In Les Visions de la nuit dans les campagnes (1851–1853), essays on superstitions in rural France, George Sand digresses from her description of fantastic tales of her native Berry region in order to address a new government initiative to collect the nation’s folk songs: ‘From this morning’s newspaper’, she writes, ‘we learn that the Minister of Public Instruction is going to have published an anthology of France’s folk songs. This is a very good idea, the implementation of which has become necessary but, we fear, rather late’.Footnote ¹ Indeed, on 13 September 1852, Hippolyte Fortoul, the French Minister of Public Instruction under Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, future Napoléon III, announced the official decree for the government-organized project in the Ministry’s Bulletin du Comité de la langue, de l’histoire et des arts de la France, complete with detailed instructions for the collection of the ‘Poésies populaires de la France’.Footnote ² George Sand, by then a prolific author and also an avid collector of Berrichon folk songs, reacted almost immediately with a word of caution, lest the collection methods prove inadequate. An amateur musician herself, Sand worked with trained musicians to transcribe local songs she heard near her home in Nohant and, as she shows in her correspondence, she was aware of some of the specific challenges of transcribing folk music. Her response to Fortoul’s decree presents certain ambivalence towards the collection project that is grounded, therefore, in her own experience with music ethnography: on the one hand, she largely welcomes the project as both necessary and well overdue; on the other hand, Sand criticizes what she suspects would be a rushed and unconscientious approach to constructing an archive.

George SandFootnote ³ (1804–1876), both remembered, infamously, for her penchant for cigars, tuxedoes and amorous relationships and cherished as ‘La Bonne Dame de Nohant’, the writer of children’s stories, was a prolific novelist, playwright and journalist who was read widely during her time. She was also a utopian socialist and a proto-feminist who championed the cause of the ‘people’ and contested institutional practices that limited the rights of women and the poor. In Histoire de ma vie, she describes her childhood as marked by division, including within the art of music. At the behest of her aristocratic grandmother, she received a classical musical education in the art music of Durante, Pergolesi and Gluck, and she could play piano, harpsichord and guitar, but Sand expressed greater affinity for folk songs, especially the children’s songs and lullabies that her lower-class mother, a child of the ‘people’, sang to her.Footnote ⁴ Sand’s affinity for folk music extended from songs of Berry to cantatas and boleros from her childhood sojourn in Spain and, later, to the folk songs of Majorca and Italy, as well as to songs by Franz Liszt, Frederic Chopin and Pauline Garcia Viardot. In her regional novels from the 1840s and 1850s, Sand marks a clear privileging of folk music over art music, at the same time as she begins to privilege the social body or the community over the individual artistic genius, yet her interest in community and traditional cultural practices falls decidedly outside and against the rubric of nationalism that structured the government’s collection project.

A full decade prior to the French government’s announcement of their folk music anthology project, Sand’s grand art novel, Consuelo; La Comtesse de Rudolstadt (1842–1844), dramatized nineteenth-century discourses of nationalism in part through the opposition of art music and folk music. The novel’s eponymous heroine must navigate between the pro-Catholic, pro-Italian rhetoric of her music teacher, Nicola Porpora,Footnote ⁵ who criticizes German compositional practices, and the pro-Protestant, pro-Bohemian rhetoric of her future husband, Albert Rudolstadt, who laments Austrian subjugation of Bohemia and collects ancient hymns that he believes could support a revival of Bohemian national culture. Supporting Consuelo’s shift towards folk music, the narrator contends that only traditional music has the ability to arouse ‘in as sublime a way human sentiment in the inmost heart of man’: ‘No other art paints to the eyes of the soul the splendours of nature, the delights of contemplation, the character of nations, the tumult of their passions and the languor of their sufferings … [all] without falling into the childish pursuit of mere effects of sound, or into a narrow imitation of real noises’.Footnote ⁶ Ultimately, Consuelo – and Albert to a degree – will reject individuating, nationalistic agendas in favour of a more cosmopolitan approach to music and to society as a whole.

Later, as Sand narrowed her focus from the vast utopian reaches of Consuelo and La Comtesse de Rudolstadt, to the small settings of her subsequent regional novels, she insisted on the importance of recognizing that, within a single nation, there is a rich culture of traditional music that varies from region to region. For example, she expressed an explicit wish that someone would publish a collection of local, Berrichon work songs, the likes of which she considered as no less than sacred.Footnote ⁷ On 12 September 1844, Sand described this wish in a letter to her friend, French poet Charles Poncy:

Yet, as much as she argues for the value of such a collection of folk songs, Sand also recognizes the disdain of the ‘enlightened classes’ who, she asserts, have forgotten the poetry and songs from France’s provinces, including fantastic or burlesque poetry rejected by ‘our French literature … as unworthy of human reason and of philosophic dignity’.Footnote ⁹ As folk song collector Hersart de la Villemarqué claimed in his preface to the Barzaz Breiz: Chants populaires de la Bretagne (1839), the history of regional tales and songs is part of the nation’s history: ‘France is just as Celtic in heart’, he wrote, ‘as Armorica today is French under the shared flag’.Footnote ¹⁰ By the time of Fortoul’s decree, Brittany indeed had Villemarqué to thank for collecting their folk songs, as Sand herself notes,Footnote ¹¹ and Normandy had Amélie Bosquet to thank for collecting their legends and folk tales.Footnote ¹² However, Sand contends, Berry still lacked such a poet/musician, even though ‘the imagination of [the Berrichon] peasants [was] no less rich than that of the Germans’.Footnote ¹³ Given the diversity of customs from the variety of France’s provinces, a well-organized, statewide collection project could provide a critical contribution to a more complete portrayal and expression of the nation than could any individual poet, provided it indeed privileged a narrative of rich diversity.

