Envisioning Freedom: Bakunin, George Sand, and the Political Imagination of Radical Romanticism

This article explores the intellectual exchange between the French novelist George Sand and the Russian radical Mikhail Bakunin during the final stages of the Romantic century. It examines how Sand’s writings and political thought contributed to Bakunin’s emerging conceptions of personal and political freedom, social justice, and the revolutionary potential of oppressed peoples. Drawing on literary-philosophical hermeneutics and close reading of published works and private correspondence, the study reconstructs Bakunin’s reception of Sand’s oeuvre, traces the evolution of these ideas in his early writings, and examines the influence of her novel Consuelo on his views of Slavic revolutionary agency on the eve of the revolutions of 1848–9. By foregrounding this underexplored relationship, the article sheds new light on the role of literary culture in shaping political radicalism and contributes to a broader understanding of the transnational circulation of revolutionary ideas in nineteenth-century Europe.