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.