Taking as its starting point a recent biography of Flaubert, this article seeks to show how his famous aesthetic of impersonality and 'art for art's sake' was closely integrated with a moral view of life developed very early in life in relation with other members of his family, such that it was imperative to 'be good' but all social and conventional manifestations of goodness, were false, superficial and boring. The article then tracks the dominance of this attitude in works as different as Madame Bovary and Salambo, suggesting that far from offering a universal prescription of 'how to write', Flaubert was doing no more than codifying his own particular position in French society at the time.