by Lauren Elkin
An untold number of women fought in the French Revolution in drag, fighting alongside their husbands, lovers and brothers, dressed like them, as male soldiers. But even in skirts, women have had a subversive power in French history, and that power has doubled when they’ve been on foot. The Revolution, for instance, truly kicked off when a mob of women marched on Versailles. The storming of the Bastille was more symbolic than anything else; only seven prisoners had been freed, including a couple of forgers and ‘madmen’. But the Women’s March on Versailles in October of 1789 persuaded the king and his family to return with the crowd to Paris, where they were imprisoned in the Tuileries Palace. The women had raided the armoury, taking all the weapons they could carry, and as they brandished them at the Palace gates, I’m sure they were terrifying.
Women had long been associated with armies, following them from camp to camp, working as washerwomen, servants and nurses, as canteen-keepers, as wives and mistresses, and, at the bottom of the food chain, earning no one’s respect, as prostitutes, providing physical comfort to the soldiers. Those who did fight did so with guns and cannon, on foot and on horseback; they wanted to display valour, and prove their worth on equal terms to their menfolk. They did not want to stay at home, defending the hearth and maintaining the distinction that allocated men to the public sphere and women to the private.
French women saw the Revolution as a chance to build the kind of world they wanted, and to demand their own political rights within it.
They were welcomed, in the beginning. Some were even awarded the Légion d’honneur. But as time went on, for whatever reason – perhaps because of the sexual promiscuity of women associated with armies – they were accused of committing fraud. The fates of Olympe de Gouges, author of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen (1791), and Madame Roland are a reminder of what the Jacobins did to women who overstepped the mark.
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In 1831, years before she would militate for human rights, all Sand wanted was to be independent. The city played an important role in this. More immediate was the question of survival. To make money, as she wrote to Boucoiran, she had ‘launched herself on the tumultuous seas of literature’ writing for Le Figaro, which was back then an opposition newspaper, and quite a small outfit with very few subscribers. Nevertheless, they paid well enough for Aurore to make a modest living, and the pieces she wrote for them in which she was quite critical of the government quickly won her fame. With Jules she wrote for La Revue de Paris, and co-authored a novel entitled Rose et Blanche under the pen name ‘J. Sand’. It was a great success, and their editor wanted more. But Aurore wanted to strike out on her own. She left their partnership (though not Jules himself until 1833), and took their pen name for her own. For a first name she opted for Georges, a common name in her native province of Berry, anglicising it, perhaps in homage to the English nuns who had taught her as a girl at her convent school. In changing her name, Sand made a ‘new marriage’ between ‘the young apprentice poet that I was and the muse who consoled me for my efforts’, asking ‘What is a name in our revolutioned and revolutionary world?’22 It was a name she forged for herself, not one that belonged to her husband or father, or even her collaborator.
Once launched, Sand became famous almost overnight. Her first novel, Indiana, was published in 1832, and the reviews were stunning. At least, Sand was stunned – by the great gasp of celebrity they brought with them, and by their vehemence in either praising or denouncing the political agenda the novel contained. She protested – perhaps disingenuously – that she had had no agenda other than to tell a story that would be true to its subject. More than one reader was convinced it had been written by a man, while another thought it evinced a ‘spirited voluptuousness’ that suggested it had been written by both a woman and a man: ‘that a young man’s hand must have tightened the strong, vulgar tissues, and that a woman’s hand embroidered onto it silk and gold flowers’.23
The novel’s premise bears a resemblance to Sand’s own situation, before she set out for Paris. Indiana is a ‘young Creole’, born on the Île Bourbon (what is now Réunion Island) and raised outside of French society, a fact which is frequently offered to explain her extremely naive behaviour: in line with contemporary Romantic ideals, Indiana is presented as more innocent because of her far-flung upbringing. She is unhappily married to a colonel, who is some years older than her, and lives with him outside Paris, where she is loved in silence by Ralph, a sort of cousin, also from Réunion, who raised her when she was abandoned as a child. When she meets Raymon she is therefore in an ideal situation to fall madly in love with him, risking her reputation (a bit like a Romantic-era Jean Rhys character) and making perilous journeys across the sea from France to Réunion to be with him. Of course he proves faithless (she later learns he has had an affair with her lady’s maid Noun, who drowns herself when he forsakes her for Indiana), and he marries someone else. Indiana has a breakdown that coincides with the July Revolution and ends up wandering the streets of Paris, her hair shorn off, her identity papers gone. From there on it’s a strange narrative in which Ralph saves Indiana from drowning herself in the Seine only to confess his love and engage her in a suicide pact to throw themselves from a cliff in Réunion. The epilogue finds them alive and well and living in a hut in some kind of mystical commune à deux.
