The narrative genre as reflection on history: A study of selected works by Flaubert, Maupassant and Zola

Focusing on works of Flaubert, Maupassant and Zola, this study analyzes both the representation of history in nineteenth-century French realist and naturalist narrative, and the conception of history these authors convey by fictionalizing it. The selected works were all written during the period they depict, which stretches from the revolution of 1848 to the end of the Second Empire, and the authors experienced personally the events described in their fiction.;The inquiries in the different chapters have two points in common: first, they take realist discourse as their subject, and, second, they take as hypothesis the idea that the literary works propose a discourse on history. The three authors respond differently to the problem of the representation of history, but they all introduce in their works a conception of history that differs from the traditional public history as a systematic classification and description of historical facts. Michel Foucault's reflections on history, elaborated in chapter one, help to discover a certain originality in the representation of history by the authors.;Chapter two examines the representation of history in Gustave Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale (1869). Flaubert only represents political history through fiction, which seems fragmented, absurd and incomprehensible. Flaubert breaks the principle of causality and marginalizes political history by privileging the individual experience. Through this representation, Flaubert questions the possibility of writing a public history.;Chapter three analyzes Guy de Maupassant's short stories, in particular "Boule de suif" (1880), and examines the conception of history that Maupassant conveys by fictionalizing the Franco-Prussian war. In effect, he assails the institution of war and undermines the official history of his time through a transposition of public history to the private level.;Chapter four studies Emile Zola's La Fortune des Rougon (1871). In this novel, Zola refutes the false history staged by the characters. This critique implies that Zola knows how to distinguish true from false histories. Like the other authors, he privileges private history, but for him it reflects, in microcosm, the larger scale of public history.;Taken together, the various conceptions of history of these three authors seem to validate Foucault's notion of history as a plural concept.