Flora Tristan

Flora Celestina Teresa Enriqueta de Tristán y Moscoso (Paris, April 7, 1803 - Bordeaux, November 14, 1844), better known as Flora Tristan (or Tristán), was a French writer, thinker and feminist of Peruvian descent. She was one of the great founders of early feminism.

Biography

His father, Mariano de Tristán y Moscoso, brother of Juan Pío de Tristán y Moscoso, was a Peruvian aristocrat and colonel from Arequipa (at that time part of the Viceroyalty of Peru) and a member of the Spanish Navy, while his mother, Teresa Lesnais, was French. Some versions maintain that Simón Bolívar was the father of Flora Tristán. Mariano and Teresa met in the Spanish city of Bilbao during Mariano's stay there. He did not legally recognize Flora as his daughter. Flora had a luxurious early childhood, and her house was visited by characters who would later become milestones in history, such as Simón Bolívar, who shared Creole and Basque origins with Flora's father. This situation of economic and social goodness was cut short with the death of her father in 1808, when Flora was barely 5 years old, which left the family in poverty. The lack of legal recognition by her father prevented him from inheriting her assets left by him.

Two years after the death of her father, Flora and her mother moved to live in a poor neighborhood of Paris, around Place Maubert, where they lived in harsh conditions. At the age of 16 she began working as a colorist in a lithography workshop and at the age of 17 she married its owner, André Chazal, on February 3, 1821. In the following four years they had three children, one of whom he died, apparently, very young; the other received the name of Ernesto, and the third, born in 1825, was Alina, who would later be the mother of the painter Paul Gauguin. This marriage of convenience was dissolved due to the jealousy and mistreatment of her husband. At the age of 22, Flora ran away from home, taking her children with her. Her dual status as natural daughter and wife separated from her reduced her to the marginal condition of "pariah", as she liked to call herself. Chazal pursued her relentlessly. Finally, they reached a judicial agreement, whereby he kept custody of the son, while she kept the girl.

Nevertheless, Flora mistrusted her husband and left Paris. She thus began her wandering life together with her daughter Alina. Thanks to the intervention of Captain Chabrié, in 1829 she was able to send a letter to her uncle Juan Pío Tristán y Moscoso, who lived in Peru, who for five years sent her money to help her against her poverty. Thanks to Pedro Mariano de Goyeneche, a relative of the Tristáns, Flora traveled to Peru in 1832, ready to collect her inheritance and recover her place in society.

On April 7, 1833, the day she turned 30, Flora embarked on Le Mexican. The ship belonged to Captain Chabrié himself, who had facilitated her first contact with her Peruvian relatives. The journey to America lasted five months and, after disembarking in Islay, Flora went to Arequipa, where she remained until April 1834. She claimed her paternal inheritance from Don Pío, but he refused to give it to her; Although Pío treated her as a “dear niece”, since there was no document proving that she was the legitimate daughter of hers, her brother, Mariano, she could not proceed otherwise. She only she agreed to give him a monthly pension.

Flora moved to Lima, where she stayed until July 16, 1834, when she embarked in Callao bound for Liverpool, in the United Kingdom. During her stay in Peru she witnessed the political crisis of 1833-1834, the civil war between the supporters of Agustín Gamarra and those of Luis de Orbegoso.

Flora wrote a travel journal about her experiences in Peru. The diary was published in 1838, as Pérégrinations d'une paria (Pilgrimages of a pariah).

Back in France, she campaigned for women's emancipation, workers' rights and against the death penalty. She had already obtained legal separation from her husband and custody of her children; However, André Chazal, enraged and powerless over her, tried to assassinate her in September 1838, shooting her in the street, leaving her badly wounded. Flora gained notoriety in the press, and Chazal was subjected to a process that was complicated by the accusation of trying to rape his own daughter Aline; he was finally sentenced to twenty years of hard labor.

Already separated from Chazal, Flora published in 1840 a coherent socialist program in L'Union Ouvrière (La Unión Obrera), where she cried out for the need of workers to organize and advocated its "universal unity" —the emancipation of workers should go hand in hand with the emancipation of women—; She was the one who created the slogan Proletarians of the world, unite.She thus became the first woman to speak of socialism and the struggle of the proletarians. Karl Marx recognized her character as "a forerunner of high noble ideals" and her books formed part of her personal library. In the text The Holy Family (written jointly by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels) in chapter IV —written solely by Engels— (Die kritische Kritik als die Ruhe des Erkennens oder die kirische Kritik ald Herr Edgar) makes a defense of communist feminist Flore Celestine.

He died at the age of 41, a victim of typhus, while he was on a tour of the interior of France, promoting his revolutionary ideas.

Family Tree

Works

Flora Tristán was the author of many ideological and literary works, the best known are:

• Pilgrimages of a pariah (French text, 1839 and 1840; Spanish translation of Emilia Romero, 1946 and 1971), a book presented as a memory of her trip to America and her stay in Peru between 1833 and 1834, however, the author adopts multiple narrative forms to offer her personal vision of her experiences. It is a fundamental book to know closely the avatars of the incipient Peruvian republic, whose practices and customs were carefully analyzed by the author.
• Tours in London (1840), piece containing sharp criticisms of British civilization.
• The working union (1843), pamphlet synthesizing its idea or program of reforms for the proletarian class; the fundamental work of the library of Marx.
• The Emancipation of Women (French text, 1845 and 1846; Spanish translation of M. E. Mur de Lara, 1948) where it is rudely manifested against the marriage inferiority of the female sex and attacks the gazmoñeria of the environment. It is an early essay of modern feminist thinking.
• Mephis, novel whose protagonist appears as a combination of Messiah and Mephistopheles.