However, while Sand recognizes that only the government has the means to undertake a project of this scope, she also doubts their capacity to do the project justice. As such, her response in Les Visions de la nuit dans les campagnes contains an explicit critique of the proposed methodology: ‘In order to complete this research, it would be necessary to send to each province a competent person charged solely with this task. … There will be no lack of commentators, but the true discoveries will be extremely rare or incomplete if one does not proceed conscientiously and by entirely specialized research’.Footnote ¹⁴ Sand’s call for specialized research pertains especially to the collection of music, which, given the space of about three pages in the 63 pages of instructions for the collection of the ‘Poésies populaires de la France’, receives much less attention in the decree than does the collection of the lyrics. Even when one committee member, M. Vincent, did insist on the importance of collecting the music, he hedged his demand: ‘The lyrics are but only one part of any song. It is therefore very much to be desired that, when these tunes will already be sufficiently familiar, the correspondents take the care to indicate the air of the songs when they communicate the lyrics; or even, when they are not, to attach the music notes or simple plainsong to their communication of the lyrics’.Footnote ¹⁵ Already in 1839, in the Barzaz Breiz, Villemarqué had argued that, in authentic ‘popular’ poetry, the union of the music and the words is ‘so intimate that if the air of the song were to disappear, the lyrics would disappear as well’.Footnote ¹⁶ However, in 1852, Sand still needed to insist that the music has always been more neglected by the government than the literature: ‘[This music] does not have any archives; how many works of art of unknown masters have perished and will perish every day! Not to mention the works of art of the illustrious masters that have never surfaced, and that will disappear completely from a lack of ministerial initiative!’Footnote ¹⁷ Thus, the administrative decree, that the collectors ‘write the music as [they] hear it sung’ in spite of their modern musical training,Footnote ¹⁸ rings in the ear of the novelist as rife with methodological shortcomings. Moreover, Sand hesitated at any idea of a collection that would privilege a cohesive narrative of an authentic, French national musical heritage at the expense of the diversity of regional dialects and musical traditions.

The impulse in Europe to collect artefacts that could ground modern civilization in ancient cultures emerged during the rise of nationalism in the eighteenth century, through the transparently patriotic writings of Johann Gottfried Herder, a seminal figure in the development of comparative philology for his argument that man’s cultural expression is shaped by and shapes his environment or ‘the conditions wherein he lived’.Footnote ¹⁹ To advance his project of cultivating a national German tradition, Herder collected poetry and songs by the German Volk – that is, by that part of the national body he envisioned as ‘working in harmony with the national soul’.Footnote ²⁰ Herder admired the seemingly impromptu nature of the Ossian poems, praising these ‘remains of that ancient world’ as precious ‘living monuments’ that should inspire the Germans to go out in search of their own local folk songs.Footnote ²¹ Herder’s folk song project stimulated a larger movement of collection that includes Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano’s publication of The Boy’s Magic Horn in 1806 and the Grimm Brothers’ Childrens’ and Household Tales in 1812.

In France, the politics of folk song collection for the production of a distinct, cultural history of the nation emerged in the nineteenth century, with short-lived, imperial surges of interest in the French peasantry: the first at the dawn of the First French Empire, with the establishment of the Celtic Academy on the heels of the rampant spread of Ossian fever throughout Europe, and the second on the eve of the Second French Empire, with Fortoul’s decree. The Celtic Academy, formed in 1804, was in charge of researching the roots of French civilization in Gallic artefacts, including traditional poetry, with the interest in grounding the glory of France in its own ancient heritage rather than in that of Ancient Rome or Greece, for example. According to one of the founders of the Celtic Academy, Eloi Johanneau, the academy’s task was to take what the educated population viewed as barbarisms – the nation’s traditional customs and popular beliefs – and refigure them as ‘precious vestiges of the wisdoms of their ancient legislators’.Footnote ²² To complete the task, the Celtic Academy thus initiated an urgent mission to ‘rediscover the Celtic language in ancient authors and monuments, in the two dialects of this language that still exist, Breton and Welsh, and even in all of the popular dialects, creoles and jargons of the French Empire’.Footnote ²³ However, as French anthropologist Nicole Belmont argues, the enthusiasm for traditional customs as valuable objects of study becomes possible only by situating them at a distance, ‘not in geographic space as was possible for the “savages” studied by the voyagers and the missionaries, but in time, in order to draw them back into a long ago history, if not into a pre-history’.Footnote ²⁴ In other words, such refiguring did not value traditional practices as living culture within the contemporary culture to which the Academy’s members belonged. Thus, despite the stated urgency, momentum for this project was short lived, particularly as contempt for what are seen as archaic regional cultural practices resurfaces among the educated elites.

Such contempt on the part of the Celtic Academy’s members played a part in the renaming of the body, in 1814, to The Society of the Antiquaries of France. The name change both reflects the members’ doubt that France’s dialects and customs have Celtic origins in the first placeFootnote ²⁵ and, as Belmont signals, highlights their disdain for the persistence of archaic practices in contemporary culture, whether in language, music, dance or dress.Footnote ²⁶ The Society members’ condescension towards ‘absurd’ or ‘bizarre’ beliefs and customs, which they saw as evidence of a credulous and superstitious population rather than of an ancient people at the height of its civilization, harkens back prior to the advent of the Celtic Academy. Belmont writes that, prior to the formation of the Celtic Academy, only the ‘curious’ or the ‘theologians’ put any effort into cataloguing traditional customs, and then only in order to ‘denounce them either as oddities or as superstitions’.Footnote ²⁷ The disdain later expressed in the Mémoires de la Société royale des Antiquaires de France thus reads as an admission of an ever-present, if briefly repressed, contempt for the people and practices of rural France, a contempt that, Belmont argues, became the government’s primary obstacle to completing the Celtic Academy’s original inventory project.

In 1845, after a period of decline in official interest in studying archaic contemporary cultural practices – as opposed, for example, to ruins or monuments – Minister of Public Instruction Narcisse-Achille de Salvandy’s education reform policies had, in part, the effect of granting official recognition of ‘popular’ or folk poetry and songs as part of the national heritage. Laurence Berthou-Bécam and Didier Bécam argue, however, that the aim of Salvandy’s ‘Commission for the Religious and Historical Songs of France’, a national competition for ancient as well as contemporary songs, was not the song collection itself but the use of the carefully selected collection as educational material for school children.Footnote ²⁸ While the French Revolution of 1848 brought an end to both Salvandy’s public career and education reform work, Fortoul’s 1852 decree, under the rule of Louis-Napoléon, the new ‘Prince-President’, marked a resurgence of France’s move to establish its ancient roots.

