The Family Idiot (originally published in French in three volumes in 1971–72) is a study of Gustave Flaubert (1821–80). It was published in a fine translation by Carol Cosman, in five volumes, between 1981 and 1994. The Sartre scholar Joseph S. Catalano has produced a skilful, beautifully edited abridgment of this gargantuan opus.

Jean-Paul Sartre had a lifelong obsession with Flaubert. The reason for this lies in the fact that his predecessor’s purported concern with Form alone, with the perfection of his style, constitutes a flagrant challenge to Sartre’s belief that art is necessary action in the real world. Sartre having chosen to study a writer as different from himself as possible, his antipathy became informed, as he tells us in his preface, by a degree of empathy. His ambivalent feelings towards his subject are to be explained by the fact that Flaubert’s ironic detachment brings into sharp relief Sartre’s own anxieties and frustrations as a bourgeois writer.