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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 January 2009
Our understanding of the idea of a ‘people's theatre’ in France derives mainly from Romain Rolland's seminal essay of that title, published at the turn of the century – from which excerpts were translated in TQ23 of our first series, together with other material on the subject going back to around 1870. Yet the French writer George Sand had evolved, more in practice than in theory, a very different approach at a considerably earlier date – and, notably in her play Old Man Go-It-Alone, she presented the working class as a ‘hero’ in its own collective right, as opposed to Romain's preference for portraying the heroic individualism of revolutionary leaders. Gay Manifold looks closely at this play within the context of Sand's life, career, and framework of beliefs. A theatre director, dramaturg, and writer, who is currently Chair of the Department of Theatre Arts at California State University, Los Angeles, Gay Manifold has published a full-length study of George Sand's Theatre Career, just available from UMI Research Press, Michigan.
1. Quoted in Cate, Curtis, George Sand: a Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), p. 627Google Scholar.
2. Shepard, Esther, Walt Whitman's Prose (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936), p. 627Google Scholar.
3. Quoted in Genevray, Françoise, ‘L'Idole de la Russie’, Présence de George Sand, no. 16 (fevrier 1983), p. 4–5Google Scholar. All translations from the French are my own unless otherwise indicated.
4. Demetz, Peter, Marx, Engels, and the Poets: Origins of Marxist Literary Criticism, trans. Sammons, Jeffery L. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 136–8Google Scholar.
5. Hobsbawm, E. J., The Age of Revolution: 1789–1848 (New York: Mentor, 1962), p. 286–7Google Scholar.
6. Sand, George, Questions politiques et sociales (Paris: Calmann Levy, 1879), p. 80 (hereafter referred to as Questions politiques)Google Scholar.
7. Sand's socialism did not favour big government or centralization of political power. When in 1844 she helped found a socialist journal called Eclaireur she proclaimed as its mission, ‘To protest the abuses of centralization and expose its disastrous consequences’ (Questions politiques, p. 27).
8. Questions politiques, p. 80.
9. Questions politiques, p. 80–1.
10. von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, trans. Carlyle, Thomas (London: Moore, 1901), p. 91Google Scholar.
11. Sand, George, Correspondance, ed. Lubin, Georges (Paris: Garnier, 1964–1983). Vol. IX, p. 446–7, 532Google Scholar.
12. Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, p. 91.
13. Correspondance Flaubert–Sand, ed. Jacobs, Alphonse (Paris: Flammarion, 1981), p. 528Google Scholar.
14. See excerpts of Rolland's essay, trans. Clark, Barrett H., in The Theory of the Modern Stage, ed. Bentley, Eric (New York: Penguin, 1977), p. 455–70Google Scholar.
15. Jules Michelet wrote about a ‘people's theatre’ in 1848 in a lecture collected with other lectures and published under the title (not Michelet's) L'Etudiant, recently revived, ed. Gaetan Picon (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1970). In his tenth lecture (17 February 1848), Michelet proposes not only heroes for subject matter in a people's theatre, but the re-creation of folk customs and festivals. Sand had already re-created folk festivals in her novels, and would do so shortly in folk plays destined for Paris stages, specifically in Claudie and Pressoir. A correspondence between Sand and Michelet began in 1845, after Michelet had sent several of his works to Sand for Comment. She spared him no punches, telling him he spent too much energy and genius on too little; he proposed reforming the church, she would rather take up the hammer and destroy it, then talk about it afterwards. See Correspondance, ed. Lubin, Vol. VI, p. 836, 855. Michelet called Sand ‘the first socialist writer’, quoted by Jacques Viard, ‘George Sand et Michelet, disciples de Pierre Leroux’, Revue d'Histoire litteraire de la France, no. 5 (Sept.–Oct. 1975), p. 773.
16. First published in L' Almanach populaire de France pour 1845, then in Questions politiques.