Spiridion (texte de 1842) (review)

George Sand. Spiridion (texte de 1842). Avant-propos de Oscar A. Haac et introduction de Michèle Hecquet. Geneve: Slatkine Reprints, 2000. Pp. 315. ISBN 2-05-101706-9

Since the publication of Isabelle Naginski's George Sand, Working for her Life (1991), scholars of nineteenth-century France have become aware of the importance of George Sand's novel Spiridion (1842) for understanding idealist aesthetics and nineteenth-century social and religious thought. However, as is unfortunately the case with other major novels by Sand, there was no recent edition of the novel (the last one was a reprint of the 1843 edition published at the Editions d'Aujourd'hul in 1976, now out of print) and no edition with an adequate scholarly apparatus. This lack is now remedied with a new edition from Slatkine, which provides a foreword, an introduction, a bibliography, a list of editions, and the variants from the first Bon-nalre edition of 1839. Although it is not clear why two different authors were needed to present the novel, especially considering several overlaps between the foreword and the introduction, both provide extremely useful information.

Oscar Haac places the novel within the context of Sand's life: after a period of skepticism, Sand believes in the possibility of progress. Haac attributes the tone of sadness and loneliness of the novel to the circumstances in which Sand lived during a winter in Majorca with the ailing Chopin, which is not quite convincing since the greater part of the novel was written and published in serial form before that stay. In Spiridion, Sand describes four successive monks and prophets: Spiridion, Fulgence, Alexis and Angel who live in a monastery, misunderstood by the members of their religious community. Their passionate quest for a new faith ends with Alexis's death at the hands of revolutionary soldiers and Angel's subsequent fulfillment of Spiridion's dream to take his new faith outside the walls of the convent. According to Haac, Sand replays themes present in her other works. In particular, he links Spiridion to the famous "tolle lege" episode of Histoire de ma vie in which Sand describes her spiritual epiphany in church. He also links Sand's move beyond skepticism to the theme of Consuelo. After pointing out the influence of Ann Radcliffe's gothic novels on Spiridion's background (graves, crumbling walls, etc), and of Michelet's account of the Franciscan monks in the Middle Ages, Haac turns to the two major influences on Sand: Félicité de Lamennais and Pierre Leroux. He gives a history of the Sand/Lamennais acquaintance, including their disagreement over the Lettres à Marcie, in which Sand dealt with the condition of women. Haac states that Lamennais resembles Spiridion and Alexis, but points out that Leroux's ideas about a trinity and about social and religious reforms were far more influential on Sand's thinking. Last, Haac mentions the far-reaching influence of Spiridion and of Sand's ideas about moral reforms on such luminaries as Ernest Renan, Matthew Arnold, Margaret Fuller, Emerson, and Dostoevski.

Michèle Hecquet's introduction focuses on Spiridion's intertextual links with Sand's later works. She notes that the novel anticipates Sand's interest in the question of initiation among workers and craftsmen and that this initiation is characterized by secret filiation and the rejection of normal social relations. Following Naginski's analysis, Hecquet notes the parallels existing between Spiridion and the well-known Lélia, and their belonging to the genre of idealism. Hecquet's most interesting observations have to do with Sand's endorsement of revolutionary violence and her representation of a type of relation in which Sand is positioned as the fervent and obedient disciple (of Leroux and Lamennais among others) while at the same time identifying with the aggressors. Hecquet also briefly mentions the cost of Sand's exclusion of the feminine and her allegiance to hegemonic imaginary structures that privilege the masculine over the feminine and the...