Flora Tristan

Flora Tristan
Flore Célestine Thérèse Henriette Tristán y Moscoso (7 April 1803 – 14 November 1844), better known as Flora Tristan, was a French-Peruvian writer and socialist activist. She made important contributions to early feminist theory, and argued that the progress of women's rights was directly related with the progress of the working class. She wrote several works, the best known of which are Peregrinations of a Pariah (1838), Promenades in London (1840), and The Workers' Union (1843). 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 (Peregrinations of a Pariah). 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.
Contributions
Repressed for the most part in history, women's historiography has been gaining traction in the attempt of historians to highlight “minoritized” histories. Through her writings, Flora Tristan was able to show the ability of women to conceptualize the idea of freedom which emanated from her works.
Seeing the failure of the promises of capitalism, Tristan wrote from a deep desire for social progress—combining the women's struggle with socialism. When one traces socialism going together with feminism, Tristan becomes the key person in this amalgamation. Tristan would be known as the “mother of feminism and of popular communitarian socialism”, fighting the prejudice and misogyny that powers women's oppression.
Flora 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”.
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 further added that this was only to be possible with the emancipation of the sexes.
Tristan organized the fragmented ideas of women's equality at that time, brought by the French Revolution. She provided the platform for the later rise of 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”.
Flora Tristan's life, works, and ideals have proved fruitful for the excavation of women's work through time. Establishing histories that would focus on the contribution of women, Flora Tristan has provided much in the progressing excavation of women's role in our history.
Family tree
References
Bibliography
Tristan, Flora. The Workers Union. Translated by Beverly Livingston. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1983, 77–78.
Máire Cross. The Feminism of Flora Tristan. Berg, Oxford, 1992.
Máire Cross. The Letter in Flora Tristan's Politics, 1835-1844, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004.
Flora Tristan’s Diary: The Tour of France 1843–1844, translated, annotated and introduced by Máire Fedelma Cross. Berne: Peter Lang, 2002.
Dominique Desanti. A Woman in Revolt: A Biography of Flora Tristan. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1976.
The London Journal of Flora Tristan, translated, annotated and introduced by Jean Hawkes. London: Virago Press, 1982.
Tristan, Flora. Peregrinations of a Pariah, translated by Jean Hawkes. London: Virago Press, 1985.
Beik, Doris and Paul. Flora Tristan: Utopian Feminist: Her Travel Diaries and Personal Crusade. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.
Dijkstra, Sandra. Flora Tristan: Feminism in the Age of George Sand. London: Pluto Press, 1992.
Krulic, Brigitte. ‘’Flora Tristan.’’ Paris: Gallimard/NRF, 2022.
Melzer, Sara E. and Rabine, Leslie W. Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, 284.
Schneider, Joyce Anne. Flora Tristan: Feminist, Socialist, and Free Spirit. New York: Morrow, 1980. .
Strumingher, Laura L. The Odyssey of Flora Tristan. New York: Peter Lang, 1988. University of Cincinnati Studies in Historical and Contemporary Europe, vol. 2.
External links
Ibero-American Electronic Text Series: Tristan, Flora, Peregrinaciones de una Paria (Selección). Presented online by the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center.
Archive of Flora Tristan Papers at the International Institute of Social History
Excerpts and full text of Promenades in London (1840) at the Marxist Internet Archive (in Spanish)
1803 births
1844 deaths
Tristán del Pozo family
19th-century French non-fiction writers
19th-century French women writers
Feminist writers
French anti-capitalists
French feminists
French people of Spanish descent
French socialists
French socialist feminists
French suffragists
French women non-fiction writers
Peruvian feminists
Peruvian women activists
Peruvian people of Spanish descent
Utopian socialists
Writers from Paris
19th-century French women politicians