Gustave Flaubert, the apostle of French literary realism, was too realistic for the imperial guardian of propriety. The prosecutor for the Second Empire charged him with offending religious and public morality with his portrayal of Emma Bovary in Madame Bovary, released in 1857 in serial form.

More specifically, the prosecutor complained that Flaubert had offended the community with "poesie de l' adultere" - the poetry of adultery. After all, Emma Bovary had shed "not a tear, not one sigh of a repentant Magalene for her crime of incredulity, for her suicide, for her adulteries." Still, the judge acquitted Flaubert after lecturing him about the extremes of the "vulgar and shocking realism." Charles Baudelaire was not so fortunate that year: he was convicted of similar charges.

Flaubert invested four painstaking years drafting and polishing off his masterpiece. In 1857 he was caricatured as a surgical novelist meticulously dissecting his anti-heroine, her heart in his left hand, its blood dripping into his inkwell. Critics classified him as a positivist or scientific thinker. Indeed, his contemporaries thought of him as a cold-blooded, clinical author.

It was no accident that Emma's cuckolded husband in the novel was a doctor who terribly botched a novel surgical procedure on a clubfoot, an operation that he hoped would bring him fame and fortune; Emma was also quite hopeful in that regard since he was not good enough for her as a small-time doctor. Flaubert himself had been raised in a hospital—his father was a doctor—and he bragged that he had seen dissections during his childhood.

Flaubert said that writing Madame Bovary, now considered as the first masterpiece of modern realism, constituted an effort to tame his romantic temper with objective realism. That was not an easy task for realism's leading artist: "I loathe what people call realism, although I am supposedly one of its pontiffs," he said.

Only by sheer acts of persevering, self-determining will was he able to complete the novel in four years, sometimes devoted several days to rewriting a single page. He said the process almost made him vomit at times. "I think that today I would have hanged myself with delight if pride hadn't stopped me. What's certain is that I'm sometimes tempted to say to hell with it all, beginning with the Bovary woman. What a damned cursed idea of mine it was to pick such a subject. Ah! I'll have learned all about the torments of Art!"

Realism disgusted not only its authors but certain members of the upper crust as well, notwithstanding the incidences of adultery, a subject many of them were intimate with. After all, they said, who wants to read a book or to see a play about what vulgar people do in their hovels?

The French, as we know, are romantically inclined despite their notorious materialism. French authors had as much difficulty as Flaubert when adapting themselves to the new realism. For instance, the great critic and historian of the French Revolution, Hippolyte Taine, was an advocate of the "botanical analysis practiced on individuals (as) the only means of bringing together the human and the positive sciences," applying the analytical or dissecting method essential to physiology to cultures, epochs and races. Nevertheless, he complained that he had difficulty restraining his own native lyrical tendency when criticizing it in his countrymen while praising English literature. If there is such a thing as romantic realism, Taine’s fact-filled history of the French Revolution is its masterpiece. Carlyle's acclaimed history of the same revolution is hysterical bombast in comparison.

Taine expressed his dilemma as follows: "I think I have found the root of my ill. Indeed, the fundamental idea has been that one must reproduce the emotion, the particular passion of the man described, but moreover to expose one by one the degrees of logical generation; in short, to depict him in the manner of artists and at the same time to construct him in the manner of reasoners. The idea is true; besides, when one succeeds in applying it, the effects are powerful. I owe my success to this, but it leaves one's brains disjointed and no one has the right to destroy himself."

Flaubert put the disjunction this way: "There are inside me, literally speaking, two distinct fellows: one who is smitten by shouts, by lyricism, by great eagle flights, by all the sonorities of the sentence and the loftiness of ideas; another who probes and digs into the true as best he can, who loves to underscore the little fact as powerfully as the big one, who would wish to make you physically the things he is reproducing..."

Flaubert and Taine were contemporaries. They did not invent realism: they were going along with the scientific-industrial revolution like corks bobbing on a river. That mechanical trend was against the traditional grain that included considerable cultural variety. Society was swept up by scientism, by positivism, the idea that the scientific methods of the natural sciences can be applied to society to manipulate people for their own good.

Hume may deny that there is a law necessarily relating cause and effect until he is blue in the face. The law of cause and effect is still very real, and it is the ticket to utopia, if rightly employed. There is no adultery in utopia.

Yes, it is all very logical. If a novel is offensive to religion and public morals, then it stands to reason that the author causing the effect must be a degenerate or bad author and therefore his work should be censored or banned.

Emma Bovary read too many bad novels, meaning bad authors who caused her to believe that her husband was not good enough for the illusions planted in her brain by diseased minds. And witness the evil consequences of her sins. No social scientist in his right mind would allow Flaubert's Madame Bovary to fall into the hands of the public.

Of course, Flaubert was not the cause of anyone’s adultery except his own. It was no fault of his that his fiction was so true to life that several women claimed to know the real identity of Emma. It would not surprise us to discover a letter in the archives from a woman threatening to sue him for invasion of her privacy.

No wonder the realists were tormented by subconscious and conscious reservations in regards to the 'realism' of their day. That censorious line of reasoning is foolhardy not to mention tyrannical, and should be censured. We might as well propose that photographs of cancerous lung tissue in jars should not be released to the public lest people take up chain-smoking and working in hazardous environments in order to have themselves dissected and their lungs put in jars.

As for adultery, people are divided among and within themselves on the issue, an issue rooted in rebellious romance and conservative religion. Flaubert had more than one real model for Emma Bovary. The French have a reputation for having affairs notwithstanding their customary discretion in such matters. When Flaubert flaunted adultery, no one was any more disillusioned than before. Was the only person still possessed by the romantic illusion was the illusory fictitious personage of Madame Bovary? Of course not! Why would an author even bother with such an ordinary subject?

Emma Bovary was in truth a protest against the realism of the day. The foremost proponent of modern realism in literature was at heart a frustrated romantic. When asked who Madame Bovary was, the apostle of realism gave his famous answer:

"C'est moi."