Gustave Flaubert

About Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) was a seminal French novelist whose rigorous, realistic style profoundly influenced modern literature. His masterpiece, *Madame Bovary*, is often cited as a landmark of realism for its detailed, objective portrayal of provincial life and its intense focus on psychological truth, contributing to his high ranking at #516 on MIT's Historical Popularity Index. Flaubert's commitment to *le mot juste* (the exact word) established new standards for prose composition across the literary world.

In the context of modern internet attention, Flaubert’s presence on Wikipedia is modest, recording approximately 207K annualized pageviews for 2025. This figure suggests an attention gap of roughly 1x relative to his historical importance, indicating that his influence is generally recognized by the online public but not overwhelmingly so. For comparison, his contemporary, Mark Twain, despite a similar HPI rank at #543, commands over eleven times the digital interest with 2.4M views in the same year.

While his attention is relatively stable, Flaubert’s 2025 performance shows a slight year-over-year decline of -5.5% in views, though his quarterly momentum between Q1 and Q3 was a flat +1%, suggesting his current cultural relevance online is holding steady.