Flora Tristan: Life Stories

Flora Tristan

A series of traditions has grown up around Flora Tristan, reflecting her involvement in different causes such as feminism and socialism. In Flora Tristan: Life Stories, Susan Grogan discusses the portrayal of Flora Tristan in the context of representations of women in nineteenth century France and Europe generally. The author also investigates the extent to which Flora Tristan orchestrated her own image for her contemporaries and posterity. This study highlights a variety of ways in which Flora Tristan represented herself to the world, and the historical context within which such self-representations were evoked. Through a survey of Tristan’s writings (which include four books, a diary, an assortment of newspaper articles, pamphlets, petitions and letters), Susan Grogan reveals Tristan’s self-conscious adoption of a variety of roles. The author also considers the limitations and possibilities of biography as a means to approach history. Susan Grogan is Senior Lecturer in History, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand and author of French Socialism and Sexual Difference: Women and the New Society, 1803–1844.

Flora Tristan Life Stories

Susan Grogan

London and New York

First published 1998 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1998 Susan Grogan All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Grogan Susan K., 1949– Flora Tristan: life stories/Susan Grogan p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: Examines the nineteenth-century French social critic and reformer’s life by exploring the ways she represented herself in her writings and how others portayed her in painting and literature. 1. Tristan, Flora, 1803–1844—Juvenile literature. 2. Feminists—France—Biography—Juvenile literature. 3. Social reformers—France—Biography—Juvenile literature. [1. Tristan, Flora, 1803–1844. 2. Feminists. 3. Reformers. 4. Women—Biography.] I. Title. HQ1615.T7G76 1998 305.42’092–dc21 97–20021 CIP ISBN 0-203-40857-8 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-71681-7 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-04962-8 (Print Edition)

Contents

Acknowledgements Abbreviations

vii viii

Introduction: biography and memory

1

1

Childhood stories

14

2

Slave and pariah

26

3

Traveller

44

4

Woman author

60

5

Social scientist

79

6

Socialist

97

7

Mother of the workers

115

8

Lover of humanity

133

9

‘The first strong woman’

152

10

Melodramatic hero

170

11

Saving woman

186

12

Death and birth of a legend

202

Epilogue

214

Appendix I: works by Flora Tristan

218

Appendix II: chronological appendix

222

Appendix III: biographical appendix

226

Notes Index

232 273

v

Acknowledgements

Many people deserve thanks for making this project possible, and in several cases a brief acknowledgement here will not do justice to their contribution. Firstly, I thank Victoria University of Wellington for providing me with a period of leave and some financial assistance, without which the research for this book could not have been completed. I thank the Internal Grants Committee for their support, and the Reference Librarians for their expert assistance. I also wish to acknowledge the assistance of Librarians and Archivists in a number of repositories in France. Those at the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand and the Bibliothèque municipale de Bordeaux were particularly helpful. I also thank the Lilly Library, Indiana University, for providing me with a number of documents, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, for permission to reproduce the images of Flora Tristan. My colleagues and friends at Victoria University and elsewhere have also contributed in ways large and small to this book. I thank, in particular, Jacquie Matthews for generously sharing her insights and enthusiasm. She read several chapters in draft, as did Kerry Taylor, Martyn Lyons, and Bronwyn Labrum. I also thank Pauline Keating and Charlotte Macdonald, and the members of the Feminist History Group, for their support. Vanessa Taler’s expertise in translating the Spanish documents for me was greatly appreciated, as was Frith Tweedie’s work on the appendices, and Pennie Gapes’ word processing advice. Claire L’Enfant and Heather McCallum at Routledge have also supported the project since its inception, and I thank them for their patience. I also wish to express my gratitude to Madame Jeannine and Monsieur JeanCharles Ricard. They welcomed me into their home, and took a personal interest in Flora Tristan. I treasure their friendship, and thank them for the many forms of practical support they offered me. Monsieur Stéphane Michaud was also generous with his time, and made available to me materials I had not seen. As always, the love and support of my family have been immeasurable, for which I am deeply grateful. The book is dedicated, as promised, to my daughter Marcelle, with much love.

vii

Abbreviations

AD AN AP BA BHVP BMD BN IFHS

Archives départementales Archives nationales, Paris Archives de Paris Bibliothèque de 1’Arsenal, Paris Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand, Paris Bibliothèque nationale, Paris Institut français d’histoire sociale, Paris

viii

Introduction: biography and memory

Flora Tristan was beautiful. This was one point on which those who knew her generally agreed. The journalist and campaigner for women’s rights, Herbinot de Mauchamps, admired ‘the ardour of those big black eyes, the ebony of that flowing black hair’, as did the writer Antoine-Laurent-Appollinaire Fée.1 For others she was a ‘very beautiful wanderer’, an ‘adorable vampire’, ‘a most glorious woman’.2 The journalist and critic, Jules Janin, has left the most detailed description of her: When I saw her for the first time, she was wonderfully attractive…. Elegant and lithe in stature, with a proud and animated appearance, her eyes brimming with the fires of the Orient, long black hair which might have served as a cloak, dark complexion, that fine olive tone that shimmers vividly, when youth and emotion mingle on that cheek aflame with a consuming fire[;] fine, attractive, even teeth, considerable grace in her bearing, firmness in her step, austerity in her dress…. [U]nhappy not to be queen somewhere, if not to be queen everywhere, she was a very disturbing and very curious subject of study; you were afraid to meet her, and that fear was mixed with a certain joy.3 As these examples suggest, men’s descriptions of Flora Tristan frequently testify to her sex appeal. Men found her alluring, not simply because of her ability to utilise her ‘charms’ to good effect, but because of her independence of spirit: she was not easily impressed by them, thus becoming both a puzzle and a challenge. Women who admired her usually focused more on the expected moral virtues, but they also recognised her imposing physical presence. Eléonore Blanc wrote: ‘The superiority of her intelligence, the strength of her character which was apparent from a very early age, finally her beauty, all combined to prepare her to exercise a powerful influence on those who surrounded her.’4 Surviving portraits of Flora Tristan substantiate these descriptions. Her dark hair frames an even-featured face dominated by the large, dark eyes which all her portraitists, those employing the brush as well as the pen, have emphasised. Simultaneously, however, these portraits alert us to the complexities of interpreting images (both written and pictorial) of Flora Tristan, or of any historical character. The surviving images of Flora Tristan were produced for public purposes rather 1

2

Introduction

than as a personal record, so whilst they may resemble her they also represent her within the conventions of the day. Three surviving images of Tristan exhibit this fact in different ways. Two date from 1839: the first, probably the work of Tristan’s friend Alphonse-Louis Constant, was published in the series Les Belles Femmes de Paris in December (figure 1). The second, by an unknown artist, featured in the Galérie de la Presse and Le Charivari early that year (figure 2). The third, a posthumous engraving from 1847, was based on a sketch by another of Tristan’s artist-friends, Jules Laure (figure 3).5 The similarities between them may attest to their likeness to Flora Tristan, but they also reflect a number of contemporary conventions of portraiture. For instance, the high forehead, the huge, dark eyes, and the Roman nose attributed to Flora Tristan typified many

Figure 1 Portrait in Les Belles Femmes de Paris, 1839, probably by Alphonse-Louis Constant

Introduction

3

Figure 2 Portrait in Le Charivari & Galérie de la Presse, 1839, by an unknown artist

representations of artistic celebrities in the Romantic period, the features intended to capture the characteristics of Genius and Melancholy.6 Janis Carton-Bergman’s discussion of the portrayal of the ‘woman of ideas’ in this period provides a context in which the images of Flora Tristan may be interpreted. She points to the increasing popularity of such images, as the ‘woman of ideas’—especially the ‘woman author’—became a more common phenomenon.7 The conventions for portraying the ‘woman of ideas’ in this period relied on generalised features: she needed to be recognised first as such a woman, and only then as an individual. Constant’s depiction of Tristan (figure 1) subscribes to the common formula: a three-quarter profile; large, dark eyes staring upwards into the distance; a small mouth and a firm chin.8 This selection of physical characteristics relied to some extent on the features of George Sand, the ‘quintessential female intellect’ of the period.9 Such representations reflected the growing market for images of ‘the author’ in an expanding and increasingly competitive literary world. Le Charivari’s portrait

4

Introduction

Figure 3 Lithograph, 1847, based on a portrait by Jules Laure

of Flora Tristan placed it within this context, and reflected its own interest (as a satirical journal) in scandal: the caption drew attention to the irregular personal life customarily associated with ‘women of ideas’.10 Flora Tristan was presented as a famous beauty and celebrity. In the wake of the appearance of her first book— sensational both for its details about her personal life, and for the attempt on her life by her ex-husband which followed it—she had become a figure of public curiosity:

Introduction

5

Today we are publishing the portrait of Mme Flora Tristan, whom Peregrinations of a Pariah and several other works have long since introduced to the reading public, and to whom the murder attempt which almost killed her has recently drawn the attention of the folk who do not read. This portrait is a very good resemblance.11 Carton-Bergman links the representation of the ‘woman of ideas’ to two traditions, an earlier one presenting her as Muse, her heavenward gaze revealing the source of her inspiration, and an emergent one which gave such women a striking air of selfpossession and confidence captured primarily through the gaze, as the ‘woman of ideas’ confronted her viewers directly and controlled their relation to the portrait.12 However, there were other sources for the types of images by which Flora Tristan was represented. The conventions for portraying beautiful women emphasised similar features to those suggested for the ‘woman of ideas’: large eyes, a broad forehead, and a small mouth. These features were also characteristic of the ‘Madonna’ portraits made famous by Raphael, and revived by Ingres. In this context, it is worth noting that Jules Laure (figure 3) was a student of Ingres. One image of Flora Tristan (figure 2) is discordant with these traditions, however, the pose, the expression, and the setting evoking the realist images of Millet and Courbet.13 It would be interesting to know what role Tristan herself played in the composition of her portraits. She clearly took considerable interest in her own representation, and had herself painted many times. She wrote to the artist, Charles-Joseph Traviès, in 1839: Traviès, one of my keenest desires is to have a portrait which resembles me closely. That is why I have had it painted more than twenty times—twenty times without success! People here [in London] are pestering me to sit. How derisive. Me! Sit for an Englishman!14 English painters, she explained, were ‘incapable of understanding what I am like—as a woman and a thinker—They wanted to portray me as a little English figure—It was terrible!!!’. In asking Traviès to paint her portrait she was keen to discuss with him the costume and the pose by which he would represent her as ‘The Pariah’.15 But if she sought to have herself represented as ‘Pariah‘, did she at other times seek to have herself portrayed as Muse or Madonna, as ‘Woman, Guide of Humanity’, or as a ‘Saving Woman’, as she represented herself in her writings? Conventions of representation may help to explain the images created by her portraitists, but it is unclear whether they show us Flora Tristan as she was perceived by others, or as she sought to represent herself to posterity. The posthumous engraving of Flora Tristan and its subsequent reproduction were part of a commemorative process which created the historical figure from the ‘real person’. The ‘real person’ was born Flore Célestine Thérèse Henriette Tristan Moscoso, on 7 April 1803. Her mother, Anne-Pierre Laisnay, was French, and her father, Mariano, was Peruvian, scion of a family of landowners descended from

6

Introduction

the Spanish aristocracy. They had met in Spain during the French Revolution, marrying and returning to settle in France in 1802. But the premature death of Mariano Tristan in 1807 left his family in financial straits, so Anne-Pierre took Flore and baby Mariano to the countryside, where they lived until returning to Paris in 1818. The adolescent Flore then sought employment with an engraver, whom she married at the age of 17. By the age of 21 she was separated with three children, and finding employment hard to come by as a separated wife, she left her children in her mother’s charge and departed from Paris. She was absent for three years working, she later reported, as a ladies’ maid for two English women. In their company she visited England, Switzerland, and Italy. After her return to Paris in 1828 Tristan’s ex-husband began to harass her. She was forced to keep on the move, and decided to seek an inheritance from her father’s estate as a means of securing her future. Tristan travelled to Peru in 1833–4, gaining a small legacy from her uncle and accumulating a stock of experiences which formed the basis for her subsequent attempt to establish a career as a writer. As ‘Flora’ Tristan (her preferred spelling of her name) she published a pamphlet and some articles in 1835–6, and a semi-autobiographical book, The Peregrinations of a Pariah 1833–1834, at the end of 1837. This drew her husband’s wrath for its revelations about their domestic life, and after a series of violent confrontations between them over custody of the children, he attempted to murder her in 1838. He was jailed for this assault, freeing Tristan to write and to become more deeply involved in political issues. She had begun to mix in socialist and feminist circles from about 1835, and her publications reflected her political convictions. Her novel Méphis, published in 1838, presented an idealistic vision of a feminist and socialist future. It was followed in 1840 by Promenades in London, an account of the dramatic contrast between wealth and misery in the ‘monstrous city’. Tristan’s focus then shifted, not only to exploring the condition of workers in her own country, but to finding a remedy for the social ills she observed. Her final publication, The Workers’ Union, presented a proposal for the organisation of workers across France in defence of their own interests. While attempting to recruit workers to her Union, she died at Bordeaux on 14 November 1844, aged 41. As the production of commemorative portraits illustrated, those who knew Flora Tristan were committed to preserving her memory and they did so in written form as well. The first biography of Flora Tristan was published in 1845 by Eléonore Blanc, daughter of a haberdasher and active within the workers’ movement in Lyon, where Tristan nominated her as her successor. Blanc initiated a tradition of canonisation, representing Tristan as a martyr to the workers’ cause: ‘She died 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.’16 Similarly, having buried Flora Tristan with ceremony in 1844, and raised a monument to her honour in 1848, militant workers commemorated her achievements in another form as they wrote their memoirs in the closing years of the nineteenth century. The silkworker Joseph Benoît recalled her visit to Lyon in 1844,17 as did Sébastien Commissaire and Joseph Reynier.

Introduction

7

They remembered affectionately Tristan’s ‘great love for the people’,18 her ‘absolute and lifelong dedication to the improvement of the working class’.19 With her passing the workers lost an ‘ardent and devoted friend’.20 The writer Fée, who was so impressed by her beauty, produced a similar assessment: One should say of Mme Flora Tristan that she died in the service of the workers; in fact, she gave her life to them, dying whilst aiding them with her intelligence and the limited resources which comprised her modest wealth. Only death put an end to this apostolate.21 The accounts of those who remembered the living person predated by only a few years the appearance of the first scholarly works. The publication of major studies by Jules-L.Puech in 1925 and Marguerite Thibert in 192622 provided the basis for a series of often derivative articles throughout the 1920s and 1930s.23 The war produced a hiatus, but interest in Flora Tristan reappeared thereafter, the centenary of the Revolution of 1848 evoking a reconsideration of the role of radicals of her generation.24 Since the mid-1970s, in particular, the stream of works on Flora Tristan has become a torrent which shows no sign of abating. A series of new biographies,25 the republication of most of Tristan’s major writings, and the appearance of translations and collections of extracts from her writings, reflect the ongoing interest in her, while the periodic discovery of new sources continues to stimulate that interest.26 Since the appearance of Blanc’s biography in 1845, then, few years have passed without some published reference to Flora Tristan. Yet one of the stories most frequently repeated of Tristan is that she has been unduly forgotten. Most accounts, whether brief biographies in the ephemeral periodical press, or more extended publications, reiterate the view that she has fallen into oblivion and deserves to be resurrected and remembered. There has thus been a curious conjuncture of remembering and forgetting Flora Tristan. The ways she has been remembered have been shaped predominantly by histories of socialism and of feminism, since it has been sympathisers of either or both those ideologies who have found her a figure of interest. Accounts have therefore reflected the concerns and preoccupations of those movements, and the complexities of their relationship, at different points in their history. The images of Tristan which they convey have been refracted through the present, with its shifting visions of the future echoed by its re-visioning and reinterpreting of the past. Flora Tristan’s reputation amongst socialists has been an ambivalent one. Her relations with her contemporaries were often marked by disagreement, but as we have seen, her contribution to the cause of socialism was also acknowledged by them. In 1863 Pierre Leroux included Tristan in the panoply of heroes who had struggled for the cause in its formative years,27 and socialist leaders of the late nineteenth century, including Jean Jaurès, Benoît Malon, and Karl Marx himself, also praised her contribution.28 Yet that contribution has frequently been ignored or minimised in formal histories of the socialist movement produced in the twentieth century.29 With the ascendancy of Marxist socialist parties from the later

8

Introduction

nineteenth century, in fact, Tristan suffered the fate of other ‘Utopians’ of the 1830s and 1840s, whose evaluation rested upon the extent to which they might be seen as ‘precursors’ of a later form of socialism. If her defenders have argued that she was an eminently practical socialist, denying the pejorative implications of the ‘utopian’ label,30 therefore, they have also explored the extent to which she might be seen as a ‘forerunner’ of Marx. Tristan’s call for ‘working men and women of the world’ to unite (which predated by four years the better-known appeal of The Communist Manifesto), epitomised the international scope of her thinking which attracted great critical acclaim.31 Tristan’s contribution to the development of the Workers’ International has also seen her dubbed the ‘grandmother of workerism’,32 and her attempt to transform workers’ trade associations into something resembling a modern union movement has been seen by many as a precedent for later developments. In the 1930s, in particular, when syndicalism was a potent political force in France, one admirer reminded her readers that ‘the idea of the workers’ Union formed in the mind of a woman, of that only too forgotten Flora Tristan’.33 If some have portrayed Tristan as a neglected forerunner of the ‘Great Man’ of socialism, or as a precursor of later trends within the labour movement, however, the growing disillusionment with Marxism in the later twentieth century led to a positive reassessment of its ‘romantic’ predecessors. As a result, Flora Tristan and other figures of the early nineteenth century have been re-evaluated, not for their similarities to Marx and the Marxists but for their differences from them. Defenders of the ‘romantic’ tradition stress the comprehensiveness of its vision, which seeks to liberate the total person. From this perspective, Tristan’s ‘romantic’ or ‘utopian’ tendencies—her optimism, her rejection of violence, her focus on class co-operation rather than class conflict, her preference for inspiration, imagination, and desire over reason—are not to be denied but applauded.34 Tristan’s feminist vision, which was interwoven with her socialism, has also provided a focus of interest, if not always acclaim. Her personal impact as a feminist was first demonstrated negatively in 1848, when feminists distanced themselves from her memory lest her scandalous reputation undermine their cause. Their recognition that she had dedicated herself to women and the workers was offset by the proviso that ‘in the moral sphere, Flora Tristan was not a model, and we do not regard her as superior in every respect’.35 A century later, Simone de Beauvoir also dismissed her historical contribution, defining her as one of the ‘oddities’, the ‘adventuresses and originals notable less for the importance of their acts than for the singularity of their fates’.36 However, the workers’ celebration of Tristan’s memory in the early years of the twentieth century was matched by a feminist one, with her grave a site of feminist pilgrimage.37 The existence of women’s centres named after Tristan in both Paris and Lima attests to the durability of her heritage,38 and proposals for a feminist dictionary of biography in France have nominated Flora Tristan amongst the leading candidates for inclusion.39 Successive generations of French feminists, and less consistently feminists outside France, have seen Tristan as a forerunner who confronted many of the same problems as they did themselves. Her ideas on

Introduction

9

women’s roles in society were invoked during debates sparked by feminist activism in the Spanish Civil War,40 and she was also appealed to repeatedly throughout the early twentieth-century struggle for female suffrage in France. She gave no particular priority to female suffrage in an era when most men did not have the suffrage either, but she did regard it as a right which both men and women should possess. Suzanne Grinberg included Tristan in her pioneering history of the suffrage movement in 1926.41 In 1934 Marguerite Grépon extolled Tristan as ‘an amazon of feminism’ before the French Union for Women’s Suffrage,42 and during a debate in the Senate Louis Martin included Tristan amongst the women whose achievements justified female political rights.43 Tristan’s activities were again recalled in 1944, when suffrage was finally granted to women, in acknowledgement of her struggle for justice.44 Feminists and their sympathisers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries frequently found Tristan’s integration of socialism and feminism positive and compelling, and this was one of the main themes in accounts of Tristan produced during those years.45 Her arguments on this subject provided generations of socialist women with both a source of inspiration, and a tool for criticising the socialist movement’s lack of attention to liberating women. This perspective is evident, for instance, in Hélène Brion’s 1919 analysis of the collapse of the Second Socialist International: In one respect especially, one critical respect, the second International which has just collapsed so deplorably at the onset of the present war…is remarkably inferior to that precursor of the first. The Workers’ Union of Flora Tristan, completely imbued with true social justice and with benevolence for all the weak[,] was profoundly feminist; she announced it, she proclaimed it.46 Beginning in the 1970s a more independent and sceptical feminist movement, unconvinced of the inevitable benefits to women of a socialist revolution, frequently questioned the workability and the wisdom of this connection, highlighting the ambiguities and inadequacies in Tristan’s theories, and the difficulties of combining feminism and socialism in practice.47 Feminist interest in Flora Tristan has focused increasingly in recent years on her role as a writer. This interest is not entirely new, but has assumed a new importance since the 1980s as poststructural theory has given rise to new methods of textual analysis and, for feminists, to new explorations of what it means to be a woman author, and new questions about how women can represent themselves and their lives.48 A series of traditions has grown up around Flora Tristan, therefore, reflecting her involvement in different causes as well as the impact of changing historical circumstances on people’s understanding of her. For the most part, they have tended to canonise their subject, creating an heroic figure to be revered and honoured. Tradition has made of Flora Tristan a socialist saint, a feminist hero, whose selfless struggle for these causes is commemorated reverently. These historical traditions continue to shape the ways in which we see Flora Tristan today, acting as filters through which the living person has become, and

