Le Bossuet de Flaubert ou la dialectique de l’aigle et de l’oie

Flaubert admired in Bossuet that very style of which he was wary because it represented his own temptation to lyricism. He also used Bossuet as a kind of support for his defense of Madame Bovary, when it was accused of affronting public decency. Finally, the preparatory notes for the second volume of Bouvard et Pécuchet show Flaubert distancing himself from Bossuet’s antimodernist stance.