‘Rather late’ indeed, to recall Sand’s words, Fortoul’s order to collect the nation’s folk songs thus came nearly 50 years after the creation of The Celtic Academy and more than 60 years after the creation of The French National Archives in 1790. Anne-Marie Thiesse writes that Fortoul ‘ha[d] to prove that France, for having fallen behind on the matter of collecting folk songs, [was] nevertheless the preeminent nation, that which “more than any other” had precious remainders of its national heritage’.Footnote ²⁹ Moreover, as Jane Fulcher indicates, the future Emperor, whose Presidential election the peasants had largely supported, was ‘deeply aware of the symbolism and political ministrations of culture [and] found it appropriate to inaugurate his reign by propagating such popular art’ as that of the people ‘supposed conservatives [and] thought to embody his communal ideal’.Footnote ³⁰ Thus, the political agenda of what was to become the Second Empire only months after Fortoul’s decree is very much that of the First Empire, and the approach to collecting folk songs follows suit: the erudite viewed rural French culture and the peasantry as archaeological evidence of an ancient past, to be valued as a measure of educated (Parisian) France and appropriated as an ideological tool by the soon-to-be imperial government.

Given Fortoul’s political allegiance and status, his collection project was received with a fair degree of scepticism, particularly by those who once knew him as a literary scholar and critic. Berthou-Bécam and Bécam describe Fortoul as someone whose interests and alliances shifted along with his political ambitions.Footnote ³¹ Prior to his career in politics, Fortoul was a Saint-Simonian and a literary critic for the socialist periodical, La Revue encyclopédique, at which point he developed a friendship with the influential songwriter Pierre-Jean de Béranger and, among others, with George Sand, whom he met in 1834. Berthou-Bécam and Bécam note that ‘Fortoul … [, who] felt a deep admiration for [George Sand], became part of the group of familiars who went regularly to her house’.Footnote ³² Fortoul’s and Sand’s interests would take decidedly different turns, however, particularly as Fortoul attached himself to the future French emperor. Indeed, if Sand’s ambivalent response to Fortoul’s decree marks her appreciation of the idea of the project, it also marks her lack of desire to contribute to the government’s efforts.

Ultimately, Fortoul’s project remained incomplete, despite intermittent efforts to respond to the decree and, since 1876, six volumes of collected songs have lain dormant in the Bibliothèque Nationale and in the French National Archives. Damase Arbaud was one collector who tried to give momentum to the project when, in 1862, he dedicated to Fortoul’s memory a collection of music entitled Chants populaires de la Provence. Arbaud considered the work of a collector to be a vocation and viewed this particular project in response to Fortoul’s decree as a duty; indeed, he subscribed to the language of the decree in his own writing, calling the book ‘less a literary work than an archaeological project’.Footnote ³³ He argued that these ‘popular’ songs, along with the language, morals and beliefs that constitute them, were disappearing from public memory due to the need for new ideas,Footnote ³⁴ and he urged collectors to hurry before the ‘tomb has consumed them all’.Footnote ³⁵ Others less passionate than Arbaud, however, grew tired of the vast collection project as it lingered on unfinished.Footnote ³⁶

Sand, moreover, understood folk music to be a fundamentally improvisational art form that resists the kind of archaeological research that the government outlined and that Arbaud later stressed in his dedication. Along with her familiarity with the songs of her native Berrichon countryside, George Sand’s awareness of the enormity of the task came from her personal efforts to collect the songs, as well as from her observation of trained musicians who attempted to transcribe the songs. In a letter to her son Maurice, dated 10 December 1850, Sand tells Maurice that she has collected a whole ‘package of Berrichon songs’ to send to Pierre-Martinien Tousez, dit Bocage, actor and theater director who supported Sand’s work.Footnote ³⁷ She then provides the following anecdote about inviting a Berrichon peasant into her home in Nohant so that she and Hermann Müller-Strübing (1812–1893), the German philologist, political refugee and musician, could transcribe the songs she had heard the peasant sing:

Sand offers this anecdote without much further comment other than to say that not all the local peasants could sing as well as Jean Chauvet, and thereby she resists homogenizing them. To be certain, this playful passage opens up a distinction between the collectors, who have had training in music, and the musical peasant, who has not. However, her presentation makes clear that her condescension is mixed with admiration: in the peasant’s mind, bémol, si, sol and diable have the devil knows what to do with music, but, in Sand’s, the songs are worth the time and energy to collect them. Frédéric Chopin and acclaimed singer Pauline Garcia Viardot also made an effort while visiting Sand in Nohant to transcribe local songs and dances, including the bourrée, a traditional dance that was and still is popular in the Berry region, and the briolage, a recitative-like chant sung by plowmen to spur on labouring oxen. Thérèse Marix-Spire, a pioneer twentieth-century scholar of music in Sand’s work, notes that what made the task particularly difficult was that ‘at times they had to choose from among 10 related versions’.Footnote ³⁹ On 18 January 1854, Sand emphasized this particular difficulty in a letter to realist novelist Champfleury:

Comparative musicologist Julien Tiersot reads this letter to Champfleury with a bit of wink. In La Chanson populaire et les écrivains romantiques, part of his larger corpus of foundational work on traditional French folk music, Tiersot writes that the source of such descriptions is ‘much more in the imagination of the writer than in her sense of objective and real observation’, particularly as concerns her suggestion that Berrichon peasants intone intervals smaller than a semitone.Footnote ⁴¹ Even with Viardot’s affirmation of a systematic quarter-tone rise at the end of a briolage, Tiersot argues that one cannot consider it to have ‘a constitutive function in the scale’ and that it is nothing but ‘a simple fantasy of the singer, a kind of ornament of a particular character’.Footnote ⁴² Tiersot does support Sand’s claim that folk songs were in a state of ruin, due to a lack of complete transcriptions, but he rejects Sand’s argument that it would take a musical genius of the likes of Meyerbeer or Rossini to transcribe such complex variations.Footnote ⁴³

