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Gustave Flaubert and George Sand
Excerpt from the author's Two Emmas
George Sand and Gustave Flaubert
"Our ignorance of history makes us slander our own times. Man has always been like that." Gustave Flaubert to George Sand
We witness a moving dialogue between Realism and Romanticism in the 1871 correspondence between two famous friends, Gustave Flaubert and George Sand. The time was apalling. France was stunned in 1870 by Prussian victories over her forces. Emperor Napoleon III himself was taken prisoner. The people demanded a republic to replace his empire and got one in the bloodless Revolution of 4 September 1870. General Trochu was the chief deputy of the new republic, but its most forceful leader was a young lawyer and radical republican hero by the name of Leon Gambetta, who, as minister of interior and minister of war, continued the fight against the Prussians. Despite his angry objections, an armistice was signed with the Prussians on 28 January 1871.
Universal suffrage elected an extremely conservative National Assembly, monarchists outnumbering republicans two to one. Adolphe Theirs, the old man of the Orleanist faction, was chosen as chief executive officer of the Third Republic - it replaced the Second Empire. A humiliating settlement was negotiated with Bismark. The National Assembly cancelled the pay of the National Guard and it rebelled in collaboration with the republicans in Paris. An army was sent to put down the uprising, but the troops refused to kill their countrymen. The Paris Commune was therefore established but its defenses were weak and it was eventually crushed: twenty thousand people were massacred - so much for the worker's movement. But several socialist parties would arise from the ashes. Karl Marx, the Internationalist, would make a myth of the Paris Commune for the propagation of modern communism.
We find Flaubert at Croisset, near
Rouen, at the time, and Sand at Nohant. She is his senior. He addresses her as "master", she calls him "my trobador." They are just close friends - he is not one of the New Woman's serial lovers. A few lines from their many letters provides us with a taste of the Realistic and Romantic flavors of the times:
"As for the Commune," writes Flaubert in an 1871 letter, "which is about to die out, it is the last manifestation of the Middle Ages. The very last, let us hope! I hate democracy (at least the kind that is understood in France), that is to say, the exaltation of mercy to the detriment of justice, the negation of right, in a world, antisociability. The Commune rehabilitates murderers, quite as Jesus pardons thieves, and they pillage the residences of the rich, because they have been taught to curse Lazarus, who was not a bad rich man, but simply a rich man. 'The Republic is above every criticism' is equivalent to that belief: 'The Pope is infallible!' Always formulas! Always gods!
"The god before the last," Flaubert continues, "which was universal suffrage, has shown his terrible farce by nominating 'the murderers of Versailles.' What shall we believe in, then? In nothing! That is the beginning of wisdom. It was time to have done with 'principles' and to take up science, and investigation. The only reasonable thing (I always come back to that) is a government by mandarins, provided the madarins know something and even that they know many things.... It is of little matter whether many peasants know how to read and listen no longer to their cure, but it is of great matter that many men like Renan or Littre should be able to live and be listened to! Our safety is now only in a legitimate aristocracy. I mean by that, a majority that is composed of more than numbers....
"For the moment Paris is completely epilectic. Result of the congestion caused by the seige.... That folly is the result of too great imbecility.... They had lost all notion of right and wrong, of beautiful and ugly. Recall the criticism of recent years. What difference did it make between the sublime and the ridiculous? What lack of respect; what ignorance! what a mess! 'Boiled or braised, same thing!'
"All was false! False realism, false army, false credit, and even false harlots.... This falseness (which is perhaps a consequence of romanticism, predominance of passion over form, and of inspiration over rule) was applied especially in the manner of judging...."
Flaubert is obviously opposed to the incipient communism of his day - the socialist radicals were called 'republicans.' On the other hand, Sand was sympathetic with the republican cause; she had openly supported the revolution of 1848, although she adamantly eschewed violent means to achieve its moral ends. And now she expresses her disillusionment:
"What will be the reaction from the infamous Commune?" she asks Flaubert in an August letter. "Isidore or Henry V. or the kingdom of incendiaries restored by anarchy? I who have had so much patience with my species and who have so long looked on the bright side, now see nothing but darkness.... I imagined that all the world would become enlightened, could correct itself, or restrain itself.... I awaked from a dream to find a generation divided between idiocy and delirium tremens!"
Now if we follow the socialist movement from the French Revolution - which was really a series of revolutions - onward through the nineteenth century, we see that the revolution really belonged to the rising middle class, a class more interested in economic principles than in noble moral principles - money was replacing both metaphysical and sentimental values. Flaubert was willing to concede a bourgeois republic to the middle class providing that it was run scientifically.
