Novel: Sentimental Education

Overview
Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education follows Frédéric Moreau, an impressionable young man from Nogent-sur-Seine, through the upheavals of the 1840s and the Revolution of 1848 in Paris. The novel charts his long, drifting pursuit of love, success, and social distinction, and shows how his feelings, rather than his intellect or morals, are formed by a sequence of desires, delays, and disappointments. It is a portrait of a generation seduced by images of passion and politics yet incapable of converting them into action.

Plot
On a steamboat along the Seine, Frédéric first sees Madame Arnoux, the beautiful, reserved wife of a charming but unscrupulous art dealer, Jacques Arnoux. That instantaneous infatuation becomes the axis of his life. He comes to Paris to study law, but his studies dissolve amid salons, cafés, and schemes, as he insinuates himself into the Arnoux circle and nourishes a reverent, mostly silent adoration for Madame Arnoux.

An inheritance briefly empowers him. Frédéric throws money at friendships and prospects, bankrolls Arnoux’s faltering enterprises, and retries the elite world through the banker Dambreuse. Yet each promising opening founders on his passivity or competing appetites. He keeps Louise Roque, a devoted girl from home, dangling; he slips into an affair with Rosanette, a worldly courtesan once kept by Arnoux; and he flirts with the favor of Madame Dambreuse, an elegant, calculating grande dame. Madame Arnoux remains the ideal just out of reach, too virtuous, or too protected by circumstance, for his decisiveness ever to catch up with his longing.

Politics and society
The Revolution of 1848 interrupts and exposes these private hesitations. Frédéric wanders through clubs, barricades, and ministries as a spectator rather than a participant, while his friends embody polarized paths: Deslauriers, his brilliant, resentful schoolmate, chases influence; Sénécal embraces austere radicalism; Dussardier, a humble clerk, displays simple civic virtue. The Republic’s initial euphoria hardens into reaction; friendships sour over principles and self-interest; careers are lost, salvaged, or reversed. In a grim coda to the political thread, years later Dussardier is shot by Sénécal, now a policeman, during a Bonapartist procession, emblem of betrayed ideals and the mutability of convictions under the Second Empire.

Love and ambition
Frédéric’s sentimental education proceeds not through conquests but through failures to choose. He betrays Arnoux by keeping Rosanette, neglects Louise until she marries elsewhere, and compromises himself in hopes of marrying wealth when Monsieur Dambreuse dies. Madame Dambreuse, discovering his duplicities, withholds both marriage and fortune. Arnoux’s ruin finally separates the Arnoux couple from Paris, and the dream that drove Frédéric begins to fade without ever having been realized.

Style and themes
Desire without action, the commodification of art and feeling, the spectacle of politics, and the inertia of the bourgeois self anchor the book. Flaubert’s cool, panoramic narration dissolves the distance between public events and private fantasies, showing how historical storms buffet characters whose deepest movements are often inward and indecisive. The title signals a parody of the traditional formation novel: Frédéric is educated by his sentiments, but they teach him vacillation more than virtue or achievement.

Ending
In a late meeting, Madame Arnoux visits Frédéric; age and hardship have touched her, but his tenderness rekindles. They confess, embrace, and stop short. She departs, and the possibility that once animated his youth recedes for good. Reunited with Deslauriers, Frédéric looks back and agrees the finest moment of their lives was a bungled adolescent trip to a brothel, an encounter aborted by shyness and confusion. That memory of the desire that never happened becomes the novel’s final emblem: the most intense experiences are imagined, postponed, or lost, and the education of the heart is an education in disillusion.