![]() ![]() As Sand stated in a 1842 letter, novels were a means "to inspire doubt about the lie that is believed, to raise a hue and cry about a truth that is forgotten" (p. The eighteenth-century story is designed to illuminate the darkness of the post-revolutionary restoration in the nineteenth. This struggle unites Christ's disciples with an extraordinary cast of religious and political dissidents all the way to 1789 and beyond to create a single and, for Sand, immortal, life force of freedom. The novel is a gothic vehicle for Sand to put forth revolutionary arguments about society, family, and marriage and to fan the flame of primitive Christian republicanism, a subterranean smoldering fire that, in Sand's view, has fueled the struggle against despotism and dogmatism for nearly two thousand years. Gretchen van Slyke has produced a new, welcome translation of George Sand's The Countess von Rudolstadt, the stand-alone sequel to Consuelo, both of which were serialized between February 1842 and February 1844 in La Revue Indépendante, which Sand founded with Pierre Leroux, the radical French philosopher. Reviewed by Peter Fritzsche (Department of History, University of Illinois) ![]() ![]() Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. ![]()
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