"I think, like you, that a bourgeois republic can be established," wrote Flaubert to Sand in July. "Its lack of elevation is perhaps a guarantee of stability. It will be the first time that we have lived under a government without principles. The era of positivism in politics is about to begin."
To better understand the exchanges between Sand and Flaubert, we should briefly examine the development of French positivism. Of course 'positivism' is the application of the methods of natural science to society, and is, as a political ideology, the replacing of 'subjective' or 'romantic' or 'metaphysical' or 'idealistic' principles with the 'objective' principles of natural science. Flaubert expresses the principle of French ideology conceived by the ideologists who helped Napoleon Bonaparte seize power, then opposed his tyranny, whereupon Bonaparte contemptuously dubbed them 'Ideologues.' Their philosophy was much admired by Thomas Jefferson and he included it in the curriculum of his beloved Virginia university as 'Ideology' - Theology was eliminated. Ideology looked to the physical body instead of the astral or spiritual body for its fundamental laws. Its physical concepts were best expressed by Pierre Cabanis, a leading ideologist who was trained as a medical doctor. Dr. Cabanis, instead of practicing medicine, wrote about the principles of physiology, in hopes that those principles would in turn be applied to the political body.
French positivists were positively impressed with the positive results of the scientific-industrial revolution. Many of them fell so madly in love with their social science that they made a religion out of it. For instance, the Saint-Simonians - followers of Saint-Simon. Saint-Simon was an aristocrat turned radical, a crackpot, a scientific buffoon, and a genius. At age seventeen he served as a line officer with the Touraine Regiment in the War for American Independence. His tour included combat in the Antilles, at Yorktown with Washington, again at St. Kitts, and he was interned by the enemy in Jamaica after being hit by a cannon ball. He returned to France where he speculated with a Prussian investor's money in church property and mansions of guillotined or emigrated nobles. He managed to evade the Terror and hang onto a substantial fortune, which he proceeded to squander on lavish parties for scientists, intellectuals, and politicians. Count Redern, his investor, showed up, and was duly concerned with the slippage, so a settlement of accounts was negotiated and the fortune was split between them. Before long Saint-Simon had spent his share of the fortune, whereupon he begged from his friends of better days; of course they ignored his pleas - now that he was broke and their positions secure, who needed him?
Saint Simon wooed wisdom in his desperate poverty. He came up with some curious scientific schemes to save society and himself to boot; he did his best to peddle his social nostrums, becoming a sort of bourgeois propagandist, but to little avail - he wound up in a madhouse for awhile. He recovered his mind and got an annuity from his family. He surrounded himself with brilliant minds, published pamphlets, and he and his social-science ideas gained a modicum of respectiblity. We might sum up his industrial-revolution ideology as a socialist version of liberal capitalism, inasmuch as he would have placed the control of the means of production in the hands of experts such as his industrialist and banker friends, scientists and engineers and the like, for the greater good of the society. Scientists, managers, and moralist leaders would share power at the apex of his Religion of Newton.
Saint-Simon ran short of money again; his acquaintances were not financially supportive enough, so he shot himself in the head, penetrating an eye. But with the help of the doctors he survived for two years, time enough to produce in 1825 his salvation gospel - New Christianity - to save the youth.
Enter August Comte, known as the father of modern sociology, or scientific socialism, was Saint-Simon's pupil. His eventual defection from the Saint-Simonians was a grave blow because he was a trained scientist who was needed to iron out industrial conflicts implicit in Saint-Simon's plans, that the system be harmonious. Comte, who often railed against religion, eventually went off the deep end too, and was converted to his own religion, Positivism. Estranged from his wife, he fell in love in 1844 with a woman of thirty, Clothilde de Vaux, whose husband had deserted her. She died; Comte devoted his life to her worship. Much to the dismay of his fellow scientists, his new religion of Positivism declared Love to be the motive force of society. He was the high priest of the new religion, and his deceased wife, Clothilde, its Virgin Mother - she was somehow superior to him although women in his religion retained a subjugated status.
The altruistic religious doctrine Comte preached was not ridiculous or philosophically absurd. His Great Being was the imminent essence of the best of humanity - the best man has ever been and done. "The least amongst us can and ought constantly to aspire to maintain and even to improve this Being," he said. Humanity is both the living and the dead, or the dead alive in the living. The living lead an objective life; when they die they become subjective humanity. "The living are always more and more ruled by the dead.... Thus man serves humanity as a being during his life strictly so called, and as an organ after his death, which finally transforms his objective into a subjective life."
