Frederick Brown has written biographies of Zola and Flaubert. For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus is his most recent book.
In 1857, when Cézanne was 18, the government lawyer prosecuting Madame Bovary as an affront to public decency declared that the novel was ‘a painting admirable from the point of view of talent but execrable from that of morality … Monsieur Flaubert embellishes his paintings with all the resources of art but without any of its caution; there is in his work no gauze, no veils...
Of the three books that Gustave Flaubert was able to write only after a lengthy cohabitation with his sources, Bouvard et Pécuchet is by some way the most approachable. The other two are...
In September 1894, the Intelligence Bureau of the French Army intercepted a memorandum (the so-called ‘bordereau’) sent to the German military attaché in Paris, informing him...
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