10

Introduction

continues to become, the historical figure. The ways in which Flora Tristan has been recreated and imagined by those who came after her, however, have as much to do with meeting the present needs of those commemorating her as with describing a past reality. Interpretations of historical figures occur through the lens of the present, telling us much about the present as well as affording new views of the past. In recent years, biography’s claim to present an objective account of what its subject was ‘really like’ has been subjected to intense scrutiny. Despite readers’ desire to recognise in the biographer’s account a ‘realistic’ life story shaped by chronology and the passing of time, the ability of biography to respond to these expectations has been questioned. Scholars have emphasised the complexities of interpreting the written sources (on which most biographies rely heavily), as well as highlighting the creative and fictional qualities of the resulting study. Critics argue that the life recounted in a biography bears little resemblance to the life that was lived by the person under study. The historical subject, they insist, is not ‘recaptured’ but created by the biographer, who invents her in the process of writing about her.49 While the creation of a sense of coherence and meaning in an individual life may well be what attracts readers to biography in the first place, the critics insist that this coherence is illusory. The fragments of a life are patched together, but the apparent coherence is created only by papering over the cracks, concealing the unknown, creating causal connections which stem from the mind of the biographer rather than that of the subject. Biography, then, is seen as a more or less specialised form of the novel. This critique emphasises the artificiality of both the life story and the subject of that life story. Not only do lives not have the neat trajectory, the logic and wholeness, which the biographer generally aspires to achieve, but personalities, ‘selves’, are fragmented and shifting rather than unitary and coherent, defying any biographical aspiration to identify the ‘real person’. Furthermore, biography’s focus on the individual as subject of history has been rejected as the last gasp of ‘modernism’ in a ‘postmodern’ age. According to this view, biography canonises ‘Individuals’ who, as agents of their own and others’ fortunes, shape events by means of their own autonomous ‘Will’. The interpretation of history in terms of individual agency, as Joan Scott (for one) points out, is a product of a specific historical moment within Western culture, a moment initiated by ‘the Enlightenment’.50 And as Liz Stanley notes, this interpretation generally envisages certain types of ‘Individuals’ as the subjects and agents of History: ‘Individuals’ who are almost always those at the top of the stratification system.51 The idea that history is the creation of ‘great men’ has been undermined by the growth of democratic principles and minority rights movements in Western culture in the twentieth century, as well as by the perceived failures of the ‘great men’— responsible for wars, cold war, and the nuclear age—to live up to the legend of such histories. However, it is also apparent that the current mistrust of ‘individual agency’ is equally a product of a particular historical moment, in this case the postmodern moment. Historical contingency thus limits the insights of this

Introduction

11

particular theoretical perspective, too, despite its claims to superior explanatory power. Such criticisms do not necessarily invalidate biography, then, though they suggest a need to re-examine its premises and practices. Despite her criticisms of biography as a genre, Joan Scott has pointed out that the ‘historical specificity’ of feminist (or any other) action makes a focus on individuals valuable. She prefers to see individuals as ‘sites’ on which ‘political and cultural contests are enacted’, rather than as heroes in the ‘modern’ sense.52 But while she rejects the chronological narrative of life experience in her study of French feminists, denying causal links between experience and political action, her account illustrates that that narrative cannot be ignored either. The individual is not irrelevant to historical investigation, precisely because individuals responded in different ways to the historical processes in which they were caught up, and the narrative of individual lives helps in the interpretation of those processes. A focus on individuals engaging with the political and cultural contests being enacted on and around them at particular moments in time provides one way of exploring the past; one way of understanding the world they created and contested—a world which has become our world. Few contemporary biographers would claim that their task is to capture and preserve the ‘real person’ like a display in a quaint museum. In this sense the notion of the ‘definitive biography’, after which no more remains to be said concerning the person under study, has little credence now, if indeed it ever did. Rather than casting us adrift in a sea of relativity, however, recognising the limits of the biographical undertaking also enables us to recognise its potential. Rather than inviting despair that the ‘real’ Flora Tristan can never be exhumed and resuscitated on the printed page, this recognition invites us to consider what the admittedly incomplete, but nevertheless substantial, remnants of her life reveal. Liz Stanley’s suggestion that we look at lives kaleidoscopically rather than microscopically is a fruitful one: as we change our angle of vision we see new patterns and discover new ways of interpreting Tristan’s life.53 In fact, my contention is that the telling of tales about her life, the recounting of stories inspired by different perceptions and understandings, is not only the work of subsequent historians and biographers but began with Flora Tristan herself. She constructed accounts of herself in writing, enacted rituals, played roles, assumed different personae in different situations. These offer a rich and rewarding way of approaching her, beyond the rigidities and limitations of the customary ‘socialist and feminist’ model, yet inclusive of it. We cannot grasp the ‘real’ Flora Tristan, but we can glimpse an historical figure assuming a variety of guises, an image shifting as we change our perspective but also as she changed her own. This study highlights a variety of ways in which Flora Tristan represented herself to the world, and the historical context within which such selfrepresentations were evoked. In Tristan’s writings (which include four books, a diary of the last eighteen months of her life, and an assortment of newspaper articles, pamphlets, petitions, and letters), and in her dealings with others, she presented herself to posterity in various guises, many of them carefully selected

12

Introduction

and deliberately maintained. Her self-conscious adoption of these roles provides a structure through which to encounter her, and the chapter titles largely borrow from her own self-descriptions.54 This is not to suggest that the possibilities presented here are self-evident, or that my role as author has simply been to present what is ‘really there’. The themes have been chosen by me and reflect patterns which I see in her life. It is no doubt possible to trace others too. In fact, one of the most interesting aspects of this project has been that I have continued to see new dimensions to Flora Tristan, and to add new chapters as a result. This study does not eschew a chronological structure, since the exploration of change and continuity over time is fundamental to the historical project. Rather than pursuing a simple chronology from birth to death, however, the book is multichronological, tracing a series of ‘Life Stories’ which overlap and interlock. Each chapter might be seen as identifying a series of markers on the landscape of Tristan’s life which together suggest a particular pattern of engagement with the events and ideas of her time. In pursuing Tristan’s ‘life stories’ this book thus retraces the chronological ground several times, but each time with a different focus. Events and characters may feature briefly in one chapter only to be explored in detail in a later one, and the same event or text may be examined several times from different perspectives. The chapters provide a layered approach to her adult life, offering a multi-dimensional image of their subject, and they could be read in sequences other than the one presented here. The benefit of this approach lies in facilitating a more sustained exploration of the roles Tristan lived out, of the selfimages she created, and of their presentation in her fictional and theoretical writings. A list of those writings, including a brief outline of Tristan’s major works, is appended to aid the reader, along with a chronological table, and thumbnail sketches of a number of her friends and acquaintances. Having examined the stories which Tristan and others have told about her childhood in chapter 1, the book therefore approaches her adult life by exploring a series of identities which she created, and which, for the most part, she lived simultaneously rather than sequentially. Her unhappy marriage and subsequent separation is the subject of chapter 2. As well as exploring the crises of custody battles and her husband’s attempt to murder her, the chapter also examines the ways Flora represented her situation as a married woman in a society which prohibited divorce: ‘enslaved’ to her husband through marriage under the inequitable French Civil Code, and social ‘pariah’ once she left the marital home. The breakdown of her marriage saw the first of many voyages for Tristan, most notably her trip to Peru to visit her father’s family, and several journeys to England. Chapter 3 explores what it meant to be a woman traveller in the 1830s and 1840s, and the impact of travel on Tristan’s self-perception and her ideas about society. In 1835, when Tristan returned from Peru, she embarked on two new endeavours. She determined, firstly, to become a writer, a role discussed in chapter 4, and she also began to search for ways to promote her ideas about social justice. Her engagement with the ideas and techniques of ‘social science’ is explored in chapter 5, while chapter 6 considers her in her best-known persona as a socialist.

Introduction

13

In order to present her ideas to the public in general, and workers in particular, Tristan utilised a number of metaphors which represented her in an authoritative guise, and these form the subjects of the following five chapters. She imagined herself, firstly, as the ‘mother’ of the workers, and this notion, along with its relation to her role as the mother of two children, is discussed in chapter 7. Chapter 8 considers her as ‘lover of humanity’, rather than of any one individual in her life. Tristan’s ‘tour of France’ to address workers made her a public figure, and chapter 9 examines her idea of herself as the ‘first strong woman’, engaging in public life in a way which was unusual (but not unique) for a woman at that time. Chapters 10 and 11 explore the self-images which made of Tristan a suprahuman figure, perhaps even a messianic one: as a ‘melodramatic hero’ engaged in a dramatic contest between good and evil; and as a ‘saving woman’ bringing salvation to the world. The notable omission in this selection is ‘feminist’. I have taken the view that Tristan’s feminism was so all-pervasive that it informed all aspects of her life. Different aspects of her feminism are therefore considered in each chapter since, if there is a ‘meta-narrative’ which informs my reading of her life, it is that of her engagement with, her contesting of, contemporary notions of womanhood. Finally, chapter 12 deals with the death of Flora Tristan, and the deliberate creation of the legendary figure in the period up to 1848, while a brief epilogue ties up the threads of her personal life, and returns to some general questions about historical figures and their representations. The aim of this study is not to arrive at the ‘real’ Flora Tristan, which would be an impossible and misguided objective, but to uncover (in Teresa Iles’ words) ‘all sides of the subject’: or at least some of them, since others are no doubt possible.55 In emphasising the multiple dimensions of Flora Tristan’s story, of course, this account reflects the perceptions of this moment in history, just as earlier biographers’ interpretations reflected the preoccupations of theirs. As such, it endeavours to re-vision her as a figure whose stories bear re-telling for the late twentieth century; a figure both timeless in her humanity, and shaped in very particular ways by her own time and place.

1

Childhood stories

Children rarely tell their own life stories or write their own histories. They lack the skills and the control over their own lives which are essential for the purpose, and they also lack that sense of the passage of time, and of their own finite existence, which leads adults to desire to record their own lives. Consequently, what is recorded and preserved of people’s childhoods is usually the work of adults, and is refracted through the perceptions and priorities of adults. Flora Tristan is no exception. The accounts of her childhood, which she initially related in adulthood, and which were then interpreted and elaborated by others writing about her, filled important functions in the creation of the historical figure. Two images predominate in these accounts. One emphasises disadvantage and poverty, laying the foundation for the emergence of the adult Flora Tristan as socialist and radical. The other emphasises her exotic links with the mighty of Peru, portending a life of fame and renown. Both bear a somewhat tenuous relationship to the events of her childhood, but they provide important insights into the adult Flora, as she wished to be seen and as she was seen by others. Information about Tristan’s family background was originally made public by Tristan herself, most notably in her first book, The Peregrinations of a Pariah 1833–1834. The revelations were necessary to make sense of this partly autobiographical story, but their exciting character also gave that story its publishable quality and its reader appeal. Had Tristan been simply another Parisian, with no distinguished or distinguishing experiences, her chances of having it published would have been minimal. Once in the public domain, however, her life story assumed a life of its own. Embroidered and exaggerated, it was useful for promoting her writings.1 It made her at least a minor celebrity, a newsworthy figure, the details of whose life became the subject of ongoing public interest and comment. Flora Tristan’s father, Don Mariano Tristan y Moscoso, died when she was 4. Her knowledge about him and his family must therefore have been provided initially by her mother. Flora knew that he was well-born: his status as a Colonel of Dragoons in the Spanish army, and a knight of the Order of Saint-James, was officially recorded on her baptismal certificate. 2 It was further attested to by the correspondence of the Spanish consul at the time of her father’s death in 1807, when he was still designated a ‘colonel in the service of the King’ of Spain.3 Flora 14

Childhood stories

15

later recounted to her uncle the story of her parents’ courtship and marriage, probably as told to her by her mother: To escape from the horrors of the revolution, my mother crossed into Spain with one of her kinswomen. These ladies went to settle in Bilbao; my father became friendly with them, and from this relationship an irresistible love soon developed between them, making them essential to each other’s existence. These ladies returned to France in 1802; my father was not slow to follow them there. As a soldier, your brother needed the king’s permission to marry: not wishing to seek it (I respect my father’s memory too much to seek to determine what his motives might have been), he proposed to my mother that he marry her only in a religious ceremony (a marriage which has no validity in France). My mother, who felt that she could no longer live without him, consented to this arrangement. The marital blessing was conferred by a respected cleric, M. Roncelin, who had known my mother from childhood. The newlyweds came to live in Paris.4 This account emphasised the irresistible appeal of true love, despite the obstacles in its path. It highlighted the purity of intentions of Anne-Pierre Laisnay, whilst admitting an element of doubt about the actions of Mariano. For as Tristan’s account acknowledged, this marriage did not include a civil service, newly required under French Revolutionary law. Consequently Anne-Pierre was simply a de facto wife, and her daughter was illegitimate. Such legal considerations probably seemed irrelevant initially, and the Tristan family’s prospects certainly seemed satisfactory in 1806. In May of that year Mariano Tristan bought a property at Vaugirard, a rural commune on the outskirts of Paris. The property had two sets of buildings, courtyards and extensive gardens, and cost him 12,000 francs. After paying a deposit of 2,000 francs, he undertook to pay the balance over ten years.5 Mariano’s military career had apparently reached a stalemate, but he took in tenants to supplement his inherited income, and was sufficiently comfortable to employ several domestic servants. As the eldest son and heir of the family, Mariano Tristan should have had few financial worries. His uncle, the Bishop of Grenada, paid him an annual allowance of 6,000 francs, and his younger brother Pio periodically sent him money from Peru. However such long-distance transactions were risky at the height of the Napoleonic Wars, particularly given English domination of the seas, and Flora Tristan later noted that two remittances totalling 30,000 francs never arrived. At the time of his death, she wrote, her father had received no money from home for twenty months, and was in debt to his wife’s mother for 2,800 francs.6 Circumstances beyond his control no doubt made it difficult for Mariano Tristan to organise his affairs as he might have wished. However, he seems to have been a rather inept, if not irresponsible, financial manager. In 1790 he had borrowed money from a fellow-officer giving his father as surety, and the repercussions of this deal were still being felt after his death: according to his younger brother Pio, who was given control of Mariano’s financial affairs in 1801, Mariano left only debts to his estate as a result of this ‘Ibanez affair’.7 Pio had a vested interest in diminishing the

16

Childhood stories

value of his brother’s estate, so his evidence is not particularly reliable. However, even Mariano’s father distrusted his financial acumen and spendthrift habits, warning the executors of his own estate to beware of any requests for special consideration or extra money from his eldest son.8 If Mariano’s carelessness with money was to have serious repercussions for his dependants after his death, his carelessness with the legal niceties surrounding his marriage proved to be equally problematic. Flora Tristan seemed to suspect that the disarray of her father’s legal affairs may have camouflaged some ulterior motive in his conduct towards her mother. Perhaps their liaison was simply one of convenience, easily abandoned by flight to Peru (and a more suitable marriage) at a later date? But Anne-Pierre’s situation, however difficult, was not one of ‘youthful innocence deceived’, as Tristan later presented it to her uncle. Laisnay was 30 years old and her husband 42 at the time of their marriage. Mariano had never returned to Peru since his youth, so evidently he felt well at home in Europe. He formally acknowledged paternity of his daughter immediately following her birth, though he was not legally obliged to do so. These factors suggest that simple negligence, or perhaps fear of his family’s disapproval of his relationship with Anne-Pierre Laisnay, might explain his conduct. After all, life might have become most unpleasant had he been cut off financially by his family and forced to support himself in some other way. The picture of Mariano that emerges from these events is one of a man who took life’s responsibilities less seriously than he might have; perhaps a man of weak character, but one who was good-natured and easy-going in his relations with others. Tristan later presented him as a dreamer, not a practical man, even the name given to his daughter reflecting his love of nature and the priorities of his life. Similarly, the portrait of Mariano attributed by Flora to Simon Bolivar, a family friend, shows a man who found his greatest joy in his extensive garden at Vaugirard, not at his desk and not on the battlefield like Bolivar: [Mariano] would regard me as crazy if I said to him that life is sad, to him who doesn’t have enough time to admire the clouds that sail overhead, the leaves stirring in the breeze, the water flowing in the stream and the plants which grow on its banks. Happy mortal! he does not need to participate in men’s dramas to enliven his days.9 The relatively secure life which his family had enjoyed was shattered by the sudden death of Mariano in June 1807. The implications of Anne-Pierre’s legal status as de facto wife, and of Mariano’s failure to make a will, were apparent immediately. On 27 June the Spanish Ambassador, Prince Masserano, took charge of Mariano Tristan’s affairs, since there were no legitimate heirs. He authorised Anne-Pierre Laisnay to continue living in the house, and to administer the property until the legal issues were settled. She was able to continue collecting rent, and was authorised to sell the furniture to pay her husband’s funeral costs and the wages owing to the domestic servants. All attempts to contact her husband’s family proved fruitless, however, a fact which Pio Tristan later attributed to the disruptions of the Napoleonic Wars.10 Any prospect that the Vaugirard property might provide an ongoing means

Childhood stories

17

of support to Mariano’s family was finally dashed in October 1808. Since France and Spain were at war it was the property of an enemy alien, and was seized by the French government.11 Tristan later reported quite straightforwardly the longer-term implications for the family of her father’s sudden death: I was four years old when I lost my father in Paris. He died suddenly, without having put his marital arrangements in order, and without having thought to compensate for that by arrangements in his will. My mother had only limited resources to survive on and to raise my young brother and I; she retired to the countryside, where I lived until the age of fifteen.12 Little is known of those years of Flora’s youth, about which she said nothing else subsequently. However, the obvious difficulties confronting a widow with two young children, and the insalubrious address at which the family lived upon their return to Paris in 1818, have led to the assumption by historians that the years which followed Mariano Tristan’s death were poverty-stricken and miserable.13 The significance placed upon this assumption has been enormous, since it provided the foundation for an image of Flora Tristan as a child of the proletariat. Childhood poverty, according to this ‘proletarian story’, laid the groundwork for Tristan’s adult commitment to socialism, and provided an explanation and a validation for this commitment. This interpretation began to emerge in the 1840s shortly after Tristan’s death, and reflected the shift occurring within French socialism at that time. The ‘fathers’ of socialism had come from comfortable backgrounds in the aristocracy or commercial bourgeoisie. But by the 1840s a more popularly-based socialism was emerging which emphasised the conflictual relations between classes, rather than their shared interest in social transformation. The experience of poverty was not essential to socialist credibility in the 1840s, therefore, but nor was it irrelevant. Hence Eugène Stourm’s obituary for Flora Tristan, published in a workers’ newspaper in 1844, explicitly linked ‘the destitution of her earliest years’ with her commitment to socialism: Without a doubt, nothing was less youthful, in the common understanding of the word, than the youth of this proletarian, who began firstly by freeing herself from the shackles of ignorance, protesting thereafter with more strength and authority against external evils. Not that the Pariah had ever dreamed of failing her race and, in return for a feigned acceptance, of siding with the caste whose exclusive privileges it was precisely her aim to oppose to the bitter end…it was in an environment of hard work[,] of inadequately-paid labour…, tortured by the sufferings of destitution and isolation, that the Pariah was to fashion her spirit, and undergo, in some sense, the apprenticeship for her apostolate.14 While it is no doubt true that the family’s financial situation became more precarious after the death of Mariano, it is less certain that Tristan’s childhood

18

Childhood stories

exposed her to the poverty and hardship which were the norm for proletarian children. Her experience lay somewhere between this mythical apprenticeship for socialism, and the alternative image evoked (as we shall see) by stories of Andalusian glory. Anne-Pierre Laisnay rented out the house at Vaugirard in 1808 and established herself at L’Hay-les-Roses, on the southern outskirts of Paris, with her daughter and baby son. Apparently a practical person and a capable manager of money, she was not completely devoid of resources. She managed her finances well enough to continue repaying the interest on her mother’s loan to Mariano until the old lady’s death in 1809, and then to repay a third of the capital to each of her two siblings.15 Laisnay’s longer-term solution to the problem of supporting her children, however, was to retreat to the land. In December 1810 she bought a forty-are property at Nogent, in the commune of L’Isle-Adam, about twenty-five kilometres north of Paris, complete with two thatched cottages, stables and sheds, for which she paid 3,000 francs.16 In 1811–12 she bought a further 80 ares in two separate purchases, and she also took an eighteen-year lease on four fields in the district.17 Perhaps she rented grazing land to other farmers in the area, and supplemented that income by finding tenants for the second cottage on the property. The larger cottage, with two rooms on the ground floor, one with a wood-panelled fireplace, and with attics upstairs to serve as bedrooms, provided an adequate if simple home for the young family. So Flora Tristan spent her remaining childhood years in the countryside, not in the slums of Paris, and her life was probably characterised by frugal and modest living rather than by destitution. Laisnay’s land transactions produced no windfall profits, but she generally managed to break even. In 1817 she sold some land for its original purchase price of 600 francs.18 This may indicate that financial pressures were increasing, but it may also suggest that she had adopted a successful financial strategy which enabled her to liquidate her assets when necessary. However in February 1818, when she sold her land at Nogent and moved back to Paris, she accepted a price 500 francs below what she had paid originally.19 The death of 10-year-old Mariano Pio in May 1817 may have prompted this change of location for Flora and her mother. It may also have seemed an opportune time to consider Flora’s education and future prospects. She was almost 15 years old when they moved to Paris: the age when a girl either had to become selfsupporting, or be groomed for the marriage market, as circumstances dictated. The little that we know about Flora Tristan’s life at this time suggests a set of aspirations concerning her future which failed to match reality. Tristan never mentioned her schooling in any of her writings. She admitted her poor knowledge of geography, and presented herself as a person whose rural upbringing was reflected in her ignorance of the world.20 Her earliest surviving letters indicate that her knowledge of grammar and spelling at the age of seventeen left a lot to be desired, but this is hardly surprising for a period when elementary education was in some disarray. Government enquiries in the early years of the

