Reading Order
Bouvard et Pécuchet Reading Order
Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881) by Gustave Flaubert is the unfinished posthumous novel that Flaubert called his 'encyclopedia of human stupidity' — the story of two retired clerks, Bouvard and Pécuchet, who become friends, inherit money, buy a farm in Normandy, and systematically attempt to master every branch of human knowledge: agriculture, chemistry, medicine, surgery, anatomy, geology, archaeology, history, literature, politics, gymnastics, philosophy, and religion. Each branch ends in failure, either because the knowledge itself is contradictory, or because their application produces disaster, or because they discover that the experts disagree about everything. The novel was intended to end with Bouvard and Pécuchet returning to copy-work and compiling a Dictionnaire des idées reçues (Dictionary of Received Ideas) that would contain every cliché, every commonplace, every piece of received wisdom in the French language — a project that, if completed, would have been the most comprehensive satire of human thought ever produced. The Dictionnaire was left unfinished at Flaubert's death, but the fragments that exist are among the funniest and most devastating texts in French literature.
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Bouvard et Pécuchet
Complete Bouvard et Pécuchet Book List
- 1Buy
Bouvard et Pécuchet
Gustave Flaubert·1881·Posthumously published and unfinished at Flaubert's death; the standard edition includes the Dictionnaire des idées reçues and the Plan et notes for the second volume; both are essential - 2Buy
Dictionnaire des idées reçues
Gustave Flaubert·1881·The intended companion: the dictionary of clichés and received ideas that was to be the culmination of the novel; the extant version contains entries from Abbé to Zèle and is the most concentrated example of Flaubert's satire of bourgeois language - 3Buy
L'Éducation sentimentale
Gustave Flaubert·1869·The novelistic predecessor of the same failure: where L'Éducation presents the failure to develop through sentimental experience, Bouvard et Pécuchet presents the failure to develop through intellectual experience; both are anti-Bildungsromane - 4Buy
Tristram Shandy
Laurence Sterne·1759·The 18th-century comic predecessor: the novel that systematically digresses from its own subject and demonstrates the impossibility of systematic knowledge through comic failure; the structural ancestor of Bouvard et Pécuchet's encyclopedic comedy - 5Buy
Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes·1605·The ultimate predecessor: the Knight of the Sad Countenance who mistakes fiction for reality is the ancestor of Bouvard and Pécuchet, who mistake textbooks for reality; both are comedies of misapplied knowledge, and Cervantes is Flaubert's acknowledged model
Bouvard et Pécuchet — Frequently Asked Questions
Is Bouvard et Pécuchet finished?
No — Flaubert died in 1880 with the second volume unwritten and the first volume unrevised. What exists is a fair copy of the first volume (the narrative of the two clerks' encyclopedic failures), the Dictionnaire des idées reçues (the satire of received ideas intended for the second volume), and extensive notes for the continuation. Editors have published various combinations of these materials, and the standard edition includes all of them.
What is the Dictionnaire des idées reçues?
The satirical dictionary of French clichés — entries in alphabetical order, each one presenting the received opinion on its subject without commentary. 'ARTISTE: Ought to be treated as someone special, as they are all penniless.' 'FRANCE: Should leave it to others to govern themselves.' 'HOMÈRE: Famous for laughing.' The entries are presented in deadpan, the irony is structural rather than explicit, and the cumulative effect is a portrait of the bourgeoisie's relationship to language as devastating as Madame Bovary's portrait of its relationship to romance.
Are Bouvard and Pécuchet stupid?
No — that is precisely Flaubert's point. They are intelligent, industrious, genuinely curious, and follow the logic of each discipline they attempt with admirable rigor. Their failures are not the failures of stupidity but the failures of the disciplines themselves, which are either internally contradictory (the agricultural experts disagree about everything), or inapplicable to real conditions (chemistry in a laboratory differs from chemistry on a farm), or honest about their limitations in ways the popular summaries do not indicate.
Who are Bouvard and Pécuchet?
Two copy-clerks who meet on a Paris park bench in 1838 and discover they have the same profession and the same spirit of enthusiastic curiosity. Pécuchet is the theorist (he reads; he forms hypotheses); Bouvard is the empiricist (he practices; he tests). Their complementarity is the comic engine of the novel: neither approach works, but their mutual incomprehension makes neither approach entirely wrong.
Is Bouvard et Pécuchet a novel or a philosophical text?
Both — Flaubert called it his 'book about nothing' and 'the book that will contain all the others.' It is a comic novel that is also a systematic satire of human knowledge, and its comedy is inseparable from its philosophical argument. The funniest passages (the medical disaster, the philosophical debate, the theological crisis) are also the most precise illustrations of how bourgeois culture handles the encounter with actual knowledge.
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