What makes Sentimental Education interesting is the description of every day events.  Well, of the bourgeoisie anyway.  Flaubert is silent on the lower classes and what their lives were like.  But he gives us a transparent image of daily life of the bourgeoisie with passages such as the newspaper description.  Describing Hussonnet’s Flambard, “The leading article was invariably devoted to taking apart some distinguished man.  After that came some society gossip and some scandals.  Then there were some wry observations about the Odéon Carpentras, fish-breeding, and prisoners under sentence of death…” “In the third column a chronicle of the arts, in the form of anecdotes or advice, gave some tailor’s announcements, together with accounts of evening parties, advertisements of auctions, and analysis of artistic productions, writing in the same strain about a volume of verse and a pair of boots.” (p.261)  We see what they were reading and talking about.

Another example is the duel. We are shown the seriousness of offenses, how they were handled and the related code of honor, the role of the seconds, who decides how they will be resolved, and what weapons will be used.  Flaubert alludes to whether or not Frédéric has a right to duel with Cicy because he is a member of the aristocracy and only members of the same social standing have the “right” to fight him.  It provides an insight to the prevailing class ideology and how this ideology affects more than economics.

Flaubert describes the dinner parties at the Dambreuse’s, what the women and men discussed, and what coffee table books the high society people were flipping through (the Revue des Deux Mondes, Imitation and Almanach de Gotha, a literature, philosophy, political and science publication, a spiritual guide, and a genealogy of royal families).  In Frederic’s rant we are told that the subject and ideologies of the revolution were taboo to the upper class, as it was economically threatening. 

The horse race passage describes how the races were executed and the scenes of the spectators.  We are shown how the spectators interacted with other social classes and within their own.  And there is the description of the Champs d’Élysées as everyone was leaving the races, the rows of carriages, horses, and people mixing with the rain, light and sky.  This was a common event, going home from the race, but because it was something meaningless and ordinary, it felt like the reader was seeing real, instead of staged and produced.

All of these things and many others give a glimpse into the society of someone like Frédéric in the first half of the nineteenth century.  It provides an interesting comparison to our present day society.  It also helps make the historical events of that time more constituent.  Instead of just seeing history as an end event and focusing on what the result was, it is also interesting to see how the changes occurred, the many elements involved that resulted in a change, and how it affected the individual.  The readers are shown throughout the text that the ideas and spirit of the Revolution were not a single ideology, or a collective rising up against the established government as a solitary force, but an opposition of many, extremely varied opinions also fighting amongst themselves.