Flora Tristan

French writer and social reformer

• Born: April 7, 1803
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: November 14, 1844
• Place of death: Bordeaux, France

During a life cut short by a murderous former husband, Tristan championed the causes of women’s and workers’ rights by documenting social conditions in Europe and Peru and calling for the international organization of labor.

Early Life

The circumstances of the birth of Flora Tristan (floor-ah tris-tuhn) to a large extent shaped her life. Her parents, a Peruvian-born Spanish nobleman named Don Mariano de Tristan y Moscozo and a French woman named Anne-Pierre Laisnay, met in Spain, where her father was serving in the Spanish army. They were married by a Roman Catholic priest but never registered their union with the civil authorities, as then required by law in Spain. Thus, while their marriage was sanctified by the church, it was legally irregular, if not illegitimate. The marital status of Flora’s parents would affect the circumstances of the births and future prospects of her and her siblings.

Flora spent her years in Paris, where the future South American liberator Simón Bolívar was a frequent guest in her family’s home. The sudden death of her father in 1807 changed the family’s circumstances drastically. Because of the legal irregularity of his marriage, his wealthy Peruvian family refused to recognize his widow or children, including a son born posthumously, as the rightful heirs to his fortune. Flora’s mother and siblings were forced to make their way outside Paris, and it is doubtful the young Flora received a full education. Sometime during her adolescence, she and her mother returned to Paris, where Flora became a lithographic colorist in the workshop of André Chazal. Flora soon married her employer. She later claimed that she had been forced into the marriage by her mother.

Flora and her husband had two sons and a daughter in rapid succession, but their marriage was anything but happy. They were prone to violent arguments and frequent separations, during which Flora fled from her husband to her mother’s home, even while pregnant with her third child. In 1832, she was granted a legal separation from her husband.

Life’s Work

As a wife estranged from her husband at a time when divorce was prohibited, Flora had no clear place in patriarchal society but still had to make her way on her own. In 1833, she embarked on a journey to Peru in an effort to lay claim to her paternal inheritance. Her hopes of finding her rightful place were dashed, however. Her Uncle Pio, the titular head of her father’s family, welcomed her with open arms as his brother’s daughter but refused to acknowledge her as a legitimate heir.

Flora later recounted the details of her travels in her best-known literary work, Pérégrinations d’une paria (Peregrinations of a Pariah , 1986), an autobiographical work first published in French in 1838. She used the book to take her status as an unmarried outcast and forge it into a new and unconventional identity, deploying the term “pariah” as an affirmation of her difference and independence. Meanwhile, her detailed descriptions of people she encountered and their living conditions became the hallmark of her writing style, often characterized as sociological and ethnographic.

Flora’s return to France in 1834 marked the beginning of her careers as a journalist and later as a professional writer, as well as a social critic and reformer. Thanks to the small allowance she had gleaned from her Peruvian family and her own earnings, she was now able to support herself, and she produced two polemic works during the period directly following her journey to Peru. In 1835, she published a pamphlet, Nécessité de faire bon accueil aux femmes étrangères (on the need to provide hospitality for women travelers), in which she underscored the need for societies to welcome women from other countries by establishing programs to help them integrate into their new surroundings.

Meanwhile, Tristan was being harassed by Chazal, but he eventually permitted her to take custody of their youngest child, their daughter Aline. In 1837, Flora sent a letter petitioning the French Chamber of Deputies to reinstitute divorce in France. Her early polemical works set the stage for an increasing social activism on her part, and they reflect her experience of the special burdens placed on women and children in societies that kept unyielding laws and social conventions.

Publication of Flora’s Pérégrinations in 1838 brought her instant celebrity, but at significant cost. Enraged at her accusations against him, her estranged husband confronted her on a public street near her home in Paris and shot her. The bullets from Chazal’s pistol narrowly missed Flora’s heart and lodged in her chest. Chazal was charged with attempted murder, and a sensational trial ensued. Chazal was sentenced to twenty years at hard labor, and soon thereafter Flora won the right to use her patronym, Tristan, as her legal name. However, she would suffer physically until her premature death from her bullet wounds. In the aftermath of the scandal, her uncle in Peru was so angered by her depiction of the Tristan family in her book that he cut off all financial support to her. It was only after Flora’s death that her daughter Aline Gauguin, along with her young son, the future painter Paul Gauguin, would find a family welcome in Peru.

