Bovary in the Dock

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The most consequential literary trial in nineteenth-century France turned a quietly published serial into a publishing sensation.

The Charges

Madame Bovary arrived in print not as a book but as an instalment, running in the Revue de Paris across six issues between October and December 1856. The journal's editors, nervous about certain passages, had already made cuts without Flaubert's consent — a fact he protested in print, asking readers to note that the text was not his own in its current form. Their nervousness proved well founded. In January 1857, the imperial public prosecutor's office filed charges against Flaubert, his publisher Michel Lévy, and the Revue de Paris's managing editor Laurent Pichat under the charge of outrage aux bonnes mœurs — outrage to public morality — with a secondary count touching on religious offence.

The indictment named specific passages: the scene in which Emma Bovary receives the last rites, described with what the prosecution read as a provocative sensualism; Emma's carriage ride with Léon through Rouen, its shutters drawn; and, more broadly, the novel's alleged glorification of adultery. The prosecution's case rested not merely on individual scenes but on what the avocat impérial Ernest Pinard argued was the novel's moral architecture: that no voice in the text ever condemned Emma's conduct, that the narrative withheld the corrective judgement a decent reader had the right to expect. Art without explicit moral instruction was, for Pinard, indistinguishable from moral corruption.

The Defence

Flaubert's counsel, the lawyer Marie-Antoine-Jules Sénard — to whom the novelist would later dedicate the book's first edition — argued the case on two grounds. The first was literary: that the novel was precisely a study of the consequences of romantic self-delusion, that Emma's fate was itself the moral, and that a reader capable of following the prose could not mistake ruin for endorsement. The second was reputational: Sénard invoked the names of Flaubert's father and brother, both distinguished Rouen physicians, framing the accused as a man of serious bourgeois standing, not a peddler of erotica.

The trial ran on 29 January and 7 February 1857. On 7 February the court acquitted all three defendants, though the judgement issued a pointed rebuke alongside the acquittal: the novel contained passages that were, in the court's phrasing, "reprehensible" and which Flaubert, "in the interest of good taste," ought to have omitted. Acquittal with censure — the state reserving the right to disapprove even as it declined to convict.

What Acquittal Did to the Book

Two months later, Madame Bovary appeared as a single volume published by Michel Lévy Frères, with Sénard's name on the dedication page and the trial's outcome printed as a preface. It sold extraordinarily well ↗ by the standards of a first literary novel. The prosecution had done what no review could have managed alone: it told every literate person in France that this was a dangerous book. The first edition of around six thousand copies was exhausted quickly, and further printings followed within the year.

The trial also confirmed, in the same calendar year, a pattern of state prosecution that the literary world was beginning to recognise as a double-edged instrument. Charles Baudelaire faced the same charge of outrage aux bonnes mœurs for Les Fleurs du mal in August 1857 — and was convicted, with six poems ordered suppressed, a verdict that stood until 1949 ↗. Flaubert was acquitted; Baudelaire was not. The difference told readers something about prose and poetry, and about judges.

What the Rouen provincial novelist brought back from Paris was not just an acquittal but a legend. Every copy of Madame Bovary sold afterward carried the faint charge of the courtroom, the suggestion of a book the government had weighed and found, reluctantly, too good to suppress.