“The idiot in the family. Gustave Flaubert from 1821 to 1857" is the last fundamental work of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) and a kind of sum of his philosophical, socio-historical and literary thought. “What can you know about a person today?” Using the specific example of Gustave Flaubert, the author tries to answer this simple and vast question with this difficult-to-define genre and unprecedented in scope, surpassing in quantity (almost 3,000 pages of neat text) and quality everything he had created previously, this “unfamiliar masterpiece.” This volume includes a translation of the first part of the work. An authoritarian father, a caring but cold mother, an older brother, the Flaubert family relationships and the social structures of France during the Restoration and the July Monarchy - based on the testimony of contemporaries, Gustave's youthful works and his correspondence, the author examines how all this determined pathetic sensuality and a passive "constitution" » child.