George Sand, 19th-century fighter, but not with feminists
By Rose Pistuddi and Maël Thierry
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Portrait In 1848, activists would have liked to see the writer as a member of parliament. She didn't see it that way...
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Could there be a more beautiful symbol? A greater coup? In the spring of 1848, a crazy idea took root in the minds of women's rights activists: to present George Sand, the great woman of letters and a figure of female emancipation, as a candidate for deputy in the new Republic. But the writer, who had not been consulted, quickly dashed their hopes. She took up her pen and wrote to two progressive newspapers to put an end to this "joke" coming from a "female circle" she did not know, and which attributed to her "a ridiculous pretension" :
"I hope that no voter will want to waste their vote by taking the fancy to write my name on their ticket."
There will be no Sand candidacy, neither then nor ever. This episode sheds light on both the iconoclastic personality of the author of "The Devil's Pool" (1846) and the long march of feminists, then divided on the tactics to adopt. Is the battle being played out primarily in the domestic or social sphere, as the…
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