Influence on literature

Inspired by reading Peregrinaciones de una paria, the Peruvian writer Abraham Valdelomar wrote in 1914 La mariscala, a novelized biography of Francisca Zubiaga, wife of the marshal and president Peruvian Agustin Gamarra.

In 1942, Luis Alberto Sánchez published a fictionalized biography of Flora Tristán entitled A single woman against the world.

In 1964, Sebastián Salazar Bondy published a drama in three acts inspired by the life of Flora: Flora Tristán.

Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, in his historical novel Paradise on the Other Corner, analyzes the journeys of Flora Tristán and her grandson Paul Gauguin as contrasts for the ideal life they sought in his experiences outside his native France.

Thought

Flora Tristan in recent years.

Flora Tristán's feminism is embedded in the Enlightenment; Therefore, it presupposes claims and a political project that can only be articulated from the idea that all human beings are born free, equal and with the same rights, but it takes shape in the period immediately after the French Revolution. Maintaining continuity with the thought of previous authors (Mary Wollstonecraft, among others), Flora Tristán gives her feminism a turn of social class, which in the future would give rise to Marxist feminism.

At the time, he was related to the critical currents that have been called «utopian socialism», but already theorizing the need for a Workers' Union, of a workers' party. "All the misfortunes in the world come from the oblivion and contempt that until today has been made of the natural and imprescriptible rights of being a woman," she wrote in Unión Obrera .

His incessant struggle to achieve a more just and egalitarian society has been reflected in his work. Thus, among others, in Peregrinaciones de una paria he denounces the different manifestations of social exclusion in Arequipa society; in Walks in London (1840) he makes one of the first and harshest descriptions of English workers. He wrote then "slavery is not in my eyes the greatest of human misfortunes since I have known the English proletariat."

In Union Obrera he describes how «improving the situation of misery and ignorance of the workers» is fundamental, because «all the misfortunes of the world come from the oblivion and contempt that until today has been fact of the natural and imprescriptible rights of being a woman”. For Flora, the situation of women derives from the acceptance of the false principle that affirms the inferiority of the nature of women with respect to that of men. This ideological discourse made from the law, science and the church marginalizes women from rational education and destines them to be the slave of their master. Up to this point Flora's discourse is similar to that of suffragism, but the class turn begins to take place when she points out how denying women education is related to their economic exploitation: girls are not sent to school "because they are makes better use of housework, whether it is to rock the children, run errands, take care of the food, etc...", and then "At the age of twelve she is placed as an apprentice: there she continues to be exploited by the patroness and often also mistreated as when she was at her parents' house ». Flora directs her speech to the analysis of the most dispossessed women, of the workers. And her judgment could not be more forceful: the unfair and vexatious treatment that these women suffer from birth, together with their lack of education and the forced servitude to men, generates in them a brutal and even evil character. For Flora, this moral degradation is of the greatest importance, since women, in their multiple roles as mothers, lovers, wives, daughters, etc... "are everything in the worker's life", influence throughout the entire life of the worker. his life. This "central" status of women has no equivalent in the upper class, where money can provide professional servants and educators and other distractions.

Consequently, educating (working) women well supposes the beginning of the intellectual, moral and material improvement of the working class. Flora, as a good "utopian socialist", trusts enormously in the power of education, and as a feminist she demands the education of women; In addition, she maintains that the emancipation of men depends on the rational education of women. A fact that to date continues to be included in the declarations of principles of the feminist movements.

His speech appeals to the sense of universal justice of humanity, in general, and of men, in particular (since they are the depositaries of power and reason), so that they agree to change a situation that, in his opinion, ends up becoming also against them.

“The law that enslaves women and deprives them of instruction also oppresses you, proletarian men. (...) In the name of your own interest, men; in the name of your improvement, yours, men; in the end, in the name of the universal well-being of all and I promise you to claim the rights for women." (Working Union).

La Flora de Unión Obrera advances a thought that, prior to the Communist Manifesto, postulates the union of workers and women —the oppressed of the world—, in an International that, through a peaceful revolution -here appears its Saint-Simonian heritage -, will bring prosperity and justice.

André Breton says of her: «Perhaps there is no feminine destiny that leaves, in the firmament of the spirit, such a long and luminous seed». The life of "a reckless and romantic vigilante" points out Mario Vargas Llosa in his book on Paul Gauguin, Paraíso en la otra esquina .

The publication of My life is the self-portrait in which she recognizes herself as a double pariah: the daughter without legal recognition of her father, and therefore disinherited, and the married for convenience (necessity). She talks about her experience in the first person. Flora confesses to being a victim of that double oppression that she as a woman feels to an extreme degree, which led her to fight against marriage as a means of oppression against women, "the only hell I recognize."