ABSTRACT
George Sand’s monumental Consuelo and its sequel La Comtesse de Rudolstadt, written from 1842 to 1844 and serialized in La Revue Indépendante, constitute a kind of compendium of the separate critiques of previous models of Romantic genius and of masculinist history and Bildung engaged in by Staël, Shelley, and Arnim. A historical novel set in the decades prior to the French Revolution of 1789, Consuelo provides a panoramic view of European culture and politics during the pre-revolutionary era, as it takes its eponymous heroine from her triumphs on the Venetian opera stage through a series of Gothic trials in a Bohemian castle, to a picaresque journey with the composer Joseph Haydn, and into the courts of Maria Theresa and Frederick the Great. The novel concludes with an initiation into a secret society called “Les Invisibles” from which Consuelo emerges to become a wandering musician who devotes herself to an art of the people, an art explicitly in the service of “Liberté, Egalité, and Fraternite.”
