Soon after writing this work George Sand began to take a vigorous share in the practical politics of the day. After her quarrel with the _Revue des deux Mondes_ she had, in collaboration with Pierre Leroux, Viardot, Lamennais, and the Polish author Mickiewiez, started the _Revue Indépendante_; now (in 1843) she and some friends started a republican provincial newspaper in her own part of the country. In this paper, _L'Éclaireur de l'Indre_, to which Lamartine also contributed, she defended the cause, now of the town artisan, now of the peasant (article on the Paris journeymen bakers, letters from a Black Forest peasant). In 1844, in her long essay, _Questions politiques et sociales_, she distinctly declared herself a socialist. When the Revolution broke out in 1848 she was ripe to take part in it. For a short time she published a weekly paper, _La Cause du Peuple_; she wrote _A Word to the Middle Classes_, and the famous _Letters to the People_, and composed the bulletins of the Provisional Government. Towards the close of the year, in face of threatening danger, her republican socialism assumed an almost fanatical form. The article _La Majorité et l'Unanimité_, in which, immediately before the elections for the Constituent National Assembly, she exhorts the electors to show their liberal principles by their votes, ends with the threat, expressed with much circumlocution, but yet plain enough, that if the assembly presently to be elected by universal suffrage does not prove to be such an assembly as popular interests demand, mere still remains the appeal to arms.[2] It is curious to see the champion of the sovereignty of the people having recourse to a threat of despotically violent measures; it shows what a vigorous, ardent, manly spirit dwelt in the bosom of this gifted woman. The same indomitable energy which produced hundreds of novels displayed itself in her alliance with Ledru-Rollin and Louis Blanc, men who were content with thinking what she gave expression to in words.