Comte expected scientists to be social reformers and was chagrined by scientists who wanted to stick to their specialty and analyze things and who did not consider themselves as humanity's high priests. At the apex of society are those who synthesize all the sciences: the sociologists. Progress is the human development of the hierarchical Order found in nature's laws, and Love of the Great Being was love of the highest human order. Order, Progress, Love.
But let's return to the Comptean's predecessors, the Saint-Simonians. After Saint-Simon died, Enfantin was the leader of the cult bearing Saint-Simon's name and professing some of his doctrines. The cult was dedicated to the regeneration of corrupt society - their means included the exaltation of free love to sacred status. They were the illegitimate children of Realism and Romanticism - but romantic revolt was the rule, and against conventional society. Their membership included merchants, stockbrokers, professors, officers of military science - Enfantin was a graduate of the Ecole Polytechnique. The Saint-Simonians preached the progress of social love over selfish antagonism. Their motto was: "Each according to his capacity! Each capacity according to its works!" Capacity was defined according to a Saint-Simonian hierarchy of expertise, over which priests and priestesses would preside; everyone is expected to voluntarily take up his or her respective position - everyone falls naturally into his or her proper position. Equality of ownership in property or community of goods (communism) was denounced; inequality was pronounced as the just relation of reward to works according to capacity - hence inheritance must be abolished.
Enfantin was persuaded to become the high priest of the cult. Since Saint-Simon had written that the social individual is both man and the woman, a high priestess was wanted. George Sand was approached for the position because she was regarded as the model New Woman - sexually emancipated and practitioner of progessive love affairs. She was courted on New Year's Day: sixty-three gifts were presented, including a writing-desk and earrings, a thermometer and intimate under-garments. She had as a matter of fact written the Saint-Simonians a typically gushy letter some time prior, but now that they wanted her for their high priestess, she gave them the cold shoulder. She thought their Saint-Simonism spelled the abolition of private property, and believed the rest of their doctrines to be the result of vanity and spirtual vexation. "Jesuitical metaphysics, and a pretended system of morality no one really believes," she indited.
Now then, returning to Sand's correspondence with Flaubert, we can better examine it in context with the foregoing in mind. The attitude in Flaubert's letter of 8 September 1871 corresponds with the abstract realism of the positivist rationalists, but he rejects the romantic reaction and identifies Christian and "democratic" sentiment as the expression of anti-socialist immorality. Of course Christianty's "anti-social" behavior was objected to by the ancient Romans, before Catholics stepped in with traditional Jewish good works for the poor and strangers. Christian or democratic sentiment and the close relation between spiritual and material communism is of slight concern today since it has been nearly rendered moot by feel-good faith instead of good works as the most convenient mode of salvation - or just honest atheism.
"As long as we do not bow to madarins," writes Flaubert in favor of expert government, "as long as the Academy of Sciences does not replace the pope, Politics as a whole and society, down to its very roots, will be nothing but a collection of disheartening humbugs. We are foundering in the after-birth of the Revolution, which was an abortion, a failure, a misfire, 'whatever they say.' And the reason is that it proceeded from the Middle Ages and Christianity. The idea of equality (which is all the modern democracy) is an essentially Christian idea and opposed to justice. Observe how mercy predominates now. Sentiment is everything, justice is nothing. People are now not even indignant against murderers, and the people who set fire to Paris are less punished than the calumniator of M. Favre. In order for France to rise again, she must pass from inspiration to science, she must abandon all metaphysics, she must enter into criticism, that is to say into the examination of things...."
Flaubert had retreated into writing his book about St. Anthony, the hermit whose temptations had become Flaubert's life-long obsession when he viewed Pieter Brueghel's painting in 1845. "I do not look forward to an imminent cataclysm because nothing that is foreseen happens.... That is why I lose myself as much as I can in antiquity," he wrote. He could hardly wait to read a few pages of his St. Anthony to Sand. But she had grown weary of his dismal, pessimistic attitude. She might have been the scandal of orthodox Christianity, which would not let women be priests, but she had not lost her natural religion, her faith in a benevolent god, or her love for humankind. On 14 September 1871, four years prior to her death, she wrote a lengthy letter of protest to Flaubert. It is a death song reminiscent of Chief Tecumseh's advice to braves to compose their death song and have it ready to sing instead of bemoaning their lives at the end. I quote the first few paragraphs and recommend the rest to all those who find the subject appealing and who perhaps understand why so many romantic and realistic women and men wept at the passing of the master.
