Flora Tristan
Flore Célestine Thérèse Henriette Tristán y Moscoso, better known as Flora Tristan, was a French-Peruvian writer and socialist activist. She made important contributions to early feminist theory. She argued that the progress of women's rights was directly related to the progress of the working class. She wrote several works, the best known of which are Peregrinations of a Pariah, Promenades in London, and The Workers' Union. Tristan was the grandmother of the painter Paul Gauguin.
Early life
Tristan's full name was Flore Célestine Thérèse Henriette Tristán y Moscoso. Her father, Mariano Eusebio Antonio Tristán y Moscoso, was a colonel of the Spanish Navy, born in Arequipa, a city in Peru. His family was one of the most powerful families in the south of the country; his brother Pío de Tristán became viceroy of Peru. Tristan's mother, Anne-Pierre Laisnay, was French; the couple met in Bilbao, Spain.When Tristan's father died in 1807, before her fifth birthday, the family's situation changed drastically from the high standards of living Tristan and her mother were accustomed to. In 1833 she travelled to Arequipa to claim her paternal inheritance, which was in possession of her uncle, Juan Pío de Tristán y Moscoso. She remained in Peru until 16 July 1834. Though she never secured her inheritance, Tristan wrote a travel diary about her experiences in Peru during its tumultuous post-independence period. The diary was published in 1838 as Pérégrinations d'une paria. Around this time, Tristan met and was influenced by the philosophy of the androgynous mystic Simon Ganneau, as well as the occultist writer Éliphas Lévi, her longtime friend.
Her married name was Chazal, legally changed to Tristan after separation in 1838.
Final years
Tristan left her home in Paris again in 1843 to embark on a tour of France to promote the ideas in her final work, L'Union Ouvrière. She journeyed from city to city, meeting with groups of worker activists, trying to interest them in her plan for a national Workers' Union. She urged them to break down occupational, regional and political barriers dividing them from each other, and to seek strength in national and global working-class solidarity.She died suddenly in 1844.
Contributions
Tristan's writings and her personal contact with worker activists across France influenced the social struggles around the period of the revolutions of 1848. After her death, her followers tried to implement her plans for a Workers' Union, with little success. But her influence was key in the 1845 strike at the Toulon arsenal, a key moment in the story of French labour movement. According to the French historian Maurice Agulhon, Tristan's visit to Toulon during her radicalised its workers, contributing to the gestation of the strike. French workers' placed a monument on her tomb in October 1848, in the wake of the French Revolution of 1848, with close to eight thousand workers marking the occasion by marching to her grave singing a song from The Workers' Union.Through her writings, Flora Tristan was able to show the ability of women to conceptualize the idea of freedom even in the seemingly most inauspicious circumstances. This was early in evidence in her account of Peru. She proposed that there was "no place on earth where women are freer more influential" than in the "fortunate" society she encountered in Lima, and this, in great measure, was not despite, but rather because of, its cultural backwardness in relation to Europe. Women were typically married by the age of eleven or twelve; did not appear on the street unless almost wholly disguised in an enveloping "walking dress"; and, like their husbands, had no formal schooling. But they did not take their husband's name; were able, in the anonymity of their dress move about the town, and enter liaisons, in almost complete freedom; and, where, in the absence of schools for either sex, "intelligence has to develop on its own resources", enjoyed a natural advantage.
Seeing the failure of the promises of capitalism, Tristan wrote from a deep desire for social progress—combining the women's struggle with socialism. Tristan highlighted themes and ideas that give primacy to worker's rights. She was the first one to conceive the idea that the emancipation of the proletariat would be the synthesis of the people's struggle against the bourgeoisie. She is now recognised as a thinker whose works bridged the gap between utopian socialism and "scientific socialism", influenced by utopian socialists such as Henri de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier but rejecting the idea that ruling class benevolence would lead to socialism. Instead, she insisted on the primacy of class antagonism and proletarian self-emancipation. She added that socialism was only to be possible with the emancipation of the sexes; like Fourier's followers she saw women's liberation as an indicator of social progress.
She was therefore key in the story of the fusion of socialism and feminism: Tristan would be known as the “mother of feminism and of popular communitarian socialism”. Tristan was “the first woman to try to merge the proto-feminist and social discourses into a critical synthesis, opening the way leading for the future shape of feminism of a proletarian class character, which finds it inconceivable that there exist oppressed women who are capable of oppressing other women”. She organized the fragmented ideas of women's equality at that time, brought by the French Revolution, providing a platform for the later rise of first wave feminism in the late 19th century.
Tristan would die “defending the rights of the proletarian or rather demanding them for him; she died whilst preaching, through her words and her actions, the law of union and love that she had brought to him”.