Rousseau and Flaubert on History

What is the role of historical progress, or its effects, in the thinking of two Frenchmen, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) and Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)?  In my last post, I compared Rousseau to Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) on the subject of what Enlightenment is and has done.  In this post, I want to build on that by focusing more specifically on the question of history as it marched from the period of Enlightenment further into the period of modernity.  And I want to explore this within the French borders.  Kant and Rousseau were contemporaries but not countrymen.  The opposite is true of Rousseau and Flaubert, and it may be beneficial to glimpse how successive generations of French writers saw things unfolding.  Before turning to that, however, a refresher on the European context may be helpful.

I.

In the nineteenth century, the rapid pace of change—from revolutions in France and the Americas to the industrialization of life and commerce—prompted questions about the nature, role, and effects of history.  During this time Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) lectured on and published his famous thesis about the dialectic, which would later be so influential on Karl Marx (1818-1883).  In his own day, Hegel sought to bridge Immanuel Kant's distinction between the noumenal (the realm of things in themselves unable to be perceived or proved by science) and the phenomenal (the realm of sense perception, this world):

The only thought which philosophy brings with it to the contemplation of history, is the simple conception of Reason; that Reason is the sovereign of the world; that the history of the world, therefore, presents us with a rational process… While it is exclusively its own basis of existence and absolute final aim, it is also the energizing power realizing this aim, developing it not only in the phenomena of the natural, but also of the spiritual universe—the history of the world. That this "Idea" or "Reason" is the true, the eternal, the absolutely powerful essence; that it reveals itself in the world, and that in that world nothing else is revealed but this and its honor and glory—is the thesis which, as we have said, has been proved in philosophy and is here regarded as demonstrated. (Lectures on the Philosophy of History)

For Hegel, one finds truth in the world in history, and the dialectic is the proper lens through which to view history.  History is properly seen as a progression from two conflicting forces or movements into some third thing as resolution, result, or effect:  from thesis to antithesis to synthesis.

Marx picks up this Hegelian idea.  Like Rousseau, when he looks around at the outworkings of Enlightenment progress in urban industrial life, especially in Britain, he despairs.  The rise of factories and cities as places to work and make a life has distanced humans from the creative labor that is natural to them and characteristic of more agrarian culture:

The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object. Hence, the greater this activity, the more the worker lacks objects. Whatever the product of his labor is, he is not. Therefore, the greater this product, the less is he himself. The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien. (Karl Marx, "Estranged Labour," in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844)

Prior to capitalism, for Marx as Michael Roth reads him, when you were working, when you made something, you learned who you are:  you are a creator of some kind; however, in capitalism when you make something, and someone takes it away for third-party use, you as a worker have less and less of yourself and feel, by working, lost and outside yourself, alienated.  This is an historical conflict that, according to Hegel, must eventually be resolved.  Marx promulgated a powerful idea about the resolution through class revolution.

It is important, I think, to see that each of these three Germans (Kant, Hegel, and Marx) were basically optimistic about the effects of historical progress.  As I noted in the last post, Kant believed that the process of Enlightenment was gaining momentum, and as a result humans were flowering into mature, bold, rationally autonomous persons who would know increasing personal and political freedoms.  Hegel tends to view history as on the move toward the reconciliation of contradictions: “The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom" (Lectures on the Philosophy of History).  Marx, following Hegel, sees something similar specifically through workers' reclaiming the authenticity, meaningfulness, and creative fulfillment of their work by the elimination of capitalistic exploitation.  All of these things are desired outcomes, good things.

It seems to me that the appraisal of the progression of history was different in two French writers during the same hundred-year period.  At least that is how I read Rousseau in his discourses and Flaubert in his most famous novel. Their outlook is decidedly more dour and in important ways different from these three Germans.

II.

Rousseau’s philosophical view of the morally unattractive and destructive role, or effects, of historical progress is vividly depicted in the lives of Flaubert’s characters in Madame Bovary (1856). Rousseau asserts that the movement from the state of nature to modern civilization produces in humans an enslaving lust for novel ideas, feelings, recognition, and property. Flaubert’s characters—particularly Emma and Homais—illustrate the insidious forms of slavery, inauthenticity, and moral degradation into which, Rousseau argues, historical progress drives people.

