The 19th Century, Realism

The concern for accurate, detailed description became the outstanding feature of realism, the movement that followed romanticism in French literature. The pursuit of scientific accuracy, which began among romantic writers, reflected a desire to keep pace with the scientific methods and discoveries of the period. This pursuit can be seen by the 1830s in Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir (1831; The Red and the Black), as well as in Eugenie Grandet (1833) and Le Pere Goriot (1834; Father Goriot) by Honore de Balzac. Balzac claimed a sociological value for his work in the preface to his masterpiece, La comedie humaine (published 1842-1848; The Human Comedy). La comedie humaine is a collection of about 90 novels and stories that present a varied and faithful picture of French society in the first half of the 19th century. Balzac was the first major novelist to document in minute detail the lives and environments of fictional characters.

By the mid-19th century, realism dominated French literature. The essay collection Le realisme (1857; Realism) by Champfleury was the manifesto of the new trend, but Gustave Flaubert was considered the father of realism by a large group of followers. His meticulous approach to fiction is best exemplified by Madame Bovary (1857), which examines the tragic life of a woman whose drab everyday existence brutally conflicts with her romantic dreams. Flaubert’s stated goal was to hide all traces of the author, much as he considered God to be absent from nature. The reader encounters characters of remarkable mediocrity and stupidity, but no narrator judges them or tells the reader how they should be judged. Flaubert’s reliance on an objective and articulate narrator to report a character’s exact thoughts revolutionized modern fiction. Flaubert himself used this technique to depict and critique the inability of the romantic temperament to live in the real world.