Readers saw in the novel a condemnation of marriage. Sand demurred, explaining in subsequent forewords that she had no intention of unseating society. ‘Some people chose to see in the book a deliberate argument against marriage,’ she wrote in her 1852 preface. ‘I was not so ambitious, and I was surprised to the last degree at all the fine things that the critics found to say concerning my subversive purposes.’24 This was perhaps protesting too much: the word joug, or yoke, appears some twenty times in the text.
It wasn’t marriage itself, though, that Sand took aim at, but the received notions of morality held by her society at large. The ending of the novel demonstrates what Sand had in mind: a balance, an equilibrium, like Indiana and Ralph perched precariously in their hut on the side of a volcano. Sand was trying to articulate a truer, purer code of ethics than that prescribed by her times. Key to this was the notion of free will, and she fought for women and men to freely exert it in their own lives. ‘We are born with instincts in our blood that would govern us with a terrible fatefulness if not for the free will which is accorded to each of us by divine justice,’ she wrote.25 Even her pastoral novels (romans champêtres) of the Berry, François le Champi and La Petite Fadette, which both seem like edifying, preceptive novels, are case studies of a kind, in which Sand could explore her ideas about living in harmony with others and with her conscience.
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Entire movements of history are born of daily revolutions. The year 1830 saw the workers and students band together on the barricades to overthrow tyranny. What they got was more absolutist government, just from a different family. In 1832, the year after Sand moved to Paris, the students took to the barricades again, trying to whip up support to try to topple the monarchy for good. They were unsuccessful, and Sand witnessed the tragic denouement from her flat overlooking the Place Saint-Michel.26
She and her daughter were alone in Paris. The cholera epidemic was at its worst, and they were afraid to leave the city – it was said to be more dangerous than staying – and in any case, if they were carrying the infection, Sand didn’t want to bring it to Nohant. In the middle of this tense moment, the conflict got under way in the narrow streets around the Saint-Merry church in the centre of Paris, on the Right Bank: the barricades went up in the rue Saint-Martin near the corner of the rue Aubry-le-Boucher and the rue Maubuée, which ran through what is now the Place Beaubourg and the Centre Pompidou. The rebels held off assaults from the National Guard from the south and from the north. The leader of the Saint-Merry resistance unit, Charles Jeanne, recounted in a letter to his sister: ‘we let them get within pistol reach without returning the fire they showered on u
s, and then all at once we welcomed them with [gunfire and] cries of Vive la république! and they stopped short, unsure what to do next. They hesitated long and hard and then a new round of fire went off from the barricades and the open windows and totally cleared out their ranks. They were, then, no longer a disciplined military corps but a swarm of Cossacks in total disarray.’27
It is the condition of the historian to be constantly picturing the past, thrilled and obsessed by it, without for one moment wanting to be a part of it. Walking in the city, looking for visible clues to its history, I can’t say I regret not having actually been a nineteenth-century Frenchwoman. It isn’t nostalgia I feel, or longing for anything more ‘authentic’. It would have been terrifying to live through Sand’s century. It is unsettling enough to walk past soldiers in fatigues holding machine guns, as all of us in Paris have done since the Charlie Hebdo attacks. The past feels as distant as another planet, even when I’m standing on its terrain. What I feel is a desire for something to align, some connection to complete, that would make their world dissolve into ours.
