Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere (2013) - Plot & Excerpts
One winter morning Frédéric Moreau, the archetypal ‘graduate with no future’, left his student hovel on the Parisian Left Bank, his mind, as always, on his forlorn romance. But history intervened: Youths in groups of anything from five to twelve were strolling around arm in arm, occasionally going up to larger groups which were standing here and there; at the far end of the square, against the iron railings, men in smocks were holding forth … policemen were walking up and down … Everybody wore a mysterious, anxious expression; clearly there was something in the air, and on each person’s lips there was an unspoken question.1 This is how Moreau, the hero of Flaubert’s novel Sentimental Education, collided with the revolution of 1848, and like his romance it did not end well. On 22 February 1848 the ‘men in smocks’—the Parisian workers—overthrew the monarchy and forced the middle class to declare a republic. It was a shock because, like Saif Gaddafi and Gamal Mubarak long afterwards, King Louis-Philippe had counted himself something of a democrat.
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