Flaubert's Madame Bovary
1856
Gustave Flaubert's novel about a provincial doctor's wife who poisons herself after squalid adulteries was serialized in the Revue de Paris and promptly prosecuted for obscenity. Flaubert was acquitted. The book - exact, pitiless, perfectly written - is usually cited as the first modern novel, and the one that taught fiction how to look at the middle class.
In context
Also in 1856 (4 other events on record)
- Bessemer Steel Process · Europe · Technology
- Sumner Caned in Senate · North America · Politics
- Arrow Incident · East Asia · War
- Treaty of Paris · Europe · Politics
Before and after in Europe
Before and after in Culture
Era
Industrial Age (1801–1900), one of 513 events from that era on Saeculum.
Sources