Europe is the world’s sun; its empires and governments recognize no enemy other than the one beyond the garden fence. Too little effort has been made to analyze this phenomenon of a matronly special status. Half a dozen mother countries maintain puppet regimes on every continent. Colonial powers install and depose potentates at will. The strongest engine behind every decision is economic interest. Of all people, the self-empowered coup maker Napoleon III (1808–1873), born Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, displays the determination to place himself at the head of the cartel. Seasoned mockers of the nation fall silent in the face of his sovereign genius for self-presentation. Along with the rest of the ungainly crowd, they marvel at the theatrical inventions imposed from above.

The emperor rewards poorly versifying flatterers and lets Balzac’s hefty tomes slip beneath the table of what is freely marketable. Flaubert and Baudelaire get into trouble. They embody modernity against a capering restoration.

Antiquatedness is deliberate. Flaubert calls the national poet Pierre-Jean de Béranger a “filthy bourgeois.” Diana Céline, a great-grandniece of the monster, even credits Flaubert with an advance in the art of obscenity—something, she claims, no one could still understand in the age of Fifty Shades and Wetlands. The literary scholar identifies “refined innuendo.”

We all know it: Flaubert himself characterizes his heroine Emma Bovary as a “pervert,” one who allows herself to be challenged by a beautifully painted Jesus yet also responds enthusiastically to money. A trial for violation of public morality and the like opens on January 29, 1857. Madame B. appears to the penal camarilla as “a danger to young girls and women.” The novel’s embattled figure is said to have experienced “sensual pleasure already as a child in the confessional.” The heavenly bridegroom awakens the desire to be fully recognized.

Stemmler notes in Flaubert an “obscenity of seeing,” evident, for example, in indiscretions toward pathological states. Flaubert ignores boundaries, prohibitions, burqa-messages. Ostentatiously—if not angrily—he overrides restrictions to indulge his descriptive monomania.

The prosecution finds Flaubert’s impersonal tone “lascivious.” God and money as the culminating points of an existence conceived as purely material: that is revolutionary (in intent). Flaubert’s beginning is already the climax. It unfolds in relationships worn to the point of absurdity, with nothing grand on the horizon. Reality is glossed over; escapism becomes a way out. The ambition of the bourgeois emperor leads to a catastrophe no one sees coming. At the same time, Paris rises to become the capital of the age, a permanent world event, the European pulse. Baudelaire’s diagnoses of society establish new disease concepts that anticipate psychoanalysis. Brilliant physicians such as Jean-Martin Charcot will soon draw on Flaubert and Baudelaire, while political France erects monuments to regression.

A ridiculous Napoleon sent Victor Hugo into exile on Guernsey. The most ridiculous Napoleon was a brother of the titanic Bonaparte. After the Peace of Tilsit (1807), Napoleon Bonaparte made Kassel (then still Cassel) the capital of the newly created Kingdom of Westphalia and placed his brother Jérôme on the throne there. As king, Jérôme styled himself Hieronymus Napoleon. He was a twelfth child and not in the least noble in his path of origin. The people of Kassel called him “King Lustik” (original spelling).

Hugo spent fifteen years on the Channel Island. His home, Hauteville House, is among the sights of Saint Peter Port. In exile Hugo wrote Les Misérables and The Toilers of the Sea (Les Travailleurs de la Mer, 1866). Hugo loved Guernsey. He savored the freedom, the nature, the sea, and the spiritual calm.