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. A sampling of her works can be read in Flora Tristan—Utopian Feminist: Her Travel Diaries and Personal Crusade selected and translated by Doris and Paul Bieck.
Tristan, who according to the Bieck’s introduction to the collection was of “an aristocratic lineage, yet came of age in relative poverty,” married her employer at age 18, the artist Andre Chazal. Chazal and Tristan quarreled, the marriage was an unhappy one, and Tristan abandoned Chazal in 1825, taking with her their daughter Aline, setting off a legal battle which ended only in 1838, when Chazal attempted to murder her.
In the years between her flight and Chazal shooting her in the chest on the street, 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 of a Pariah (1838), which the Biecks describe as “a shockingly personal but wonderfully descriptive look backward at her search for identity in Peru,” and the book which began Tristan’s career as a writer and social critic.
That same year Tristan produced the picaresque novel Mephis, about a working-class Mephistopheles and his love for an independent-minded woman, Marequita. But Tristan was by no means done with her nonfiction reportage. After recovering from her husband’s attempt to assassinate her (he spent the next 20 years in prison), 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, gentleman’s clubs, prostitution, and the living conditions of the working class.
Influenced by socialist thinkers like Fourier, St.-Simon, Considerant, and Owen, Tristan produced a remarkable tract called Workers Union, introducing the idea of a global worker’s solidarity movement several years before Marx made the same call to action in the Communist Manifesto. Tristan’s wasn’t passive in her call to action either, but in 1843 embarked on a tour of France to promote these ideas to local workers and organize around her radical ideas.
Flora Tristan died in 1844 of typhoid fever while on her book tour 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.
“… everything comes there to be hidden, to be lost, to be engulfed.” – Flora Tristan on women in large cities (Women Travelers, 1835) pic.twitter.com/qSDGH1EX5N
— Old Books Abe (@bookappreciator) April 18, 2018
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