Flaubert and Marx on 1848

Gustave Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale of 1869 is a story of a middle-class man who falls in love with a married woman. There is not much more to the plot of this novel. It affects the kind of ordinariness its hero tries desperately to escape. It makes even political revolution seem ordinary. I approach this work through Karl Marx’s historical studies of 1848 and its aftermath, beginning with an analysis of “The Class Struggles in France.” L’Éducation plays with time, filtering the story of revolutionary hope through the hopelessness caused by Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup of 1851. Interweaving Marx and Flaubert, I turn to The Eighteenth Brumaire for an understanding of 1851 as a predictable consequence of 1848. Marx claims that the giddy liberalism of February was a farce, and that Napoleon III represented the victory of farce. My paper will argue that Flaubert’s farce of the farce of politics recognizes the Marxian point aesthetically, even though Flaubert was far from being a revolutionary or a supporter of the working class.