Editors Reads Verdict
Flaubert's most devastating novel is also his most modern: a portrait of passive desire, political disillusionment, and bourgeois sentimentality so precisely rendered that it feels less like nineteenth-century fiction than like a diagnosis of how we still live. The ending is one of the most withering in all of literature.
What We Loved
- The famous ending is one of the most precise condemnations of bourgeois sentimentality in all of fiction
- Flaubert's rendering of the 1848 revolution and its aftermath is among the greatest political fiction ever written
- Frédéric's passivity is rendered with a sympathy and an irony that are impossible to separate
- The novel anticipates twentieth-century modernism in its treatment of time and aimlessness
Minor Drawbacks
- Frédéric's passivity can frustrate readers who want protagonists who act
- The large cast of secondary characters requires attention to track
- The political sections presuppose some knowledge of 1848 and its aftermath
- Less immediately accessible than Madame Bovary
Key Takeaways
- → Idealized desire, kept at a distance, is not love but a substitute for engagement with actual life
- → Political idealism of 1848 is shown to collapse into opportunism and nostalgia
- → The romantic imagination — like Emma Bovary's — distorts reality rather than illuminating it
- → The most cherished memories are often of things that never quite happened, which says everything about how we construct the past
| Author | Gustave Flaubert |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Penguin Classics |
| Pages | 432 |
| Published | November 17, 1869 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Classic Fiction, French Literature, Realist Fiction |
Sentimental Education Review
Flaubert began Sentimental Education in 1864, five years after the triumphant first publication of Madame Bovary, and published it in 1869 to a reception that puzzled and disappointed him. Critics found it shapeless, its hero passive, its story unresolved. They were not entirely wrong about any of these things. What they could not see was that the formlessness was the form — that Flaubert had written a novel whose subject was precisely the failure of shape, of resolution, of achievement, of desire ever arriving at its object.
Frédéric Moreau arrives in Paris from Nogent-sur-Seine in 1840, eighteen years old, carrying the standard equipment of a romantic hero: intelligence, good looks, social ambition, and an intense capacity for idealised feeling. On the boat from Nogent he glimpses Madame Arnoux — older, married, serene — and falls into a love that will consume twenty years of his life without ever being consummated. Around this central non-event, Flaubert constructs a portrait of Paris in the 1840s and 1850s: the art world, the political clubs, the demi-monde, the 1848 revolution, the coup of 1851, the slow consolidation of the Second Empire.
Frédéric pursues everything and achieves nothing. He pursues Madame Arnoux without resolution; he pursues a career in law, then in finance, then in politics, then in art, completing none of them; he pursues other women as substitutes for the one he cannot have. His friend Deslauriers pursues ambition with more energy and comparable futility. The novel’s structure — the rhythm of aspiration and disappointment, aspiration and disappointment, repeated until it becomes almost comic — is the rhythm of bourgeois life as Flaubert understood it.
The ending is the most famous in Flaubert’s work and one of the most withering in all of French literature. Years later, Frédéric and Deslauriers meet and attempt to identify their finest memory. They settle on an episode from their adolescence: a visit to a local brothel from which they fled in embarrassed terror before anything happened. “That was the best time we ever had,” one says. Flaubert does not comment. The two men have spent twenty years pursuing various forms of experience and meaning, and their most cherished memory is of something they were too timid to do. There is no more precise condemnation of bourgeois sentimentality in the French novel.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "Sentimental Education" about?
Frédéric Moreau arrives in Paris from the provinces and spends twenty years pursuing an idealized love, a political career, wealth, and artistic ambition — achieving none of them. Flaubert's most autobiographical novel is his most devastating account of an entire generation's failure.
What are the key takeaways from "Sentimental Education"?
Idealized desire, kept at a distance, is not love but a substitute for engagement with actual life Political idealism of 1848 is shown to collapse into opportunism and nostalgia The romantic imagination — like Emma Bovary's — distorts reality rather than illuminating it The most cherished memories are often of things that never quite happened, which says everything about how we construct the past
Is "Sentimental Education" worth reading?
Flaubert's most devastating novel is also his most modern: a portrait of passive desire, political disillusionment, and bourgeois sentimentality so precisely rendered that it feels less like nineteenth-century fiction than like a diagnosis of how we still live. The ending is one of the most withering in all of literature.
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