Flora Tristan

Flora Tristan there Moscoso , born with Paris the April 7th 1803 and died with Bordeaux the November 14th 1844, is a Woman of letters, militant Socialist and feminist French which was one of the major figures of the social debate in the Années 1840 and took part in the first steps of internationalism.

Of origin free - Peruvian, Flora Tristan claimed to go down from Montézuma. She was the girl of a noble Peruvian, Mariano de Tristàn there Moscoso, and of a small Parisian middle-class woman emigrated in Spain during the Révolution, Anne-Pierre Laisnay. His/her parents were married in Spain by a refractory priest, but his/her father, of return in France, never took time to regularize his marriage. He died shortly after their return to Paris; and this blow dealt by fate was the first of a dramatic existence: “My happy childhood was completed, at four years, with died of my Father. ” ( Pérégrinations of one bet )

Flora and her mother then will struggle with insurmountable financial problems which will precipitate, at 17 years, the marriage of Flora with a copper plate engraver, André Chazal. Rich person, Chazal was especially jealous, poor and very violent one. Tristan escapes from a daily life where the woman is regarded as minor an incompetent by the reading of Rousseau, Lamartine and especially of Madam de Staël. She hates Chazal, her husband more and more. The failure is total, woman beaten, humiliated, sequestered, Flora will succeed in fleeing it, although enclosure of its third child. In spite of the threats and the increasingly serious ways in fact, it will take again the common life never again. In 1838, Chazal, which always continues it, of a blow of gun perforates the left lung to him. We are at one time when triumph since the Restauration a strong reaction as regards manners and the divorce is interdict since 1815 except for serious deficiencies and the judges grant to Flora only “the Judicial separation” (whereas they were already separate since nearly ten years), but the divorce to him “for lack of convincing elements refuses”. Also, for the remainder of her life, Flora will fight for the divorce of the women.

She turns over to the Peru, hoping to be made recognize by her grandfather, noble Peruvian, but he treats it the “bastard one”, of “bet” and family home drives out it. It is new and painful failure.

Without losing the moral one, Flora sharpens her talents of social investigator with the publication of the Promenades in London (1840) and invests mission of organizing the working classes.

Worker in the spinning mills, printing works but also woman of letters, militant socialist and feminist, it was one of the major figures of the social debate in the years 1840, and took part in the first steps of the Internationalisme.

To spread its ideas, Tristan embarked, in 1843, in “a turn of France”, the traditional circuit of the apprentice-companions. Its newspaper, published posthumously, working trace its meetings with the women and men through France. Tristan forever completed its voyage. She died prematurely of the Typhoid fever in 1844 in Bordeaux. She is buried with the cemetery of Chartreuse in Bordeaux.

“Aristocrat déchue, Woman socialist and Working feminist” as she liked to indicate herself, his major work will be published after his death by Eliphas Lévi under the title the Emancipation of the Woman or the Will of Bet .

Quotation

Pérégrinations of one bet , Extrait from the foreword: “My mother is French: during the emigration she married in Spain a Peruvian; obstacles being opposed to their union, they married clandestinely, and it was an emigrated French priest who made the ceremony of the marriage in the house that my mother occupied. I was four years old when I lost my father in Paris. We returned to Paris, where my mother obliged me to marry a man I could neither like nor to even estimate. With this union I owe all my evils…”
“the Stamping from the workers will be the work of the workers themselves. The man more oppressed can oppress a being, which is his wife. She is the proletarian of the proletarian even. ”

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