SOURCE: Durr, Volker. “Introduction” and “An Allegory of Bonapartism.” In Flaubert's Salammbô: The Ancient Orient as a Political Allegory of Nineteenth-Century France, pp. 1-9, 87-108. New York: Peter Lang, 2002.

In the following excerpt, Durr dissects the critical consensus regarding Salammbô, contending that most readings of the work are flawed. Durr also illustrates the ways in which Flaubert subtly draws comparisons between the Carthage of the book and the Napoleonic France in which he lived.

Salammbô, Flaubert's only historical novel, was long discreetly ignored by literary criticism but in more recent book-length studies of his oeuvre a number of scholars sought to make amends for past neglect.¹ The same claim can be made by the authors of a host of articles, especially since the early 1970s. Many of them evidently took their cue from R. J. Sherrington's observation that “we have yet to see an adequate treatment of it...