8 June 1876: George Sand dies

George Sand died on 8 June 1876, at the age of 71 from intestinal cancer at her family’s estate at Nohant surrounded by her children and grandchildren. There is a lovely rose garden and a tiny burial plot in the grounds of her home where she rests with members of her family.

Born Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, she was raised on her grandmother’s French estate. She and her husband, Casimir Dudevant, had two children. George Sand was a novelist, memoirist, and journalist and one of the most popular writers in Europe in her lifetime, being more renowned than both Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac in England in the 1830s and 1840s.

George Sand’s life was unconventional in numerous ways. She was one of many notable 19th-century women who chose to wear male attire in public and she caused a scandal by smoking cigars in public. There were numerous love affairs that included the composer Frédéric Chopin from 1837 to 1847. She also had an intimate friendship with actress Marie Dorval.

George Sand was a prolific writer who expressed a deep concern for human problems and strong feminist ideals, although her books are little read today. She wrote over 70 novels, including La Petite Fadette, Indiana, and A Winter in Majorca, 24 plays, 10 volumes of autobiography, essays, book reviews, political pamphlets, and an estimated 40,000 letters. She corresponded with Gustave Flaubert, the author of the then-scandalous novel Madame Bovary. Both Flaubert and Honoré de Balzac admired her work.

Sand’s last lover was the engraver Alexandre Damien Manceau, who gave her not only romance but devoted friendship. After her 1872 retirement, she left Paris to live at her picturesque country estate at Nohant in Berry. Sand died at Nohant on 8 June 1876, at the age of 71. She was buried in the private graveyard behind the chapel at Nohant-Vic. Her grave marker documents her name as “George Sand.”

In 2004, controversial plans were suggested to move her remains to the Panthéon in Paris.