Setting

//Madame Bovary// was written against the **country landscape of 19th century France**, an era of social change in the unstable monarchy. The specific time frame of the novel - the 1830s - was called the "July Monarchy." King Louis-Phillipe had overthrown the previous regime in favor of a more liberal government based on a constitution.

Europe was in the midst of an industrial revolution, which fomented the growth of factories and warehouses. Society witnessed the **rise of a commercial middle class**, known as the bourgeois. Gustave Flaubert detested the ambitions of the bourgeois, and expressed his disdain for their kind in the character Monsieur Lheureux, a conman who leads Emma Bovary into financial ruin through a series of manipulative loans.