Bouvard and Pécuchet

Bouvard and Pécuchet Review

Flaubert spent the last decade of his life on Bouvard and Pécuchet, the novel he called his “encyclopaedia of human stupidity,” and died in 1880 without finishing it. The first volume was published posthumously in 1881; the projected second volume, which was to consist entirely of quotations from stupid books — the famous Dictionnaire des idées reçues and a Catalogue des idées chics — exists only in notes and fragments. What we have is therefore incomplete. It is also, for a certain kind of reader, magnificent.

The premise is almost mathematically simple. Bouvard and Pécuchet are copy-clerks in Paris who meet by chance on a park bench and discover they are kindred spirits. When Bouvard inherits a farm in Normandy, they retire together to devote themselves to intellectual improvement. They study agriculture, horticulture, preservation of fruit, architecture, geology, archaeology, history, literature, politics, magnetism, medicine, physiology, metaphysics, religion, education, and love — in that order, more or less. At each subject they apply themselves with genuine enthusiasm, achieve initial confidence, encounter complications, make catastrophic errors, and move on to the next. The pattern does not vary. The disasters do.

Flaubert’s target is bêtise — a French word that means stupidity but carries with it a specific flavour of complacent self-assurance, of received ideas mistaken for genuine thought. The novel’s great joke is that Bouvard and Pécuchet are not fools; they are earnest, enthusiastic, reasonably intelligent men who simply cannot match the ambitions they carry. But the joke extends beyond them: the experts they consult are no better, the books they read are no more reliable, the authorities they trust are no more authoritative. The novel is not a satire of two credulous amateurs but a satire of human intellectual culture as such.

The unfinished state gives the novel a strange quality. We know the projected ending: Bouvard and Pécuchet, having exhausted knowledge and found it wanting, return to copying — but now they copy the stupidities they have collected, the world’s bêtise in their own handwriting. It is the most Flaubertian ending imaginable: a complete circle, a cosmic joke at everyone’s expense, including the author’s. That it was never written is itself, in a Flaubertian register, fitting. The encyclopaedia of stupidity must be, by its own logic, incomplete.

The Comedy of Comprehensive Failure

What makes Bouvard and Pécuchet more than a one-joke book — though it is, on one level, a single joke repeated with magnificent persistence — is the seriousness with which Flaubert pursues its logic. The two clerks are not idiots, and this is the crucial point. They are earnest, curious, reasonably intelligent men who genuinely want to understand the world and improve themselves. Their failure is therefore not the failure of fools but the failure of the human intellectual project as such. When they take up agriculture and ruin the harvest, when they attempt medicine and nearly kill their neighbors, when they wade into philosophy and emerge more confused than when they began, the comedy lands because we recognize the ambition behind it.

Flaubert’s target is bêtise, a word that means stupidity but carries a particular flavor of complacent self-assurance — received ideas mistaken for thought, confidence unearned by understanding. And the genius of the structure is that the satire does not stop with Bouvard and Pécuchet. The experts they consult are no more reliable than they are; the books they read contradict each other; the authorities they trust turn out to be charlatans or fools in better clothing. The novel is not a comedy about two credulous amateurs. It is a comedy about the entire apparatus of human knowledge, and the amateurs are simply the instrument through which Flaubert exposes it.

The Unfinished Circle

The novel’s incompleteness is more than a biographical accident; it has become part of how the book is read. Flaubert died in 1880 with the first volume essentially complete and the second — the great compilation of quotations, the Dictionnaire des idées reçues — surviving only in notes. We know the intended ending: having exhausted every branch of knowledge and found each one wanting, Bouvard and Pécuchet return to copying, but now they copy the world’s stupidities in their own hand. It is the most Flaubertian conclusion imaginable, a perfect circle, a cosmic joke at everyone’s expense including the author’s. That the encyclopaedia of stupidity should itself remain forever incomplete is, by its own logic, almost too fitting to be accidental.

What Survives the Demands

This is the most demanding of Flaubert’s works to read in sequence, and the systematic repetition can become wearing — the joke is, after all, the same joke, applied again and again. It also presupposes some acquaintance with nineteenth-century intellectual life to feel the full sting of its specific targets. None of this should be hidden from a prospective reader. But what survives the demands is a book that anticipates twentieth-century absurdism in its structural logic, and that contains, beneath its relentless comedy, something genuinely touching: the friendship between the two men, which survives every catastrophe. They fail at everything together and remain devoted to each other through all of it. That this constancy persists through the comprehensive collapse of every shared project is its own quiet form of heroism — perhaps the only thing in the novel Flaubert does not mock.

Its Place in Flaubert’s Work

Bouvard and Pécuchet is the logical endpoint of a career, and it reads differently once one sees it that way. Across his fiction Flaubert had returned obsessively to the figure of the person undone by received ideas — Emma Bovary, fed on romantic novels until she could no longer see her own life; Frédéric Moreau, drifting through borrowed political and amorous postures; the provincial bores of Yonville with their complacent certainties. Bouvard and Pécuchet are the final, most concentrated version of this preoccupation: two men who attempt to acquire all of human knowledge and discover only that the knowledge itself, as packaged and transmitted by the culture, is riddled with the same complacency they brought to it. The book is in this sense a summation, the place where Flaubert’s lifelong quarrel with bêtise arrives at its widest possible scope.

For the reader willing to take it as such — not as a conventional novel with a plot to follow but as a comic encyclopaedia, a structure to inhabit rather than a story to be carried by — the rewards are considerable. The accumulation of facts without wisdom, Flaubert shows, produces not knowledge but a more sophisticated confusion, and there is something bracing and even liberating in watching the entire apparatus of human expertise dismantled with such cheerful thoroughness. It is the funniest of his books precisely because it is the most despairing, and the unfinished circle it traces — two clerks returning at last to their copying desks, now transcribing the world’s stupidity in their own careful hand — is the most complete statement Flaubert ever made of his vision of human intellectual life. It is best read late, after the other novels, by a reader who has already learned to trust where Flaubert is taking them.