Un enterrement à Paris de Gustave Flaubert (L’Éducation sentimentale, 1869)

Abstract

“A Burial at Paris” by Gustave Flaubert (Sentimental Education, 1869) The paper focuses on the passage on the burial of the banker Dambreuse in chapter IV of the third part of Sentimental Education (L’Éducation sentimentale, 1869) where there is a portrayal of the path from the final illness to the agony and, above all, to the tomb of a rich Parisian. The funerary scenography that Gustave Flaubert sets in this scene radicalises the break with the intimate code of death. It deprives the deceased of the role of protagonist of the drama to make room for the public management of death: the gestures and parades that regulate the ritual, beyond the collective and spiritual investment in death.