This year is the 150th anniversary of the publication of Madame Bovary, probably the most influential French novel of the nineteenth century, which reached the general public only after trials and tribulations that would have taxed the patience of the most philosophical of authors.
Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert, seems rather tame today but in 1857 a novel that dealt extensively with marriage, sex and the role of women inevitably attracted the unfavourable attention of the authorities. Censorship under Emperor Napoleon III was uncompromisingly strict, so much so that when the novel's serialisation began a few months earlier in the literary magazine, Revue de Paris, editor Maxime du Camp made cuts himself rather than run into legal difficulties.
He removed about 35 pages from the first episode that contained, as he put it, dangerous words : he was anxious about ‘adultery’ and concerned about ‘concupiscence’. Although Flaubert was an old friend, Du Camp decided not to tell him what he had done. Flaubert reacted furiously when he saw what had appeared in the journal but then so did the Revue de Paris’s provincial readers, for whom even the expurgated version was a step too far. Du Camp decided to placate them by removing even more of the original from subsequent episodes, including the celebrated sexual encounter between Leon and Emma in a fiacre, a closed hackney cab.
What survived intact still received criticism. Le Figaro described the book as in danger of ‘slipping into vulgarity’, a view that may have been influenced by the fact that they had bid for the serialisation and lost. Flaubert sued Revue de Paris for undermining his literary reputation and eventually an uneasy compromise was reached, with Du Camp explaining in one huge footnote why he thought some parts of the book were unsuitable for publication, and Flaubert in another defiantly disowning what remained.
Such a blazing row conducted in the prominent pages of Revue de Paris brought the censors down on Flaubert’s head, especially when they discovered that for the book publication Flaubert had restored the cuts, preferring, he said, to fight his battle ‘in full armour’. Flaubert was charged with ‘outraging public morals’ and his trial, held in February 1857, was the talk of Paris. Senard, Flaubert’s lawyer, advanced the defence of literary merit and quoted from some dreadful works already in print to make an effective comparison with his client’s book. In acquitting Flaubert, the judge concluded that unlike certain books, Madame Bovary had not been written ‘solely to satisfy sensual passions’. When the work was published a few months later, there was such a scrum among the genteel Parisian ladies to get their hands on an early copy that the vans carrying the books could not penetrate the crowds ; they arrived half an hour after the bookshop had opened.
Although Madame Bovary was Flaubert’s first novel, at 35 he was already a prolific writer, but remained largely unpublished due in part to his agonies of self-doubt that always came across in the letters he sent with the manuscripts to prospective publishers. He never made up with Du Camp and later had his revenge by describing their joint visit to Egypt in November 1849, when Du Camp had become aroused upon seeing a half-clad negress drawing water from a well and, said Flaubert, ‘was equally excited by negro boys’.
August 2007