According to Tiersot, as told to him by Pauline Viardot, Meyerbeer, upon hearing Berrichon peasants sing ‘popular’ or traditional folk songs while he was staying with Sand at Nohant, proclaimed that the songs could not be transcribed.Footnote ⁴⁴ Further, Tiersot suggests that, in any case, a more appropriate genius would be one who had some affinity to or experience with the songs.Footnote ⁴⁵ Indeed, Sand seems to contradict herself when she names Meyerbeer and Rossini as the model musical geniuses for the task, given a statement she had already made regarding a briolage sung by a Berrichon plowman, in her ‘country’ novel La Mare au diable (1846), that ‘no genius foreign to working the land could have invented it, and that no singer other than a gifted labourer of this land would know how to sing it again’.Footnote ⁴⁶ However, the full statement of Sand’s gesture towards these two great names of art music, in both of whose operatic works Pauline Viardot was a lead performer, reads more as a call to urge ‘elite’ or ‘cultured’ musicians to see the value of, and to want to invest themselves in, transcription projects: ‘for the very ancient songs, in which the versions vary infinitely, a man like Meyerbeer or Rossini should have been tasked, or have wanted to task himself, to supplement, using the logic of his genius, … lacunae and serious uncertainties’.Footnote ⁴⁷ The narrator of Consuelo; La Comtesse de Rudolstadt indeed laments that ‘trained musicians do not take enough interest in folk songs to collect them’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Continuing the lament, the narrator of this musical novel claims that ‘most [trained musicians] simply disdain the music; … others are repulsed by the difficulty that they meet as soon as they want to find the one true and primitive version, that might not even still exist for the author himself, and that certainly was never recognized as a determined and invariable type by its numerous interpreters’.Footnote ⁴⁹ With Sand’s repeated emphasis on infinite variations and untranslatable sounds, she challenges the notion that a folk song is a stable object with an identifiable original version. To this point, M. Vincent, in the ‘Instructions’ pertaining to the ‘Poésies populaires de la France’, does propose a solution: ‘If someone finds variations, they will take charge of collecting them and sending them to the committee’.Footnote ⁵⁰ However, he does not indicate how the committee will identify which is the original and which are the variations; moreover the possible ‘solution’, given by the committee’s secretary, to ‘trace back through the lyrics’ to get to the original song, dismisses even the final point Vincent makes about the music of songs in the oral tradition, whose ‘character it is to be perpetually modified by the living transmission that perpetuates them’.Footnote ⁵¹ Herein again lies Sand’s ambivalence towards Fortoul’s project, as her insistence on the necessity of collecting the music along with the lyrics bears with it her recognition of the particular difficulty of conscientious transcription of folk music, especially without the assistance of musicians both dedicated and apt to the task.

In her rustic novels, from Jeanne (1844) to Les Maîtres Sonneurs (1853), in which she presents rural customs and non-standard dialects as living culture, Sand grapples with the very real problem of even the communication gap between the capital and the provinces, one that she parallels with the gap between elite Parisian art musicians and regional or traditional musicians. To tell and preserve a story about a young country boy, the narrator of Sand’s novel François le champi (1847) must find a compromise between modern French and the French of the waif: ‘If I make the man of the fields speak as he does, I need to include a translation on the opposite page for the civilized reader, and if I make him speak like we do, I make him into an impossible being, in whom it would be necessary to suppose an order of thinking that he does not possess’.Footnote ⁵² It is not that one language is necessarily better than the other to tell the story: the narrator considers the peasant’s language more suitable to the task of expressing the thoughts and emotions of the waif, but unsuitable for the task of transmitting the story to someone taught only to understand modern French. Rather, the problem, as Sand later suggests in response to Fortoul, is that the transmission is indeed rather late – so late that one needs a dictionary or an interpreter to communicate it. More precisely, the narrator of François le champi finds fault with the French Academy’s institution of ‘pure’ French that works to eliminate all forms of non-standard French, and Sand voices a pain that runs deeper than the trouble of translation mechanics: ‘For me it is a cause of despair to be forced to write the language of the Academy, when I know another much better that is superior for rendering a whole order of emotions, sentiments and thoughts’.Footnote ⁵³ What the Academy and other centralizing institutions promote as progress, Sand thus understands as a form of cultural imperialism working, through censorship, to eradicate marginal cultural practices, including the creation and transmission of regional stories and songs.

Founded in 1635, the goal of the French Academy was to raise the prestige of the vernacular, French, to the level of Latin, by giving it ‘sure rules’ and rendering it ‘pure, eloquent and capable of treating the arts and sciences’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Michel de Certeau, Dominique Julia and Jacques Revel explain, however, that the target population excluded the masses, who did not ‘have access to written culture’.Footnote ⁵⁵ If the leaders of the French Revolution extended the project to the masses in 1790, it was in order to gain popular support by eradicating resistance that could come from ‘ignorance’ or ‘prejudice’.Footnote ⁵⁶ At this time, the focus was primarily on those populations that spoke foreign dialects, whether Breton, German, Italian or Basque, with little concern for the various patois, or regional dialects, jargon and slang.Footnote ⁵⁷ On 4 June 1794, however, Abbé Grégoire presented to the National Convention a measure to eliminate all patois, in his Rapport sur la nécessité et les moyens d’anéantir les patois et d’universaliser l’usage de la langue française.Footnote ⁵⁸ As Certeau, Julia and Revel note, Grégoire’s investigation into the use of patois aimed at creating an inventory of language that was to be protected as a ‘national treasure’ but eradicated from everyday use.Footnote ⁵⁹

