Wit & Attitude Quote by Gustave Flaubert

Flaubert doesn’t bother with the melodrama of horns and pitchforks. He drags “immorality” down from the cathedral ceiling and pins it to something more banal and more damning: ignorance and stupidity. It’s a novelist’s heresy, and a moralist’s one. Evil, for him, isn’t an exotic force that seduces decent people; it’s the everyday failure to think, the refusal to see clearly, the lazy appetite for ready-made ideas. That’s why the line bites. It turns sin into a civic and intellectual problem, not a supernatural one.

The subtext is pure Flaubert: contempt for received wisdom and the bourgeois comfort of not knowing too much. He spent his career anatomizing what he called bêtise, a kind of thick, self-satisfied stupidity that reproduces itself through clichés, pieties, and “common sense.” In that light, “true immorality” isn’t scandalous behavior; it’s the mind’s surrender. You don’t need malice when dullness can do the job.

Calling the devil “Legion” sharpens the point with biblical irony. In the Gospels, “My name is Legion” signals possession by many demons at once. Flaubert repurposes it: stupidity is not a lone villain but a crowd, a mass phenomenon, everywhere at once, speaking in the plural. The consequence is bleak and modern. If evil is collective inertia, then fighting it isn’t exorcism; it’s attention, education, and the hard, unglamorous work of refusing the stupid story.