Childhood stories

19

nineteenth century failed to establish which communes actually had schools, and revealed much confusion about what even constituted a ‘school’ or a ‘teacher’. So Tristan may have experienced the intermittent schooling, provided by poorlyeducated and itinerant teachers, which was common for rural children. Her inability to write an elegant and correct letter in adolescence also reflected contemporary pedagogical practice. Reading was taught separately from and prior to writing, which also cost more in school fees, so reading skills were more widely disseminated than writing skills. Besides, as the Church resumed its control of education after the French Revolution, the inculcation of religious precepts took precedence over both these skills in the schooling of the majority of children.21 Nevertheless, the image of the semi-literate young woman whose lack of education confirmed her proletarian status is undermined by several fragments of evidence which, taken together, suggest a modification to this view of the young Flora Tristan. Firstly, her early letters, while weak in grammar and spelling, reveal an adolescent imitating a style and turn of phrase which is far from ignorant: All night long I did nothing but think of you, I was still with you, indeed I saw only you in all of nature. Farewell friend of my heart, until morning…farewell! friend of my soul, but I cannot leave you, ah…how it pains me to say goodbye.22 Leaving aside the content of this letter for the moment, its phraseology is stilted and artificial. The amorous expressions might even have been borrowed from books she had read, although nothing is known of her reading habits in these years. However, perhaps she had at least a limited exposure to literature (quite possible, given the social backgrounds of her parents), and she may also have had sufficient leisure time to benefit from that exposure. This image is reinforced by the fact that the Flora who returns to view in Paris in 1821 was taking dancing lessons, and was sufficiently skilled as a porcelain painter to have her own apprentice, a young woman named Armandine.23 Dancing lessons were surely a luxury which those unable to make ends meet would have abandoned. And painting, while it provided poorly-paid employment for young proletarian women, was also a pastime for the well-born. Together, dancing and painting were desirable accomplishments in a young lady hoping to make a good marriage. The fact that Tristan learned both these skills suggests aspirations and expectations beyond the realm of proletarian women her own age, even if those expectations were not able to be fully realised. Despite her apparent desire to become a ‘lady’, or perhaps her mother’s desire to make her one, Tristan nevertheless needed to earn an income. Puech has pointed out that the rue du Fouarre, where they lived on their return to Paris, was in one of the poorest parts of the city, the haunt of prostitutes, beggars, and criminals.24 Her mother was unlikely to have settled there unless a concern about affordable rent overrode all else. Tristan was certainly employed to colour his designs by André Chazal, who owned a small engraving workshop in Montmartre, because her mother’s small family annuity—about 200 francs—was not enough to support

20

Childhood stories

them.25 Nevertheless, the little evidence which remains does not fully support the view that Tristan and her mother lacked basic necessities like candles and firewood.26 Instead she wrote to her employer: ‘Give a little wood to Armandine, it’s for her, because I don’t need any.’27 A few days later she asked him to ‘send a few pieces of wood to Armandine so that she does not freeze’, and to ‘take pity on the others’, presumably others who worked for him.28 Tristan’s precise status as a worker remains unclear, since she and her employer (later her husband) provided different versions. Chazal claimed that she worked in his workshop as an employee: a claim designed to validate the assertion that he had saved her from poverty and obscurity by marrying her. Tristan insisted on a different version: she worked at home, she declared, going to Chazal’s workshop to take lessons from time to time.29 Outwork was a common mode of employment for women at the time, and was usually more exploitative than workshop employment. However, Tristan’s version of her work situation camouflaged her dependence on wages. It raised her status as a worker, just as she would later destroy the humiliating evidence that, in separating from her husband, she had been forced to earn her living as a ladies’ maid.30 In discussing her adolescent years she presented herself as an independent worker ‘taking lessons’ rather than an employee. The ambiguity of her position—needing to support herself yet seeking to become and to be seen as a lady—was revealed here. She aspired to bourgeois status, even if her material circumstances at the time indicate that she had not yet achieved it. In later references to her childhood years, then, Tristan made no claims to proletarian status, and no references to poverty and deprivation. While we cannot be certain of the reasons for this, it seems that she was rather ashamed of this period of her life and wished to erase it from the record, if not from her memory. There is certainly no evidence that she gloried in the experience of poverty or sought to use it as a sign of her credentials as a socialist. In fact, in contesting those credentials in 1843 with another socialist, Prosper Enfantin, it was not her own origins as a worker that she emphasised, but the fact that she had raised her children to be workers: ‘If you place yourself amongst the class of proletarians, what should I say, I who have raised my two children as workers, labouring with their hands.’31 Rather than relating her own ‘proletarian’ childhood, in fact, Tristan recounted more exotic stories of her Spanish-Peruvian ancestry, identifying herself as an ‘Andalusian’ aristocrat, a child of the elite. She was, she declared, ‘the woman born an Andalusian and condemned by Society to spend her youth in tears and without love!’32 The similarity between Maréquita, the heroine of Tristan’s novel, and the descriptions which others have left of Tristan, suggests that she modelled the character in some respects on herself, revelling in her own perceived ‘otherness’. ‘The beautiful Maréquita’ created a sensation wherever she went: ‘her physiognomy, the tint of her skin and especially her magnificent hair indicated that she was from the land of Cervantes’, while her eyes flashed with a ‘magnetic fire’ that captivated her audiences.33 In representing herself as ‘the Andalusian’, Tristan both indicated her perceived difference from some undefined norm, and helped her contemporaries to identify

Childhood stories

21

and understand her as she wished to be understood. In observing her and her actions they reflected on her family history, and noted her foreign ancestors and extraordinary heritage. The significance of Tristan’s ancestry for most contemporary observers lay less in the physical advantages it had conferred on her than in the social connections it announced, for her Peruvian forebears were part of the elite. The Wars of Independence in South America in the 1820s had brought renown to some of the leading figures in the struggle, including Tristan’s uncle, Don Pio de Tristan y Moscoso, and the family friend Simon Bolivar, the ‘Liberator’ of South America.34 Commentators in France debated the development of the young South American Republics as they threw off the Spanish yoke, and considered the preparedness of their peoples for democracy, drawing lessons for the French situation.35 Tristan’s descent from the Peruvian aristocracy, itself closely connected with the Spanish Crown, thus featured prominently in newspaper reports of the 1830s and 1840s about Flora Tristan, ‘daughter of a French émigrée and of Don Mariano de Tristan, brother of the famous general Pio de Tristan who held the post of Viceroy of Peru’.36 For more imaginative reporters Tristan became the descendant, not of Peru’s colonial conquerors, but of the fabled Aztec King Montezuma.37 The ‘Andalusian story’ evoked a majestic ancestry; one which forecast power and greatness, fame and fortune. If ‘Castilian blood’ implied Tristan’s direct links with the Spanish royal family, it also explained Tristan’s fiery temperament, her passion, even (according to her detractors) her uncompromising search for sexual pleasure.38 What made her a sinner, however, could also make her a saint, giving additional merit to her social commitment: despite her aristocratic background this woman devoted herself to the poor.39 Tristan’s achievements thus became more meritorious for being devoid of self-interest. The ‘Andalusian story’ was a vital component of the persona which Tristan sought to create and impose upon the world, and it had its origins in the stories of the Tristan family which filled her childhood. Their Spanish-Peruvian connections were important for both Anne-Pierre Laisnay, the de facto wife, and her illegitimate daughter, providing a souvenir of past happiness and a proof of dignity and self-worth in the face of legal and social marginality. Tristan recounted that her mother religiously observed the cult of Mariano during her childhood, to such an extent that she felt an ‘idolatrous love’ for her father.40 Devotion to his memory was supplemented by celebration of the legendary fraternal devotion between Mariano and Pio. The son born to Anne-Pierre three months after his father’s death had been named Mariano-Pio, living symbol of the bond that united the brothers. Letters from Pio to his brother were carefully preserved, forming the relics on which the project of commemoration rested: I worshipped my father’s memory, I trusted always in the protection of my uncle Pio, whom my mother talked about continually, making me love him, although she only knew him through his correspondence with my father. I had read and re-read that correspondence, an extraordinary memorial in which fraternal love is reiterated in every possible form.41

22

Childhood stories

The legend of fraternal devotion rested on the claim that the elder brother, Mariano, had filled the role of defender and educator of his younger sibling, establishing a bond of gratitude and a debt to be repaid. According to this legend Mariano had loved Pio ‘like his son’, giving Tristan a reciprocal claim on the affections of her uncle. In making contact with her uncle in 1829, seeking to recover her share of her father’s estate, Tristan began her letter: ‘Sir, it is the daughter of your brother, of your beloved Mariano, who takes the liberty of writing to you.’42 Mariano’s apocryphal deathbed statement, ‘My daughter, you still have Pio’, which she reported to her uncle in the same letter, announced the expectation that the orphaned child and her mother could rely on the support and financial aid of the Peruvian Tristans. A mythical Mariano, devoted husband and father, loving and beloved brother; and a mythical Pio, indebted younger brother who would defend and provide for his older brother’s family, were created. This myth was not without substance, for Pio de Tristan himself acknowledged the family bond that united him with Flora: I give you very willingly the title of my beloved niece, and I will even add of my daughter; for nothing which was an object of my brother’s love could fail to be extremely important to me; neither time nor his death could erase in me the tender attachment which I felt for him and which I will keep for him throughout my entire life.43 And Tristan’s paternal uncle, Pedro de Goyeneche, who was the business agent for Pio de Tristan in Bordeaux, was struck by her resemblance to Mariano. After she visited him at Bordeaux in 1833 he wrote to Pio that her visit to Peru would evoke very painful memories, ‘because I know how much you loved your brother’.44 Although Tristan reiterated her attachment to her father, however, she was well aware of the legendary character of the accounts about him. A second letter to her uncle Pio, who initially rejected her inheritance claim in 1829 and thus failed to live up to the legend of fraternal devotion, bluntly outlined an alternative view of Mariano as husband and father. Speaking of her desire to ‘cast a veil over the transgression of [her] father, whose memory remain[ed] tainted by the state of neglect in which he has left his child’, she outlined the burden of proof which Pio would face in the case of a legal challenge to the settlement he had offered her: In effect, you would have to show that your brother was a dishonest man and a criminal father; that he was vile enough to deceive a young defenceless girl in a cowardly way…and that taking advantage of love, of inexperience, he concealed his perfidy beneath the fraud of a clandestine marriage; you would have to prove further that your brother abandoned the child given him by God, abandoned her to misery, to insults, to the scorn of a barbarous society, and while he recommended his daughter to you with his dying breath, slandering his memory, you would have to attribute to premeditation the error of his negligence.45 While she clearly did not want to accept such an interpretation of her father’s

Childhood stories

23

actions, the clarity with which she was able to outline this alternative image of Mariano revealed her underlying suspicion of his motives, and her resentment about the predicament in which his actions had left her and her mother. While she could reiterate the heroic and romantic stories handed down to her about him, then, she could also construct others which were embroidered in a different way, emphasising his suspected human frailties rather than his virtues. Mariano held an important place in this family history, as remembered and recounted by Flora Tristan. The absent father figure, precisely because of his absence, could be idolised and revered in the way that a parent who was present could not. The stories constructed him as a powerful, free figure, although he could also carry the blame for the problems and disappointments that beset his daughter. However, Mariano was in some respects less important than his brother to Tristan’s sense of herself. Pio de Tristan was the power-broker, the head of the family from 1801 when, despite being the youngest of five sons and one daughter, he was selected by his father to succeed him as the administrator of family affairs.46 The legendary devotion between Pio and his eldest brother provided a tool for Tristan’s attempt to secure an inheritance from her father’s estate, to close ‘the gap which exists between my lot and that which the daughter of Mariano should have had’, to nourish ‘the hope of a better future’.47 In addition, however, it served to establish a connection between Flora and her uncle, linking her with a general and politician whose reputation had spread even as far as France. It was Flora’s relationship to Pio, rather than to Mariano, which announced to the world her place within the elite, and which thus denoted her entitlement to wealth and power. Similarly, the letters from Simon Bolivar, carefully preserved by Tristan’s mother, linked her with another South American whose exploits had excited the imaginations of many Europeans. Not only her parents, but her relatives in Peru too, were ‘intimately connected’ with this ‘extraordinary man’.48 These letters told how Bolivar met Mariano Tristan and Anne-Pierre Laisnay at Bilbao in 1800. In the following years he spent a lot of time in their company both there and in Paris, and wrote to them periodically during his travels in Europe. The letters emphasised the intimacy of this relationship. Bolivar declared that he ‘loved [them] with the most sincere friendship’.49 He shared in the family life of the Tristans at Vaugirard, strolling in the gardens and chatting with Mariano; taking solace in the company of Anne-Pierre after the sudden death of his wife; finding a refuge in their home when his republican sympathies made him a social outcast in Napoleonic France. The letters from Bolivar to her parents were edited and published by Tristan in 1838. The originals have not survived, so it is impossible to know just how rigorous her editing was; whether she exaggerated the intimacy of the relationship, or the perfidy of Pio to the memory of Mariano, whose devotion to his young brother is praised by Bolivar.50 However, Tristan’s introduction to these letters explains why she believed people were interested in the early years and private lives of prominent political figures: We like to identify in the aptitudes exhibited in their childhood, in the circumstances surrounding their earliest years, in all the events which

24

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combined to develop their facuities[,] the mysterious hand of providence which shapes the instrument to the task, the man to the mission which he must accomplish.51 From this perspective the letters have a double historical significance, for while they speak of the early years of Bolivar, they also attest to the early life of Tristan herself. Since Tristan was no more than 3 years old at the time of her parents’ relationship with Bolivar, it is fanciful to insist on her exposure to advanced political ideas, to the defence of equality and the denunciation of tyranny, if a direct influence on her later life is thereby implied.52 However, the letters as she published them did emphasise Bolivar’s dedication to ‘the liberty of peoples’, his frank denunciation of the ‘despotism’ of Napoleon, his condemnation of the Church, his abundant energy, his struggle to find a purpose or goal in life: all sentiments which she shared herself in adulthood.53 In recreating her family heritage, therefore, the letters of Bolivar served to establish and reinforce the credentials of Flora Tristan. Like references to Montezuma, and to Pio, Viceroy of Peru, they located her within a genealogy of the South American elite, and their publication in 1838 affirmed her own importance as well as that of Bolivar. In addition, from Tristan’s own perspective, they revealed some of the influences which helped to shape her own personality and her purpose in life. Given her belief in the power of destiny, in the gradual unfolding of a preordained mission,54 her childhood relationship with Simon Bolivar was not accidental, and nor was it inconsequential. The ‘Andalusian story’ identified Flora Tristan as exotic, linked by her foreign blood with the mighty of Spain and Peru, touched by the passing of the young Bolivar, whose political reputation was as yet unsullied. In evoking this past Tristan discovered a way to escape from obscurity, since it was this heritage which originally enabled her to break through into public prominence as a writer. She threw in her lot with her father, ‘Mariano, brother of the famous general Pio de Tristan’, rather than accepting the fate of her mother, always an anonymous émigrée in these accounts. Whether her silence about her mother was a form of rejection stemming from shame at the insignificance her social standing announced for her daughter, or whether it reflected an impulse to protect a loved (and living) person, is impossible to say. However, in practical terms it was essential that Tristan should identify with her father if she were to claim the benefits derived from family membership.55 Once this hope had been crushed that identification nevertheless retained its symbolic value. The Andalusian story identified a figure who was, at the very least, interesting and newsworthy for her contemporaries. In addition, it hinted at a destiny out of the ordinary, perhaps even a potential for greatness which remained to be fulfilled. Accounts of Flora Tristan’s background and childhood presenting her as ‘Andalusian’ and as ‘proletarian’ differ in many respects, yet they are not so much contradictory as complementary. The ‘Andalusian story’ draws its sustenance

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25

from the first four years of Tristan’s life, the ‘proletarian story’ from the following eleven; the ‘Andalusian story’ establishes the genealogy of influence, the blood lines of the crusader; the ‘proletarian story’ identifies the focus of her mission. To describe them as stories is not to imply falsehood, but to highlight the fact that people’s beliefs about the past, the ways they recreate and represent it, are as important as factual information for an understanding of that past, and in particular for an understanding of its impact upon their lives. During Flora Tristan’s life, these particular stories functioned not only to make sense of her past, but to account for her present and future too. After her death they played an important role in attempts to make sense of the totality of her life. The ‘proletarian story’ has been of critical interest for Tristan’s subsequent reputation as a socialist, establishing as it does a history of disinheritance, poverty, and oppression. For Tristan herself, however, the ‘Andalusian story’ was the critical one. It defined her identity, established her roots, and continued to provide a source of sustenance for her pride, her ambition, and her search for her purpose in life.

2

Slave and pariah

Flora Tristan married André-François Chazal on 3 February 1821, two months before her 18th birthday. The ceremony took place at the town hall of the eleventh arrondissement in Paris, and there was no religious service. Tristan’s husband was a 24-year-old engraver, younger son in a family of artists. His mother had published prints in the Quartier Saint-Jacques during the Empire, and his brother, Antoine, was an accomplished painter of flowers and animals who exhibited at the Salon, and taught drawing at the Jardin des Plantes.1 If the Chazals had some reservations about André’s choice of partner, as he later claimed they did, Madame Tristan seems to have been strongly in favour of the match.2 However, the marriage was a disaster and four years later, pregnant with her third child, Flora Tristan left the marital home never to return.3 As a separated wife in a society where divorce was illegal, Tristan became a social outcast in the eyes of many. She described herself as ‘an unfortunate Pariah, whom people believe they are treating indulgently if they spare her injury’.4 Over the following years Tristan adopted the ‘pariah’ role self-consciously, and used it to articulate both her sense of personal alienation and her broader view of the oppression endured by women in her society. But this self-definition was contested between husband and wife, since Chazal considered himself the injured party and claimed the title too, and between Tristan and the wider society, whose defenders rebutted her claims about the persecution of women. The debate surrounding the ‘Pariah’ reached beyond Tristan’s own life, and her right to personal freedom, to encompass contemporary definitions of womanhood and female roles. In marrying André Chazal, Flora Tristan assumed the role expected of her by her society. The ‘good wife and mother’ was the paragon of female virtue, and there was scant encouragement or opportunity to consider anything else. As the wife of a self-employed artisan, she was expected to assume responsibility for running the home as well as to participate in the business affairs of her husband. Chazal’s later criticisms indicate that he envisaged Tristan filling such a role. But if the artisanal family was a partnership, dependent for its survival on the contribution of each person, it was not an equal partnership at law. Under the Civil Code, a wife (whatever her social status) remained a legal minor. She was required to obey her husband, to live where he decided, to accept his total control over the finances of the partnership, even those she brought into the marriage 26

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27

herself. He could dispose of her property and personal effects, and her earnings automatically passed into his hands. The husband’s paternal rights over his children were not offset by any corresponding notion of maternal rights, so that even a widow could not necessarily expect custody. On the other hand, a man could not be made liable for children he fathered outside marriage. While male adultery could be prosecuted only if he brought his mistress to live in the family home, female adultery was punishable by imprisonment, and the husband could sue the third party for damages. ‘Just anger’ could even exonerate a husband’s murder of his wife and her lover if he caught them in the act of adultery.5 Few young women were probably aware of their legal position as they took their marriage vows, and Flora Tristan was no exception. But, rapidly disillusioned with married life, she was soon to encounter the impediments to breaking its bonds. Divorce was illegal, and legal separation only permissible with considerable expense and difficulty. ‘Separation of property’ was somewhat easier to obtain than the right to live separately (séparation de corps), for which irretrievable breakdown of the marriage, and the culpability of one spouse, had to be established. The legal permanence of the marriage contract combined with financial dependence to make marriage an unequal relationship which was particularly oppressive for women. Their later recriminations before the courts demonstrate that Tristan and Chazal had held dramatically different expectations of marriage from the beginning. Chazal made no secret of the fact that he fell in love with Tristan at first sight: ‘Among the women colourers that I employed one aroused in me a violent passion; she saw my passion grow and surrendered to it.’6 Details of the courtship are sparse and come only from Chazal as he sought, after the failure of the relationship, to establish his own credibility and enforce his custody rights over the children. However, he claimed to have spent many evenings at Tristan’s place helping her paint the labels for perfume bottles by which she earned her living, and bringing occasional gifts of firewood.7 He won the admiration of Tristan’s mother, if not the total affection of Tristan herself, but finally, as he recalled, ‘My unhappiness won her over, she became my wife!!’8 Tristan maintained that she had never loved André Chazal but was forced to marry him by her mother.9 Chazal retorted by publishing four letters which he claimed were written to him by Tristan in the weeks preceding their marriage, and in which she declared her love for him. Assuming that the letters are authentic (and Tristan never challenged this), they nevertheless offer evidence which supports the claims of both parties. Certainly, Tristan wrote: ‘I swear that I will love you always’. She signed herself ‘yours for life’ or ‘your friend for life’, and when Chazal’s mother lay dying she wrote to him: ‘Heaven is taking away your mother, but it is giving you a friend who loves you and who will love you until death.’10 The letters even suggest that Tristan and Chazal became lovers before their marriage: I was telling you, my dear, that I really wish the evening which I was so looking forward to was still to come, for I experience terrible pains especially when I walk;…but what happy moments too!…[sic] All night long I thought only of

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you, I was still besides you, in fact I saw none but you in all of nature. Farewell friend of my heart until morning[. H]ow this heart was calling you, my eyes were searching for you, my mouth sought yours, my arms sought to clasp you to my breast, to this breast which has known pleasure only through you.11 In the face of such avowals, Chazal had grounds for believing that Tristan entered the marriage voluntarily, and expected not merely to fulfil its obligations but to find happiness there. Nevertheless, the letters also reveal a 17-year-old who was under some pressure to conform to the wishes of those around her. She wanted them to love her, and was making an effort to please them by overcoming her reluctance and agreeing to the marriage: Believe me, I want to become a perfect wife, you know I won’t be able to, I want to make you so happy that you’ll forget all the trouble I’ve caused you. I want to treat my mother as I would like to be treated by my children, in fact I want to be on good terms with the whole world.12 This letter, the first in the series, suggests a turning point in Tristan’s relationship with Chazal. It reveals her struggle to resign herself to her appointed destiny. Tristan later accused Chazal of employing ‘moral violence’ to force her to marry him.13 From her perspective, at least, emotional pressure was exerted by both her mother and would-be husband to persuade her that this was a sensible undertaking. The subsequent passionate declarations can be read as those of a young woman who was in love with an imagined idea of love, rather than with the person of Chazal. Tristan’s later reflections on the meaning of love provide some support for this view, at least as she recreated her own earlier position with hindsight: My ardent soul had deified [love] from the time I was fourteen. I regarded love as the spirit of God, his lifegiving idea, that which produced the great and the beautiful…. The only affection which could have made me happy then would have been a passionate and exclusive love for one of those men to whom great devotion attracts great misfortune, who suffer from one of those tragedies which glorify and enoble the victim they befall.14 She also claimed to have been disillusioned twice, as an adolescent, about the ability of men to measure up to this model. Her first love, when she was ‘still a child’, possessed the necessary heroic qualities, but surrendered to his father’s disapproval of the match; the second ‘was afraid of my love, he feared that I might love him too much’.15 Tristan’s prompt disillusionment with her marriage suggests that she was not prepared for the unromantic reality. It failed to provide the great and all-consuming passion which she sought, and Chazal proved far from the romantic hero she had created in her mind. While fictional characters cannot be taken as voices of their creators’ own views, the narrator’s comments on marriage in Tristan’s novel Méphis are reminiscent of views she also expressed in her non-fiction:

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29

Love!…the young man of twenty and the young girl of sixteen can only understand these great mysteries with difficulty. Maréquita had thought she loved Olivera, whereas this passion was only a whim of the imagination, a seduction of external appearances; we men and women make mistakes in this respect, then we often realise that our soul had no part in what we had taken to be love; unfortunately this understanding almost always comes too late, and only serves to poison the rest of our lives.16 Chazal may have been right, then, in claiming that Tristan had said she loved him, but this does not necessarily mean that Tristan was lying as some have suggested.17 She wanted to love him, and as a healthy adolescent she was sensitive to his sexuality and curious about sex. But she was probably telling the truth, too, when she later denied having made an informed commitment to Chazal.18 Like many disillusioned couples, Tristan and Chazal gave conflicting accounts of the events leading up to their separation. Both assumed the role of the wronged party, and both had a vested interest in establishing their innocence before the courts. Tristan described her marriage as ‘endless torture’, with long silences and separate routines. She described Chazal as uneducated and boorish, if not depraved and immoral, though he had aspirations to literary talent like she did.19 She also discovered that her husband had large debts which she attributed to his gambling habit, and accused him of suggesting that she prostitute herself to raise extra money. Chazal vehemently denied these charges. He insisted that they lived happily at first, and that he cared for her tenderly when she was ill. His debts were work-related, he insisted, and might have been repaid had she assumed her proper role in the business. Chazal attributed the breakdown of the marriage to Tristan’s discontent with the modest life of an artisan’s wife. She wanted to be a lady and gave herself airs, he declared, thinking that he was not good enough for her. The arrival of two children in quick succession did nothing to improve the relationship, and initially their separation was mutually agreed. The doctor’s advice that their elder son needed fresh country air to improve his health provided Tristan with the excuse that she needed, and she left the marital home on 2 March 1825. Six weeks later Chazal delivered their beds to her new address, near the Jardin du Roi. He left Paris to escape his creditors, assuming the name of ‘Monsieur André’. They were never to live as husband and wife again.20 As a separated wife and single parent, Flora Tristan faced a lengthy struggle to maintain her independence. She had to support her two sons, one born in 1822 or 1823 whose name is unknown, and Ernest-Camille, born on 24 June 1824 and placed with a wet nurse at Dammartin. In addition, Tristan soon found that she was pregnant again, and on 16 October 1825 she gave birth to her daughter, AlineMarie. She later explained: The presence of my children prevented me from passing as a single woman, and I almost always presented myself as a widow; but, living in the same town as my husband and my old acquaintances, it was very difficult for me to sustain a role when a host of circumstances could expose me.21

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She tried to resume work as a colourer, then in quick succession she became a shop assistant for a confectioner and, at the end of 1825, a ladies’ maid for two English women. In that capacity, she later informed the courts, she left France for the first time, travelling to England, Switzerland, and Italy.22 Little is known of her life then until 1828. Following Tristan’s departure early in 1825, Chazal appears to have kept a low profile for several years: understandable if he wished to throw his creditors off the scent. Tristan supported her children herself, aided by her mother, and the property separation in May of 1828 was uncontested.23 In 1831, however, Chazal began to search for his wife and children. He insisted that he had no wish to force his wife to live with him, but was adamant that the children should be in his custody. A letter to the mayor of Arpajon, where Tristan’s mother lived, revealed that Ernest was attending school in that town,24 but he was unable to locate his daughter, whom he had never seen. Suspecting that she might have been placed with a wet nurse at Dammartin, as her brothers had been earlier, he wrote to several towns by that name without success.25 The first of several violent scenes recorded between the spouses took place at Tristan’s uncle’s home at Bel-Air, north of Paris, at the end of March 1832.26 A passionate argument over Aline, in which both parties hurled abuse and furnishings at each other, resulted in what Tristan believed was a compromise: she handed over Ernest to his father in exchange for a signed statement that Chazal would agree to a legal separation, and to a divorce when that became possible. However, Chazal was not satisfied with this agreement since he still knew nothing of the whereabouts of Aline, then aged 5. He followed Tristan back to Paris and attempted to have her arrested, but the police commissioner refused to co-operate. Chazal lost track of Tristan shortly after, when she went to Peru leaving Aline in boarding school in Angoulême.27 Apparently he did not give up the search, however, since he informed Flora’s mother at the beginning of 1834 that he was contemplating legal action to recover his daughter.28 His campaign was renewed in earnest from October 1835, when an anonymous letter informed him that his wife was back in Paris and that she was rich. His correspondent suggested that he should kidnap his daughter and blackmail his wife, who would be desperate for her return.29 Chazal took half of this advice, seizing his daughter as she was on her way to school one morning: hardly an introduction designed to produce good relations with Aline. Tristan located them at her uncle’s place near Versailles and, following another violent scene, fled back towards Paris with her daughter. However, Chazal had taken the precaution of wearing his National Guard uniform and had her arrested. Tristan and Aline spent the night in prison but the following day the prosecutor denied jurisdiction, advising Chazal to follow her to Paris and have her arrested there. She outwitted him by paying a bonus to the coach driver to escape her pursuer.30 When Aline was returned to her former school as a boarder at the end of 1835, on the court’s orders, a compromise seemed possible. Both parents had access to their daughter, and six months of calm ensued. However, in June 1836 Aline refused to go out with her father any more, so he retaliated by removing her to another

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school, with instructions that she was not to see her mother without a chaperone. Aline ran away from school to her mother a month later, and stayed there for three months until the police restored her to her father.31 With this development, at the end of November 1836, Chazal seemed to have achieved his objective since both the children were living with him. However he was virtually destitute because his life had become a campaign against his wife and his business had been neglected. The apartment was sparsely furnished, and all three slept in the one bed. On 1 April 1837 Tristan received a letter from her daughter alleging that her father was sexually abusing her, and shortly afterwards, while Tristan was still investigating what she could do, the child ran away to her mother’s place once again. Aline’s letter has not survived, but she accused Chazal, in the words of Tristan’s lawyer, of ‘touching her sexual parts whilst at the same time she had acted as an instrument of defilement with her own hands’.32 Ernest gave evidence that Aline had complained several times about her father touching her, and that he had witnessed such incidents on several occasions.33 The investigating magistrate decided that there was a case to answer, and Chazal was arrested and charged with ‘attempted indecencies, with violence, on the person of his daughter’. However, the court found in June that there was insufficient evidence for the case to proceed. The judges decided that Aline should be placed in boarding school once again, with both her parents having access.34 In March 1838 Tristan finally gained the right to live apart from her husband on the grounds of this long history of conflict, and because of the defamatory pamphlet that Chazal had published about her.35 The decree provided that Ernest should return to his father, and that Aline should be placed in apprenticeship, which meant that she would live with her employers. However, these arrangements were never implemented. Ernest stayed with his maternal grandmother, where he had lived intermittently since his parents’ separation, and Aline remained with her mother. She did begin an apprenticeship with a Madame Ricard, but her mother took her back home because she was unwell.36 From Chazal’s point of view, these developments represented a flouting of the legal judgement. He was the father of the family, who possessed in theory full legal rights over his children. Yet his wife continued to ignore the decisions of the courts, and they seemed either powerless or unwilling to stop her. The despair and all-consuming rage to which this gave rise were now mobilised by Chazal for a final assault on Tristan. The form which this would take was evident in May 1838, when Chazal designed a headstone for ‘The Pariah’, and the method in June, when he bought a pair of pistols and the materials for manufacturing ammunition. He told his friends outright that he was planning to kill his wife, and neither they nor his family were able to deter him. After consultation between the Chazal family and Madame Tristan senior, Ernest was sent back to live with his father in the hope that this would assuage his sense of grievance, but Chazal continued to practise with his pistols. Ernest warned his mother to be careful, but she feared that his target was actually Aline. Nevertheless, Tristan did begin to go out less often: something Chazal observed from his regular vantage-point in the wine bar opposite her apartment. On the

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afternoon of 10 September 1838 he saw his wife walking home along the rue du Bac in central Paris. He approached her from behind, and shot her at point-blank range in the left side. He then handed his pistols to a witness and surrendered. Meanwhile Tristan was carried back to her apartment and surgeons were called. It was several weeks before she was declared out of danger, though the bullet was never extracted.37 News of the incident spread quickly in Paris, particularly since it was not entirely without precedent. The newspapers initially reported that the victim was George Sand, who was also separated from a vengeful husband, or reminded their readers of the murder of a certain Madame Obry by her husband in the rue Richelieu.38 However, Tristan’s public profile was sufficiently high, due largely to the recent appearance of her first book, to warrant a running commentary in the press over several weeks concerning the state of her health, and the history of marital discord which had led to this incident. Chazal was found guilty of attempted murder the following February, and sentenced to twenty years’ hard labour. At his trial Chazal admitted shooting his wife at point-blank range with the intention of killing her, but was concerned by the misunderstanding and misrepresentation of his motives: not hatred or anger, certainly not derangement caused by intoxication, but the desire for justice. Chazal’s self-justification focused around his rights as husband and father, which he outlined in the Mémoire published in his own defence. But the weight of publication lay in Tristan’s favour, and all her writings, during these years of conflict and later, emphasised the right of women to independence. Whereas Chazal defended the patriarchal family order, Tristan’s many writings on women and on marriage attacked it. Given the pronounced subordination which the Civil Code established for married women, it is not surprising that this was one of the main targets of feminist protest during the July Monarchy. Tristan was not alone, then, in condemning the oppression of women in marriage. She was an outspoken advocate of the legalisation of divorce, submitting a petition on this subject to the Chamber of Deputies in December 1837, and returning to the theme in a petition for the abolition of the death penalty the following year, shortly after Chazal’s conviction. Here she attacked the Catholic Church’s opposition to divorce, and reiterated the argument of the socialist, Charles Fourier, that permanent relationships were contrary to human nature.39 In her view, indissoluble marriage was responsible for a host of social problems: illegitimate children, illicit liaisons, and crime. Personal experience no doubt underlay her claim that the inescapability of marriage gave rise to domestic violence and worse, as desperate spouses murdered their spouses and unmarried mothers murdered their infants. The only solution to this deplorable situation, she argued, was to reintroduce divorce at the request of either party.40 In addition to writing tracts on these issues, however, Tristan wrote about her own experience of marriage, most notably in her first full-length book entitled The Peregrinations of a Pariah 1833–1834. Published in November 1837, it recounted her marriage, the hardships she suffered following her separation, and

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her voyage to Peru in search of her father’s family and his fortune. The appearance of this book, with its personal revelations about their marriage, had been the last straw for Chazal, who saw himself as a victim of Tristan’s determination to find fame and fortune. But Tristan presented herself in the book as a wife caught in the inescapable trap of marriage; as the property of her husband, and as a social outcast for having left him. The metaphors which expressed those positions— ‘slave’ and ‘pariah’—developed a critique of marriage as a social institution, and simultaneously established the personae of victim and rebel in which Tristan sought to enter the public debate. Yet these metaphors spoke ambiguously about her and her place: acknowledging her tie to Chazal as she repudiated it; linking her with other women in a shared oppression, yet creating her as a unique and persecuted figure who was marginalised and rejected by all. In presenting herself as a ‘slave’, Tristan utilised a metaphor employed by other contemporary feminists to describe women’s abject status in marriage. The petitions for women’s rights initiated by the Gazette des Femmes in 1836 adopted a technique first utilised by the Abolition movement in Britain and the United States, and the Gazette’s description of women as ‘white slaves’ illustrated the way in which the rhetoric of the anti-slavery movement alerted women to the similarities between the slaves’ position and their own.41 The master’s absolute power over his slave’s movements, place of residence, occupations, and activities; the inability of the slave to select or change masters; the dependence of the slave on the master’s goodwill; the master’s right to discipline a recalcitrant slave, if need be with the aid of the State: all presented similarities to the legal position of the married woman in relation to her husband. The slave’s shackles symbolised the unbreakable bonds linking the wife to her husband, just as she and Chazal were ‘chained to one another for ever’ by legal obligation,42 and she was denied the chance of future happiness as a result: Form a union with a person whom I felt loved me, impossible! An infernal voice repeated to me with a hideous chuckle: ‘You are married! True, he’s a despicable creature; but chained to him for the rest of your life, you cannot escape his yoke. Feel the weight of the chain which makes you his slave and see if…you can break it!’43 Tristan found numerous examples of ‘enslaved’ wives during her travels. Her account of Peru, for instance, recounted the fates of a number of women in addition to herself: Madame Aubrit, ‘another victim of marriage’, who had also taken refuge from a failed relationship on the other side of the world;44 Tristan’s cousin Dominga, who had fled from the Carmelite convent in search of freedom but remained bound by indissoluble vows similar to marriage;45 her cousin Carmen, despoiled by a spendthrift and womanising husband and reduced to reliance on her uncle Pio’s charity for survival;46 Caroline Delooze, the 18-yearold married off by her parents to an elderly man who had falsely claimed to be President of Peru.47 Her later observation of English middle-class families offered further examples of the exploitative character of marriage. The English husband

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demanded of his wife ‘the passive obedience of the slave’, and regarded his wife simply as ‘his property, like a piece of furniture, which must be reserved for his use and which must always be at his disposal’. The serfdom experienced by his household servant was even worse, since she was seduced by her master but cast out if she fell pregnant.48 Together these women’s fates illustrated various aspects of the ‘barbarism’ of marriage, and reiterated Tristan’s general case, that all women shared a similar oppression: Slavery is abolished, they say, in civilised Europe. Certainly, slave markets are no longer held in the town square; but in the most advanced countries, there is not one where numerous classes of individuals don’t endure legal oppression. The peasants in Russia, the jews in Rome, sailors in England, women everywhere….49 Since slavery was regarded as a ‘barbaric’ practice, the extraordinary nature of women’s treatment in marriage in ‘civilised Europe’ was evidently emphasised in this metaphor. The alien yet familiar ‘barbarity’ of the wife’s status as property was most clearly represented by Tristan in her portrayal of Monsieur Tappe, a French slave-trader she met in the Cape Verde Islands on her way to Peru in 1833. Tappe lived in fear of being murdered, so he had married one of his slaves and fathered several children, largely as a protective measure. However, he proposed to abandon them and return to Europe, leaving his wife to sell her children in the slave market in order to survive. The relevance of this story to French husbands and wives was emphasised by Tristan in Tappe’s self-justification: ‘things like this happen every day in our society’.50 As Tristan told his story, therefore, Tappe, the slave-owner, was simply an extreme version of the European husband, whose wife and children were also at his mercy. While critical of women’s acceptance of ‘victim’ status (she preferred to see rebellion), Tristan attempted to see the situation from the ‘slave’s’ perspective. What she saw, in fact, was that women were forced to choose between slaveries of different kinds, with different degrees of severity, rather than between slavery in marriage and freedom. Marriage offered a degree of independence and esteem to women, she noted, making them generally eager to escape the stigma of spinsterhood.51 Working women married to escape family controls, while wealthy girls dreamed of being carried away by a handsome young man in a horse-drawn coach, as happened in novels.52 But the likelihood was that the husband would be old and unattractive or young and indifferent, given that arranged marriages rather than love matches were the norm in bourgeois families. Raised in sheltered circumstances, with no real knowledge of the world, or in an environment where inequality and mistreatment represented ‘normal life’, bourgeois girls had little chance to consider an alternative model of relationships. Women inhabited a world in which they were subordinate to men, and where men had the power to maintain the situation. Men had constructed a range of ideological justifications for their power, and there was always violence, ‘brute force’, which could be applied if necessary.53 In this context, Tristan summoned the metaphor of the ‘runaway slave’ to describe the situation of women like herself who abandoned the marital home.

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A runaway slave lived in fear of being recaptured and subjected to the rigour of the law. Society was relentless in its pursuit, she suggested, since the ‘fugitive slave’ was too great a threat: ‘a society which suffers under the weight of the chains it has forged for itself…doesn’t pardon any of its members who seek to free themselves’.54 For the slave to speak out and make public the persecution she suffered, therefore, as she herself did by writing about it, was to expose herself to the vengeance of society’s watchdogs, whom she likened to the ‘slavehunters’ of North America.55 This may have been a useful justification for a selective account of her own past, but its accuracy was borne out later when her writings became a weapon used to blacken her reputation. This ‘runaway slave’ was not to be let off lightly. The Peregrinations of a Pariah also established another persona for Flora Tristan, as the title indicated. In likening her situation as a separated wife to that of a ‘pariah’, the outcast of Indian society, Tristan drew on another metaphor which was gaining familiarity in France at the time through literature and the theatre.56 Like the ‘slave’, the ‘pariah’ was regarded in the West as a remnant of ‘barbarism’, yet the feminist appropriation of this metaphor reiterated the point that ‘barbarism’ towards women remained the norm in societies which prided themselves on their ‘civilised’ values. In claiming ‘pariah’ status, Tristan presented herself as an outsider: homeless, despised, and marginalised by her irregular status. As a separated wife, she claimed, she was ‘maliciously excluded from everything, in this society which boasts of its civilisation, she is nothing but an unfortunate Pariah, whom people believe they are treating indulgently if they spare her injury’.57 Even changing location did not provide an escape, as she had discovered through her travels: ‘Pariah in my own country, I had thought that I could recover a glimmer of liberty by putting the immensity of the sea between France and myself. Impossible! in the New World, I was still a Pariah as in the old.’58 This self-creation reflected a social context which allowed women no acceptable identity other than ‘wife and mother’. To reject it was to reject womanhood as it was understood, and enter a shadowy land beyond respectability. If she made this choice a woman faced the problem of establishing an alternative identity.59 What would a woman who rejected current definitions of womanliness actually be like? How would she or could she represent herself? Tristan attempted to answer this question about herself in 1839, in commissioning Traviès to paint her as ‘The Pariah’: As soon as I arrive in Paris we will have to have some long chats on various subjects so that you can grasp my physiognomy. Reflect now on the costume you will give me[,] what pose I will assume. Consider, my dear brother, that this will be a portrait of the Pariah—of the woman born an Andalusian and condemned by society to spend her youth in tears and without love!…This woman whose heart, whose mind, whose lips are still bursting with youth and whose hair is white!60 A successful portrait of the ‘pariah’ would capture the elusive quality of the outsider.

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It would be a portrait of suffering and of love denied. It would represent society’s victim, but a victim unsubdued. The identity of the ‘pariah’ was the identity of the insubordinate and unsubordinated woman, and despite the hardships this entailed she gloried in the fact. Tristan’s performance as ‘pariah’ was a very self-conscious one. It highlighted the injustice of her treatment; constructed her as the innocent victim of malevolent forces whilst at the same time allowing her to emphasise her own virtue. It evoked the sensibility of the Romantic generation which saw not fate, but social institutions, as the source of personal suffering.61 As a ‘pariah’ Tristan proclaimed her own social isolation, but this was not a masochistic gesture, as Dijkstra has argued, so much as a tool for conveying specific ideas about herself and about society.62 The ‘pariah’ figure was a suffering individual, an isolated outsider, a lone voice of protest against society’s unjust moral code. Tristan wrote in the preface to Peregrinations of a Pariah: Although the courts resound with applications made by women, seeking either living allowances from their husbands, or legal separation, not one has dared to raise her voice against a social order which, by leaving them unemployed, keeps them dependent, at the same time as it rivets their chains through the indissolubility of marriage.63 This claim to uniqueness was highly exaggerated, since the campaign for marriage reform had been waged vigorously by feminists and socialists for several decades before Tristan joined the fray. She was well aware of this, given her friendship with some of the main protagonists.64 But as the Gazette des Femmes complained,65 her claim to be the pariah par excellence largely ignored the efforts of others, despite her stated desire to rally other women to the cause: ‘Within ten years the Pariah will no longer be alone; others will dare to inscribe their names on her standard….’66 Her self-proclaimed identity as ‘the pariah’ relied upon the exaggeration of her own exceptional position, and thus alienated some potential sources of support in a generally hostile environment. However, Tristan also applied the concept more widely, arguing that all women shared the condition of ‘pariah’ by virtue of being women in a man’s world. Like other feminists before and since, she argued that women do not belong to society on the same terms as men. Where religious, political, and legal systems are established and dominated by men, women remain outsiders, defined as ‘other’ by virtue of their sex. She expressed this view most comprehensively in 1843: Up to now, woman has counted for nothing in human society…the priest, the lawmaker, and the philosopher have treated her as a true pariah. Woman (half of humanity) has been excluded from the Church, from the law, from society. For her, there is no function in the Church, no representation before the law, no function in the State.67 The Indian Pariah, born from the feet of the Hindu God, and the female ‘pariah’, born from Adam’s rib, were both attributed with a primeval sin whose guilt was

