French Literature Reviews - 2026
V. Robert, La petite-fille de la sorcière. Enquête sur la culture magique des campagnes au temps de George Sand
History, Politics and Society
La petite-fille de la sorcière - Enquête sur la culture magique des campagnes au temps de George Sand
Vincent Robert
Publication date: 08/04/2015 Publisher: Belles Lettres ISBN: 978-2-251-44530-4 EAN: 9782251445304 Format: Paperback No. of pages: 318 p.
In the 19th century, witches had not been burned at the stake for a very long time. Consequently, trial records do not exist. Apart from a few fraud cases and rare tragic news items, the judiciary is silent. Nor can we rely too heavily on the earliest folklorists: these notables primarily sought vestiges of ancient cults or customs in rural mores and, in short, cared little for the peasants of their own time. A different approach was required, starting from literature.
By rereading La Petite Fadette, the dus frays bessous (twins) of the Gascon writer Jasmin, and other works by authors who spent a rural childhood, the aim is to identify what Carlo Ginzburg would call traces: half-erased traces of an essentially oral and deeply despised culture, subtle clues that must be interpreted in light of what anthropologists and folklorists have taught us about tales and beliefs.
The goal is thus to reconstruct the multiple logics of a cultural universe highly alien to our modern eyes, suspended between dream and reality, populated by witches and werewolves, fortune-tellers and will-o'-the-wisps. And, like a good historian, to anchor these beliefs in time: to understand why, despite minority contempt following the bloody persecution of previous centuries, they were still so vibrant at the beginning of the 19th century; then to attempt to assess their decline, or rather the transformations they underwent at that time; and finally, to appreciate the political stake they came to represent when, in 1848, the introduction of universal suffrage gave still-illiterate and "superstitious" country folk a decisive weight in the destiny of the nation.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
Part One: Precautions
Chapter I. A Modern Pastoral
Chapter II. Gathering Peasant Speech
Chapter III. Denials
Part Two: Decodings
Chapter IV. Three Powerful Women
Chapter V. Portrait of Fanchon Fadet as a Witch
Chapter VI. The Will-o'-the-Wisp, or How Landry Nearly Drowned
Chapter VII. Sylvinet's Lamb, or Return from the Land of the Dead
Chapter VIII. The Curse of the Twins
Chapter IX. Fadette as Unhexer and Healer
Part Three: Beliefs and Narratives in History
Chapter X. The Reign of Superstition
Chapter XI. Tall Tales
Chapter XII. Marianne and the Witch
Chapter XIII. Myth, History, and Politics
Conclusion: From One World to Another
Sources
Bibliography
Vincent Robert, born in 1957, is an agrégé in history and teaches 19th-century political and cultural history at the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne. He has previously published Les chemins de la manifestation. Lyon, 1848-1914 (P U Lyon, 1990) and Le temps des banquets. Politique et symbolique d'une génération, 1818-1848 (Publications de la Sorbonne, 2010), which was awarded the Blois Rendez-vous de l'histoire prize in 2011.
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D. Kalifa reviewed this book on Liberation.fr on 1/7/15.
An investigation into 19th-century peasant culture in the footsteps of La Petite Fadette.
Can a literary work be analyzed in the manner of an anthropologist? This is the approach proposed by Vincent Robert in an original investigation into 19th-century peasant culture. His terrain is George Sand's La Petite Fadette (1848), a well-known text belonging to the series of "rustic novels." Hitherto, it has been viewed as the simple, touching story of a wild young girl, a sort of modern pastoral attesting to the moral virtues of rural France. Without dismissing this interpretation, Vincent Robert pairs it with another, much more unsettling one, which unveils a hidden facet of the rural imaginary, composed of superstitions and obscure beliefs. Nourished by the work of ethnologists and folklorists, his meticulous reading invites us to track down the clues of a vanished culture within the text. Here, he spots a gesture or an odd remark; there, an innuendo or a forgotten legend, such as the curse believed to afflict twins (bessons). These signs no longer speak to us, but George Sand, who knew the Lower Berry region well, could not mistake their meaning. Suddenly, the novel is populated by fades ("they are daughters of God or daughters of the devil"), will-o'-the-wisps and wolf-leaders, healers and female counter-spell casters. Witches are never far away. With great subtlety, Vincent Robert leads us to the heart of a universe where things had to be understood without being spoken, a world traversed by magical rites and practices.
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An article about this work can be read on laviedesidees.fr:
This study belongs to the field of nineteenth-century cultural history, drawing upon the methods of historical anthropology to examine popular mentalities and oral traditions in rural France. By turning to literary texts rather than traditional judicial archives, which offer little evidence for this period regarding magical practices, the approach intersects with the history of mentalities and microhistory. Scholars in these fields frequently examine semi-erased traces of popular culture embedded within dominant or canonical discourses, reading imaginative literature alongside the insights of ethnologists and folklorists to recover lost social universes.
Vincent Robert investigates the magical culture of the French countryside during the time of George Sand, focusing on works such as La Petite Fadette and the writings of Jasmin. The analysis explores rural beliefs populated by witches, werewolves, fortune-tellers, and will-o'-the-wisps, while examining the persistence of superstition in the early nineteenth century and its intersection with political history following the introduction of universal suffrage in 1848. Readers interested in nineteenth-century cultural history, popular religion, and the interplay between literature and anthropology may find this work relevant.