"And what, you want me to stop loving? You want me to say that I have been mistaken all my life, than humanity is contemptible, hateful, that it has always been and always will be so? And you chide my anguish as a weakness, and puerile regret for a lost illusion? You assert that the people has always been ferocious, the priest always hypocritical, the bourgeois always cowardly, the soldier always brigand, the peasant always stupid? You say that you have known all that every since your youth and you rejoice that you have never doubted it, because maturity has not brought you any disappointment; have you not been young then? Ah! We are entirely different, for I have never ceased to be young - being young is always loving.
"What, then, do you want me to do, so as to isolate myself from my kind, from my compatriots, from my race, from the great family in whose bosom my own family is only one ear of corn in the terrestrial field? And if only this ear could ripen in a sure place, if only one could, as you say, live for certain privileged persons and withdraw from all the others!
"But it is impossible, and your steady reason puts up with the most unrealizable of Utopias. In what Eden, in what fantastic Eldorado will you hide your family, your little group of friends, your intimate happiness, so that the lacerations of the social state and the disasters of the country shall not reach them? If you want to be happy through people - those certain people, the favorites of your heart, must be happy in themselves. Can they be? Can you assure them the least security?
"Will you find me a refuge in my old age which is drawing near to death? And what difference now does death or life make to me for myself? Let us suppose we die absolutely, or that love does not follow into the other life, are we not to our last breath tormented by the desire, by the imperious need of assuring those whom we leave behind all the happiness possible? Can we go peacefully to sleep when we feel the shaken earth ready to swallow up all those for whom we have lived? A continuous happy life with one's family in spite of all, is without doubt relatively a great good, the only consolation that one could and that one would enjoy. But even supposing external evil does not penetrate into our house, which is impossible, you know very well [for instance, his house was ransacked by the invading Prussians], I could not approve of acquiescing in indifference to what causes public unhappiness.
"All that was foreseen... Yes, certainly, I had foreseen it as well as anyone! I saw the sormm rising. I was aware, like all those who do not live without thinking, of the evident approach of the cataclysm. When one sees the patient writhing in agony, is there any consolation in understanding his illness thorougly? When lighting strikes, are we calm because we have heard the thunder rumble a long time before?
"No, no, people do not isolate themselves, the ties of blood are not broken, people do not curse or scorn their kind. Humanity is not a vain word. Our life is composed of love, and not to love is to cease to live.
"The people, you say! The people is yourself and myself. It would be useless to deny it. There are not two races, the distinction of classes only establishes relative and for the most part illusory qualities. I do not know if your ancestors were high up in the bourgeosie; for my part, on my mother's side my roots spring directly from the people, and I feel them continually alive in the depths of my being. We all have them, even if the origin is more or less effaced; the first men were hunters then shepherds, then farmers then soldiers. Brigandage crowned with success gave birth to the first social distinctions. There is perhaps not a title that was not acquired through the blood of men. We certainly have to endure our ancestors when we have any, but these first trophies of hatred and of violence, are they a glory in which a mind ever so little inclined to be philosophical, finds ground for pride? The people always ferocious, you say? As for me, I say, the nobility always savage!
"And certainly, together with the peasants, the nobility is the class most hostile to progress, the least civilized in consequence. Thinkers should congratulate themselves on not being of it, but if we are bourgeois, if we have come from the serf, and from the class liable to forced labor, can we bend with love and respect before the sons of the oppressors of our fathers? Whoever denies the people cheapens himself, and gives to the world the shameful spectacle of apostasy. Bourgeoisie, if we want to raise ourselves again and become once more a class, we have only one thing to do, and that is to proclaim ourselves the people, and fight to the death those who claim to be our superiors by divine right. On account of having failed in the dignity of our revolutionary mandate, of having aped the nobility, of having usurped its insignia, of having taken possession of its playthings, of having been shamefully ridiculous and cowardly, we count for nothing; we are nothing any more: the people, which ought to unite with us, abandons us and seeks to oppress us...."
Works Quoted:
THE GEORGE SAND-GUSTAVE FLAUBERT LETTERS, translated by Aimee L. McKenzie, New York: Boni and Liveright, 1921
SYSTEM OF POSITIVE POLITY by Auguste Comte, London (1875)
