Soon after writing this work George Sand began to take a vigorous share in the practical politics of the day. After her quarrel with the Revue des deux Mondes she had, in collaboration with Pierre Leroux, Viardot, Lamennais, and the Polish author Mickiewiez, started the Revue Indépendante; now (in 1843) she and some friends started a republican provincial newspaper in her own part of the country. In this paper, L'Éclaireur de l'Indre, to which Lamartine also contributed, she defended the cause, now of the town artisan, now of the peasant (article on the Paris journeymen bakers, letters from a Black Forest peasant). In 1844, in her long essay, Questions politiques et sociales, she distinctly declared herself a socialist. When the Revolution broke out in 1848 she was ripe to take part in it. For a short time she published a weekly paper, La Cause du Peuple; she wrote A Word to the Middle Classes, and the famous Letters to the People, and composed the bulletins of the Provisional Government. Towards the close of the year, in face of threatening danger, her republican socialism assumed an almost fanatical form. The article La Majorité et l'Unanimité, in which, immediately before the elections for the Constituent National Assembly, she exhorts the electors to show their liberal principles by their votes, ends with the threat, expressed with much circumlocution, but yet plain enough, that if the assembly presently to be elected by universal suffrage does not prove to be such an assembly as popular interests demand, mere still remains the appeal to arms.[2] It is curious to see the champion of the sovereignty of the people having recourse to a threat of despotically violent measures; it shows what a vigorous, ardent, manly spirit dwelt in the bosom of this gifted woman. The same indomitable energy which produced hundreds of novels displayed itself in her alliance with Ledru-Rollin and Louis Blanc, men who were content with thinking what she gave expression to in words.
It was chiefly through Lamennais that the current of democratic ideas reached Victor Hugo. In Lamennais' principal work, Essai sur l'Indifférence, there were already signs indicating the possibility of a rejection of that principle of authority which he had championed so ardently in his youth. In August 1832 his theories were condemned by the Pope. The intimate relations between Lamennais and Hugo began in the latter's youth; Lamennais congratulated Hugo on the occasion of his marriage, and Hugo's first odes were dedicated to Lamennais. In 1822, persuaded by the Abbé de Rohan, Hugo determined to unburden his mind to a father confessor. The first he went to was Frayssinous, once the intrepid, self-sacrificing curé, now the fashionable Paris clergyman, a bishop, and head of the University. Hugo was repelled by Frayssinous' worldly ideas and counsels, and the Abbé then sent him to the little, frail, slender man with the yellow face, hooked nose, and beautiful, restless eyes, who walked the streets of Paris in a shabby cassock, blue woollen stockings, and hobnailed shoes—the famous Lamennais, whom he already knew so well.
The ideas of both confessor and penitent underwent a change in the course of the years preceding the Revolution of July, and the one was not long after the other in going over to the Liberal and anti-clerical party. One evening in September 1830 Lamennais, entering Hugo's room, found him writing. "I am disturbing you," said Lamennais. "No. But you will not approve of what I am writing." "Never mind; let me hear it." And Hugo read the following lines from his Journal d'un Révolutionnaire de 1830:
"The republic, which is not yet ripe, but which in a century will embrace the whole of Europe, signifies that society is its own sovereign. It protects itself by means of its citizen-soldiers; judges itself, by trial by jury; administers its own affairs, by local government; rules itself, by popular representation. The four limbs of monarchy—the standing army, the courts, the bureaucracy, the peerage—are for the republic only four troublesome excrescences which are withering up and will soon die."
"You have one clause too many," said Lamennais; "that which asserts that the republic is not ripe. You speak of it in the future tense, I in the present."
A few years later, Lamennais' connection with the Roman Catholic Church was at an end. It was in order to show that his defection was not the result of unbelief but of a new conviction, that he entitled his famous manifesto Paroles d'un Croyant (1833).
It has been averred that no book since the invention of printing had created such a stir as this did. In the course of a few years a hundred editions of it were printed; it was published in foreign countries and translated into many languages. It is an imitation of a work which appeared not long before it, Mickiewiez's Book of the Polish Pilgrim. Half in Old Testament, half in Christian style, it denounces monarchy in Europe, the Pope and the priesthood, those to whom the fall of Poland and the serfdom of Italy were due, and the self-interested bourgeois government of France. The eloquence is of the genuine sacerdotal type; the book is strong in pathos, but weak in psychology; it only condemns and praises, knows no shade between black and white—the blackness of hell, the whiteness of heaven; nevertheless its author's warm-heartedness, purity of motive, and beauty of soul have imparted to it a rare charm.
In 1837 followed Livre du Peuple, a work written in the same spirit. The bold Abbé was imprisoned, but from his prison he sent book after book out into the world. Une Voix du Prison, Du Passé et de l'Avenir du Peuple, De l'Esclavage modern, were all written in Sainte-Pélagie.
Lamennais died three years before the Revolution of February, at a time of violent political and social agitation.
I give a few fragments from Paroles d'un Croyant as specimens of his style: