She wore the trousers – and scandalised France: The true story of George Sand

Icon: Merle Oberon as Sand in A Song To Remember, 1945

There were any number of ways for women to ‘scandalise’ society in 1830s France. Flashing your ankle on the street was probably as shocking as taking your breasts out in the House of Lords today.

At the time, prudishness was almost a religion, and it’s only thanks to certain iconoclastic bohemians that women can now don such daring apparel as trousers or shorter skirts.

One such rebel was Aurore Dupin (known by her pen name George Sand), who flung caution to the wind with the force of a champion shot-putter.

Sand’s sentimental and romantic novels were devoured by the people of France like Brie-smothered frog-legs. Confession, I’ve never read any of her novels – but that doesn’t stop one enjoying this biography of her extraordinary life.

When she was born, in 1804, the blood had barely dried on the guillotine that had killed a king and queen. The old world order had been flipped on its head and no one really knew what was up or down any more.

Sand’s very birth was a stark indicator of this brave new world. Her father was the great-grandson of the King of Poland and her mother previously worked as a prostitute. By the time she was four her beloved father was dead and her mother, unable to cope, sold her young daughter to Sand’s paternal grandmother, an aristocratic woman living in a manor house in the countryside.

George Sand as she was in real life, and drawn in men’s clothes

Before she’d reached her fifth birthday she had no doubt collected enough material for a great novel, but as the years went by she would stuff her life with enough passions and adventures to fill whole shelves of books.

In spite of the changes wrought by the French Revolution, women were still expected to have only domestic ambitions. To be a writer, Sand needed to break into a man’s world and what better way to do so than becoming one. Or at least, in appearance. Soon she would be going around Paris in trousers and a top hat, smoking endless cigars and scandalising French society everywhere she went.

Countless times she was told to make babies, not books. Charles Baudelaire was flummoxed and enraged ‘that men were able to fall in love with this latrine’. And fall in love they did, not just with her books, but the writer herself. Over and over again.

When women were condemned as promiscuous in the 19th century, they rarely deserved their reputations. In Sand’s case it’s fair to say that she did… and then some. 

She just loved love, and had an insatiable appetite for it, particularly for younger men (and at least one woman).

There was one occasion when Sand and her lover Alfred Musset were in Venice when he became seriously ill with typhoid. Fretting and worrying for his life, she called a doctor, Pietro Pagello, to care for him, only to soon become the doctor’s lover. As Fiona Sampson puts it, George could be ‘her own worst advertisement’.

However, breaking taboos and unshackling herself from 19th century expectations was the only way to live a life as far-reaching as hers. No doubt her novels – widely read in Britain, where she was better known than Victor Hugo or Honore Balzac – would not exist were it not for her hoovering up the wealth of experiences love and life have to offer.