and to warn women in a better way, that the greatest danger for
their cause would be the triumph of what is called by an ironical
term--feminism.

These retractions, though, have very little effect. There is a certain
piquancy in showing up an author who is in contradiction with himself,
in showing how he refutes his own paradoxes. But these are striking
paradoxes which are not readily forgotten. What I want to show is that
in these first novels by George Sand we have about the whole of
the feminist programme of to-day. Everything is there, the right to
happiness, the necessity of reforming marriage, the institution, in
a more or less near future, of free unions. Our feminists of to-day,
French, English, or Norwegian authoresses, and theoricians like Ellen
Key, with her book on _Love and Marriage_, all these rebels have
invented nothing. They have done nothing but take up once more the
theories of the great feminist of 1832, and expose them with less
lyricism but with more cynicism.

George Sand protested against the accusation of having aimed at
attacking institutions in her feminist novels. She was wrong in
protesting, as it is just this which gives her novels their value
and significance. It is this which dates them and which explains the
enormous force of expansion that they have had. They came just after
the July Revolution, and we must certainly consider them as one of
the results of that. A throne had just been overturned, and, by way of
pastime, churches were being pillaged and an archbishop's palace had
been sackaged. Literature was also attempting an insurrection, by way of
diversion. For a long time it had been feeding the revolutionary ferment
which it had received from romanticism. Romanticism had demanded the
freedom of the individual, and the writers at the head of this movement