The influences behind A Sentimental Education (L'Éducation sentimentale)

1869

A Sentimental Education (L'Éducation sentimentale)

Gustave Flaubert

Second Empire. France. Written in French.

Flaubert's 1869 novel follows Frédéric Moreau from 1840 through the 1848 Revolution and the coup of 1851, as his lifelong unconsummated love for Madame Arnoux and his drifting ambitions come to nothing. It turns the novel of a young man's education into a study of illusion, inertia and failure.

Where it came from

Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert 1857 follow this thread
Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes 1605–1615 follow this thread
Lost Illusions (Illusions perdues), Honoré de Balzac 1837–1843 follow this thread
Volupté, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve 1834 follow this thread
René, François-René de Chateaubriand 1802

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1802

René

François-René de Chateaubriand

Consulate. France. Written in French.

Short narrative in which a melancholy young Frenchman tells his life of restless, aimless longing; a founding text of the 'mal du siècle'.

What it handed down

To A Sentimental Education (L'Éducation sentimentale) (1869)

Thematic kinship, probable.

Frédéric's vague yearnings, idleness and sense of a life without purpose descend from the 'vague des passions' that Chateaubriand's René made fashionable. Flaubert absorbed Chateaubriand as an adolescent and treats this Romantic malaise ironically, as a generation's habit of mind.

To Volupté

Thematic kinship, probable.

Amaury belongs to the generation of melancholy, irresolute heroes that René created. Sainte-Beuve, a close reader and later historian of Chateaubriand, gives him the same mix of introspection, religious longing and paralysis of will.

Where it came from

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1774

The Sorrows of Young Werther

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Sturm und Drang. Germany. Written in German.

Epistolary novel of a young man's hopeless love for Lotte, who is engaged to another, ending in his suicide.

What it handed down

To René (1802)

Thematic kinship, probable.

Chateaubriand discussed Werther in the Genius of Christianity, the work in which René first appeared, as a case of passions without object. René takes up Werther's solitary, self-consuming sensibility while recasting it in Christian terms.

Where it came from

The Works of Ossian, James Macpherson 1765
The Odyssey, Homer c. 700 BCE follow this thread
Julie, or the New Heloise, Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1761 follow this thread

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1765

The Works of Ossian

James Macpherson

Scottish Enlightenment. Scotland. Written in English.

Prose poems presented as translations of an ancient Gaelic bard, widely read across Europe as primitive epic.

What it handed down

To René (1802)

Direct source, well documented.

René tells of travelling to Scotland and hearing a bard sing in the hills where Ossian's heroes once fought. The misty landscapes and elegiac tone of Macpherson's poems colour the whole narrative.

To The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774)

Direct source, well documented.

In the climactic scene Werther reads to Lotte his own translation of the 'Songs of Selma' from Ossian, and the passage is quoted at length. Werther's turn from Homer to Ossian marks his descent into despair.

Where it came from

The line stops here: macpherson's sources are Scottish Gaelic ballads and oral tradition, largely unrecorded in published form.

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Where it came from

What it handed down

To A Sentimental Education (L'Éducation sentimentale) (1869)

To Volupté

Where it came from

What it handed down

To René (1802)

Where it came from

What it handed down

To René (1802)

To The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774)

Where it came from

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