Background
Gaultier, Jules de was born in 1856 in Paris.
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Jules de Gaultier
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Spent his professional life as a civil servant in the Ministry of Finance and in the department which inspected municipal administrations until his retirement in 1919. An extensive contributor over many years to Mercure de France. After retirement in 1919 he devoted all his time to his writing.
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In calling his philosophy ‘Bovaryism’, de Gaultier wanted to emphasize that, like Emma Bovary, we are enticed by an ideal world beyond our immediate experience and we constantly confuse the two. But it is the ability to think of things as other than they are which constitutes the most interesting and important fact about human beings. Although it was his understanding of Flaubert’s imagination which most interested him. the influence of Nietzsche is clear, and his version of ‘idealism’ is unique amongst French philosophers. His work attracted interest from literary scholars—he has frequently been cited in studies of Flaubert—but his own main interests were in the reform of moral theory and epistemology. He saw the tendency to think of things as other than they are as the source of art, and he believed that this tendency posed an aesthetic problem and not, in the traditional sense, an ethical problem. He wanted explicitly to substitute aesthetics for ethics. Consciousness, he claimed, is necessarily inadequate to its objects because it is a subjective principle which demands for its intelligibility an objective order. Like Pascal, de Gaultier insisted that the infinity of things outreaches reason. He inferred that relativism must result, and this further underlines his insistence on an aesthetic understanding of the problem. Ultimately, human beings are not responsible for their condition. But they do have the power to represent things in many ways and thus an all-important capacity for art. The critical appreciations listed above all emphasize his interests in Flaubert, in literature and in aesthetics. It is natural that at least one commentator. Benjamin Cassères, should notice the connection with La Rochefoucauld, the sevententh-century epigrammatist and commentator on the corrupt court life of his time. La Rochefoucauld, in his concern to expose the absurd pretensions of the society around him. makes much of the connection between such pretensions and the tendency of human beings to imagine things other than as they are. But La Rochefoucauld’s witty moralizing is closer to Sartre than to de Gaultier. Sartre’s 2,800-page assault in L'Idiot dans la famille, Gustave Flaubert, 1821-1857 sets out to expose ‘Bovaryism’ and Flaubert himself as manifestations of a corrupt bourgeoisie, while de Gaultier’s rather amiable relativism was combined with an intention to undermine moralizing and to concetrate on aesthetic issues. Sources: Hector Talvart and Joseph Place (1937) Bibliographie des auteurs modernes de langue française, Paris: Chronique des lettres françaises, vol. 6, pp. 296 302; Baruzi: Benrubi; Parodi; Enciclopedia Filosofea; FranBio; Larousse du XXieme siede.
