L'Éducation sentimentale Reading Order

L'Éducation sentimentale (Sentimental Education, 1869) by Gustave Flaubert is the most important French novel of the second half of the nineteenth century and one of the great novels of Western literature — the story of Frédéric Moreau, a young man from the provinces who comes to Paris in 1840, falls in love with the wife of a linen merchant, and spends the next thirty years of his life pursuing this impossible love while the great political events of mid-century France (the Revolution of 1848, the June Days massacre, the coup of Napoleon III) flow around and past him without touching or changing him. L'Éducation sentimentale is the novel that killed French Romanticism as a literary ideology and replaced it with something darker and more honest: where the Romantic hero (René, Julien Sorel, Rastignac) is at least energetically engaged with his impossible world, Frédéric Moreau is the first great anti-hero of French fiction — a man without will, without conviction, without the energy to be even fully wrong about his life. Flaubert spent five years writing L'Éducation sentimentale (the subject had been with him since the 1840s) and it was received as a failure when it appeared: critics could not identify with Frédéric, could not admire him, and could not understand what Flaubert was doing by making him so uniformly passive. It was recognized as a masterpiece only in the twentieth century, when Kafka, Proust, and later the nouveaux romanciers identified Flaubert's negative method — the refusal of any consolation, any redemption, any coherent meaning to Frédéric's life — as the founding move of modern fiction.