Well-known for writing against the currents of realism, Sand certainly idealizes the French countryside and ennobles the peasantry as bearers of French history and culture.Footnote ⁶⁰ Indeed, Sand’s claim in her socialist novel, Jeanne, that the Berrichon peasants speak the most ancient forms of French that are still in use and are thus the real bearers of French culture,Footnote ⁶¹ seems to align with the rhetoric of the government in positioning the provinces as sites of archaeological treasures. However, for Sand, the people and customs of the provinces are not the ruins of an ancient France that failed to keep up with the rapid pace of modern civilization, nor does she understand the ‘people’ of France as a monolithic body, or of interest only as a benchmark of the modern nation, which is to say of the capital. Brigitte Lane argues that Sand’s country novels at once indicate Sand’s awareness of the peasants’ marginality in French society and provide the peasants with a visibility and a voice in literary history that they otherwise lack in political history.Footnote ⁶² Further, Eric Bordas writes that Sand’s Berrichon novels serve ‘to remind an authoritative and centralized state that it is not alone, but that it is surrounded by the nation’s workforce [les forces vives], more or less widely known, whom one does not allow to speak, but who have their own languages, laws [and] standards’.Footnote ⁶³ It is thus this unacknowledged workforce – indeed, the nation’s lifeblood – that suffers doubly when torn asunder at the collision point between the government’s standardization policies and their cultural heritage projects. In 1860, Champfleury provided an anecdote to this effect:

If Champfleury’s anecdote lacks the nostalgia or sentimentalism of the narrator’s lament in François le champi, it nonetheless furthers the narrator’s complaint, and Sand’s, by compounding the actual loss of cultural activity with the criminalization of those who still practice such activity. Thus, at the intersection of the official solicitation of formerly prohibited cultural practices and the fear of punishment inflicted by those same officials, lies silence. Indeed, as I argue below, a reading of Sand’s earlier novel, Consuelo; La Comtesse de Rudolstadt, shows that her critique of Fortoul’s decree, or of any form of either censorship or collection that prevents the transmission of the songs that otherwise would allow them to remain a part of living or current collective memory, bears with it the weight of the torment of a marginalized and criminalized population.

I propose that, in Consuelo; La Comtesse de Rudolstadt, published a decade before Fortoul’s decree, Sand’s interpretation of the loss of Bohemian music at the hands of the Austrian Empire’s censurers offers a way to read the French Academy’s and Abbé Grégoire’s official linguistic projects as forms of imperialism within national borders. Further, Consuelo; La Comtesse de Rudolstadt offers a model for conscientious collection, whereby Sand insightfully, if cautiously, navigates the tensions of preserving this fundamentally non-static and ephemeral art form. Set in the mid-eighteenth century, the novel traces the musical, emotional and moral education of Consuelo, an acclaimed female musician modelled on Pauline Viardot.Footnote ⁶⁵ Consuelo, originally of mendicant beginnings, travels through Venice, the Bohemian Forest, Vienna, Prague, Berlin and back to Bohemia on a quest to reconcile liberty, art, love and equality. In this pre-Revolutionary context, Sand’s designation of musique populaire as a living art that is free of strict rules and convention functions as a critique of the rigidity of social conventions and structures that limit the freedom of the artist.Footnote ⁶⁶

At Giant’s Castle, in Bohemia, Consuelo meets the novel’s principal male character and collector of Bohemian songs: Count Albert Rudolstadt, a self-taught musical genius who, subject to metempsychosis, variably believes himself the reincarnation of long-dead family members and Hussite warriors, particularly including Jan Žižka. Having devoured publications on Bohemian history, including L’Enfant’s Histoire de la guerre des Hussites et du concile de Basle (1731), Leroux and Reynaud’s article ‘Bohême’ in the second volume (1836) of L’Encyclopédie nouvelle and even Nodier’s tale, L’Histoire du roi de Bohême et de ses sept châteaux (1830), George Sand embeds Albert’s personal history into a history of ancient Bohemia that ostensibly emphasizes the devastating effects of imperialism, while sounding out a distinct critique of modern nationalist projects. Albert’s cousin Amélie tells it as a history of collective subjugation:

What Amélie articulates here is precisely that for which Albert seeks reparation: the loss of Bohemian culture, including religious freedom, language, literature and music, in the name of political and cultural unification through the force of persecution and censorship.

Through the novel’s Bohemian episodes, and in counter distinction to the preceding Venetian episode, which features Consuelo’s musical training and debut as singer of both sacred and operatic music, Consuelo; La Comtesse de Rudolstadt becomes a story about recuperating this loss of traditional, regional culture through music conservation, education and production. Further, it becomes a story about rebuilding a community dedicated to renouncing and overturning tyranny, whether cultural, political or economic. Against nineteenth-century official discourses of nationalism, The Invisibles, the multi-lingual and cosmopolitan fraternity that Albert and Consuelo will come to join, works not in the name of a particular nation but in the name of the marginalized – in particular, women, children and the poor – who struggle both to thrive in the dominant culture and to celebrate what is unique about their heritages. The introductory lesson the narrator and characters provide, both on Bohemian history and on the place of the Rudolstadt family within that history, thus functions to lay the necessary groundwork for the subsequent stages of Consuelo’s musical apprenticeship. Whereas Consuelo’s early musical training with renowned composer and choirmaster Nicola Porpora distinctly lacks a concomitant study of the historical and cultural context within which the music was created, supported rather by only vague notions of religion that Consuelo uncritically inherited from her mother, this next stage – one of both aesthetic and ethical development – cannot be accomplished without a more in-depth understanding of the political, cultural and familial histories that structure Albert’s cultivation of, and retreat into, Hussite war songs and Protestant hymns.

