Chapter 1 - Trials of modernity

Summary

In January 1857 French prosecutor Ernest Pinard accused Gustave Flaubert of an “offense to public and religious morality and to good morals” for publishing Madame Bovary (1856), the story of a bored housewife who has two extramarital affairs but finds adultery almost as disappointing as marriage. Pinard failed to win a conviction, but the court reprimanded Flaubert for forgetting that art “must be chaste and pure not only in its form but in its expression.” In August of the same year, Pinard had greater success in prosecuting Charles Baudelaire for The Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du Mal) (1857). The court banned six of Baudelaire's erotic poems, two of them on lesbian themes and the other four heterosexual but mildly sadomasochistic. The ban was not officially lifted until 1949, by which time Baudelaire and Flaubert had achieved “classic” status as among the most important influences on modern literature in France and throughout Europe. The trials of the two writers mark a new form of tension between the arts and the established social order that helped to define the oppositional spirit of modernism. Like the later modernists, Baudelaire and Flaubert believed that the standards of the artist might conflict with those of society, and that beauty, truth, and justice might sometimes conflict with one another.