There is a scene in Gustave Flaubert’s novel Sentimental Education that one cannot read without turning one’s mind to today. Set against the backdrop of the 1848 revolutions in Europe, it tells the story of the romantic and intellectual wanderings of the earnest but capricious young Frédéric Moreau. In the exhilarating world of the newborn Second Republic, Moreau and his Parisian social circle flirt with high idealism about politics and international affairs while jostling for female attention, intellectual fulfilment, sources of stable income and, of course, their inheritance.
Flaubert has some fun with the character of Moreau’s close friend, Deslauriers, a legal clerk and struggling scholar who has strong political views but fails to think things through to the finish. As an ardent republican, he gains notoriety for his passionate but rather blustery “display of virulence [against] those who held conservative views”. At one point, he gets so swept up in his enthusiasm for natural law that he claims to have identified the root of all political injustice in the world in the form of an arcane property right. “Abolish it,” Deslauriers declares, at the end of a passionate but incoherent ramble to some bemused legal seniors, “and the Franks will no longer oppress the Gauls, the English oppress the Irish, the Yankee oppress the Redskins, the Turks oppress the Arabs…” and so on.
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