From explication to emancipation: the radical pedagogy of George Sand’s Le Compagnon du tour de France

Abstract

Le Compagnon du Tour de France, published in 1840, is best known for being one of the first French novels to feature a proletarian protagonist. This character, a Christ-like carpenter named Pierre Huguenin, resembles two of Sand’s good friends: the typographerphilosopher Pierre Leroux, and the journeyman-turned-writer Agricol Perdiguier, whose Livre du Compagnonnage (1839) provided Sand with many of the novel’s realist details. The narrative follows the sociopolitical, sentimental, and intellectual trajectory of a young autodidact who strives to elaborate his ideas in a society that values above all institutional and hierarchical knowledge. In this way, the novel dramatizes a larger debate about education taking place across July Monarchy culture. Between, a radically egalitarian ideal of émancipation intellectuelle proposed by Joseph Jacotot on the one hand, and, on the other, the liberal government’s emphasis on the institutional transmission of knowledge, Sand declares herself, through narrative, in favor of the former. The work has rightly been identified as an early manifestation of George Sand’s awakening to the political and social potential of literature. Naomi Schor, for instance, has called it one of Sand’s “most overtly political fictions [where] idealism is promoted as an erotic and ultimately conjugal mode superior to realism” in its ability to forge crossclass harmony (1993, 100). Margaret Cohen reads Compagnon as the archetypal Social Sentimental novel, which carved out a particular place in the literary field between the idealism of sentimentality and the “worldly Machtpolitick” of modern society (2002, 131). Most recently, Bettina Lerner has examined it with an eye for intersectionality, pointing out the insight it provides into “the problematic relationships between class and gender that characterize both [Sand’s] fiction from this period and her relationship with working class writers” (2018, 97). Little attention, however, has been paid to the very pedagogical nature of Compagnon despite the centrality of questions of learning and intellectual development within the plot. Although the text is not strictly didactic – the lack of resolution to the novel’s central sociopolitical and romantic conflicts makes it impossible to draw any real moral or practical lessons – it does act out a particular kind of intellectual emancipation that was the topic of much discussion among pedagogues of the time. Le Compagnon du Tour de France tells the story of the coming of age of a young carpenter, Pierre Huguenin. Newly returned from his “Tour de France” (a rite of passage for