Towards a Critique of Historicism: Gustave Flaubert and Walter Benjamin’s theses On the Concept of History

Abstract

In the seventh thesis of his essay On the concept of History, Walter Benjamin presents Gustave Flaubert as a representative figure of the empathic sensibility that underlies the historicist current of historiography. The first aim of this article is to analyze this mention and to confront it with other texts where Benjamin reflects on Flaubert: in this regard, it can be said that the concise judgment of the seventh thesis, in which Flaubert becomes the symbol of the inactive melancholy of historicism, can be challenged. Secondly, the article intends to prove that Flaubert’s literature (specially through the genre of historic novel as it is exemplified by Salammbô) achieves two of the tasks that Benjamin assigns to the dialectical-materialistic historian: on one side, to be capable of hearing the grieving complaints of the defeated dead; on the other, to restitute potentiality in the past