In the “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality” (DOI), Rousseau identifies two human dispositions in the state of nature: self-preservation and empathy. A savage man’s “desires do not go beyond his physical needs… Man’s first sentiment was that of his own existence” (DOI, 46, 60). He is free but not completely self-absorbed: “[P]ity is a natural sentiment, which, by moderating in each individual the activity of the love of oneself, contributes to the mutual preservation of the entire species. Pity is what carries us without reflection to the aid of those we see suffering” (DOI, 55). The historical move from the natural state to a civilized state corrupts these two human dispositions. Late 18th-century France was for Rousseau emblematic of this corruption.

Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)

Flaubert sees the same corrupting tendency of historical “progress” via Romanticism and the Enlightenment. As Emma increasingly pursues her social cravings—romantic love and beautiful possessions—she loses the natural contentment that she fancies she had in her youth: “What happiness there had been in those days! What freedom! What hope! What an abundance of illusions! She had none left now. Each new venture had cost her some of them, each of her successive conditions: as virgin, wife and mistress” (149; see 245). Eventually she will completely lose not only the contentment characteristic of the natural state (“she was not happy, and never had been. Why was life so unsatisfying? Why did everything she leaned on instantly crumble into dust?” [245]), but also her desire for self-preservation. She commits suicide.

Also at the novel’s end, Homais (the Enlightenment figure) acts not out of pity for the blind beggar but vindictive shame. The pharmacist had unsuccessfully tried to cure the blindness of the beggar, who reports the failure to passers-by. Homais therefore “hated him, and, wishing to get rid of him at any cost, for the sake of his reputation, he launched into an undercover attack which revealed the depth of his cunning and the unscrupulousness of his vanity. ... It was a fight to the finish. Homais won: his enemy was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in an asylum” (297-98). Civilization introduced the notion, Rousseau claims, of public esteem: “Each one began to look at the others and to want to be looked at himself, and public esteem had a value. And this was the first step toward inequality and, simultaneously, vice. From these first preferences were born vanity and contempt, on the one hand, and shame and envy on the other” (DOI, 64; see 68). Homais, the progressive, is a paradigmatic civilized man.

Historical progress magnifies, Rousseau argues and Flaubert portrays, forms of social slavery. Humans formed political society, and thereby, Rousseau supposes, “they all ran to chain themselves, in the belief that they secured their liberty” (DOI, 70). The same self-deception about individual liberty in the political economy has occurred with the advent of Enlightenment. Why? The new thinking from arts and sciences—novels, romantic ideas, and everything Emma cherishes—emphasizes an addiction to the aesthetic over the functional: “One no longer asks…whether a book is useful, but whether it is well-written” (“Discourse on the Sciences and Arts,” 17). So did Emma: “[S]he…rejected as useless all that did not contribute to the immediate desires of her heart” (31).  Although she pursues adulterous desires with Rodolphe in hope of liberation, instead, Flaubert writes, “[s]he was under his domination” (147). And she would be so fettered in her affair with Leon and beyond (238). Emma desires more desires, and she increasingly enslaves herself in a vicious cycle because of them.

Title page to the first full edition in 1857.
The book was initially serialized in 1856.

Emma is also imprisoned by her lust for the money she borrows and the goods she purchases from Lheuheux. For Rousseau, humanity became enslaved when civil society began, when personal property was established (DOI, 60). Some have possessions and thus influence greater than others. Property entails inequality, and inequality entails power relationships. Property and power create ideals to which people aspire. “And since these qualities were the only ones that could attract consideration [from other people], [man] was soon forced to have them or affect them. It was necessary for his advantage to show himself to be something other than what he in fact was” (DOI, 67).

Emma seeks to own and imitate both idealized feelings through reckless affairs and social status through acquisitions from Lheuheux. This pursuit leads to a form of compulsive and capital slavery: “She could no longer do without his services. She sent for him a dozen times a day” (224). Emma desires to be someone she isn’t, and she desires to own things that she could not afford. Literally and figuratively, she was in debt, enslaved.

A disillusioned Flaubert may, as Michael Roth contends, view the role of historical progress as pushing humans away from the reason of Rousseau and toward artistic expression as antidote to modernity’s awfulness. Flaubert may not be concerned about inequality per se, as Rousseau was. But Flaubert shared Rousseau’s belief in the existence of inequality, contemporary social injustice, multiplying forms of modern slavery, the dehumanizing effect of quixotic preoccupations, and the destructive obsession with social vanity.

The men took different paths but reached similar conclusions about the role of historical progress: it destroys human contentment and decreases freedom (because it increases slavery); it corrupts natural empathy and decreases “mutual preservation” (because it increases immoral vanity). Flaubert illustrates in Madame Bovary what Rousseau describes: human progress plays a morally and existentially regressive role.