Wit & Attitude Quote by Gustave Flaubert

Flaubert lands this line like a snapped ruler across the knuckles: democracy, in its self-congratulatory mythology, doesn’t elevate the masses into enlightenment so much as standardize everyone into the same dullness. The barb is double-edged. It insults the bourgeois for their complacent, self-satisfied mediocrity, and it refuses the sentimental idea that “the people,” once empowered, will naturally choose the brave or the beautiful. What rises, in this view, is not intelligence but banality.

The key word is “dream.” Flaubert isn’t describing a policy platform; he’s puncturing a fantasy that political equality automatically produces cultural or intellectual elevation. His real target is the 19th-century faith in progress and mass opinion, a moment when expanding suffrage and the growth of the press made “public taste” feel newly sovereign. Flaubert, allergic to received ideas, heard in that sovereignty the clink of the same clichés being passed from hand to hand. His novels are basically laboratories for this suspicion: people speak in prefabricated phrases and call it conviction.

Subtextually, he’s also sketching a darker sociology. Democracy, as it spreads, can incentivize leaders and institutions to flatter the median voter, sanding down complexity into something easily consumed. “Raise the proletarian” reads like uplift, but it’s uplift toward the bourgeois ceiling of stupidity: a world where status is less about thought than about the comforting performance of having opinions. The sting is that equality, without a hunger for excellence, can become equality of emptiness.