Sand and her daughter were playing not far away, in the Jardin de Luxembourg, when Sand realised that a line of troops was on the move from each side of the park. They left, trying to get home by the side streets, avoiding the ‘mobs of curious on-lookers who, after having been cordoned off and interrogated, were rushing about and crushing each other in a sudden panic’. Sand understood they would be safest if they were inside and rushed her daughter along ‘without stopping to see what was happening, having never yet seen street warfare, and having no idea what I was about to see: the blood lust that takes hold of the soldier and which makes him, seized as he is by fear of surprise, the deadliest enemy you could encounter in battle’.28 She muses over how unsurprising this is, given that, in the history of urban violence, most people have had no idea what is happening very close by, and attack out of fear that they will be attacked. The rumour of violence spreads ‘through a million delirious fictions’.
Where once Sand found the freedom she craved in the street, she now found that freedom taken away by the zeal of the mob, but even though she retreated to her tiny flat above the Place Saint-Michel, she was not fully separate from the spectacle of insurrection. Outside, the streets were taken over by angry Parisians and terrified, bloodthirsty soldiers, but the horrors of street warfare threatened to penetrate Sand’s home. She threw a mattress against the window to block stray bullets from entering, and comforted her daughter, who was sick with fear. ‘I told her the people outside were bat-hunting, as she had seen her father and uncle do at Nohant, and managed to calm her and put her to bed in the midst of the gunfire.’ She spent part of the night, she writes, on the balcony, trying to make out in the shadows what was happening below. (Paris was not yet the City of Light; gas lamps were only very slowly being installed in the streets in the early 1830s.)
This is one of the most exciting passages in the autobiography. I want to be appalled, I want to side with Sand. I’m there with her, terrified in her garret, but I’m here in my own as well, titillated and sheepish. It’s incredible to read her account, to reflect on how little she knew – as she says – about what was going on just around the corner from her. As difficult as it is to conceive of events happening on the other side of the world, it’s just as hard to comprehend what is happening in your backyard. Or even in front of your own eyes, as I struggled to do on 11 September 2001, watching from one mile uptown as the World Trade Center towers collapsed. Sand’s account of the fighting is quite different; she doesn’t see any of it, for one thing, and her culture had no conception of the total image saturation of our own. But she did grasp that in times of violence, spectacle replaces reality.
During the night, seventeen rebels took over the barricade on the Hôtel-dieu Bridge. During the night, the National Guard launched a surprise attack. ‘Fifteen of these unfortunates,’ wrote Louis Blanc, ‘were cut into pieces and thrown into the Seine. Two were caught in the nearby streets and had their throats slit.’29 Sand herself did not witness this ‘awful scene, which took place hidden in the folds of the night’, but she reported hearing ‘the furious clamouring and the formidable roaring, then a deathly silence settled over the sleeping city, depleted from the fear’.
In the morning, the streets were silent. The bridges were guarded, as well as the entrances to nearby streets, and traffic did not circulate. ‘The quais,’ she noted, ‘stretching long and empty in the bright sunlight took on the aspect of a dead city, as if the cholera had borne away its very last inhabitant.’ The only movement was from the swallows skimming the surface of the water, ‘with such anxious rapidity, as if this unusual calm had frightened them’. There was no sound, except for the ‘bitter cry’ of the birds circling around the towers of Notre-Dame. The captive populace of Paris went to their windows and onto the rooftops to see if they could catch a glimpse of what was taking place. And then the ‘sinister’ noise began again:
the firing squads carrying out their justice. Sitting on the balcony, and taking care to keep Solange occupied in her bedroom to keep her from looking outside, I could count every assault and retort. And then the cannon thundered.
Seeing the bridge congested with litters returning from the fighting, leaving behind a trail of blood, I thought the insurrection was still going strong. But its strikes were weakening … Soon silence returned, and the people came down from their roofs onto the street. The house porters, expressive caricatures of fearful home-owners, cried: It’s over! And the conquerors, who had done nothing but watch, surged forth a tumult. The king walked on the quais. The bourgeoisie from city and country fraternised on every corner of the street. The troops were dignified and serious. They had believed, for a moment, that a second July Revolution was at hand.
