2021 will mark the bicentenary of the writer’s birth. We propose to create a public monument to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Flaubert’s birth in Rouen. The proposal is to engrave his famous text onto a permanent ceramic or glass wall in Rouen.

Flaubert’s literary and philosophical fight against stupidity represents one of the most constant and current aspects of his work, especially in the era of social networks which serve as unprecedented resonance box for all forms of idiocy, prejudices, ready-made ideas, stereotypes, rumors, hypocrisies and defamation which circulate daily in opinion.
A visual presentation of the Dictionary of Accepted Ideas will, therefore, constitute a prominent project to celebrate this bicentenary in a way that is both literally exemplary and culturally beneficial.

The project will include selecting one hundred current quotes (from the Dictionary of received ideas, Bouvard and Pécuchet, L’Education sentimentale, etc.) and inscribe them in public space, without comment, leaving the passing by to take note of it, to be astonished and to think about it, wondering for example if it did not happen to him to think or to say himself similar nonsense.
It would be a kind of conceptual installation, in the spirit of Brecht’s distancing, which will force the reader to wonder who is talking to him and what we are talking to him about until he understands that people are talking to him about himself, about language and universal nonsense.

The project will be built in a subway station or onto a wall in a street in the city of Rouen or Paris.

Françoise Schein
Pierre-Marc de Biasi
Abir Belaid

Pierre-Marc de Biasi, spécialiste de Flaubert
Esam- Ecole Supérieure des Arts et Média de Caen
Abir Belaid, professeur de Design
Françoise Schein, professeur d’art
Les étudiants du département de design de l’Esam

Ville de Rouen
Ville de Paris