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37

then borne by subsequent generations. Such assertions gave a religious justification to a range of legal and civil discriminations against this inferior group.68 The ‘pariah’ image thus articulated Tristan’s perception of a gendered world in which biological sex was the primary marker of social position; in which the male was the norm and the female was the ‘other’, the ‘pariah’. The ‘pariah’s’ challenge to this social order was both ideological and personal: she articulated a claim about the oppression of women, and assumed a female identity which embodied and challenged that oppression. It was not simply Tristan’s writings and her claims about the mistreatment of women which were attacked in return, therefore, but her person and her lifestyle. As she had predicted, she could not be allowed to live as a ‘pariah’, since that would reveal what was supposed to be concealed, namely that women’s subordinate status in marriage was not ‘natural’ but political. By living as a separated wife, and glorifying in her ‘pariah’ status, Tristan offended her own family and especially her estranged husband. She fell out with her mother who remained friendly with Chazal, at least until the suspicions concerning his behaviour towards Aline were aired.69 Her mother’s brother, Thomas-Joseph Laisnay, was openly hostile to his niece, supporting Chazal’s efforts to gain custody of the children and later testifying on his behalf in court.70 Tristan’s claim to be a ‘pariah’ amongst her immediate family was to some extent justified, in that they thought her foolish and rebellious, and appear to have had little sympathy with her views. She also became a ‘pariah’ amongst her Peruvian relatives after her visit there, due to her critical comments about them in her book. The ‘lovely girl’, the ‘good sensitive and noble’ woman whom they praised in 1832–4 became ‘the little tramp’, the ‘despicable, ungrateful, fabled and crazy Flora’ of 1838–9.71 In creating herself as the ‘pariah’ in her Peregrinations, which required an unflattering portrayal of rejection by her father’s family, the exposure of the secrets of her mother’s life and of her husband’s failings, Tristan indeed became a ‘pariah’, condemned and even despised for her betrayals. More significantly, each component of André Chazal’s identity—as husband, father, artisan—was also undermined by the ‘pariah’s’ actions. Tristan’s economic and personal independence, and her de facto custody of their children, highlighted his status as despised husband, failed businessman, ignored father. Her successes emphasised his failures; her growing fame—set in train by the appearance of Peregrinations of a Pariah—his insignificance. These facts impressed themselves on Chazal’s mind with increasing urgency during the 1830s. Chazal could not assert his manliness if Tristan refused to adopt a feminine demeanour, that is, to become a proper wife and mother. Chazal thus defended his masculinity by attacking Tristan’s non-femininity: her adoption of the ‘pariah’ role in preference to the normative roles of womanliness. His life became a personal mission to punish the ‘pariah’ who had destroyed his life, and reclaim his personal dignity by exerting his legal rights and his status as head of the family. Writing in defence of his attempt on Tristan’s life, Chazal presented himself as a wronged husband entitled to redress against a recalcitrant wife. He was demeaned by

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her ‘immorality’, his pride severely dented by his inability to control her and make her submit to his authority. In defending himself at his trial Chazal emphasised his wife’s ‘suspect’ behaviour: how did she support herself? where and with whom did she live? Implicit was the question ‘with whom did she sleep?’, since he made a virtue of the fact that he had always slept in his own bed.72 From his perspective, Tristan led a ‘mysterious, suspicious, even culpable life’,73 marked by intrigues, liaisons, and adulterous affairs. Her money came from immoral sources, he maintained. She was the mistress either of her lawyer, Duclos (in whose name her apartment was rented to prevent unwanted intrusions by her husband), or of another unidentified man. Chazal sought an enquiry into his wife’s lifestyle in order to reveal her wrongdoing and clear his own name: I want you to find out the identity of the elderly man who was at her place with Mr Duclos, in order to ascertain whether he isn’t the one supporting her, and who, more than any other, has an interest in destroying my reputation, so that in obtaining a legal separation [séparation de corps], my wife will no longer have to fear a prosecution for adultery on my part.74 Chazal was not only concerned with his dignity as a husband, however, he was also motivated by his rights as a father. Paternal power was not simply a legal right but a natural right, he asserted, and he would never surrender it.75 Despite his attempts to incriminate his wife, Chazal declared: Out of self-respect, I renounce the exercise of my rights as a husband; but I want to be able to fulfil those of a father to their full extent, I want to lead my children along the path of honour and social propriety, and I will always and everywhere demand this right, which is mine at law.76 In Aline’s case this meant creating a good housewife and mother, not a ‘pariah’ like Tristan. This was the crux of his dogged pursuit of his daughter: If I have devoted so much willpower, so much persistence to gaining control of my daughter, it is because I wanted to remove this child from the dangerous influence of her mother; I wanted and I still want my daughter to become, through her education, a good housekeeper, a good wife, a good mother and not an idle dreamer, a Pariah.77 In order to assert his rights as a worthy father, then, Chazal focused attention on Tristan’s unworthiness as a mother: ‘…this Pariah’, he charged, ‘…has roamed from one hemisphere to another, without considering the bonds which should, at least, have attached her to her children’.78 Her fitness to raise a daughter was challenged, partly because his custody of Ernest had already been determined, but also because the issue of Aline’s education and care brought definitions of womanhood into focus in a crucial way. He argued that Aline was more at risk from her mother’s ‘bad example’ than her son would have been, because Aline could not learn to be a ‘proper woman’ if her role model was inadequate:

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I actively concerned myself with restoring this child to Society and to her family. It was necessary, I had to do it no matter what the price. Because, alongside her mother, having only a pernicious example before her, she could only lose her way and pick up bad habits…. I had everything to fear from leaving her with a mother whose reputation was sullied, a vile woman, respecting nothing, and recoiling from nothing which might make her wealthy!!!!79 Chazal also maintained that Aline’s contamination was already evident, since her preference to be with her mother, and her accusations against her father, could only be due to Tristan’s manipulation and scheming.80 Diverting attention from his own improper behaviour towards his daughter, then, Chazal asserted that the sexual charges which she made, if not taught to her parrot fashion, showed that she was already on the path to prostitution.81 In a further assertion of his manliness, Chazal also justified his actions as those of a good citizen defending society. He was the avenger silencing the ‘pariah’, who had shown herself impervious to the constraints and order imposed by the justice system. He condemned Tristan for having deliberately and voluntarily flouted the dictates of society. She had rejected normal social mores, he asserted, determined to satisfy her own wishes and desires at any cost.82 As a ‘pariah’, she possessed none of the virtues normally found in women: She possesses none of the virtues which bring esteem to the daughter, the wife, the kinswoman, or the woman of quality,…for her, family ties, the duties of society, and the principles of religion are useless impediments, from which she frees herself with an audacity which is fortunately quite rare….83 During their marriage she had failed in her duties as a wife, had taken little interest in her children, and had been irretrievably lost to society from the moment she had abandoned the marital home. In rejecting marriage she had become an outrageous woman, wanton and shameless, confirming her fall through her unfeminine violence and bad language.84 Tristan’s alleged self-interest and rejection of social expectations were contrasted by Chazal with his own qualities as a model citizen. Despite the fact that he had never supported his children and was even suspected of abuse, that his business was a failure, and that he lived in a state of destitution, owing his housekeeper fifteen months’ wages, he presented himself as a pillar of society. He was an honest, hardworking man, he avowed, living a simple and laborious life. He presented himself as sober and industrious, with no ambitions above his station, and insisted (in the face of some evidence to the contrary) that his moral conduct was without blemish. His goal was to raise his children to be respectable members of society too. Chazal was proud to be a member of the National Guard, quartermaster of his company. His captain appeared as a character witness for Chazal, sympathising with his ‘despair’ and declaring that ‘every family man would understand’ his actions.85 This highlighted Chazal’s self-appointed role as defender of the status quo, since the purpose of the National Guard was to protect the established order. In defying

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her husband Tristan simultaneously defied society, and the husband’s self-defence could thus be presented as a defence of society and its principles. Chazal’s arguments echo wider artisanal beliefs regarding family structure and women’s position within it. Craft workers did not share a single and uniform view of relations between the sexes, but held a range of views which varied according to the traditions in particular crafts and occupations.86 But male workers frequently linked household organisation and workplace issues, as they attempted to articulate their self-consciousness as workers and as men. Chazal’s emphasis on exercising authority over his wife and children reflects the patriarchal family model supported in some artisanal circles, in which the ‘head of the household’ was simultaneously the head of a family productive unit, and in which gender hierarchy and a hierarchy of skills and tasks were inter-related. From this perspective, notions of manliness were closely linked with power over women, though not necessarily with the concept of an economically dependent wife.87 In Chazal’s case, however, the younger son struggling to make his mark and assert his control over his own life may have had personal reasons for needing to establish his authority over others. Tristan’s greatest crime as a ‘pariah’ was the desire to be free, for freedom, as her husband understood it, was the rejection of legitimate social restrictions and obligations. But if the contest between the spouses was a contest between an ideology of freedom and one of authority,88 it was a contest which was highly gendered, and which made patriarchal authority the crux of social relations. Chazal wrote of Tristan: ‘She wanted to be free, to live like a free woman in the broadest sense of the word….’ 89 The sexual innuendo in this accusation emphasised the danger which sexual ‘licence’ posed to society’s family base. Tristan’s assault on the family, according to Chazal, was implicit in all her actions: passing as a single woman, giving her daughter her own family name rather than his name as the child’s father, favouring her daughter over her son.90 Each of these actions undermined paternal power and patriarchal authority, which decreed male priority and defined women and children by their relationships with men. It assumed a right to independence and self-assertion in women which could not be tolerated. Besides, Tristan had also undermined the family by her written attacks on marriage, ‘the basis of the family and of society’.91 She ‘profess[ed] doctrines utterly subversive of social order and morality’.92 Chazal thus presented himself as the defender of families, especially of male heads of families, against the threat posed by wayward women like Tristan. His act of ‘justice’ was intended to preserve his own family, and protect other families from contagion. The inscription on the headstone which Chazal sketched for the ‘pariah’ four months before his attack on her life was quite explicit: You are fleeing from justice, but it will not escape you [sic]. Sleep in peace to serve as an example to those who are sufficiently misguided to follow your immoral precepts. Should one fear death for punishing an evildoer? doesn’t one save her victims!93 Chazal, the attacker of his wife, thus transformed himself into the victim of ‘the

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pariah’ and her supporters. Tristan was conspiring against him, laying traps for him, seeking to destroy him. He claimed to the courts that he was being pursued by unnamed ‘enemies’, all of whom were orchestrated by his wife.94 Given this belief, he admitted that he might make another attempt on her life if he were acquitted: As for myself, I need not to be continually persecuted, prosecuted…not to be persecuted in myself and in the person of my children…. If the same persecutions started again, it is probable that they would have the same results.95 It would have been weak to change his mind once he had decided to kill her, he declared. But rather than suggesting strength of character, this was the admission of a pathetic figure who believed that to be weak was worse than to be wrong. Chazal was not, as Baelen implies, a victim of his wife’s invented accusations against him. Rather, as Leprohon argues, he was tortured by his own inadequacies, and became a victim of a passion which he could not control.96 Chazal also saw himself as the victim of an unjust legal system which was incapable of distinguishing guilt from innocence. He believed that his legal rights as husband and father had not been upheld by the courts, entitling him to exact by force the justice that was denied him by legal channels: ‘Having employed every means, tried everything…only one avenue was left to me and I took it.’97 The ‘violent passion‘ he had felt for Flora in 1821 had degenerated into a violence of another kind, and he even regarded his attack as an act of courage. This masculine self-exoneration, which linked his crime with the defence of his manhood, was preserved by Chazal long after the event. A memoir to the President of the Republic in 1849, written from his prison cell, described his crime as having been a legitimate defence of his rights in the face of calumny and persecution. He likened himself to a political prisoner, and signed himself ‘the pariah Chazal’: a reference to his social marginality as a convicted criminal, but also a rejection of Tristan’s status as victim.98 Tristan herself clearly understood the social implications of her husband’s attack on her. During the trial she protested about the questioning directed at her morals: she was the victim of the crime, she reminded the court, not the accused.99 Writing to a friend a week later she observed: My wretched murderer, aggravating his crime by ordering his defence lawyer …to defame me publicly and to destroy me morally after having put a bullet in my chest! This jackal…sitting up there on the accused’s bench this time, not as the defendant, but in fact as the champion of the old society!…Indeed it was quite obvious that he was presenting himself not as the attacker of Flora Tristan, but as the defender of the husbands attacked by Flora Tristan—I tell you again, for those who were aware of it…it was quite something!100 Tristan may have been the victim, but she was guilty of provoking the attack upon herself by her outrageous demand for autonomy and her flouting of convention. Her husband had been able to find no evidence of her adultery, but the fact that

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she was found in flagrant breach of the ‘paragon’ role was just as bad, an equal assault on the rights of the husband and the foundations of patriarchal power. Consequently, although Chazal was found guilty, the judges accepted the jury’s plea for mercy. There were, after all, ‘extenuating circumstances’.101 The jury’s sympathetic response to Chazal’s crime reflected the fact that Tristan’s life as a ‘pariah’ challenged society in general, and that many of her contemporaries shared Chazal’s views on society rather than hers. This was evident not merely in the courtroom but in responses to her Peregrinations of a Pariah, when the press embarked on a staunch defence of the patriarchal order. In some reviews Tristan was simply dismissed as a ‘bluestocking’ not to be taken seriously,102 but others defended precisely the view of marriage which Tristan condemned as oppressive for women. The rejection of divorce was almost universal. The Journal des Débats equated divorce with the abolition of marriage, which Figaro also insisted was Tristan’s ultimate goal.103 The Revue de Paris was particularly hostile, arguing that a society which permitted divorce ‘would decline to the level of the most barbarous peoples’.104 It contrasted monogamy, as a superior stage of social development, with the mythical and oppressive promiscuity of ‘barbarians’. For Tristan, contemporary society was ‘barbaric’ because it ignored women’s rights as individuals, and it would become more ‘civilised’ by extending those rights. For the Revue, by contrast, contemporary society was ‘civilised’ because it controlled sexual behaviour, particularly (given organised prostitution and the discriminatory laws on adultery) the sexuality of women. Exposing the very ‘public’ significance of people’s ‘private’ lives, the Revue expressed the pervasive fear of disorder, the potential for which was represented by female sexuality. And as a woman outside her husband’s control, Tristan’s life raised the spectre of female sexual disorder even more clearly than her arguments for divorce did. Reactions to Tristan also condemned specifically the metaphors she used to depict women’s experience. Reporters were outraged that the plight of ‘negro slaves’ was minimised by equating it with the position of women, and that men’s sufferings as husbands were ignored in Tristan’s assessment of marriage.105 More significantly, the ‘pariah’ herself, not simply her ideas and theories, was the subject of generally hostile reaction. The workers’ newspaper, L’Union, was unique in responding positively to Tristan’s ‘pariah’ status, but it did so by claiming Tristan as one of the ‘race’ of pariahs, the proletarians.106 Others challenged the legitimacy of her title as ‘pariah’, arguing that she had received assistance and sympathy, not rejection, or asserting that, as a disorderly woman, she got what she deserved.107 The literary critic, Jules Janin, though mesmerised by her physical attractions, condemned her irregular lifestyle. He berated Tristan for deserting her family and the joys of the hearth; for rejecting her true role as a woman; for abusing social mores. After her death, he wrote: She lacked nothing, except humility, obedience and resignation to the decrees of Providence, which even gave the Ocean, for its eternal limit, the grain of sand on which is written in the hand of God himself: Thou shalt go no further!108

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Ironically, his attack not only confirmed her status as ‘pariah’ but validated her arguments about male hypocrisy and the double standard. His self-righteous defence of the laws of marriage was undermined by the fact that he lived for several years with the Marquise de la Carte, who was separated from her husband.109 The conflict between those who favoured marriage reform and those who opposed it was partly a reflection of broader political affiliations. Thus Tristan’s views on divorce were supported by the populist Journal du Peuple and the feminist Gazette des Femmes.110 However, such political divisions were not always clear cut. The general emphasis on ‘order’ in response to Tristan’s call for ‘rights’ demonstrated a broadly conservative response on the question of the family: a question on which political conservatives and liberals often found common ground. Even the Republican democrats at Lyon who published Le Censeur cited Tristan’s marital conflict with her husband (that is, her status as a ‘pariah’) as one reason for refusing to support her.111 Sexual politics apparently overrode broader political affiliations, and support for political democracy was not always accompanied by belief in democracy in the home. The chorus of denunciation which met Tristan’s call for women’s liberation from an oppressive family structure, the attacks on her character and her life, illustrated that she was, in one sense, a ‘pariah’ for refusing to conform to social expectations. Nevertheless, the publicity aroused by her controversial beliefs and her marital conflict with Chazal made her a figure of public interest. Ironically, therefore, the factors which made her a ‘pariah’, a social outcast, simultaneously aided her efforts to gain social recognition. The proclamation of her ‘pariah’ status made Tristan a figure of renown, and she became not so much a social outcast as a social celebrity.

3

Traveller

Shortly after leaving her husband in 1825, Flora Tristan departed France in her capacity as a ladies’ maid. This was the first of many journeys both abroad and in France, being followed by a visit to England in 1826, several trips into the provinces around 1830, another journey to England in 1831, and a voyage to Peru in 1833–4. Tristan made two further trips to England in 1835 and 1839, and travelled extensively within France in 1843–4. These voyages made of Tristan a well-travelled woman by the standards of the day, but nevertheless she was far from unique. Women were increasingly represented amongst the mobile population whose search for economic wellbeing took them to the towns, permanently or temporarily, in the nineteenth century,1 and they also participated in Europe’s encounter with lands and peoples beyond its borders, in that heyday of colonial expansion. If the majority of women who left their homes were escaping the limited employment opportunities in their places of origin, however, some, like Tristan, travelled from choice as much as from necessity. They were inspired by curiosity, and were motivated by what Flora Tristan described as a ‘taste for adventurous voyages’.2 Tristan was one of those who not only spent lengthy periods exploring foreign places and living amongst strangers, but who wrote about those experiences. Her first publication was a pamphlet on The Need to Extend a Warm Welcome to Foreign Women, which was specifically concerned with the problems of women travellers,3 and her first book, Peregrinations of a Pariah, was an extended account of her voyage to Peru. Her travels in England were discussed briefly in two articles on London’s monuments and public places, published in 1837,4 and more extensively in Promenades in London, a book based on her 1839 journey.5 Finally, Tristan’s travels within France in 1843–4 are also well documented, since a diary she kept throughout the journey has survived.6 This was intended as the basis for a book on the condition of workers in France, but it also documented her reactions as a traveller. The image of Flora Tristan as traveller emerges through a range of sources, then, including her own and others’ correspondence, but her published accounts of her travels are the most significant. Moreover, since her experiences as a traveller are conveyed mainly through her own writings, we cannot encounter the traveller except by encountering the travel writer, and the conventions of that genre shape, to some extent, the stories that she told. 44

Traveller

45

To travel is to remove oneself from the familiar and to situate oneself amongst others. This relocation leads the traveller to see those others as ‘foreigners’, but simultaneously (and maybe more importantly) it makes the traveller a ‘foreigner’, and thus involves a reassessment of personal identity as the traveller sees herself from a new perspective, in a new context. Tristan’s comments about herself as a traveller trace the most self-aware moments in this process of self-assessment, as she considered who she was and where she belonged. Tristan’s travel writings sometimes focus explicitly on her own personal and familial history, exposing the personal dislocation inherent in the experience of travel. At other times they comment on the societies she visited, and which (like other travel writers) she described from the perspective of the outsider. Through these processes she clarified and reaffirmed her sense of place, and her identification with the world she had left: with Europe, with France, and especially with Paris. Tristan published The Need to Extend a Warm Welcome to Foreign Women in July 1835. She had recently returned from Peru, and the impact of that journey, along with her earlier travels, was reflected in this pamphlet, which emphasised the problems faced by women travelling on their own. As she explained, they were hampered by social conventions which decreed that ‘respectable’ women did not appear in society without a male chaperone. They could not receive male visitors at their hotel, or visit restaurants and places of entertainment alone, without attracting unfavourable notice. Even finding accommodation could pose serious problems for the woman traveller, for if the incompetence and ill-will of hoteliers ‘[made] journeys excessively difficult, tiring, disagreeable’,7 as Tristan later suggested, their attitude to unaccompanied women verged on hostility. Tristan wrote in 1835: She will be welcomed [at the hotel] with a certain attitude which I don’t know how to describe. You can be sure that they will begin by addressing these words to her: ‘Madame is alone (emphasising the word alone); and, after her affirmative reply, they will tell the servant or the maid to show her to the worst room in the establishment…. Nevertheless they will charge her 10 fr. more for her poor room than they would have charged a man.8 There was a certain irony in the fact that Tristan produced this analysis so soon after having demonstrated, by travelling to Peru on her own, that these conventions could be broken or ignored. This is not to suggest that such norms and expectations posed no difficulty for women travellers like herself. Rather, the publication reflected some key concerns about the solo woman traveller in this period, as Tristan attempted to justify and explain her to the public. Cuche has argued that anxiety about the woman traveller stemmed from her independent status. Since she was not contained within the domestic environment or subject to male ‘protection’ and authority, she sparked the suspicion and the closing of ranks which the community normally reserved for the ‘other’ who was feared.9 This was well illustrated, as Tristan herself observed, in the fact that a woman travelling alone was sexually suspect. The woman traveller would be ‘the

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subject of all the conversations of the notable people in the village’, ‘exposed to calumny’, as was also the case in the spa towns: If a woman, tortured by any illness whatsoever, has the courage (and the word is not exaggerated) to take the waters alone, charitable people, of whom there are so many, will have no scruple in expressing doubts about her honour; others will affirm, on hearsay, that she is a fortune-seeker; and she can expect to hear propositions from young men which will poison her heart….10 Tristan countered such attitudes by outlining the social benefits accruing from travel, which increased cultural contact and understanding between peoples.11 She also sought to defend the legitimacy of women’s independent action, their right to be alone and autonomous. But the pamphlet dwelt at greater length on the reasons women might have for travelling alone whether they liked it or not. The ‘largest and most interesting group’ she identified were women who travelled to another town to conceal a personal misfortune, as she had done herself. This group included, for instance, ‘the unhappily married woman, whom our social institutions allow to live apart from her husband, but without allowing her the divorce necessary for the happiness of both parties and for public order’.12 The category also reflected a growing phenomenon in the early nineteenth century: the movement of single women to the towns in search of work, and the related increase in extramarital pregnancies.13 Tristan thus gave voice to contemporary concerns about women living and travelling alone, removed from the constraints and protections of marriage and family structures. The city was frequently seen (with some justification) as a place of sexual danger for such women, unable to support themselves by honest work, and lacking the social and economic power to enforce promises of marriage.14 But Tristan insisted that such women were victims of social disorder in the city, rather than its perpetrators.15 The city was not the haunt of female sexual indulgence, but the refuge of the female victim. In presenting it in these terms Tristan entered a debate about urbanisation in which the female figure—whether predator or victim—was also a vehicle for the expression of ideas about change. This was a debate to which she would return. If travel presented such difficulties and dangers for women that Tristan was moved to suggest a special organisation to assist them, this did not mean that she was a reluctant traveller herself. In fact, her admission of her ‘taste for adventurous voyages’ came as she explained her disappointment at not being able to afford to visit North America on her way back to Europe from Peru.16 Tristan’s journey to Peru in 1833–4 gave rise to her most fully developed travel narrative. It told of her chance encounter in a Paris boarding house in 1829 with a ship’s captain, Chabrié, who traded regularly with Peru. Having had her mother’s tales of the Peruvian Tristans’ wealth and power confirmed, she made contact with them, and sailed for Peru in April 1833.17 Tristan’s voyage from Bordeaux, down the coast of Africa, across the Atlantic Ocean, around Cape Horn into the Pacific, and up the coast of Chile to the port of Valparaiso, was still extremely hazardous in the 1830s. Tristan made the journey

