use of language. A regime based on censorship is not constrained by the rules that operate in a polity legally recognizing civil liberties. But the questions raised by Flaubert’s trial tend to transcend or to undercut this important consideration, for they would also raise difficulties with respect to more conventional tests concerning freedom of speech and of the press. (These questions came to a head with reference to the family, religion, and the status of the narrative subject.) In general, the use of language has a problematic relation to the distinction between thought and action, and the complex problems it generates induce a displacement of attention onto narrower and more easily negotiable considerations (for example, that of whether a novel serves “prurient” or “lascivious” interests or has “redeeming social value”). The use of language is a practice mutually related to other practices in culture and society. And significant changes in it may be related to social and cultural issues in ways that give “stylistic” innovations a political significance, thus taking them beyond the range of purely “formal” concern. Perhaps the largest question related to these issues—one that is pertinent to the reading of Madame Bovary at Flaubert’s trial but that also goes beyond it to engage broader interpretative matters—is the extent to which the novel conforms to (or is symptomatic of) its context, is critical of it, and initiates processes that cannot be contained within the categories of the symptomatic and the critical but are nonetheless bound up with sociocultural transformation in its most comprehensive sense.2

Before turning to the larger questions I have evoked, I shall explore the degree to which Flaubert’s trial was indeed a pretext for the government to “crack down” on the Revue de Paris. Enid Starkie, in her useful biography of Flaubert, has summarized the evidence well.3

The Revue de Paris was known to authorities of the Second Empire as a periodical purveying objectionably liberal, republican, and generally “advanced” views. Maxime Du Camp, who had earlier been a very close friend of Flaubert, persistently urged the reluctant Flaubert to publish something and thereby to assume his proper place among the recognized elite of belles lettres. Du Camp was anxious to have Madame Bovary appear in the pages of the Revue. But, along with the other editors, he feared, upon reading the novel, that it would prove to be the occasion for censorship that the government sought. Indeed the way the editors themselves read the text had remarkable similarities to the way it was read at the trial. Aesthetic judgment, combined with political caution and moral reservations, led the editors to suppress portions of the novel. Here one has a first sign of the strange alliance between stylistic and ethicopolitical considerations in the trial of Flaubert.

Du Camp reports that he and Laurent Pichat arrived without prior consultation at nearly identical conclusions about the need for excisions in the novel. In a letter to Flaubert of July 14, 1856, Du Camp exhorted Flaubert to allow the editors of the Revue to be the “masters” of the novel and to make the cuts they deemed indispensable for its aesthetic success and political safety: “Be courageous, close your eyes during the operation and trust, if not our talent, then the experience which we have acquired in this kind of business and our affection for you. You’ve buried your novel under a heap of well-made but useless things, and one can’t see it clearly; it is only a question of cleaning it up.” On the back of this rather impertinent letter, Flaubert wrote “gigantesque.” On November 18, 1856, Du Camp wrote Flaubert: “It’s no joking matter. Your scene in the cab [Part III, Chapter II] is impossible.” The cab or fiacre scene was the first segment of the novel to be cut, and Flaubert demanded that an explanatory note be inserted in the Revue attributing this action to the editors. As we shall see, Sénard, in his defense of Flaubert, provided an interpretation of this series of events that many commentators have followed, for he saw Flaubert’s action as itself instrumental in attracting the attention of the censors.

In his Misères et grandeurs littéraires, Louis Ulbach, another editor of the Revue, offered this account of why the novel caused him concern:

First I was very much alarmed when, after a first reading, I recognized that we were about to publish a strange and daring work, cynical in its negation of everything, unreasonable by dint of reason, false on account of too much truth in detail, badly observed on account of the crumbling, so to speak, of observation. Madame Bovary offended my artistic taste more than my modesty as a reader, but I was afraid lest it provide a pretext for those who might be looking for one to get the review suppressed.4

Ulbach’s retrospective account weights the aesthetic, ethical, and political factors in his own way, but what seems clear is that the editors of the review were moved to precensorship because of some combination of these factors. (At the trial itself, all mention of the political factor would of course be bracketed, and the prosecution and defense would reach a limited agreement on the aesthetic quality of the novel. But they would relate the aesthetic to the moral and the legal in a manner that indicated both shared assumptions and different conclusions, for the art that was an inducement to evil for the one became an incitement to virtue for the other.)

Flaubert refused to accede to the demands of the editors, but they went ah...