Flora Tristan by Brigitte Krulic (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Flora Tristan by Brigitte Krulic Nadia Margolis Krulic, Brigitte. Flora Tristan. Gallimard, 2022. Pp. 380. ISBN 978-2-07-282022-9. 21.50€ (paper). First-time readers of Flora Tristan (1803-1844) often tend to ask the same question: why have we not heard more about her sooner? For indeed, she was one of those extraordinarily accomplished women authors who were so ahead of their time that, despite recognition by their contemporaries, they ended up forgotten shortly after their deaths. Fortunately, scholars and activists of congruent ideological agendas to theirs (as in 1968) finally discovered and evoked them as presaging voices from the past, yet still not engagingly enough for recognition by the general public, even though Tristan's life reads like a romantic novel, as surrealist André Breton and others would later observe. Brigitte Krulic offers the most complete, rigorous yet readable, up-to-date appraisal of Flora Tristan's place [End Page 155] in women's history and European social history in general. Interwoven within her biography, Krulic's main arguments and elucidations are discussed below. Tristan's pervasive self-image as "pariah" first relates to her early childhood as an orphaned bastard child: born to a Creole aristocratic Peruvian father and bourgeois Parisian mother married in a Catholic (but not civil) wedding, she led an impoverished childhood with her mother in Paris after her father died when she was four. Her situation forced her into an unhappy early marriage to her boss, Chazal, with whom she had three children (the third, Aline, would become mother to the celebrated, if hardly feminist, artist Paul Gauguin). Chazal's abusive treatment made her a fugitive, then victim of Chazal's pistol, until she convinced the courts to grant her a divorce (outlawed since 1816—a major blow for feminism). This prompted Tristan to formulate a working idea of consentement for women, since a conventional woman's background prevents her from conceiving of consent as a man does, much less act upon it. A pariah marginalized by society, she was also freer to think, then act and effectuate her ideals. Despite hardship, she refused to see herself as a victim, but rather as better educated to help women and the poor. Tristan also never refuted her femininity by dressing as a man to gain respect, as did George Sand, for example, except when she once dressed as a man to gain entrance to a meeting of the British Parliament. While a feminist, she prioritized workers' rights ahead of Marx. She supported universal suffrage, but less pointedly than feminists like George Sand who were in favor of this larger mission. Tristan put first the poor and mistreated workers in the fight for unionization. She contended that effectuating solidarity with the worker's unions would render women's rights to vote more meaningful towards reforming a property-based society that de facto favored men. She traveled alone to London and Peru, producing extraordinary narratives on the plight of the poor and working class and on the women of post-revolutionary Peru who wore their veils as sources of mobility and power—rather than subjugation—within society. She could simply have limited this arduous Peruvian voyage to the recovery of part of her family fortune, but she never lost sight of her larger mission to learn from direct experience how to help the poor and enslaved. She even corresponded with Simon Bolivar on the new hope fostered by Latin American revolutions. Tristan consciously added solidarité to the French revolution's motto of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. Yet she never fully joined other thinkers and movements in such solidarity—Proudhon (pioneering trade-unionist but too misogynistic), Saint-Simonians or Fourierists—while borrowing some principles from each and prefiguring Marx's scientific socialism, uncredited. Doctrines did not suffice; they required actualization as solutions to society's ills. Part of Tristan's reformist activism included calling out (nommer)—j'accuse-style—persecutors of women and workers through cruelty, greed, and dishonesty. It was during her impassioned "Tour of France" traveling mission to educate the oppressed that she fell ill and died in Bordeaux, greatly mourned and revered by her followers and admirers. Although her books, articles...