Five Years of Writing Under the Second Empire
Gustave Flaubert wrote the novel from September 1851 to April 1856, at Croisset, the family house on the banks of the Seine, near Rouen. In those years France changed regime: the coup of December 1851 gave Louis Napoleon, then president of the Republic, full power, and in 1852 he became the Emperor Napoleon III, with the press under government surveillance. The story, however, is set earlier: it begins still under the Restoration and runs mainly through the July Monarchy, which reigned from 1830 to 1848. The Marquis who invites the Bovarys to the ball was secretary of state "under the Restoration," the regime overthrown in 1830, and he tries to return to politics (chapter 7 of Part I). In the province, according to the narrator, only in 1835 did a passable road to Yonville come into being (chapter 1 of Part II).
From Serial to Court
The book first came out in the Revue de Paris, a literary review, in six issues, from October 1 to December 15, 1856. The editors cut passages they judged risky, among them the cab ride through the streets of Rouen (chapter 1 of Part III). Even so, the imperial public prosecutor sued Flaubert, the manager of the review, and the printer for offense against public morality and religion. The trial took place in January 1857, and on February 7 the three were acquitted. The novel came out in two volumes in April, with a dedication to the defense lawyer, Jules Sénard. The prosecution spoke of morality and religion, and the book does indeed tell adultery from within, without a narrator's sermon, as in the scene in which Emma, after yielding to Rodolphe, sees herself in the mirror and repeats that she has a lover (chapter 9 of Part II).
Where the Story Came From, and What Emma Read
Tradition links the novel to a real case: that of a health officer of the village of Ry, in Normandy, whose young wife died young and in debt. Flaubert denied, in a letter of 1857, that the book told anyone's life. The world of Emma's reading, however, is historical. At the Ursuline convent she reads, in the dormitory, the love novels that an old seamstress from the linen room lends the older pupils in secret (chapter 6 of Part I); at Tostes she moves on to Balzac and George Sand (chapter 9 of Part I). Since 1836 the serial novel had filled the newspaper feuilleton, and reading rooms rented books by subscription: when Emma falls ill from boredom, her mother-in-law goes in person to the Rouen bookseller to announce that Emma is cancelling her subscriptions (chapter 7 of Part II).
Doctors, Pharmacists, and the Law
Charles is not a doctor, he is a "health officer," a title created in 1803 for those who did not complete the full course of medicine and abolished in 1892. He fails the first examination (chapter 1 of Part I). Homais, who is a pharmacist and has no medical diploma, is summoned to Rouen by the king's prosecutor for breaking the law of 19 ventôse of year XI, the 1803 law that forbids practicing medicine without a diploma, cited in the novel itself (chapter 3 of Part II). The club-foot surgery on Hippolyte, which cuts the Achilles tendon, was then a recent method: Charles has the book by Doctor Duval on the subject sent from Rouen before operating (chapter 11 of Part II).
The Law and a Wife's Money
Napoleon's Civil Code of 1804 prevented a married woman from taking on debts, or selling or mortgaging property, without her husband's consent. This is the background to the power of attorney that Lheureux suggests (chapter 2 of Part III), by which Charles would give Emma the power to act in his name, and to the mother-in-law's reaction when she sees the bill for Emma's purchases: she extracts from Charles the promise to annul the power of attorney, and burns it (chapter 5 of Part III). The same France appears on the day of the agricultural show, with the parade of the National Guard, reorganized by law in 1831 (chapter 8 of Part II).