Méphis, or le prolétaire (1838; Mephis, or the proletarian), the melodramatic fiction that Tristan wrote during her convalescence, was met with harsh criticism, in large part because its protagonist, an artist turned social activist, was a thinly disguised vehicle for Tristan’s own criticism of the class system and the Roman Catholic clergy. As a work of fiction, Méphis lacks structure and verisimilitude, but it does reveal the writer’s preoccupation with many forms of injustice.

In 1840, Tristan returned to her most successful genre with Promenades dans Londres (Flora Tristan’s London Journal, 1980), a work in which she documented various aspects of British society. Her work on England was more systematic than her work on Peru, because the express purpose of her travels was research. Her topics included women’s education, the living conditions of the Irish in London slums, conditions in urban factories and the mental asylum at Bedlam, and the British parliament.

Tristan next turned to her native France and produced L’Union ouvrière (The Worker’s Union , 1983), a manifesto issuing the first call for the organization of labor both nationally and internationally. Her agenda included the foundation of an association uniting all of the laboring classes, workers and artisans alike; a fund for the union’s programs; and the establishment of centers for the education of children and care of the aged. Tristan also dedicated an entire chapter of the book to working-class women, addressing them on the realities of their lives.

Because some of her ideas resembled those of utopian socialists who preceded and influenced her, Tristan is often categorized among them. However, she herself focused on the practical implementation of her ideas during her own lifetime at the national, rather than local, level. She set out on a journey through France, following the traditional journeyman’s practice of traveling throughout the country before earning the rank of master tradesman. She went from industrial city to industrial city, attempting to enlist workers in her union and to garner support from all quarters, including municipal officials and clergymen, and even business owners. She also made it a point to speak with women from the working classes wherever she went.

Tristan found a number of patrons for her workers union among France’s literati, but workers often proved less open to her project and remained entrenched in older artisan movements. Even when working-class leaders recognized the value of organizing labor, they were skeptical of Tristan’s ability to accomplish real reform.

As Tristan traveled—often while sick, exhausted, and discouraged—she was frequently harassed by police suspicious of her project. Her notes and journal entries from this period became the posthumously published book Le Tour de France (1973), a rich portrait of life in urban France during the nineteenth century. Ill and exhausted, Tristan finally succumbed to typhoid fever in Bordeaux on November 14, 1844. She never completed her “tour de France.”

Significance

Flora Tristan’s posthumously published journal, Le Tour de France, was not a polished volume, but rather the raw material intended for a future study. It included not only detailed observations but also harsh judgments formed on the spur of the moment, as well as commentaries on Tristan’s own state of mind, be it exultant or disheartened. Tristan’s journal is also colored by her use of religious metaphors, which she used to characterize her mission as messianic, while comparing herself to a Christ figure. The journal lacks the objective tone of previous works, such as Pérégrinations and Promenades dans Londres, but offers powerful testimony about the condition of the French working classes.

Tristan was among the first French women openly to protest against the status of women under the early nineteenth century Napoleonic Code. She documented Peruvian, British, and French society; called for reforms to better the lives of women and workers; and was the first French socialist to propose a workable plan for the organization of French labor.

Tristan’s Major Works

1835

• Nécessité de faire bon accueil aux femmes étrangeres (on the need to provide hospitality for women travelers)

1838

• Pérégrinations d une paria (Peregrinations of a Pariah, 1986)

1838

• Méphis, ou le prolétaire (Mephis, or the proletarian)

1840

• Promenades dans Londres (Flora Tristan’s London Journal, 1980)

1843

• L’Union ouvrière (The Worker’s Union, 1983)

1973

• Le Tour de France: État actuel de la classe ouvrière sous l’aspect moral, intellectuel, et matériel (Flora Tristan’s Diary, 1843-1844, 2002)

Bibliography

Cross, Máire Fedelma. The Letter in Flora Tristan’s Politics, 1835-1844. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Explores Tristan’s politics through her dialogue with contemporaries in her correspondence.

Cross, Máire, and Tim Gary. The Feminism of Flora Tristan. Providence, R.I.: Berg, 1992. Traces the development of Tristan’s feminist thought.

Grogan, Susan. Flora Tristan: Life Stories. London: Routledge, 1998. A study of the author’s self-representation in a variety of roles related to her social context.

Strumingher, Laura. The Odyssey of Flora Tristan. New York: Peter Lang, 1988. A complete and well-researched biography.