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in the Mexican, a vessel of 200 tons with a complement of fifteen crew and five passengers.18 The ship’s living area, approximately 17 feet by 12, housed five small cabins and the saloon. This, together with a small deck cluttered with livestock and cargo, was home to the company for four and a half months. The Mexican reached Valparaiso in mid-August 1833, and Tristan then took a small coastal vessel to Islay, a port in southern Peru. Her family’s estates were located in Arequipa, about 100 kilometres inland, and the forty-hour journey through the desert and across several summits of the Cordillera mountains was made by mule. Tristan’s account of this journey echoed some of the key themes also found in other travellers’ accounts of their voyages in foreign lands.19 Her voyage to this distant country provided scope for compelling description of Southern land- and seascapes. Despite difficulties in finding her sea-legs, she was entranced by the splendour of tropical sunsets; the dolphins at play beside the ship; the magic of nights at sea, where the surrounding blackness was illuminated by the brilliance of the Southern Cross and Milky Way.20 And having reached South America, she described vividly the panoramic views from the summit of the Cordilleras: The vastness of the desert, the Cordillera mountain range and the three gigantic volcanoes of Arequipa revealed themselves to our view…. My eyes surveyed…these great endless mountain-chains, whose thousands of snowcovered peaks sparkle in the sunlight, and mark on the skyline the western edge of the desert with every colour of the spectrum.21 But Tristan’s voyage offered more than sightseeing opportunities, and her story also incorporated more dramatic themes. Her experiences at sea offered that combination of novelty and danger which was a key theme for the traveller writing for those at home. Tristan painted a dramatic contrast for her readers between the extreme heat of the tropics and the freezing conditions near Cape Horn, when the sailors’ clothes froze to their skin, and ice on the deck caused serious accidents.22 Her account of her overland journey from Islay to Arequipa emphasised even more clearly the dangers she had faced in a distant and different land. Her account described a journey marked by raging thirst, sunburn, and swirling dust, the remains of dead animals and one traveller’s grave reminding her of its real dangers. She suggested that, had it not been for Islay’s administrator of customs, concerned that no harm should come to this visitor who carried the prestigious name of Tristan on her passport, she may have become another casualty. The soldiers he sent to protect her tied her onto one of their horses on the second day when her weakness became a serious concern. Once in the mountains the threat of heat exhaustion was replaced by other dangers, as the party wound its way along narrow paths fringed by crevasses. On the third day she finally reached the safety of Arequipa, and the security of her father’s family home.23 As a woman travelling with men, Tristan shared the same problems and dangers faced by her male companions. But women travellers also faced additional problems, particularly as targets of sexual harassment or attack. Tristan’s account of her shipboard experiences illustrated this danger in a dramatic way, and is

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quite unusual in raising a subject about which most women travellers kept silent.24 The fact that Tristan was the only woman on board the Mexican made her vulnerable, as did the lack of privacy: From the beginning of the voyage, I had abstained from appearing at breakfast, and later made it a rule. Since I ate very little, and was almost always sick in the mornings, I preferred not to get up until breakfast was finished and everyone had gone on deck. Then I felt freer to attend to my ablutions and my personal needs. Since my cabin was enclosed only by shutters, I could hear everything that was said and see everything that happened in the saloon without being seen.25 Between the lines, this account made clear that there was little standing in the way of a determined attacker except the presence of other men, and their respect for her. Tristan’s sense of vulnerability explained, at least in part, the close relationship she formed with Captain Chabrié on board the Mexican. According to Tristan, he fell in love with her and, not wanting to reveal that she was already married, she finally promised to marry him in America. But she also explained her behaviour as a matter of self defence: Alone in the midst of the Ocean, I had nothing to fear with his love. The nobility of his sentiments protected me against him, and his bravery protected me against every other attack…. I was afraid of being abandoned; my life might depend on the protection of others; and I clung to the love of Mr Chabrié like a shipwrecked sailor to a floating log.26 If Chabrié’s love and the friendship of the other officers kept her safe on the Mexican, Tristan recorded the re-awakening of her fears as she boarded the coastal vessel Leonidas to travel from Valparaiso to May. She felt intimidated as she was eyed and discussed by a room full of male travellers, her vulnerability as a foreigner exacerbated by her vulnerability as the only woman present: There were several Englishmen or Americans in the room sitting around a table drinking grog. I became the focal point of all these foreigners; they were speaking English and I saw that I was the subject of their conversation. Their derisive laughter, their insolent looks made my heart skip a beat. I felt how alone I was in the midst of these men, with their unspeakable vices, who were totally ignorant of the consideration due to a woman and to the first law of society, decency…. I was already experiencing all the horrors of isolation.27 Similarly, recalling the return journey from Peru in her diary some years later, Tristan described having been ‘worried by the presence of that wretched madman Antonio, exposed to the insults of those vulgar sailors, in a word in the most frightful position that a woman can find herself in’.28 Tristan’s emphasis on danger and on her own vulnerability as a woman traveller had a basis in reality. Nevertheless, the reiteration of this theme, as Mills suggests,

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may have served other purposes than simple revelation of her own experiences.29 In fact, evidence which she provides herself counters some of her claims about her own timidity and fearfulness, suggesting the need to consider those claims more carefully. Her account of sexual danger on board ship, for instance, was accompanied by a counter-discourse of respect and chivalry. This was what distinguished her time on the Mexican from that on the Leonidas. Similarly, if Tristan had felt intimidated by public scrutiny as a young woman travelling alone, as her 1835 pamphlet suggested, the records relating to her later travels reveal no shrinking violet. In England in 1839 she would insist on visiting places barred to women such as the British Houses of Parliament, dressing as a Turk in order to gain entry there.30 She would also defy convention by visiting places considered inappropriate for women, investigating the red light districts, and describing the drunken orgies she witnessed.31 The rules of etiquette might have limited the behaviour of unaccompanied women, but Tristan does not seem to have let them stand in her way. In emphasising this aspect of women’s experience, however, Tristan adopted a distinctly feminine pose as a travel writer. A male writer might readily present his ‘adventures’ and adopt a hardy and heroic stance in describing himself overcoming them. But this stance was not readily believable in a woman, and women travellers frequently minimised or omitted the adventurous elements in their accounts for fear of disbelief.32 The adventurous woman might strike off into foreign parts alone, as Tristan did, but in facing her own society—even through the medium of the printed word—she might revert to the feminine stance which made it more likely that she would be comprehended. In presenting herself as a traveller, then, Flora Tristan had to negotiate the complex expectations concerning what women could and did experience, and what they could say of those experiences.33 Her frequent references to her own delicacy—suffering from seasickness more than the men, at risk of sexual attack or of perishing in the desert, and needing the frequent support and assistance of men—may have been designed to offer her readers a gesture of femininity even as she broke the social rules which made the unaccompanied woman traveller a transgressor. Like many travellers, Tristan was impressed by the unfamiliar and the unusual, and life in Peru provided ample scope for a travelogue certain to intrigue its readers. Her experience of an earthquake in Arequipa, her description of the town’s live volcano, the Inca legends she related, her account of Peruvian burial customs, and of the indigenous peoples’ use of llama as beasts of burden, possessed considerable curiosity value for Europeans.34 Similarly, Tristan’s detailed description of people and places, of such things as Peruvian housing, lifestyle, history, entertainments, and cuisine, provided an image of a society which was, in many respects, different from that of the European reader. In describing this world she created it for her readers and made it comprehensible to them, but she did so from the vantage point of the ‘stranger’ rather than the insider. As Kramer has noted, Tristan’s discussion of places she visited employed themes common in travellers’ cross-cultural comparisons, particularly in confirming the superiority of the ‘Old World’.35 The physical environment, for

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instance, was frequently perceived in negative terms.36 Social and cultural phenomena also compared unfavourably with the world she knew. Dress codes appeared ‘grotesque’ or ‘burlesque’ by European standards. She also criticised housing and furniture, cuisine and table manners.37 She commented on dirty people and dirty living conditions. 38 Such descriptions emphasised the ‘backwardness’ of this society in comparison with Europe. La Praya’s African inhabitants were ‘far removed from civilisation’,39 the American consul’s house an oasis of culture in an otherwise desolate outpost. Peru was also ‘backward’, ignorant of irrigation schemes which would have allowed greater productivity; favouring crude pas-times like bullfighting which revealed a lack of refinement. ‘The phase of civilisation in which this people is located’, she wrote, ‘is still far removed from the one we have reached in Europe.’40 Yet the picture Tristan painted of South America was not entirely negative. If her eye was taken by the aspects that differed from the familiar, she also identified many praiseworthy elements of Peruvian culture. Lima fared particularly well in her estimation, partly because of its resemblance to Europe and its adoption of European norms.41 But novel South American customs sometimes facilitated a critique of European practices too. The social relations of the sexes in Lima, in particular, enabled a critique of those in Europe. Tristan may have borrowed ideas from the English writer Lady Montagu’s account of her travels in Turkey to make her case.42 She described the local costume of Lima which concealed women’s faces entirely, comparing it explicitly to the Muslim veil. Like Montagu, Tristan argued that women’s physical concealment in this society was the source of their freedom, whereas European women’s visibility served to restrict them.43 And echoing Montagu, Tristan exclaimed: ‘There is nowhere on earth where women are more free….’44 The fact that even husbands could not recognise their wives shifted the balance of power between men and women, making marriage itself less oppressive. Peregrinations of a Pariah was also a semi-autobiographical work, revealing as much about Tristan’s own self-understanding as about her understanding of other peoples and places. Dijkstra’s Freudian reading of this work focuses on Tristan’s apparently deliberate alienation of her family, which illustrates, she suggests, a masochistic element in her personality. Rabine’s Lacanian reading emphasises instead Tristan’s identification with her father and her refusal to adopt a ‘feminine’ demeanour, seeing these as challenges to the patriarchal system in which one’s place was defined by sex.45 Tristan’s account offers some support for each of these interpretations. Her attack on her family was so severe that the book was publicly burnt in Arequipa, and the pension she had so recently won was revoked. Her attachment to her father was intense, and she represented herself in terms which disturbed sexual boundaries. But other readings of this work are nevertheless possible, and show Tristan exploring her own identity as a woman of mixed ethnicity, who sought to discover who she was and where she belonged.46 As Planté suggests, Tristan’s Peregrinations described not merely a voyage from France to Peru, but a passage from naivety to self-knowledge.47 The process of selfdiscovery was a gradual one, the encounter with the ‘other’ creating a shifting and

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evolving sense of self which she often presented as painful. This was evident from the moment of her departure from France in 1833. On the one hand, she condemned the society which had rejected her, implying the expectation that the society she now approached would welcome and befriend her. On the other hand, in evoking a sense of sadness at leaving home she implied that she would not be ‘at home’ anywhere else. As Tristan recounted the experience of travelling abroad, she explored this contrast between belonging and not belonging. When she set out for Peru she identified with France and expressed a strong sense of national pride, although she reported those feelings self-critically in her published account: In 18331 was still a very long way from holding the ideas which have developed in my mind since then. At that time, I was very exclusive: my country occupied more space in my thoughts than all the rest of the world; I judged the opinions and customs of other countries according to the opinions and customs of my fatherland. The name of France and everything connected with it had an almost magical effect on me. At that time I considered an Englishman, a German, an Italian as foreigners [étrangers]: I did not see that all men are brothers and that the world is their common fatherland.48 Consequently, she took pride in finding evidence of French social and cultural superiority.49 Tristan’s sense of personal identity was also at stake in these encounters. She identified with other people and places which resonated with a recognisably ‘French’ quality. On the way to Peru she felt a sense of affinity with the crew of the Mexican and the French community of Valparaiso, with whom she shared a common identity in an alien place. She recorded her regret as she left them to head for Arequipa: ‘I hadn’t known these people for very long; but we were in a foreign land, some had come from France with me, the others were my compatriots, spoke my language, and my heart was saddened to see them leaving.’50 Yet on board the Mexican Tristan had also identified herself as Peruvian, protesting with another passenger against the insults levelled at ‘her’ country by one of the officers. Tristan argued at that point that her sense of national identity was not simply defined by her place of birth. Confronting the offender, she insisted: ‘I was born in France, but I belong to my father’s country’, and cited the physical characteristics which marked her as ‘Andalusian’. 51 From this perspective, her reception in Peru as a member of one of the country’s leading families seemed only to be expected. In coming face to face with her Peruvian family and her Peruvian compatriots, she may have expected to experience an echo of self-recognition. Instead, the encounter ultimately reinforced her identification with France, and her sense of alienation in a foreign land. In visiting Peru Tristan was visiting family, not simply adrift in a world of strangers. Rather than setting out, as Dijkstra suggests, ‘to untie the blood knot’ by means of a martyrist venture which ensured her rejection,52 Tristan hoped initially not merely to win her inheritance, but to establish herself as a ‘real’ Tristan, her father’s daughter. But Tristan’s relations with her Peruvian family,

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and hence her view of her own place amongst them, wavered between warm identification and strained antagonism: an ambivalence not inconsistent with her marginal status as illegitimate child. Pio de Tristan was absent at his summer residence in Camana when she arrived, and officials and family members were uncertain about how to treat her. Her cousins received her extremely politely, but only Emmanuel de Rivero exuded warmth rather than caution.53 No one wanted to offend the man at the apex of the triangle of power. Tristan responded to this situation with an astuteness worthy of her uncle Pio himself. Rather than proceeding to Camana as a supplicant, she decided to head directly for the family estate in Arequipa and await her uncle there: From all that I knew of my uncle, I didn’t think it prudent to go immediately to his country house and place myself at his discretion as it were. I believed it would be much better to go directly to Arequipa, so as to gather information, to investigate the lie of the land and to wait there so that my uncle might be the first to raise the question of financial interests.54 Pio, in turn, seems to have delayed his return to Arequipa quite deliberately. Recognition of Flora’s status as legitimate daughter of Mariano promised to be expensive, and unbeknown to Flora, her uncle Pedro de Goyeneche, whom she had met at Bordeaux, alerted Pio of her imminent arrival in Peru. He hinted at potential difficulties: She has with her all the papers in order, and your recognition of her as your brother’s daughter cannot undergo any difficulty. If I did not know you as I do, the most just, loyal and religious man in the world, I would implore you as a relative of this dear girl, as an old friend of her father’s, and as a reasonable, conscientious and religious man, to receive, have dealings with and work with this kind person, as a good and worthy relative should do, a just and honest man. She goes to ask you for your friendship, justice and hospitality: I am convinced that you will be diligent in giving both to her. She is only claiming her rights; I find this very just, and I am sure that you will as well, as would any right-thinking man.55 Goyeneche’s detailed reminder about how any ‘right-thinking man’ would behave in this situation suggests that Pio could not be relied upon to remember the role unaided. Pio’s reply to Flora’s initial letter in 1829 had been a shrewd amalgam of affection for his ‘dear niece’, and legal argument concerning her illegitimacy.56 If Pio had already rejected Tristan’s claim to legality in his reply to her letter, her venture did not imply that she masochistically sought rejection. She hoped instead to persuade him to change his mind. Tristan insisted that the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children was a legal fiction which could not delete her real status as blood-child of Mariano: a status acknowledged by Mariano himself on her baptismal certificate, and by her uncles Pio de Tristan and Pedro de Goyeneche. Rather than Tristan being guilty of deception in falsely claiming the Tristan name as her own, then,57 Pio exercised a deception by refusing to translate

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his admission that she was indeed Mariano’s daughter into legal recognition. Flora Tristan’s presence in Peru challenged the patriarchal ‘fiction’ of illegitimacy, but she was powerless to overturn the system in which the fiction of her non-existence could be maintained as the truth. Pio thus ignored the ‘rights’ that even Goyeneche admitted she possessed, and ensured that his debt to Mariano was repaid largely in affection, with limited impact on the purse-strings. In an emotional scene described dramatically by Flora, he offered her a pension of 2,500 francs per year, and a legacy of 10,000 francs from her grandmother’s estate, but this was the legal minimum due to an illegitimate child rather than full recognition of her entitlement as his niece.58 Tristan’s account of these events emphasised her sense of grievance at the injustice of the financial settlement and at the family’s failure to accept her fully into their ranks. She acknowledged the hospitality extended to her, her friendship with a number of individuals, and her generally affectionate relationship with her uncle, yet accused her family of callous rejection. The contradictions Tristan reported in her family’s attitude reflected her own ambivalence about them, and even about herself. She felt that she belonged yet did not belong to the Tristan family. In fact, her uncle’s refusal to accept her legitimacy shattered her identification with her Peruvian family and simultaneously alienated her from Peru: ‘You reject the daughter of your brother, of that brother who acted as a father to you’, Tristan charged her uncle Pio. ‘I reject you in turn, I am not of your blood.’59 From that moment, she described her position in Peru as that of an étrangère, a stranger to her family and a foreigner far removed from her homeland. She was treated ‘like a stranger in her father’s house’, she declared. The ‘only daughter of Mariano’ was ‘tolerated but not adopted’ into the Tristan family as one of their own.60 Flora Tristan did not fit into a ready-made niche amongst her family in Peru, as she had imagined or hoped she would. The conflict over her status highlighted her ambiguous identity: as an illegitimate child who was not fully accepted by the Tristan family; and as a French-Peruvian, ambivalent about her national identity and her homeland. Since she had felt rejected in France, her rejection in Peru heightened her sense of homelessness: ‘I only recalled France with all the sorrows I had experienced there. I didn’t know where to flee or what would become of me. I could see neither shelter nor resting-place anywhere on earth.’61 This sense of isolation was reiterated in Tristan’s account of her departure from Arequipa, not only with nowhere to go but with no clear sense of identity: I was fleeing to go where?…I did not know. I had no destination in mind, and, tired of disappointments, I was no longer making plans; rejected everywhere, without family, without fortune or profession, or even a name of my own, I was heading off at random, like a balloon in space which will land where the wind takes it.62 The question of her name was a critical one, for the Tristan name, which supposedly designated her place in the world and her sense of self, did neither of these things. She had discarded her married name but now found that her father’s

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name, too, fitted uncomfortably, and that its significance as a statement of identity and relationship was denied her. In fact, after the publication of Peregrinations of a Pariah, which criticised her family’s treatment of her, Pio de Tristan attempted to prevent her using the Tristan name at all.63 But Tristan clung determinedly to this sole remaining paternal legacy which, despite Pio’s claims, was clearly gifted to her on her baptismal certificate. Flora Tristan may have left Arequipa in 1834 with no clear purpose, then, but despite her protestations she was not heading aimlessly into the future as she left her father’s house. She was heading to Lima to be met by her cousin Manuela and fêted once again with every hospitality. However, this time she chose not to stay with her family, but to take a room in a French boarding house: marking her rift with her family and her recognition that she belonged amongst the French.64 Her visit to the holiday resort of Chorrillos reaffirmed that feeling: ‘After having stayed for a week at Chorrillos, I returned to Lima with great pleasure: my little apartment furnished in the French style, my everyday French lifestyle were more comfortable to me than ever before….’65 She was impatient to return to Europe, which she ‘appreciated and loved much more since having left it’.66 The encounter with Peru had initially exacerbated her sense of estrangement and homelessness. But having failed to gain recognition by her family, and thus unable to recognise herself as ‘Peruvian’, she began the return journey to France confirmed in her sense that she was returning home.67 Tristan represented her exploration of her own identity not only by recording her ambivalent reactions to her family, but also by her ambivalent response to the experience of being a ‘foreigner’. She explored this issue both in her account of Peru, and also in later writings on her travels in England and within France. To be a ‘foreigner’ sometimes implied exclusion from native society, but as Cuche points out, it also provided privileged access to that society, since the ‘foreigner’ was frequently an admired and honoured guest, as Tristan was.68 It also offered potential integration into an expatriate community of other ‘foreigners’. To be a ‘foreigner’ was thus an ambiguous experience involving conflicting feelings of exclusion and acceptance. The ‘foreigner’ encountered and understood herself in relation to others, and in the experience of identification with or alienation from those others. Tristan’s experiences as a visitor in Peru were sometimes described as extremely positive. The fact that she was regarded as a foreigner not only proved useful when the Peruvian Civil War erupted, keeping her safe from personal attack,69 it assigned her a privileged role and a way of interacting with others. She was a curiosity whom many wished to see, to meet, and to question about her homeland. The ladies of La Praya had been curious to meet the foreign visitor when her ship called at that port. Whatever her relations with her family, Flora’s membership of the Tristan clan ensured a deferential, if not friendly, reception wherever she went in Peru.70 People were interested to know her opinions, to gauge her responses as a foreigner to events like the earthquake at Arequipa, to find out first hand about European politics and culture.71 Peruvian curiosity about Europe offset Tristan’s curiosity about their world and customs. Tristan, the

