Item:

George Sand’s Claudie and the Precarities of Peasant Life

With input from the social sciences (history, demography, and anthropology), this essay looks at George Sand’s interpretation of the precarity of rural lives in mid-nineteenth-century France. In her play, Claudie (1851), Sand follows two seasonal workers, a twenty-one-year-old and her octogenarian grandfather, as they labor through the wheat harvest, where they are threatened with wage theft. In Sand’s “rurodrame,” the spectator learns of the death, from extreme poverty, of Claudie’s frail young son, at a time when childhood mortality had begun to improve, a child born out of wedlock in an era when paternity research was forbidden by the Code civil. The play’s interest for the censors was thus not surprising.