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in 1799, with a nephew who is but a shadow of his monumental uncle. The course of history also betrays circularity and entropy.
    Who is Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte? A Napoleon with a touch of the royal Louis, a prince elected president before usurping power, an adventurer who garners the benefits of autocracy, republic, and military populism. Even though he accepted the new regime, Flaubert shows how this amalgam is in sync with the ideological confusion and the recantations of almost all the characters in Sentimental Education: from Dambreuse, an ex-noble turned speculator who always sides with the victor, to Martinon, an opportunist who sleeps with Madame Dambreuse and marries her husband’s daughter; from Sénécal, a Jacobin with fascistic tendencies, to Regimbart, a protestor and a drunkard; from the self-righteous Madame Dambreuse to la Vatnaz, a procuress and feminist full of envy; and even Dussardier, the honest republican misled into serving the forces of repression. The exasperation of the revolution reduces them all to “an equality of brute beasts, a same level of bloody turpitude; for the fanaticism of self-interest balanced the frenzy of the poor, aristocracy had the same fits of fury as the mob, and the cotton cap did not prove less hideous than the red cap” (pp. 377-378).
    This messy history is largely apprehended from a private perspective, that of Frédéric. As a consequence, even though the narrator never intervenes, history is not described in an impartial way. Of course, Frédéric is neutral, and even too much so; yet his is not the neutrality of the historian who is above any partisanship but rather that of the idler, who gets excited briefly and then leaves. The historian scrutinizes the complexity of the situation, the idler sees surfaces; the historian discerns links and proposes syntheses, the idler catches glimpses; the historian looks for reasons, the idler is stopped by a detail or an image. Frédéric, a quick-to-be-enthused witness, and his comrade Hussonnet, whose nose is more delicate, attend the February events as though they were a spectacle that the one finds sublime and the other nauseating, and in which the People becomes flux, whirlwind, beast—undifferentiated, indefinite, elusive. The interposition of the fictional character, himself a prey to the vertigo of history, has the unexpected consequence of rendering unreal the very experiences he has a chance to live: “The wounded who sank to the ground, the dead lying at his feet, did not seem like persons really wounded or really dead” (p. 323). This is all the more the case because the inexhaustible discourses on the facts obfuscate the facts themselves. Flaubert lets his characters chatter, more or less banally, foolishly, sometimes unintelligibly: At the Club of Intelligence (what a misnomer!), a militant speaks Spanish, and the author does not translate; another one talks chivalric jargon. The collision of half-cooked ideas, deceitful statements, worn-out slogans, broken declamations, and obscure allusions results in the same magma in the political gatherings as in the banquets and orgies, and proves no more efficacious than the stereotypical love rhetoric.
     
    While the characters’ existences give a sense of reiteration, circularity, and entropy, Flaubert’s mode of composition, in its meandering and occasionally enigmatic complexity, remains highly controlled. If in the epilogue Frédéric and Deslauriers “blamed bad luck” (p. 477), Flaubert calls the shots. If his descriptions are fragmented, he has an overarching aesthetic objective. If his protagonist’s perspective, which largely dominates, is not enlightening, he intends it to be so: For only idiots, whose received ideas regularly, although not always visibly, punctuate the text, believe in the certainty of meaning.
    Frédéric never completes his artistic education; he becomes neither a writer nor a painter, hardly even an amateur. A similar degradation affects