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observer of Peruvian society, became herself an object of study, as her account of her visit to the Carmelite convent of Santa-Catalina illustrated vividly: What deafening noise, what hoorahs when I entered! La Francesita! La Francesita! people cried on all sides. The door was hardly opened when I was surrounded by a dozen nuns all talking to me at once, shouting, laughing and jumping for joy. One pulled off my hat, because a hat was an indecent thing, she said; another took my comb under the same pretext that it was indecent; a third tugged at my leg-of-mutton sleeves…. One lifted up my skirts from behind, because she wanted to see how my corsets were made… but what excited the most wonder was the discovery of my drawers…. In short, they turned me this way and that like children with a new doll72 Tristan’s rescue by the Mother Superior simply raised the investigation to a higher plane, as they sat down to discuss European music and culture. Nevertheless, Tristan’s poor command of the Spanish language reinforced her sense of being an ‘outsider’ in the Spanish-speaking community of Peru, and led her to identify with other expatriates. She could read Spanish but, although she took lessons from her cousin Carmen, she often relied on the presence of French speakers in order to communicate.73 Tristan also cultivated the identity of the foreigner quite deliberately, choosing to socialise with the French community of Arequipa, and through them meeting most of the other foreigners who visited the town. This, she suggested, was the only relief from the boredom of life in this provincial centre. Several of her closest friends were foreigners like herself: Althaus, her German cousin by marriage; the Frenchmen Le Bris and Viollier; and the Englishman Mr Smith.74 Amongst her Peruvian relatives, too, she felt a special bond with her cousin Emmanuel who not only spoke French like a native but was ‘French in character’.75 Despite the celebrity status afforded her as a ‘foreigner’, Tristan was frequently beset by loneliness and homesickness in Peru. She sometimes described her travels, there and elsewhere, in terms of exile and alienation rather than adventure. Her 1835 pamphlet had asked its readers to imagine what it would be like to be ‘strangers on foreign soil, where the climate made them sick, where the customs, which were foreign to them, annoyed them constantly, and finally where they did not understand the language’, reflecting aspects of her own experience in an acute way.76 Her lengthy descriptions in Peregrinations of the ‘foreign’ and unpleasant customs of South America also captured this sense of personal estrangement and dislocation, as well as drawing broader cultural distinctions. A similar sense of alienation was reflected in Tristan’s accounts of her subsequent travels. Her published account of her sojourn in London, which she visited for the fourth time between May and August 1839, was presented as a report on social conditions rather than primarily as a travel narrative.77 Nevertheless, the survival of correspondence from this period provides an insight into Tristan’s ambivalent reactions to the experience of being a ‘foreigner’ in England, and one which is less self-conscious than her account of Peru, which was written for publication. She had

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a number of friends and acquaintances amongst English socialists by this time, and she also had letters of introduction to other people whose hospitality helped to smooth her path.78 But her sense of alienation predominated. Tristan’s English was even poorer than her Spanish, and she struggled to communicate in a foreign language.79 Surrounded by the fair complexions and blonde heads of England, she longed for the familiar faces of home. Tristan hated the English climate where it seemed to rain all the time, and abhorred drinking tea.80 She missed her friends, and chided one of them, Olympe Chodzko, for not writing more often: Dear friend you are very unkind to me you do not write—you forget the poor exile!—if only you knew how much I need your letters!…. I haven’t kissed a man’s cheek or shaken hands with a women’s—I haven’t smiled at a child or greeted an old man…. I cannot tell you dear friend how much this cold, colourless life devoid of all affection irritates me, suffocates me, crucifies me!81 In Peru Tristan had found the French expatriate community a refuge when needed, but the same could not so easily be said of London. She devoted an entire chapter of Promenades to ‘foreigners in London’, focusing on the French and condemning the majority as social climbers who played on the English fascination with titles to advance their own interests.82 Nevertheless, Tristan found relief from her sense of isolation in the company of other foreigners. Her friend Olympe Chodzko had given her a letter of introduction to one of her Polish friends in London, and she became friendly, too, with a Spanish woman who reminded her of her absent friend: ‘In my misery I feel happy once again to have met here a Spanish Lady whom I call the little Chodzko. She is a diamond lost amidst all these coarse and heavy English stones whose lustre is false.’83 As an ‘exile’ in London in 1839, Tristan was moved to exclaim: ‘Oh! Paris where are you?’84 She felt oppressed by the unfamiliar, lacking a sense of belonging and cut off from her home. However, it was Paris that she missed rather than France. Paris was ‘the only town in the world which I have ever cared for’, she once declared.85 The isolation and loneliness of the woman traveller in the provinces, that she had described in 1835, was reiterated with a new emphasis as she travelled within France in 1843–4. After a brief excursion to Bordeaux in September 1843, she set out the following April on a journey which took her south-east from Paris, through centres such as Dijon and Mâcon, to Lyon, Roanne, and Saint-Etienne, and then through Avignon to Marseille and Toulon on the Mediterranean coast. Tristan then proceeded westward through Nîmes, Montpellier, Béziers, Carcassonne, Toulouse, and Agen, to Bordeaux, where she arrived in September. Several of the hotels where Tristan stayed on this journey treated her with the disdain she had remarked on in 1835. When she arrived in Montpellier at four o’clock in the morning, for instance, she was informed by the management that the Cheval Blanc did not admit unaccompanied women.86 The town’s Hôtel du Midi, where she then took a room, valued her custom so little that she was placed in a wing under construction, to be woken by building activity at five o’clock.87

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She was offered a ‘miserable’ room at the Hôtel de France in Agen, as she was at Carcassonne, where badly-located accommodation meant that she was awoken by the regimental band serenading its general at four o’clock.88 In fact, so bad was the service overall that she determined to add an appendix to her proposed book on her journey exposing hoteliers’ shortcomings. The small-mindedness and backwardness of French provincial life became one of the refrains of Tristan’s journal, and reinforced her sense of being a stranger within her own country. Most of France was, in fact, a ‘foreign country’ to this Parisian, and the account of this journey saw her modify the critique of the city developed in her 1835 pamphlet. At that time she had portrayed the city as a ‘vast sewer’, an ‘abyss’ swallowing up the innocent.89 She had dwelt on the plight of unaccompanied women, abandoned to misery and despair, presenting the city as a place of desolation, and echoing the anxiety of other contemporary commentators as urban growth escalated at an unprecedented rate.90 In 1838, her novel also touched briefly on that theme, comparing the suffering of the stranger in Paris to that of the traveller in Tartary, or in other equally unknown, and therefore infinitely imaginable, situations: One has to have been in Paris, penniless, without family, without friends, to form a clear idea of what the poor and unknown stranger experiences. The Arab in the midst of the desert is less deprived of assistance than the stranger lost amidst the crowd, which elbows him in the street, without caring whether he is hungry, whether he has a bed, and whether he will throw himself into the river that very day.91 Tristan contrasted the atomisation of modern urbanising societies with the social integration of less ‘civilised’ communities. ‘Hospitality reigns amongst savages, amongst primitive peoples, and has been preserved in all its sanctity amongst nomadic populations,’ the novel’s narrator lamented, ‘while it disappears more every day from the lands where civilisation is developing.’92 By inverting the ‘savage’ and the ‘civilised’ in these accounts, Tristan had criticised social fragmentation and isolation in her own increasingly urban culture. Her analysis rested partly on her personal encounter with other peoples outside Europe, and the experience of living as a ‘stranger’ at home and abroad. But it also relied on a fabled image of exotic worlds she did not know, but which made Europe comprehensible by comparison. If the city was portrayed as uncivilised and hostile in 1835, however, Tristan’s close association with the provinces in 1844 made her emphasise instead the culture and civility of urban life, which she contrasted with the ‘barbarity’ of village and provincial France. The dirtiness she remarked on in provincial hotels was reminiscent of the dirtiness which had offended her in South America, acting as a marker of her estrangement in a ‘foreign’ place. Towns like Nîmes, Béziers, and Saint-Etienne were populated largely by peasant workers, she noted, who maintained the ways of the villages they had so recently left. ‘Nobody speaks French,’ Tristan lamented, ‘one could believe one was in a savage land in the depths of America.’93 Even worse than their dialect, however, was the Southern

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pronunciation of French which was incomprehensible to a Parisian. Marseille, with its legions of immigrants from Europe and Africa, was the worst offender: Here, as in Avignon, people speak patois—and as in Avignon the result is that everybody, almost without exception, speaks abominable French!—Confusing the genders, the tenses of verbs, it’s frightful to hear!—Add to that an accent so atrocious that the words are distorted to such a point that many are no longer comprehensible…. Truly it would be better forego the pleasure than to speak French like that.94 Tristan’s cultural identification with the urban, ‘civilised’ world was made explicit here, and she was unable to recognise in the linguistic particularism of the provinces another form of the close identification with ‘home’ and its ways which she experienced so strongly herself. Tristan’s reaction to provincial France in 1844 was negative in other respects as well. She developed a repulsion for the smaller centres which she found lacking in social and intellectual life. To her urban eye towns like Avignon, where dogs and ducks roamed the streets, and where the ‘barbaric’ sport of bullfighting still thrived, lacked the culture and refinement she valued.95 Her frustration mounted as she passed through Mâcon and Roanne, where she declared: ‘Staying in these little towns bores me to death…. I have now decided to bypass all the small towns which are on my route.’96 Tristan’s excursion into the countryside around Vaucluse did nothing to improve her outlook. She found the scenery beautiful but village life barbaric: ‘All these peasants are rich—which doesn’t prevent them from living a dog’s life—they sleep on straw—badly housed, badly dressed, dirty—I’m told they eat well. It’s absolutely idiotic, not speaking French.’97 Her criticism of peasant France was remarkably similar to her criticism of Peru, focusing on the vast gap between ‘civilised’ values and practices—those of the urban middle classes of Europe—and the standards she observed. If returning from Saint-Etienne to bustling Lyon with its 200,000 workers was like returning to ‘civilisation’,98 only Paris offered the true sense of familiarity and the urban comforts she enjoyed. Tristan’s negative portrait of rural and provincial France in 1844 was created through a largely implicit comparison with the urban world where she felt at home. She was not blind to the ugliness and dislocation of the urban environment in industrial towns like Lyon and Saint-Etienne, with their dirty, narrow, and sunless streets, substandard housing, and chaotic layout.99 But the urban world was now associated for her with progress and the improvement of human life, with learning, culture, and advancement. The idyllic picture of villagers sharing ‘the purity of their morals’ with urban travellers, in her 1835 account,100 now gave place to an image of the village as the epitome of changeless and irrational custom, and resignation to necessity. Tristan’s own urban prejudices were evident in her preference for city living, and reflected her experience that villagers were less likely to share her values than those who were urban in mentality. This evaluation contrasted significantly with the picture of urban misery and isolation she had drawn in 1835. By 1844, however, Tristan had come to view the places she visited,

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not just through the lens of the outside observer, alarmed at the dislocation of urban development, but from the perspective of the socialist and social reformer. She saw the city not just as the home of the dispossessed of society, but as the source of the ideas and the zeal through which that society could be transformed. Avallon, Béziers, and Roanne might have been ‘worthless towns’, then, and preaching to the workers of small-town France like sowing on stony ground.101 But the cities gave hope for the future: ‘From [Paris], the capital of the world, will resound the thunderbolt which must overturn the old society’; and ‘From the heart of such great misery [in Lyon]!—will arise the true, equitable, fraternal organisation of the regenerated world!’102 Flora Tristan wrote shortly before her death: Oh! how unfortunate is the person who is born, lives and dies in the same place and circumstances. In this respect I am very privileged.—What life was ever more varied than mine! In these 40 years, I have lived through so many centuries!103 At a personal level, travel revealed Tristan’s emotional vulnerability. Separated from the people and places she loved, she exhibited a sensitivity and emotional need which were concealed (or not committed to paper) when she was at home. Nevertheless, travel reflected and reinforced her yearning for independence, and she clearly rejected the mythology that fulfilment for a woman lay in a life of domestic tranquility. She preferred a world of unlimited geographical boundaries, arguing that, in order to understand society, ‘we must…have seen a lot, so that, stripped of all prejudice, we can regard humanity from another perspective than our own church steeple’.104 As her own reactions frequently indicated, however, it was difficult to overcome those prejudices in practice. Tristan’s travels also reflected her search to find her ‘home’; to confirm her own sense of identity and belonging. But if the voyage to Peru, in particular, was interpreted for her readers as an exploration of self, Tristan also reflected on the broader significance of the experience as she wrote about that voyage some two years after the event. It was presented as an encounter with other cultures, an occasion to observe and comment, in the manner of the moralists and travel writers of the day. As this and her other travel writings illustrated, then, travel stimulated an awakening to the world beyond personal experience. It placed her personal grievances into a broader context and raised a variety of questions about society which Tristan then began to explore. Her travels were thus part of a broader investigative process, and in accounts of her later voyages this element came to predominate. In England in 1839, and in France in 1844, she examined social organisations, conversed with a wide variety of people, and observed patterns of social relations, in order to evaluate the character and wellbeing of those societies. Travel was to facilitate her development into a social investigator and socialist. But first, as her voyage to Peru demonstrated, it provided the raw materials which Tristan could utilise in order to establish an independent life as a writer. On her return to Paris in 1835 she set out to become an author.

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Tristan published her first work only a few months after her return from Peru at the end of 1834. She had apparently decided some time during the voyage to try her hand at writing, and the journal she kept during her travels provided the raw materials for this venture.1 Tristan had won a pension from her uncle and her financial worries were less pressing than they had been at her departure. But publication of her first book saw the cancellation of her annuity, because it criticised her Peruvian family. What was given by the goodwill of another could always be taken away, then, and could not compensate for economic independence. In the longer term the decision to become a writer proved advantageous, both because Tristan enjoyed some success, and because writing proved a useful vehicle for expressing her ideas and attempting to influence the course of events. By the 1830s writing had become one of the few potential opportunities for women with a little education to earn an income. The success of George Sand as a novelist would become legendary, but others like Marie d’Agoult (alias Daniel Stern), Hortense Allart, Delphine Gay, and Anaïs Ségalas were also prominent during the July Monarchy, even if their reputations have been less enduring. Furthermore, the working-class woman writer made her appearance about this time, with the works of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Antoinette Quarré, and Louise Crombach gaining considerable renown.2 Writing was more attractive than alternatives like governessing, since it allowed a woman some independence, and had the added advantage of being a career which could be pursued from the home. Besides, most women writers were inspired not merely by personal economic considerations but by broader social concerns.3 For someone like Tristan who believed that she had something worthwhile to say, then, writing represented a mission as much as a career choice. However, becoming a writer was no easy task for a woman. Getting her work into print could be a challenge, particularly if she lacked experience in business negotiation. And since most publishers probably did not expect their next successful writer to be a woman, her persuasive task in approaching a publisher or editor was arguably greater than that of an untried male writer. Tristan soon confounded such negative assumptions, proving herself a tough businesswoman with a good eye for a market opportunity, although this aspect of her career as a writer has attracted little attention from commentators. However, more deepseated prejudices against women writers were not so easily avoided, and identifying oneself as a woman 60

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author was tantamount to admitting ‘irregular’ behaviour. Like other women writers of her generation, Tristan would experience not merely the denial of her talent, but the questioning of her character, and the challenge to her right to be heard. Tristan’s breakthrough into the ranks of published authors did not come without a struggle, and was due at least in part to her own skills in self-promotion. In 1835 she embarked on her literary career by financing publication of her own pamphlet, The Need to Extend a Warm Welcome to Foreign Women.4 If it made little public impact, its distribution provides the first evidence of her contacts with feminist and socialist causes. She sent a copy to the socialist Charles Fourier, for instance, and it was reviewed favourably by Le Citateur féminin.5 Tristan may also have sent a copy to the Gazette des Femmes, whose salons she soon began attending.6 The editorial offices of the Gazette were a meeting place for a small community of women writers and their male supporters, many of them already well known at this time. Anaïs Ségalas and Hortense Allart (both of whom later contributed funds for the publication of Tristan’s book, The Workers’ Union) regularly attended the salon, and this may have been where Tristan first met the novelist Louise Lemercier.7 Tristan and another regular participant, Eugénic Niboyet, were planning to launch a newspaper together in 1836: Madame and friend, I say friend even though I have not had the privilege of knowing you for very long. But I believe that when minds are in sympathy friendship develops very quickly…. I am deeply convinced that in establishing the newspaper which we are thinking about we will perform a fine and praiseworthy act…. So, my good Madame Niboyet, I am placing great faith in this paper. I am anxious to see you so that we may discuss it at our leisure.8 This project does not appear to have come to fruition, and Tristan’s relationship with the Gazette ws not an enduring one. Rather than publishing in its pages, Tristan began extending her contacts within the broader literary community at this time. She approached editors with offers of material, and sought introductions to established male writers—like Alfred de Montferrand and Frédéric Soulié—who might speak on her behalf.9 The support of the writer Sainte-Beuve proved decisive. He recommended one of Tristan’s articles to the influential François Buloz, editor of the Revue des Deux Mondes and the Revue de Paris.10 Her account of ‘The Women of Lima’ appeared in the Revue de Paris in September 1836, followed two months later by a piece on The Convents of Arequipa’.11 In the following years Tristan had an important but strained professional relationship with Buloz, as she did with Hippolyte Delaunay, co-editor of L’Artiste. Single-minded and impatient, she chafed at what appeared to be incompetence and disorganisation, and waged an ongoing struggle with them over editorial control. Tristan’s grammar and spelling were not perfect, and even the supportive SainteBeuve suggested that ‘little corrections to the style’ were in order.12 Nevertheless, Tristan insisted that changes to what she had written, no matter how trivial, should not be made without her consent. The use of italics, for instance, was a subject of

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dispute, since she regarded it as essential for conveying the emphasis in her message, while Buloz preferred a less excessive style.13 When Buloz made substantive changes to her prose, Tristan threatened to withdraw her article altogether: I can see the appropriateness of some of the alterations which have been made; but I cannot consent to the other changes. So in several places I have restored the original text and I am adamant that my article should be printed just as I am now returning it to you; So if it does not suit you in that form, I will be very upset, Sir, but I would prefer to see my article withdrawn from your esteemed review[.]14 The conflict between Tristan and Buloz revealed the gulf between the literary world, with its customary styles and conventions, and the newcomer not well-versed in its ways. Rather than conforming to expectations, Tristan insisted that style was a matter of personal preference and that she was entitled to write in her own voice.15 She was willing to eliminate grammatical errors, but she would not conform to a predetermined concept of acceptable language: These sorts of errors are what I call my pearls. I regard the corrections which you have made as so many crimes of lèse-poëtique…. My whole article is strewn with what you call daring expressions and it is precisely these daring expressions which let me escape the monotony of academic taste.16 Despite being a novice in literary matters, then, Tristan was not afraid to insist upon her own independence, and to challenge the professional judgement of her editors. As she pointed out: ‘I sign my articles, so I assume responsibility for them. If subtle minds find faults there, let them attack me[.] I can defend myself.’17 Tristan’s frustration with Buloz stemmed not just from questions of literary and linguistic autonomy, but also from the fact that she hoped to use the publication of extracts from Peregrinations of a Pariah as an enticement to a publisher to produce the entire work. She tried to explain this to Buloz: What have you told my old friend, Mr Buloz, that you could not include my article on Sunday, but remember that I am counting on it, and on your publicity which will help me find a publisher…. Monsieur Buloz this time I will not say that I appeal to your kindness; I will say more than that, I am counting on you to oblige me; you know that this question of a publisher is bothering me[;] you must help me to resolve it—I believe that the extract I have given you is likely to stimulate public interest[,] besides I fail to see what disadvantage there is in having my name appear on two consecutive Sundays in your review.18 Her difficulties in finding a publisher reflected, at least in part, the nature of the publishing industry in the early nineteenth century. The number of readers was expanding, but competition was increasing too. Printing remained small-scale and artisanal, only the large circulation daily newspapers utilising mechanical presses.

