In a passage that could have been written yesterday—and has in fact been freshly translated by Raymond MacKenzie, who has also translated the work of Stendhal and Balzac—Gustave Flaubert’s 1869 novel Sentimental Education gives us history with an evenhanded irony that weighs the wages of all ideologies and finds them wanting. In the “year of revolution,” 1848, during a radical uprising that penetrates the palaces of French politics, we encounter what many today would call an insurrection, wherein a man
with a black beard sat on the throne, his shirt half open, clearly thinking this was hilarious, grinning stupidly like an ape. Others scrambled up onto the platform to take his place.
“There’s the great myth!” said Hussonnet. “There you see it—the sovereign People!” The throne was picked up, rocking as it passed from one pair of hands to another all across the room.
“Damn! Look at it sway! The ship of state, pitching around on a stormy sea! Look at it dance—it’s doing the cancan!”
They had carried it over to a window, and while the crowd hissed and booed, they threw it out.
MacKenzie’s new translation grants us the chance to read American political tumult—from the January 6 Capitol riots to the toppling of statues—as unexceptional. Show me a political program, the novel seems to say, whose strategies are scrubbed of the libido dominandi. Reading the novel alongside The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, also newly released and edited by the estimable Francis Steegmuller, renders this judgment even more convincing.