Faith & Spirit Quote by Gustave Flaubert

A slap in the face to salon culture and the little social lies that keep it humming. When Flaubert says art needs neither complaisance nor politeness, he is refusing the 19th-century bargain that art should flatter patrons, soothe readers, or behave nicely in public. Complaisance is the key word: not merely courtesy, but the pliant readiness to agree, to give people what they already want. For Flaubert, that instinct is aesthetic death. Politeness is just its better-tailored cousin, the etiquette that turns bold perception into acceptable conversation.

The engine of the line is its double insistence: faith, faith and freedom. Faith here isn’t religious comfort; it’s the writer’s stubborn belief that the work is worth the loneliness it demands and the backlash it may invite. Flaubert knew that backlash intimately. Madame Bovary didn’t just scandalize; it landed him in court, charged with offending public morals. The trial made visible what he’s pushing against: art as a civic instrument, accountable to propriety, measurable by whether it keeps the peace.

Freedom, then, isn’t a romantic slogan. It’s a technical requirement. To describe desire without sermonizing, to depict banality without redeeming it, to let characters be ugly, bored, or petty without the author rushing in to apologize - that takes freedom from audience management. The subtext is almost ruthless: if you’re writing to be liked, you’re not writing. You’re performing manners. Flaubert is defending the artist’s right to be unsociable in service of being exact.