Law, Fact, Fiction

Paris, summer 1838

It is thirty-two degrees Celsius on the deserted Boulevard Bourdon. Deserted? No, not really. Two solitary walkers brave the heat. From the direction of the Bastille, François Denys Bartholomée Bouvard, widower, aged forty-seven, and copy-clerk in a business concern, appears. From the Jardin des Plantes, Juste Romain Cyrille Pécuchet, bachelor, aged forty-seven, and copy-clerk at the Admiralty, comes into view. On making one another's acquaintance – on a seat in that historical Arsenal triangle – they immediately feel ‘the charm of affection in its initial stages’. Their conversation soon turns to scientific developments, and ‘neither concealed his opinion from the other. Each recognized that it was well-founded’ (BP 24, 27–8). Thus opens the novel that, as far as its factual descriptions is concerned, vies only with Robert Musil's novel The Man without Qualities (the topic of Chapter 4), and that launches the story of the curious quest for perfect knowledge with which Bouvard and Pécuchet become obsessed. Characterised by the deep-rooted belief in human progress typical of the nineteenth century, their search for knowledge is, on the one hand, a meaningless, pathetic journey through all the available disciplines and their scientific findings, and is, on the other hand, a metaphor for progress itself. But more on that later.`

Why Flaubert?

Oddly, on the now accepted view that literature has an epistemic value for law, Flaubert is an author who has so far received scant attention in Law and Literature, both in Anglo-American and continental-European contexts. Admittedly, attention to the trial for literary obscenity following the publication of Madame Bovary is not wanting. However, most of the research focuses on the way in which law deals with alleged obscenity or blasphemy in literary works. Flaubert himself was obviously instrumental in this. He hired a stenographer, and had him make a verbatim report of the court proceedings. What is more, this report was added to the first official edition of the novel. It should be noted that Flaubert was accused on the basis of the publication of Madame Bovary in six installments in the Revue de Paris, from October to December 1856.