Eventually, the monarchy itself was dissolved and the nation was ruled by a republican dictatorship.

The Revolutionaries pillaged and burned châteus, nobles were forced to relinquish their traditional privileges, religious orders were suppressed and church property nationalized, and clergy were made to take an oath of allegiance to the new Constitution, relinquishing their ties to the Pope of Rome.

This overthrow was not peaceful or restrained. The definitive break of the French people with the medieval political order began in 1789, with the revolutionary overthrow of the monarchy, aristocracy, nobility, and Church. Lee, Madame Bovary is arguably one of the great apologias for Christianity in modern French literature.Īn overview of the historical background is in order. Thankfully, Catholics have never ascribed the charism of infallibility to ecclesiastical censorship, because, pace Ms.

is a foundational event in Madame Bovary.” made the mistake of sometimes losing sight of the rules that every writer who respects himself must never transgress.” The Catholic Church was less forgiving: In 1864, Madame Bovary was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books, where it remained until 1966, the Vatican evidently agreeing with literary critic Susanna Lee that “for Flaubert, the absence of God and the rise of science signify the denial of a last word, a negation of transcendence and determination. Madame Bovary was greeted with no little controversy on its release, the French government going so far as to charge the author with having “offen public and religious morality and decency.” After a day-long trial, Flaubert was acquitted, the court noting that although “the work referred to court deserves a harsh rebuke, for the task of literature must be to embellish and to amuse the mind, by elevating understanding and by refining morals,” Flaubert had “declare his respect for the accepted standards of good behavior and all that relates to religious morality ” and had “only. These ultimately leave her unfulfilled and heavily in debt, and in an act of desperation she swallows arsenic, from which she meets her death. The story is well-known: Emma Bovary finds herself in a surprisingly loveless marriage (albeit one she freely consented to) to her conventional but devoted husband, Charles, and seeks passion and fulfillment in material luxuries, a bourgeois social status, and eventual adulteries with two men. These struggles are reflected in Gustave Flaubert’s first novel, Madame Bovary, published as a complete text in 1857. The nineteenth century was a difficult and dynamic period for the French nation, as citizens of all classes and philosophical persuasions struggled to come to terms with modernity.

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