French Literature Reviews - 2026
Y. Leclerc, Album Gustave Flaubert
Writers: Biography, Letters and Memoirs
Yvan Leclerc, Album Gustave Flaubert
Collection Albums de la Pléiade (no. 60), Gallimard, 2021
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When Flaubert died on May 8, 1880, his appearance was unknown to the public. This is an exception in a century when the artist's figure was widely disseminated through engraving and photography. The absence of an image stems from the author's explicit intent: he consistently refused to let his face be seen by the public.
This aversion to portraiture was matched by a rejection of illustration. "Never, while I live, will I be illustrated." "All illustration in general exasperates me—all the more so when it comes to my own works—and in my lifetime, none will be made, dixi. It is the same with my portrait."
A third refusal: to reveal, or allow to be revealed, the details of his life. "On the contrary," he wrote in 1859, "the writer should leave behind only his works. His life matters little. Away with the rags!" Having no face for his contemporaries, the artist had to be without a biography as well.
Flaubert was the first to theorize and put into practice the disappearance of the author within the text, under the concept of "impersonality."
These three refusals—of the portrait, the illustration, and the biographical footprint—stem from a single principle: the work alone, Literature as an absolute. He did not make the task easy for his biographer or his iconographer, this writer who resisted the imagery and imagination of his century. Yet this "photophobe" posed before several camera lenses, this iconoclast used images for his documentation, and this opponent of biographical curiosity scattered discourse about himself across some four thousand five hundred letters, while piously preserving all his manuscripts.
Drawing upon all these documents, Yvan Leclerc retraces Flaubert's life in a text that is at once perceptive, witty, and profound, supported by an exceptional mastery of the author's work, of which he is one of the foremost specialists.
Published to mark the bicentenary of the author's birth, the Album Gustave Flaubert follows the Album Flaubert compiled in 1972 by Jean Ducourneau and Jean Bruneau—Jean Bruneau, who dedicated his life to editing Flaubert's Correspondance, an edition ultimately completed by Yvan Leclerc, whose five volumes, complementing the five volumes of the Œuvres complètes, offer an extraordinary reading experience.
256 pages, 189 ill., 105 x 170 mm, leather-bound – ISBN: 9782072926877
The nineteenth century was defined by the rise of mass media, where the figure of the artist became increasingly public through photography and engraving. Gustave Flaubert resisted this trend by rejecting portraiture, illustration, and biographical scrutiny. This stance was rooted in his commitment to the concept of impersonality, which sought to remove the author from the text to elevate Literature as an absolute. The author's life was marked by a tension between his desire for privacy and his extensive preservation of personal letters and manuscripts.
This volume follows the 1972 collection by Jean Ducourneau and Jean Bruneau. It situates Flaubert within the intellectual history of the nineteenth century, a period characterized by shifting attitudes toward the role of the writer in society. By utilizing the author's correspondence and archives, the text documents the life of a writer who theorized the disappearance of the author while leaving behind a significant documentary footprint. Readers interested in the history of literary biography may find it relevant.