The memory of that night would stay with Sand for the rest of her life. For several days, she wrote, the Quai Saint-Michel was stained with blood. For two weeks she could barely eat, and for a long time afterward, she could not eat meat, after seeing the streets run red with blood, the ‘hideous masonry’ of cadavers piled up in front of windows, and after breathing the ‘fetid’ odour of butchery which had risen, ‘acrid and hot, to awaken me, the 6th and 7th of June, in the middle of the late exhales of spring’.
What was it all for? The bloodshed of June 1832 provoked no change in regime: its expression of desperation went unheeded. The monarchy went on with its business. Disgusted with the city, Sand retreated to Nohant and wrote Valentine, about a young aristocratic woman in love with a penniless farmer, and a return to Sand’s major themes during that period: the restrictions of marriage for women, and the ways in which education would broaden their horizons and enable them to make better choices for themselves.
The blood has long been scrubbed from the Place Saint-Michel; any trace of it has disappeared beneath new layers of pavement. And I wonder: how many of those kids who congregate there on a Friday night, gabbing on their cell phones, cruising each other, flirting or failing while groups of teen boys break-dance and Pakistani men throw neon LED toys high, high up in the air, that never seem to come down, how many of them know what happened where they’re standing, that once upon a time, 180 years ago, young men fell there, as they stood up to a monarch, and that George Sand looked down on them from her balcony, trying to make out their sacrifice in the shadows.
the quickest would be to walk across the river to Châtelet and take the line 1 to Gare de Lyon but the nicer way is to walk along the quay for half an hour, stopping to browse in the bookstalls along the way, then to cross the river, it’s not far, then to get the night train, though these days you can catch a flight from Orly which you can also reach from Châtelet
VENICE
OBEDIENCE
I see myself at the labyrinth’s gate, ready to get lost in this city and this story. Submissive.
– Sophie Calle, Suite Vénitienne
For a couple of years, instead of writing my PhD thesis, I wrote a novel about Venice.
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I was reading Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers, set in a noir, uncanny, unnamed city of canals and subterfuge, and it loosened something in my mind, or maybe it planted something, I’m not sure. Reading McEwan I felt compelled by something I didn’t understand to write a story about love, and loss, and being lost, and to set it in Venice. Now I look back and think that unconscious thing had recognised Venice as a shadowy double for Paris, and chosen it as a way to talk about trying to make a life for myself in a place where I knew no one and where I had no real reason to be. Moving by myself to a new country seemed as absurd as building a home on the sea. As the novel began to take shape, I called it Floating Cities.
Some novelists – Jeanette Winterson, for example – have written about Venice without visiting the city, and manage to conjure it up through sheer force of imagination. But I need to see things for myself. I didn’t want to invent Venice, I wanted to capture something of how it was in reality, not only in our cultural imaginary. In writing about it, I wanted to restore placeness to Venice.
I had visited Venice several times as a tourist, and done some basic reconnaissance, but it wasn’t enough; I didn’t feel I could write about life there with any authority. I decided to spend a month there, studying Italian at the Istituto Veneziana and taking notes on daily life in the city. This required learning as much as I could in advance, and anticipating what I might want to know that I wouldn’t be able to find out unless I were there. Also, I was still working out the plot, and I hoped Venice would guide me, that in its streets the story would find its way.
The main character was a student, like me, but in art history, specialising in the early Renaissance. I’d always wanted to be an art historian, and this was my chance, sort of. I named her Catherine, after my Italian great-grandmother, and after the patron saint of unmarried girls, teachers and scholars. Her research would be on the history of the book. But she would be teaching a basic art-history course to students abroad, so I needed to know how to talk about palazzo facades, the mosaics of San Marco, the paintings in the Accademia. I wanted to learn the things that I had learned in Paris which I knew marked the difference between someone who has lived there and someone who has only passed through. And because the book had a hidden synagogue at the heart of it, I had to find a place to put one, in a city with no basements.
