Eighteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

My paper demonstrates parallels between George Sand’s character, Consuelo, and Italian revolutionary activist Cristina Belgiojoso. Sand’s plots for her novels, “Consuelo” and “The Countess of Rudolstadt” illustrate the emotional catharsis that a woman experiences as she pursues a secret society devoted to founding a new state based upon Enlightenment egalitarian principles. Sand’s novels act as manuals for conversion and participation in revolutionary events, and demonstrate the appropriate response to autocrats. In fact, Consuelo sacrifices all, and follows her husband who represents the revolutionary principle, into exile and oblivion. The same plot was re-enacted by Belgiojoso, who sacrificed everything to follow the Carbonari revolutionary impulse. When a second wave of revolutions shook Europe in 1830, in which the French monarch Charles X was deposed, in Italy, Carbonari revolutionaries attempted to depose the Austrian Imperial rulers. Sand became politically active at this time, as did Belgiojoso, who fled her native Milan to Paris where both women opened salons. Like Sand’s character Consuelo, who marries the aged Count of Rudolstadt only to become his widow, Belgiojoso formed an intense platonic relationship with much older Lafayette before his death, and he supported her revolutionary sympathies and motivated her to pursue her cause in Italy. Their relationship can be compared to Consuelo’s relationship with the older Count of Rudolstadt, who returns after his death under the new identity of Leverani to support her conversion to the revolutionary cause of the Enlightenment Invisibles. Leverani suggests a symbolic analogy to the biblical name Lazarus, Lafayette and resurrection/Risorgimento.