George Sand

From Philosopedia

Sand, George (Amandine Aurore Lucile [Lucie] Dudevant, née Dupin, Baronne Dudevant) (2 July 1804 - 8 June 1876)

Sand came from an old and aristocratic family. Her father, Maurice Dupin, had been an officer in the Imperial Army. Upon his death at the age of thirty from a fall off his horse, her mother had to raise the family, all boys but Aurore, who was raised by her grandparents. At the age of fifteen, she was sent to a convent in Paris to finish her education, and the following year when her grandmother died she was left heiress of the Dupin estate at Nohant. There were not many eligible men of her own class in the vicinity, but she met and married Baron Dudevant, a young neighbor of twenty-seven and an officer in the Imperial Army. They separated when she was but twenty-four, she retained her estate, and when twenty-seven she and her little children went to Paris (possibly to be with Jules Sandeau, a young journalist she had once met).

At first trying to be a painter, then a writer, she chose to appear before the public under a masculine guise for, as explained by Underwood, “already she had learned that the world is more lenient in its criticism and judgment of a man than it is of a woman. The petty, superficial homage paid to youth and beauty in a woman did not deceive her.” She went to Paris in 1831 and worked for the Figaro; it was her first literary activity, together with Jules Sandeau. Their first common works they published with the pen name J. Sand. Later when she wrote her own articles, she agreed with the editor to call herself George Sand, because the name "Sand" became already well established by the Figaro customers.

From then on she also adopted the habit of speaking about herself in the masculine form. She became famous and notorious for wearing men's clothing and heavy boots, for smoking cigars, for having numerous lovers, and for keeping up a long-standing affair with actress Marie Dorval.

A romantic by nature, Sand shocked the Parisian literati and became its center. Her iconoclastic opinions and daring mode of life caused many rumors during the period in which she wrote eighty novels, all of which made the Vatican’s list of prohibited reading from 1840 to 1863.

Sand was a strong believer in women’s rights. Often wearing male attire, she was said to have had female as well as male lovers. Her notorious liaisons included Jules Sandeau, Alfred de Musset, Prosper Mérimée, and Frédéric Chopin, giving her the reputation of being a nymphomaniac. However, the philosopher she most admired - Pierre Lerous - was not her lover. Nor was the philosopher Rousseau, whose work had led to her dropping Catholicism - he had died in 1778. The Goncourts, “who believed genius to be exclusively a male possession, put it with a gloating coarseness: an autopsy of any famous female writer, Mme. Sand or Mme. de Staël, would reveal a clitoris growing enviously toward the size of a penis,” according to Julian Barnes in a review of Barbara Bray’s Flaubert-Sand: The Correspondence (The New York Review of Books, 10 June 1993). A restaurateur once told the Goncourts, “It’s a funny thing, but when she’s dressed as a man I call her Madame, and when she’s dressed as a woman I call her monsieur.”

Sand once wrote concerning the Prussian invasion of 1870 and the Commune of 1871 that the Communards “have ruined and will continue to ruin the republic, exactly as the priests have ruined Christianity.”

After Balzac, John M. Robertson notes, it is difficult to find a great French novelist who is not frankly rationalistic. He claims Sand will not be claimed by the orthodox. However, in her correspondence with Flaubert she has an open mind about the afterlife, writing, “When I’m no longer useful or agreeable to other people, I’d like to depart peacefully without a sigh, or at least with no more than a sign over the poor human race: it doesn’t amount to much, but I’m a part of it, and perhaps I don’t amount to much either.” As for her using the word “God,” she explained that “it is an avatar of which the meaning is often an enigma.”

In Flaubert-Sand: The Correspondence (1993), The Economist (5 June 1993) remarks of the letters to her literary friend in France,

• They had their differences. Flaubert was a vehemently reactionary anti-Christian, arguing always against the need to assist or promote the weak and meek. Sand was a true daughter of the French revolution; Flaubert, examining it with his head rather than his heart, saw dismal proof of human stupidity, the failing he excoriated in Bouvard et Pécuchet. He was appalled by modern life; Sand, although older, embraced it wholeheartedly. But life was, as Henry James shrewdly observed, her greatest talent; she was “a supreme case of the successful practice of life itself.” The English, who once had thought of her as an assailant of marriage and religion, eventually came to appreciate her work and genius, J. M. Wheeler observed.

Of religion, she wrote to a friend,

• If I make use of the expression ‘God,’ it is only to refer to one of the loveliest of hypotheses which the human mind has ever conceived, and which expresses only the complete good which we all seek. I appreciate and respect your faith (theism) but cannot share it with you. In the future, my friend, make up your mind to respect those who love the truth, even if they seek it in a light that you consider deceptive.

Upon her death and in accordance with her wishes, no religious ceremonies were performed, according to Sara A. Underwood, “save a short prayer, which was insisted upon by the Catholic priest of the diocese, as essential to his permission to allow the body to be buried in consecrated ground."

Victor Hugo delivered the funeral oration over her grave, in the course of which he thus eulogized her:

• She is the one great woman in this century whose mission it was to finish the French Revolution and commence the revolution of Humanity. Equality of the sexes being a branch of the equality of men, a great woman was necessary. It was for a woman to prove that her mind might possess all gifts, without losing a particle of her angelic nature - might at once be strong and gentle. George Sand was that woman. She is one of the glories of our age and country. She had a great heart like Barbes, a great mind like Balzac, and a great soul like Lamartine. She was good, and accordingly she had detractors, but the insults to her were of that kind which posterity will count as glories.

Upon her death Turgenev wrote to Flaubert, “What a good man she was, and what a kind woman.” Flaubert had addressed her as “chere maître.”

Plauchat, in his Galerie Contemporaine, had said that Sand believed in God, but “certainly not in the vengeful and merciless God of the orthodox.” Her last work was a critical notice of Renan’s “Dialogues et Fragments Philosophiques” in Le Temps only a month before her decease. Toward the end of May she took to her bed, suffering from internal paralysis, from which she never rose again. Up until the day of her death she remained lucid, one of the last directions being, “Ne touchez pas à la verdure,” which her children understood to mean that she wished that the tree in the village cemetery where she was soon to be buried should not be disturbed. On 8 June, at nine in the morning, George William Foote reported, she “expired in calmness and serenity.”

{BDF; CE; FO; PUT; RE; SAU; TRI; TYD}