Prior to Consuelo’s sojourn at the castle, Albert’s friend Zdenko’s endless fountain of Bohemian folk songs nurtures Albert and sustains his creative activity. For Albert, Zdenko, called the ‘the innocent one’, is living music and serves as a testament to the once thriving Bohemian culture: he sings songs long forgotten by most others; he improvises endlessly; and, as he never sings a song twice, his songs seem to disappear almost as soon as they begin. Zdenko uncritically carries within him this inexhaustible musical heritage: ‘an immense number of admirable poems … that have been prohibited by the imperial police. These religious and national hymns, set to music by the unknown geniuses of Bohemia, have not all been conserved in the memory of the Bohemians’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Counting among his collection music by Josquin des Prez, Martin Luther, Claude le Jeune, Jacques Arcadelt and Georg Rhau, Albert, who recognizes the cultural import of preserving the songs, transcribes and collects them in a grotto that serves as his hermitage.Footnote ⁶⁹

Through Albert, Sand represents, avant la lettre, the musical ethnographer par excellence. As opposed to an outside observer, Albert belongs to the setting in which he collects the music. Although of Saxon blood, Albert is also of Bohemian blood and inhabits Zdenko’s world out of preference, as well as out of religious and socio-political conviction. His skill for collecting the songs comes from his close study of Bohemian music through his understanding of the music’s national and religious spirit. While he plays the songs on his violin, the narrator describes Albert as first taking in and getting to know the music, rather than imposing himself upon it, and only then improvising on it according to its spirit and to his sensibility:

As he brings the spirit of the original into the new, his improvisation is a means of both conservation and development. Sand’s narrator thus describes Albert’s improvisation as both doing honour to the past compositions and infusing them with new life, and Albert’s work as a collector serves as an active form of preservation of a dying culture. Sand scholar David Powell, whose book While the Music Lasts: The Representation of Music in the Works of George Sand investigates music as an organizing principle in Sand’s fiction, writes that ‘[t]he preservation of history, an important theme in the novel and Albert’s raison d’être, is accomplished largely through music’.Footnote ⁷¹ At once a memorial to the dead Hussites, a place of prayer and a place of safe exile from the ‘upper’ world of orthodoxy and heresy, Albert’s hermitage is where he safeguards his violin and music, including extremely rare notations of music by Martin Luther. The act of transcribing the Bohemian songs of his friend Zdenko provides Albert a means to relieve his memory of some of the burden that he alone seems to carry; the scores serve as surrogate bearers of Bohemian culture that allow Albert not to have to remember the music as well as the history that others have tried to overwrite, hide and forget.

Consuelo, a child of the ‘people’ who, like Sand, secretly preferred her mother’s boleros to her teacher’s sacred music, immediately appreciates the beauty of Zdenko’s songs. When she attempts to decipher the songs, however, the fact that she does not know enough of Bohemian language and history prevents her from fully assigning meaning to the songs. While Albert’s cousin Amélie helps Consuelo translate Zdenko’s songs, it is Albert, through his violin playing, who brings Consuelo into intimate contact with Bohemian music:

The narrator here insists on the power of music to communicate both the spirit and energy of the performer and the culture. Moreover, if Albert’s discussions with Consuelo fuel the creation of specific images of Bohemian history in Consuelo’s mind, they also indicate Sand’s position that meaningful, and therefore successful, folk music collection necessitates a degree of cultural embeddedness that Consuelo does not have when she first tries to transcribe Zdenko’s songs.

Consuelo undergoes a transformation over the course of her adventures, through which she comes to understand her role in conserving and perpetuating the faith and mission that Albert promotes and that is so integral to the folk songs she had already come to cherish. Further, with their joint composition of a new ballad, ‘The Good Goddess of Poverty’ [‘La Bonne Déesse de la Pauvreté’], Consuelo and Albert demonstrate that folk songs are not dead artefacts but manifestations of living cultures that result from the musicians’ talent and love for the art, as well as from their assiduous musical training. That they allow the narrator to transcribe, translate and pass on the ballad furthers the project of collection and transmission that Albert had begun in his grotto and, with Consuelo, brought out of hiding and back to life. Consuelo and Albert’s project to collect, regenerate and teach the music works in a progressive manner that insures the conservation, and thus validation, of the past, while striving to make a change for the future. ‘The Good Goddess of Poverty’, with its emphasis on a need for social change, opposes what Fulcher identifies as the social theorists’ view in the 1830s and 1840s of folk songs as ‘socially benign’ popular songs that ‘[help] to effect and maintain social peace’.Footnote ⁷³ Neither is it by any means a new Marseillaise, even if the close of the novel anticipates the French Revolution. ‘The Good Goddess of Poverty’ is not a war song or a call to arms; it is a song for a different kind of revolution: a social revolution through art, work and charity rather than through violence. In 1847, on the precipice of yet another revolution, nineteenth-century feminist and socialist Pauline RolandFootnote ⁷⁴ would indeed call for a new song for a new future: ‘In our eyes, the Marseillaise cannot be a “popular” song except for an epoch of transition. The breath that animates it is the breath of the God of combat, the future will only know the God of love. The veritable poet of the future will be the singer of universal peace, of human fraternity, of religion in the end’.Footnote ⁷⁵ George Sand, frustrated with the failure of the political revolutions to bring about equality, insists throughout her writing that the Republican ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity can never be achieved as long as there remains the disparity that divides the rich from the poor, the capital from the provinces and the government from the people.

From Sand’s position, then, the archival work of the Second Empire, like the linguistic project of the French Academy, maintains rather than eliminates the divisions and hierarchies. Her last rustic novel, Les Maîtres Sonneurs (1853), about traditional music in contrasting rural French regions, sets music as the force that unites the people of the two regions, completed through sharing their musical knowledge and unique practices with each other. In the novel, something of an idealized counter project to Fortoul’s collection decree, George Sand re-narrates in 1853 a story told to her by 73-year-old Étienne Depardieu, all the while trying, along the lines of the narrator of François le champi, to make the native Berrichon man speak for himself ‘by imitating his manner as much as it [is] possible for [her] to do so’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Étienne tells the story of the tragic fate of a friend from his native Berry, an isolated, musical genius named Joseph, and about the otherwise happy communion, through a double marriage, of two families from different regions in the French countryside. Drawing from the traditions of the Meistersinger and the Bildungsroman, the story traces Joseph’s journey to becoming a master bagpiper, starting from his early discovery of music and then proceeding through the positions of musical novice, apprentice, journeyman and guild applicant to, finally, guild initiate. As Powell suggests, ‘[w]hat makes the musical aspect of Sand’s description noteworthy is that she accentuates the insistence on music at each turn of the festivities and incorporates it into the narrative rather than leaving it as an accompaniment’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Indeed, in Les Maîtres Sonneurs and other works, Sand brings music to the fore, particularly as the privileged means by which characters unite or communicate. Joseph’s downfall ultimately results from his inability to reconcile his conviction of his own musical superiority with the communal nature, in both the Berrichon and the neighbouring Bourbonnais regions, of music as an art of expression.

