Recommendations
Books Like Le Compagnon du tour de France
Best books to read after Le Compagnon du tour de France by George Sand
Readers drawn to Sand's portrait of working-class dignity, the compagnonnage guild tradition, and her democratic socialism will find the tradition of French socialist fiction and the European novel about labor and class.
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Indiana
by George Sand
Sand's first novel and the feminist companion to the socialist argument of Le Compagnon — where Indiana analyzes female constraint within the bourgeois marriage system, Le Compagnon analyzes the working-class man's dignity and intelligence within the class hierarchy; both novels argue for the equal humanity of those whom the social system treats as inferior.
- 2Buy
Germinal
by Émile Zola
The great French working-class novel that realizes the documentary ambition of Le Compagnon in the Naturalist mode — Zola's 1885 account of a mining community's strike is the fullest treatment in French fiction of the working-class world that Sand was beginning to document; where Sand's journeyman carpenter is a dignified individual protagonist, Zola's miners are a collective force.
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The Condition of the Working Class in England
by Friedrich Engels
The documentary companion in the tradition of the investigation of working-class life — Engels's 1845 account of the Manchester working class, based on his direct observation, is the social science companion to Sand's fictional portrait; both were written in the same period, both take the working class as their central subject, and both argue that the conditions of working-class life are the central political question of the age.
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Les Misérables
by Victor Hugo
The French companion novel in the tradition of the sympathetic portrait of the poor — Hugo's 1862 epic shares Le Compagnon's democratic argument that the dignity of the poor is equal to that of the rich, and Jean Valjean, the former convict who becomes a factory owner and mayor, is a more famous version of the working-class protagonist who rises through his own moral quality rather than through social privilege.
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Mary Barton
by Elizabeth Gaskell
The English working-class novel most directly comparable to Le Compagnon — Gaskell's 1848 novel about a Manchester factory worker's daughter caught between labor agitation and her love for the mill-owner's son is the English industrial novel equivalent of Sand's French artisan novel; both are fiction by educated women who investigated working-class life to make a democratic argument about its dignity.
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The Iron Heel
by Jack London
The American companion in the tradition of the working-class socialist novel — London's 1908 dystopian novel about the oligarchy's suppression of the labor movement is the American equivalent of the democratic socialist fiction that Sand was pioneering with Le Compagnon; both writers combine socialist politics with fiction to argue for the working class's right to dignity and self-organization.
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News from Nowhere
by William Morris
The English companion utopian fiction in the tradition of the artisan socialist — Morris's 1890 utopian novel about a traveler in a twenty-first-century England organized by artisan craft and democratic fellowship is the English version of the vision that Sand was beginning to articulate with Le Compagnon; Morris knew Sand's work and the figure of the dignified craftsman as a model of democratic humanity runs through both.
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Consuelo
by George Sand
The Sand companion novel that shares Le Compagnon's democratic argument about the dignity of those who work for their living — Consuelo rises from poverty to artistic greatness through talent and integrity rather than through social privilege, making the same argument as Pierre Huguenin's journeyman carpenter story but in the registers of music and Bildungsroman rather than labor politics.
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