Flora Tristan, born 7 April 1803, turned her own private struggle for emancipation into a universal campaign for the rights of women and workers. The life and career of this French feminist and socialist writer and activist make for an incredible story.
Of “an aristocratic lineage yet came of age in relative poverty,” (as her translators Doris and Paul Beik tell it), Tristan married her employer at age 18, artist Andre Chazal. They quarreled, she abandoned Chazal in 1825, took their daughter Aline, and set off a legal battle ending only in 1938, when he attempted to murder her.
In the years between her flight and Chazal shooting her in the chest, Tristan sailed to Peru to try to recoup an inheritance from some distant relatives; she didn’t get that, but instead wrote a travel journal, Peregrinations, which began her career as a writer and social critic.
Peregrinations of a Pariah (1838) “a shockingly personal but wonderfully descriptive look backward at her search for identity in Peru,” according to the Beiks, and that same year the picaresque novel Mephis, about a working-class Mephistopheles and his love for an independent-minded woman, Marequita.
After recovering from her husband’s attempt to assassinate her (he spent the next 20 years in prison), Flora Tristan travelled to England to finish writing a book based on observations from her travels there, Promenades in London (alt. title The Monster City). For this wide-ranging book, Tristan visited the Jewish and Irish Quarters, and (surreptitiously) Parliament (where she saw O’Connell speak.) She sharply criticized the industrial transformation of London, gent. clubs, prostitution, and the living conditions of the working class.
Influenced by socialist thinkers like Fourier, St.-Simon, Considerant, and Owen, Tristan soon after produced a remarkable tract called Workers Union, introducing the idea of a global worker’s solidarity movement and in 1843 embarked on a tour of France to promote these ideas to local workers.
Flora Tristan died in 1844 of typhoid fever while in touring in Bourdeaux. She was remarkably ahead of her time in combining feminism with union organization into a vision of global solidarity, and overcame formidable personal obstacles to accomplish this.
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