In the aftermath of yet another failed revolution and at the dawn of a new Empire, the privileging in Les Maîtres Sonneurs of the community of equals over the egotism of the individual genius, and the resultant expulsion of the egoist from the community, still resonates with the utopian call in Consuelo; La Comtesse de Rudolstadt for the end to tyranny but transfers it to a less grand, more particular and local setting of everyday social interactions. Along with the rejection of the egoistic tyranny that is emblematic of the Second Empire, Les Maîtres Sonneurs refuses to erase cultural differences and, thereby, refuses to participate in the central government’s homogenization of rural France. In this sense, Sand anticipates the French ‘regionalism’ that Thiesse identifies as the ‘intellectual decentralization’ movement ‘invented’ at the end of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁷⁸

Ever invested in the preservation of Berrichon cultural practices, just one year prior to her death, Sand endorses the ethnographic work of a contemporary and friend, Germain dit Alfred Laisnel de La Salle (1801–1874). In a preface to his work on Berrichon customs, Sand speaks of Laisnel de La Salle’s arduous and meticulous research and credits him for his ideas of the importance for an ethnographer to live in the place he studies.Footnote ⁷⁹ In terms that could as well describe her, she praises him as someone who intimately knows the language, beliefs and legends of the peasants. In his own introduction to the first volume of Souvenirs du vieux temps: Le Berry (1875), Laisnel de La Salle argues that someone cannot get to know a region or its people as a tourist; rather, he must live in that region and participate in its daily life.Footnote ⁸⁰ Infused with the language of a poet, Laisnel de La Salle speaks of the ‘imagination of the people’ and of their ‘love of the ideal’ as the ‘inexhaustible source of so much poetry’.Footnote ⁸¹ Further, calling George Sand the Christopher Columbus or James Fennimore Cooper of Berry, he gives her the credit for bringing the Berry region before the eyes of the nation.Footnote ⁸² While Laisnel de La Salle’s uncritical and, indeed, ideologically inaccurate tribute to Sand by way of association with Western imperialism does Sand a disservice, Sand would certainly have embraced a comparison between herself and the famed American author whom, in an essay on Cooper, she credited with having expressed a resounding cry of mourning in his reflection on colonial violence against Native Americans.Footnote ⁸³ Still, in acknowledging that Laisnel de La Salle’s goal was not to create a work of poetry, but a work of history, Sand defers the ethnographer’s task to him, thereby associating her own work with his through the connection she draws between literature and history rather than by positioning herself as an ethnographer.Footnote ⁸⁴

Julien Tiersot, one of the earliest ethnographers of music to credit Sand’s role in contributing to the conservation of traditional French folk songs, and of Berrichon songs in particular, asserts that, from Sand, ‘we have learned to recognize that this central province of France possesses a repertoire that, at once, fits into the ensemble of the common fonds spanning across all of the national territory, and, at the same time, retains an originality and a singularity that are proper to itself’.Footnote ⁸⁵ In his research into Sand’s references to folk songs in her novels, Tiersot discovers that, by and large, Sand gives little more than a phrase or two of a song that would have been well-known in the region, with the exception of the lyrics to ‘The Three Woodsmen’ [‘Les Trois fendeurs’], in Les Maîtres Sonneurs, which she gives in their entirety, as they are of her own invention.Footnote ⁸⁶ However, even though Sand invents the lyrics to suit her narrative, the song, Tiersot discovers, is similar enough to other well-known songs that he was able to track down the melody; Sand herself admits to her poetic license in this case: ‘[The] song …, today, is currently well-known in our region, although the words have been greatly altered’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Thus, while relying on her readers’ cultural memory to supply the music as they read the lyrics, Sand also privileges those readers, as she says, from ‘our region’ – that is, from Berry. Consuelo and Albert’s song, ‘The Good Goddess of Poverty’, is another for which Sand gives the complete lyrics, yet, even if this song is wholly of Sand’s invention and thus one for which the reader does not have access to the music, Sand emphasizes both the congruity of the words and music and, moreover, the affective nature of the melody as sung by the seraphic voice of young Zdenko.Footnote ⁸⁸

As part of his collection project, Tiersot not only gained access to Viardot’s transcriptions during his visits to Sand’s house in Nohant; he worked directly with Viardot herself, who sang the melodies for him. In his song collection, Mélodies populaires des provinces de France (1887), Tiersot credits Viardot in particular for her transcriptions of two songs from Berry, the ‘Briolage’ and the ‘Song of the Liveried’ [‘Chant des livrées’],Footnote ⁸⁹ which he claims to publish for the first time ever; later, in La Chanson populaire et les écrivains romantiques, he also credits her with transcriptions of several additional songs from Berry, as well as from other regions. Simone Vierne notes that Viardot’s own compositions were inspired by the chanson populaire, even if, given that she was a student of Franz Liszt, the musical accompaniment to her songs is more ‘savant’ than ‘popular’ and her songs are therefore imitations of traditional folk songs rather than folk songs themselves.Footnote ⁹⁰ Finally, Tiersot argues that ‘we would not have known much about the popular songs of Berry if George Sand had not set us on the path to find and complete them’.Footnote ⁹¹ When Tiersot took up the collection project, he did so along the lines of Sand’s own approach to respecting and highlighting regional differences and original musical creations and, in working directly with the Berrichon peasants as well as with Viardot, he helped to bring Sand’s work as a collector to the attention of the French Academy of Fine Arts.

