Gustave Flaubert’s first novel, Madame Bovary, which…

Gustave Flaubert’s first novel, Madame Bovary, which had taken him five years to write, had been serialized in the Revue de Paris in 1856.

The French government brings an action against the publisher and against the author on the charge of immorality, equating the novel’s publication with the dissemination of supposedly immoral and irreligious ideas, but both are acquitted.

Madame Bovary meets with a warm reception when it appears in book form in 1857.