Who was Flora Tristan?
Flora Tristan was born in Paris in 1803, the daughter of a Peruvian father and a French mother. She married a lithographer, André-François Chazal, in 1821 and separated from him after an unhappy marriage, at a time when divorce was illegal in France. In the early 1830s she went to Peru to claim an inheritance and wrote about the trip in Peregrinations of a Pariah. She studied poverty in London for Promenades in London and in 1843 published The Workers' Union. She toured France to promote it and died of a fever in Bordeaux in 1844, at the age of 41.
Political views
- She proposed a universal union of working men and women, funded by small annual dues, that would build communal schools and retirement homes and press for workers' rights.Source: encyclopedia.com
- She urged workers on her tour of France in 1843 to cross divides of trade, region and ideology and to seek national and international solidarity.Source: sites.ohio.edu
- She assumed a basic antagonism between classes and rejected the idea that an enlightened middle class could create harmony. She said workers could best represent their own interests.Source: sites.ohio.edu
- She held that the oppression of women and the oppression of workers were linked, and that workers could not be freed until women were.Source: encyclopedia.com
- She campaigned for the return of divorce, for education for girls and for legal reform, arguing that marriage left women without legal rights.Source: encyclopedia.com
- She also campaigned against the death penalty and for the organization of workers.Source: marxists.org
- She drew on the utopian socialists but split from the Saint-Simonians and Fourierists on class harmony and on speaking directly to workers.Source: sites.ohio.edu
- In 1839 and 1840 she studied poverty and unrest in London, Manchester and Sheffield, and she published her findings in Promenades in London.Source: encyclopedia.com
Legacy
Admirers see Tristan as a founder of both modern feminism and the labor movement, an early voice who tied women's rights to workers' rights and argued for a union of all workers. Historian Maurice Agulhon says her visit to Toulon helped radicalize workers and fed the 1845 arsenal strike. In October 1848 workers put up a monument on her grave, and about eight thousand marched there. Critics note that her Workers' Union had little success after her death and that her work is often labeled utopian. She was also a victim of violence, since her husband shot her in 1838 and was jailed.