Around the same time as Tiersot published some of his later work on French writers and traditional folk songs, an attempt at an extensive chronicle of Sand’s references in her writings to regional cultural practices surfaced in a French literary magazine, the Mercure de France, in what might seem as a surprising source considering the disdain with which the author approaches George Sand’s œuvre. On 1 June 1926, French ethnographer and folklorist Arnold van Gennep published an article, entitled ‘George Sand folkloriste’, in which he argued that Sand’s biographers afford her too much space in the history of French folklore studies and that true folklorists would grant her only a much more conservative place in that history.Footnote ⁹² Indeed, Van Gennep calls out Sand as a bad ethnographer, not only because he finds her writing painful [penible] to read but because, aside from in her description of traditional Berrichon wedding customs in her appendix to La Mare au diable, she gave neither complete reports on the folklore she mentions nor detailed descriptions of her ‘observable reality’.Footnote ⁹³ Moreover, Van Gennep further critiques the novelist for ‘believing it her vocation to “poeticize” men and their actions’ and for not making a study of the folklore her end goal.Footnote ⁹⁴

In addition to critiquing her ‘folkloric activity’, Van Gennep more than once dismisses Sand’s interest in regional culture, including folk songs and regional dialect, as not her own but ‘surely’ one she picked up from Parisian conversations and influence.Footnote ⁹⁵ In doing so, he neglects not only the time Sand spent in Nohant as a child and as an adult, but also the fact that Sand wrote many of her works there in her childhood home. Further, although admitting to having not read her complete œuvre, he argues that her interest in traditional songs began only after 1850, thus ignoring Sand’s references to songs in novels he credits himself with having read, including Jeanne and La Mare au diable. Van Gennep concludes the article with the list of Sand’s references to folklore, complete with texts, pages and themes, which he addresses both to folklore specialists and to ‘literary critics, of whom none appeared to [him] to be up to date’ on what he calls ‘our science’.Footnote ⁹⁶ Given his insistence on Sand’s unreliability as an objective observer, and his complaint that her descriptions are neither complete nor presented as an end in of themselves, Van Gennep’s production of what he admits to be an non-exhaustive list, then, reads as an anxious attempt to force a systematization of her ‘folkloric activity’, despite his finding that it was not scientific enough to qualify as good folkloric activity.

However, for as much as Sand introduces the Berry region to her Parisian audience, she does not position herself as what Van Gennep might understand to be a scientific or objective observer of reality. In Belmont’s critique of Van Gennep’s attack on George Sand, she asserts that ‘to speak of George Sand, Folklorist, or of George Sand, Ethnographer, makes little sense’.Footnote ⁹⁷ Sand was, after all, a writer and primarily one of fictional works, whether novels or plays. In her address to the reader in La Mare au diable, Sand identifies her idealist aesthetics: ‘Art’, she writes, ‘is not a study of positive reality; it is a study of ideal truth’.Footnote ⁹⁸ Sand’s writing is rife with irony Van Gennep did not appear to detect; his own criticism of Sand’s tendency to poeticize what she saw, and of her lack of interest in what amounts to ‘folklore-for-folklore sake’ rings true. Indeed, she would have been no more interested in folklore-for-folklore’s sake, than she was in the art-for-art’s sake movement which she outright rejected; moreover, she actively cultivated a literary practice of ‘poeticization’. In her letter to Charles Poncy, cited above, she relays to him her thoughts on this very literary approach: ‘Poeticize, ennoble each kind of work, complain at the same time about the excesses and the wrong social direction of this work, as it is understood today; this would make for a grand œuvre, one that is useful and sustainable. This would teach the rich to respect the workman, the poor worker to respect himself’.Footnote ⁹⁹ A year after Van Gennep published his article, Sand’s granddaughter, Aurore Sand, proposed an alternative reading of Sand’s position vis-à-vis literary realism: ‘If George Sand’s peasants are a literary creation, they are nonetheless as real as those in what is called realist literature: they are of a different reality, better and more ideal, that is all’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Finally, as George Sand herself insists that ‘the history of fiction is like the study of man, in that all fiction is the idealization of a received impression in a certain time and in a certain historical milieu’,Footnote ¹⁰¹ Sand scholars have since engaged in an active investigation of Sand’s idealization of peasants and provincial life, taking seriously the function of her call to poeticize within her vision of the interconnectedness of the literary or musical and the social.Footnote ¹⁰²

If George Sand herself was not in name or by training an ethnographer, or an ethnographer of music, her writings, as well as her accumulation of transcripts of traditional folk songs, survive as a mark of the extent of her investment in the music, whether in her attempts to describe the melodies and rhythms in her novels, in her efforts to encourage musicians to transcribe the songs or, as Powell writes regarding her stage works, in her ‘unceasing efforts to verify the authenticity of the musical aspect of the production’: ‘She gathered Berrichon folk music herself, wrote it down, and sent it to Joseph Ancessy, the orchestra conductor at the Odéon’.Footnote ¹⁰³ Powell concludes that ‘Sand’s need to change societal attitudes towards the French people through music displays at once a socialist and an aesthetic goal that knows no peer in French literature of this or any time’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ With her life-long attention to Berrichon culture, Sand insists upon the historical, cultural and personal significance of the preservation of folk music and articulates the value of musical sensibility, memory and heritage. If Sand’s response to Fortoul finds much of its grounding in her earlier fictional works, it also, more than any of her novels, carries her project more visibly from the literary world into the socio-political world. Further, after nearly two decades of her own occupation with rendering music legible in her fiction, her critique attests to her appreciation for the nuances both of musical transcription in general and of improvisational folk song transcription in particular. Considering the extent of Sand’s novels, plays, essays and letters that focus on Berry and the Berrichon culture – even to include its smaller inhabitants, such as its frogs whose ‘songs’ sounded in Sand’s ears as marvelous in every sense of the termFootnote ¹⁰⁵ – one might venture to argue, after all, that George Sand herself was indeed the poet that Berry needed to archive the legends, the poetry and even the songs of its unknown masters.