Madame Bovary

How come that it took me one year in the USA, plus attending classes in politics and reading books in linguistics to understand what Madame Bovary was all about? This society we are living in has made me be very very dumb.
When I studied it at high school it was presented to me like a book written by an emmbittered man, who was living alone in a house and had nothing to do but writing a novel about a woman who cheats on her husband. So when I had to choose a topic for my final dissertation for my second BA in French Litterature I went for it. And I decided to deal with the central chapter, where Emma is seduced by a kind of Don Juan during a political rally.
I would have never immagined that Flaubert was describing exactly what is happening in our society...just like George Orwell in '1984'.

The whole story is that in France the industrial middle class, just like in the USA the Northern countries with the Civil war, was trying to get the power. In 1848 they organised riots involving the whole population to send away the king. Then they did not know what to do with the rest of the population, that expected changes. So they decided to fool them by introducing democracy. What they did was allowing everyone to go and vote for their representatives, but these representatives had to be rich middle class people who had to make the interests of rich middle class people anyway. And they sent people to speak to the peasants in the countryside. The speeches they gave are reported by Flaubert in his book.
They convinced the peasants that 'security' was their interest. To keep thier private property safe. This made sense to the people but they did not realise that security was the richest classes interest, not theirs. Because if they accepted this idea they would be sure to keep their donkey and their small house, whereas the rich would be sure to keep all the money that they had, continuing to exploit the peasants who would work to produce food for them for little money. The peasants interest should have been to ask the rich to make the system fairer and to get more money for their hard work. They should have questioned the concept of 'security'.

The concept is the same here in the USA: the poorest people vote Conservative because they are easily manipulated and are made to believe that it is right if there are no taxes. In this was they keep their few money but they don't get any access to education or health care and their children stay poor anyway. They don't understand that if they paid a small amount of taxes the rich would pay a lot of taxes and they could not but benefit from it. In Europe this concept is pretty clear to everyone. But here the wealthy of the nation have managed to create a system where they make believe the people anything they want by using the mass media.

What happened in France was that the first elections with universal suffrage ended up with the whole population voting to restore the empire. And this is what will happen in Italy in July: the whole population will vote to get a two-party system, like in the USA and UK, because Berlusconi is manipulating them with his TVs. This means that they would not have the communist party anymore, which is the only one that, by getting the 3 or 4 per cent, represents more or less the interests of the majority of the population (it is pretty logical!). Only having this small party makes it possible to journalists who are in favour of the people and against Berlusconi to speak in the public TV. Once it will be no longer possible people will stop having any information which goes against the interests of rich people.
To make Italy like the USA is dangerous because there are not enough money and I am not sure if the rich American people who are behind Obama (USA controls Italy after the II WW ) will allow Berlusconi to do it. Despite the constant moaning and begging Berlusconi is doing...I bet he calls them everyday...
Any system of this kind, where the rich have all the power and resources, has had to resort to get money from external sources to keep a kind of balance: see Hitler's expansionism, or Stalin's (what a rip-off was that!) or the USA, or Napoleon III in France at Falubert's times. They had to invade other coutries to get more money so that the rich could get richer without making the poor starve.

Going back to Madame Bovary: Flaubert wanted to show how the rich people were seducing the poor people to make them make the interests of rich people. And he compared the politician speaking to the people to a man who is seducing a woman just to sleep with her by convincing her that happiness is to cheat on one's husband and being immoral is a matter of freedom.

This is another key point. The politicians were saying to the peasants: Progress is the key for happiness! Go and get rich! (sounds like Stalin..sic) To educate people to immorality and to stimulate in them constant desire for improvement is another key to make the system work.
For example let's say that Napoleon III wanted to make a lot of money by invading foreign countries or that Berlusconi wants to make a lot of money by doing things which should be considered immoral and unaccpetable like lying or bribing people. A good way of making people accept this it to make them believe that it is in their interest that the system is like that, because in that way they are allowed too to do immoral things. And they foolishly believe it, without realising that in this way they are allowed to make 30 euros by cheating, and Berlusconi is allowed to make 4 billions by taking them away from the rest of the population. What people do not understand is that if they were living in a communist country like Cuba they would be just as poor as they are now, but rich people would be poorer, they would not pollute the environment and the world would be better.
Instead they are made believe, like Madame Bovary, that happiness lies in constant desire for improvement and they struggle to get more and more money, that they end up spending in things they don't need but that they are made to believe they need by advertisment. Like a big house. They indebt themselves like Madame Bovary and then they are not able to repay the debts (this is what happened here with subprimes). They do not realise that the system is made so that they cannot get as rich as rich people, because education is private and the access to important positions is limited to people who are already rich.
So people are constantly unhappy, trying always to make more and more money. And they want to keep the system like that, hoping that one day they'll dream will make true.
According to Orwell this also leads to being unable to feel any kind of pleasure, including sexual one. Because pleasure is not possible while being in constant desire.

Now I believe that this capitalist system is very wrong because it keeps poor people as poor as they would be in Cuba, but allows rich people to to things that are highly dangerous for the future of humanity. But people don't understand it and go on leading their unhappy lives, constantly striving for improvement.
This is probably because people are naturally cooperative when they listen and they naturally try to fool the others when they speak. So there will always be speakers who will make listeners go against thier own interests...What a foolish species are we!