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Production costs remained high, profits remained low and bankruptcies were frequent. Under-capitalised publishers were necessarily cautious. A well-established and popular author could be a boon, but a novice was a risk and her bargaining position was weak. At best she could hope for a small lump sum, perhaps 300 francs, in return for the production of a few hundred copies of her manuscript.19 Despite this competitive environment Tristan worked ceaselessly to get her books into print on favourable terms. She was not averse to bargaining, writing to the publisher Hippolyte Fournier, for instance, in 1837: ‘Before submitting my manuscript [of Peregrinations] to you, I would like to talk to you. In fact that is essential. If we reach agreement on the conditions, I will immediately hand over the first volume which is written out in full.’20 Apparently they did not reach agreement, since the first two volumes of what was intended to be a four volume work were published by Arthus Bertrand in November.21 Nor was her relationship with Bertrand entirely satisfactory. The following year she was trying to clinch a deal with Charles Ladvocat to publish volumes three and four of Peregrinations: Once and for all, since neither you nor I have time to waste in haggling, here is the price I want for the two volumes I have to sell to you—three thousand francs for the first edition (at one thousand [copies])[.] I have about 400 copies of the first part left[.] I will let you have them at eight francs—If my conditions are acceptable be kind enough to let me know as soon as possible, so that I will know that I can count on you for this publication.22 Shortly after, she suggested to Ladvocat that they ‘split the difference’: ‘instead of 3,000f it will be 2,500f for the three works which I undertake to deliver’, that is, for the remaining volumes of Peregrinations plus two novels she was currently writing, Méphis and Une Fille de Lima.23 An advance of this size placed Tristan well outside the ranks of celebrities like George Sand or Victor Hugo, who could expect up to 4,000 francs for a new novel.24 But Tristan’s hard bargaining reflected her belief that she had a very marketable product to sell. ‘My Peregrinations must have had great force of their own,’ she suggested to Ladvocat, ‘to have sold despite my old Arthus.’ And lest he think that their market in France might be exhausted she suggested other possibilities: You are certain to sell many copies of my work in Peru, and at a high price— 9 of our fellowcountrymen, wealthy businessmen established in that country, will be pleased on my recommendation to take an active part in disposing of whatever I produce—Since I have a lot to say about England and since I currently have devoted friends and zealous supporters of my ideas in London I can also assure you of a market there[.]25 Tristan may have been talking up the market, but Ladvocat was sufficiently impressed to offer her a contract, and he was known to have an instinct for the potential best-seller.26

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Tristan’s protracted efforts to find a publisher illustrated some of the difficulties women writers faced, as they tried to make a place for themselves within a literary world controlled by men. Their problem was not simply to find a vehicle for publication but to establish a means of expression. As Slama notes, the French language (like a number of others) has no feminine form for the words ‘writer’ or ‘author’.27 Women’s efforts to introduce the feminised term auteure in this period were not successful, although romancière, the female form for ‘novelist’, came into usage in the 1840s. A woman attempting to become a writer entered a cultural space which was apparently closed to her, or very narrowly defined. She claimed a legitimacy not reflected within the language which constituted her tools of trade, and had to express herself in a language she did not fully control. English women, Tristan later noted, were forbidden to use a whole series of words: ‘shirt, drawers, breeches, chicken thigh, bitch etc’.28 However, Buloz’s rejection of the ’daring expressions’ which peppered Tristan’s own writing suggests that this problem was not confined to the English. As the writer and philosopher, Clémence Royer, later noted of France: ‘Because of a too pronounced difference in their education, the two halves of humanity speak two different dialects…. There are more than ten thousand words which women have never heard spoken, whose meaning they are ignorant of.’29 In publishing Peregrinations Tristan confronted not only the problem of finding an appropriate language in which to express herself, but the question of whether she should speak publicly at all. Peregrinations was not simply a travel commentary but an autobiographical account. It revealed personal details about Tristan’s family (including her parents’ de facto relationship), her failed marriage, and her subsequent thwarted attempts to find love and happiness. Love was ostensibly the subject on which women could speak with authority and it was a common theme in their writings,30 but it was also the one on which their words were most likely to be censored. Some literary critics argue further that the ‘silencing’ of women writers reflects their ambiguous position within the symbolic order created through language. Rabine argues that to speak as subject is a masculine prerogative, so that a woman writer is forced either to attempt to create a feminine order of meaning or, as Tristan did, to imitate a ‘masculine’ voice and ‘masculine’ perspectives. For Rabine, Peregrinations of a Pariah is a strongly ‘masculine’ text in which Tristan adopts the authorial pose of a male writer, claiming authority and truthfulness as she tells her autobiographical story, presenting an aggrandised ego and an exaggerated sense of self. It therefore has stronger connections to the traditions of male autobiography than many such works written by women.31 If we accept that claims to speak with authority and to discern ‘the truth’ demonstrate a masculine ego, then the preface to Peregrinations, on which this interpretation relies heavily, provides considerable supporting evidence. Tristan analysed the conventions of life-writing, criticising the practice of posthumous publication, by which writers evaded responsibility for their deeds,32 and did not hesitate to name the offenders:

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In our day, prominent men see to it that their testamentary revelations are published immediately after their death. They seek to ensure that at that moment their ghost bravely tears the mask from those who have preceded them to the grave and from some of their survivors whom old age has removed from the stage. That is what Rousseau, Fouché, Grégoire, Lafayette etc…did; that is what Talleyrand, Chateaubriand, Béranger, etc…will do.33 Tristan then presented an alternative agenda which she claimed derived from the Divine law of progress. It emphasised revelation of the inner person rather than the chronicling of great deeds, and called on ordinary people rather than ‘the great ones of the social order’ to write their memoirs.34 Women, in particular, were urged to expose the social evils, which oppressed them, for ‘reform cannot take place, and there will never be honesty and uprightness in social relations except as a result of such revelations’.35 Flora Tristan—female, uneducated, with no recognisable basis for claiming expertise in writing, let alone in interpreting the Divine will—nevertheless did claim both. She called God to her side as witness, and asserted her superiority over a number of men, dead and living, who were famous for their political and literary achievements. The effrontery was remarkable. But to read this as the revelation of a masculine ego assumes a transparency which such poststructural interpretations claim to have overcome. Another reading focuses on the effort of justification which is necessary before the fragile feminine ego can dare to begin her story. It is not sufficient to desire to speak, or to claim the right to speak. The feminine subject needs the validation of the Divine before she can make a claim to be heard. She needs to demonstrate the existence of an ordered universe in which even the lowly have a place and a destiny, and where value is not determined by recognised social position. If Tristan did imitate the traditions of masculine autobiographical writing, then, citing the canonical works of Rousseau and Chateaubriand, she also adopted some of the poses of a woman writer in introducing her personal story to the reading public. In her introduction she defended her temerity in speaking about herself by emphasising the social gains her writing promoted: a justification also offered by other women authors. Her account demonstrated the human struggle against adversity, she claimed, the resistance of the weak to their abuse by the powerful. Besides, given the likely consequences of her admissions in the book, the act of publication was an act of self-sacrifice.36 Whether her stance reflected the attractions of martyrdom for an inherently masochistic personality,37 or a shrewd articulation of the feminine motivations expected by her readers, is open to speculation. The qualifications she claimed for writing her life were the ‘feminine’ ones of sorrow and suffering, rather than the ‘masculine’ ones of struggle and triumph over adversity. And her account would reveal the qualities of the inner life, rather than the great deeds in which a man might have claimed to excel. Tristan understood that the defining feature of autobiography is the assumed identity between the author and the main character of the account, which tells a true story of that person’s life. As she later explained in her novel when introducing the life story of Maréquita:

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There are perhaps no forms of writing which more strongly engage the reader than confessions; especially when they are made in good faith like those of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or Madame Roland. One cannot refuse to take an interest in these troubled lives. The person described lives within us; and without sharing their opinions or their tastes, we are tormented by their anxieties, rejoice in their happiness, and suffer their sorrows.38 This description encapsulates what critics describe as the ‘autobiographical pact’, which aligns ‘good faith’ on the part of the writer who undertakes to tell the truth, with sympathetic reception by the reader. But while Tristan emphasised the need for truthfulness because she wished to attribute a didactic purpose to life accounts, she also noted the difficulties presented for the female writer by the ‘autobiographical pact’. A woman’s life was subject to more constraints than that of a man, and she thus had more to lose by self-revelation. If she told the whole truth, as her pact with the reader required, the consequences for her could be devastating.39 But if she did not tell the truth the impact of her account, as witness to the sufferings and oppression of women in marriage, would be lost. Tristan’s dilemma over telling the truth led her to modify the conventions of the genre to meet her own needs as a female autobiographical subject. Confiding in the reader in her foreword, Tristan revealed that she had constructed a carefully censored version of the truth in her book, pretending to be ‘Mademoiselle Tristan’ when she was really a married woman separated from her husband.40 She demonstrated her good faith in Peregrinations, as the autobiographical genre required, not by promising to tell the whole truth or by establishing a false aura of absolute truthfulness, but by alerting the reader to the silences and deceptions in her account. Furthermore, by discussing problems of memory and recollection, and the male autobiographer’s impulse to establish himself within the annals of history, Tristan questioned the truth claims which were fundamental to the genre more broadly.41 Whereas the hallmark of the male autobiographical tradition lay in the individual’s uniqueness, Tristan also reshaped the conventions of personal narration by insisting that her story was representative of the experiences of many women: ‘I have not sought to attract attention to myself personally’, she wrote, ‘but indeed to all those women who find themselves in the same position, and whose number increases daily’.42 Tristan’s response to the problems which autobiography posed for the woman writer, therefore, was to change the rules. In her hands, it became a ‘collective’ account in which authorial responsibility, and the relationship between author and subject, were redefined.43 Tristan’s next major work was a novel, Méphis, which was published by Ladvocat in November 1838.44 This 685-page, two-volume work had a complex structure of plots and sub-plots, interspersed periodically with sermons on some of Tristan’s pet subjects: the frauds of the press, the ambitions of the Catholic Church, the evils of the prison system, for instance. But rather than indicating that Tristan could not tell a single story,45 this suggests that she wished to tell many. And some of the repetitions and errors in the plot may well have been due to the unwieldiness

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of this vast manuscript, and the difficult circumstances under which it was written and revised (as Chazal’s harassment reached its climax in the attempt on her life), rather than reflecting deeper anxieties within her own psyche.46 At the centre of the novel were the dual stories of Méphis (short for Mephistocles) and Maréquita, who recount their life stories to one another. Volume one traces Jean Labarre’s transformation into ‘Méphis the proletarian’ as he discovers the injustices of society, and volume two details Maréquita’s sufferings and her exploitation by men. Together they then set out to transform the world, leaving the completion of the task to their daughter, Mary. The themes of this novel had much in common with others of its time. The story of an imaginary woman’s life was the mainstay of novels by women, and like them it also explored a woman’s search for happiness in a society which offered her few opportunities for fulfilment. It questioned the meaning of love, and highlighted the disappointments of marriage and sex for women. Tristan’s heroine, Maréquita, joined others—most notably de Staël’s Corinne and Sand’s Consuélo—as examples of women who challenged social norms and suffered as a consequence. Her novel echoed the desire expressed by other women writers to transform personal relationships, imagining a society which would allow liberty and personal fulfilment to women.47 The literary devices which Tristan utilised in her novel were also commonly employed by other women writers of the period. If some constructed characters who had a double, like the submissive sister of Sand’s rebellious Indiana, they also frequently employed a male character as a vehicle for their ideas. Tristan combined these strategies in creating Méphis and Maréquita. The hero Méphis represented advanced opinion in Tristan’s novel, while Maréquita voiced the superseded outlook which Tristan believed was common to most women of her day. The juxtaposition of a conformist, obedient female character and a rebellious, assertive male character enabled the woman writer to express her ‘deviance’ within a narrative of conformity.48 Thus one of Méphis’ main tasks in the novel was to educate Maréquita to different ways of thinking about her life, and about the restrictions imposed on her by social convention. He suggested to her how she might live as a woman of the future, and persuaded her to grasp that choice. In some respects, however, Méphis was an unconventional novel for the period. Its overtly socialist theme, as hero and heroine confront the powers of the old order, and set about the transformation of society according to feminist and socialist principles, did not conform to the usual romantic plot. Besides, given Tristan’s belief in the social mission of the writer and her condemnation of ‘art for art’s sake’, the fact that she wrote novels at all is noteworthy. She insisted that fiction could not fulfil the writer’s duty to shape social values and inspire reform: ‘Fiction is enjoyable, occupies our thoughts briefly, but never motivates men’s actions’, she declared.49 But however attached Tristan may have been in principle to ‘useful works’,50 the market for essays on social reform was decidedly limited, and Tristan may have decided to sweeten the didactic pill by coating it in the sugar of fiction. After all, despite her criticism of the genre, even she enjoyed reading novels: Sand, Balzac, Hugo, and Walter Scott are amongst the writers she

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acknowledged. 51 Perhaps Tristan was attracted by the sheer pleasure of imaginative creation that writing a novel afforded, as Planté suggests,52 but the marketing possibilities of this increasingly popular genre probably had something to do with her venture into this field. It made good sense for a professional writer to try her hand at fiction. Méphis was published by Ladvocat in November 1838, and Tristan was full of good ideas about how he might promote this book and Peregrinations more effectively. In fact, Ladvocat’s innovative marketing in actively seeking press reviews53 may have inspired Tristan to court him as her publisher in the first place. Techniques of publicity and marketing were not highly developed in the 1830s. Publishers might send out prospectuses of forthcoming works, advertise them inside the covers of those already in print, or issue press announcements. But the practice of sending out review copies to stimulate interest in a new publication was not commonplace. In fact, books were often borrowed rather than bought, the high cost of each volume explaining the popularity of reading rooms and lending libraries.54 Tristan was a committed and successful promoter of her own writings, offering articles to newspapers and asking them to reproduce or comment on material published elsewhere.55 She actively sought reviews, providing journalists with copies of her books if her publisher seemed tardy or reluctant. She sent copies of Peregrinations to Desnoyers at Le Siècle56 and to Valentin de la Pelouse at the Courrier Français, advising him on the timing of his review: I would be eternally grateful, Sir, if you could speed up publication in my favour; because after the chamber [of deputies] resumes public attention will be absorbed by the great political questions, poor authors will have few openings and their works will run a great risk of passing unnoticed.57 She also sent copies of Méphis, and later, of Promenades in London, to potential reviewers at her own expense.58 Her self-promotional activity never waned, even during the most critical moments in her own personal history. Just after she signed the contract for Méphis with Ladvocat, for instance, in September 1838, her husband shot her. The months of October and November were a period of recuperation from this serious injury, yet there was no let up in her attention to business matters. As well as publishing a piece on ‘Art since the Renaissance’ in October,59 she corrected the proofs of Méphis,60 and sent an extract to Delaunay for publication in L’Artiste hoping to arouse interest in her forthcoming book. And since Ladvocat was ill, she negotiated a deal with Delaunay by which he would publish two advertisements for Méphis in his prospectus as payment for that chapter. The date of publication, and the fact that the advertisements should be placed in the early pages of the leaflet, were carefully stipulated.61 As well as enlisting her friends in the continual search for publicity,62 Tristan attempted to capitalise on every marketing opportunity, however unlikely. In mid1840 she even attempted to persuade a bookshop owner in Lisbon, whose brother

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she had met in France, to market her latest work, Promenades in London, in Portugal and have it reviewed in local papers. 63 However, the marketing opportunities which Tristan perceived were usually quite realistic. Events in Lima in late 1838, when Peregrinations was burnt publicly in protest at her criticism of Peruvian society, appeared promising in this respect. She wrote immediately to Louis Desnoyers at Le Siècle, informing him that she had been ‘burnt in effigy on the stage in Lima—and in the great square of Arequipa’, and suggesting that ‘Mr Pierre Durand might turn this to good account in his serial pages’.64 Tristan also suggested to her publisher that he should immediately send more copies of the book to Peru, as well as some copies of Méphis, and she suggested several businessmen with branches in South America who might be entrusted with the consignment.65 Another opportunity to promote her writings was provided by her husband’s trial for attempted murder, scheduled to take place in January 1839. In December she sent a review copy of Méphis to Delaunay at L’Artiste, asking that JacquesGermain Chaudesaigues be entrusted with the task. Try to have it appear in the first week of January’, she advised. ‘That’s when the trial will take place and public interest will again be aroused.’66 She also reminded Ladvocat to take advantage of the publicity promised by the trial: ‘This would indeed be the time to place some advertisements in the main papers.’67 The popularity of the feuilleton, the novel serialised in the newspaper, offered another potential avenue for getting her writings into print and bringing her name to public attention. Authors like Alexandre Dumas, Honoré de Balzac, and Eugène Sue earned significant sums from this mode of publication. The circulation figures of Le Constitutionnel, La Presse, and Le Journal des Débats escalated dramatically once they adopted this technique.68 Tristan appears to have envisaged this mode of publication for Méphis in the first instance, before Ladvocat accepted the book,69 and she later asked Louis Desnoyers to consider serialising it in Le Siècle in a strategy designed to assist sales of the work.70 Tristan also explored this option for the publication of a second novel, Une Fille de Lima. Having once again approached Desnoyers unsuccessfully, she offered it to Victor Considerant for La Démocratie Pacifique: I think that my serials would be worth a bit more than what you offer.—That is the weakness, the great weakness of your paper and does it enormous harm. We could come to an arrangement for my Fille de Lima.71 Considerant apparently declined her offer. Given that Tristan expended so much energy in publicising her own works, she was soon disappointed with Ladvocat’s marketing of her books. She urged him to place more notices in the papers and pleaded with him to send copies of Méphis to London, where her friends could not obtain it. ‘It is indeed fortunate my dear sir that I proceed all by myself,’ she wrote, ‘for you do not bankrupt yourself with advertisements to promote me’: a biting criticism for a publisher who had already been bankrupt once and would soon have the experience

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again.72 Ladvocat’s limited investment in publicity probably reflected his insecure financial position, and the fact that Tristan’s success as an author was no more significant to him than that of any of his other writers. But Tristan’s concern finally led her to take legal action in August 1839. Court cases between authors and publishers were not unusual. Balzac’s battle with Buloz, in which the writer alleged that Buloz’s promotional practices were inadequate, was one of the best known.73 Tristan’s case against Ladvocat was similar, since she sued him for failing to honour his financial commitment to her. But just as Buloz had counter-charged that Balzac had not delivered the manuscripts stipulated in his contract, Ladvocat asserted that Tristan had not delivered volumes three and four of Peregrinations, or the novel Une Fille de Lima. The court ordered arbitration, but no agreement was reached.74 While none of the volumes cited in this court case was ever published Une Fille de Lima was certainly completed, so Tristan may have withheld it from Ladvocat deliberately because of her unhappiness with his efforts on her behalf.75 The breakdown of Tristan’s relationship with Ladvocat in 1839 also required her to seek a different publisher for Promenades in London, which she was writing at that time. This book was an investigation of social conditions in England where, as Tristan put it, ‘a handful of aristocrats, lords, baronets, bishops, landowners and sinecurists of all kinds…can oppress, torture and starve a nation of twenty-six million.’76 For Christine Planté, Promenades illustrated the resolution of the tension in Tristan’s earlier works as she renounced literature—that is, a solitary life as a creative writer—in favour of a life of social action. Literary creativity thus took a back seat to political purpose.77 The voice of the social reformer and political radical was certainly clearer than ever before in this work, although Tristan had always integrated her literary aspirations and her social activism. In fact, her emergence as a writer coincided exactly, according to the surviving evidence, with her entry into feminist and socialist politics. But to see Promenades as marking a renunciation of the desire to write creatively camouflages the literary dimensions of this work. The didactic task Tristan set herself in Promenades in London made the literary task significant, since her political success depended upon her literary skills. The writing of Promenades reflected Tristan’s desire to use it as a vehicle to mobilise French workers. It utilised forceful prose and dramatic contrasts, creating a very selective image of England and its inhabitants. Tristan built up a mood of oppression and despair from the earliest pages in describing ‘the monstrous city’ itself: its ‘prodigious’ size which ‘stifled’ and ‘annihilated’ its inhabitants; its hazy and coal-impregnated air which engulfed and suffocated them; the climate of sorrow and misery created by this physical environment. The rich remained sketchy figures in her account, seen at play (and at their worst) at the Ascot races and in the ‘mephistophelian debauchery’ of the gin palaces. But their victims— the ‘slaves’ whom they ‘starved’ and ‘tortured’ to create their wealth; the prostitutes exploited for their pleasure; the criminals created by their injustice; the insane whose proliferation reflected the moral degradation of British society— were described compassionately and at length. The exaggerated portrayal and the

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threatening atmosphere in many of its descriptions gave the account a strongly Gothic flavour.78 As a piece of literature, Promenades in London belonged to no clear genre, having elements of the political tract, the novel, and the statistical enquiry into social conditions.79 As a work written for a general audience, however, the strength of the book lay in its human focus. Tristan’s picture may have been selective, but it was a picture of individuals with whom her intended readership could empathise. She did not simply describe the prison system, for instance, but the mother imprisoned for theft;80 she did not simply condemn the evils of the new system of production, but described the fatigue of individuals in the gas works in Horseferry Road.81 But as Hoock-Demarle points out, Tristan did not sink to sentimentality,82 advocating political action and even insurrection: ‘…when the people are oppressed, insurrection becomes a sacred duty….’83 Given the subject matter of Promenades, Tristan wanted a strong marketing base in England as well as in France, and she began to work on this during her visit to that country in May 1839. A letter of introduction to Jeffs, a publisher and bookseller in Piccadilly, proved to be the beginning of a successful business relationship, and they apparently reached agreement about the terms of the venture while she was still seeking a publisher in Paris.84 In January 1840 she approached Jean-Baptiste Paulin about the French edition, apparently thinking that his interest in political economy might make her book attractive to him, but this came to nothing.85 Her difficulties may have reflected the controversial contents of the book, with publishers unwilling to risk the fine it might have attracted.86 The book finally appeared in May 1840 as a joint publication of Jeffs in London and H.L. Delloye in Paris. They produced the first three editions before Tristan switched to Raymond Bocquet for the fourth ‘popular’ edition in 1842. If Promenades in London had been intended to provide French workers with a warning about the dangers they faced in an industrialising world, The Workers’ Union, written in 1843, aimed to show them how to respond to that threat. Tristan described this book as her ‘little bible for the workers’. It was a political manifesto; a call to action. Once again, and even more clearly than in Promenades, literature was placed at the service of politics. Some of the same literary devices employed in Promenades in London were utilised again, therefore, in The Workers’ Union. The prose was persuasive and emotive. Contrasts between the unhappy present and the glorious future were frequent, and the text exhibited a generous array of the devices of emphasis which Tristan favoured: italics, capitalisation, exclamation marks, and ellipses. In summoning the workers to action, for instance, Tristan’s emotion was palpable on the page: You see, the bourgeois class, which is already much more numerous and more useful, has succeeded the noble class; it remains now TO ESTABLISH THE WORKING CLASS.—So it is essential that in their turn the workers, the hardy part of the nation, form an enormous UNION and ESTABLISH THEMSELVES AS A UNIFIED GROUP!87

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The structure of the book was also well shaped to Tristan’s persuasive task. The approach was simple and clear: to indicate what was wrong with current worker organisational practices; to indicate what (in her view) would be more effective; and to outline a series of steps to achieve that end. In the process Tristan raised and rebutted possible objections and criticisms. The publication of letters of support from prominent figures like Adolphe Blanqui, a leading economist, aimed to give credibility to her book amongst workers. Similarly, the publication of the names of those who had contributed to publication costs and those who had refused served a political purpose, identifying the ‘genuine’ friends of the workers amongst whom Tristan, by implication, had pride of place. When Tristan produced The Workers’ Union, which she claimed to have written in six weeks at the beginning of 1843,88 her first idea was to publish it through the workers’ newspaper, La Ruche Populaire. Having shown some of her draft in January to leading workers, she began reading extracts from her book to the editorial committee of La Ruche at the beginning of February 1843. Despite sustained negotiation over the contents and over printing costs (which required dealing with the printer Elias Schiller as well as the committee), it soon became clear that this arrangement would not be successful.89 By the last week of March Tristan had therefore begun exploring other avenues, sending extracts to Considerant at La Phalange and Pernet at the Revue Indépendante.90 La Phalange published extracts which helped to publicise the project, but Pernet refused to assist. Tristan also began visiting publishers who might have been willing to take on the project, placing her faith mainly in Laurent-Antoine Pagnerre. Pagnerre was a veteran of the 1830 Revolution and a Republican activist, with a reputation as a publisher of radical works. Tristan described him as the ‘publisher of the lions of democracy, the people’s editor par excellence’.91 She was angered by his refusal to publish The Workers’ Union: How can we explain Pagnerre’s rejection? Here we have the democrat, the publisher who does not want to be a book seller because he would have to swear an oath to the king, the people’s editor! He is presented with a book produced for the people and in the people’s interests, he says that he does not approve of the methods which I am proposing and that he cannot produce my book.92 This refusal left Tristan with few options. By the beginning of April Tristan had given up on the conventional channels of publication: This has made me resolve to take up a subscription for the printing of the entire work,’ she noted.93 Fears about possible prosecution, and even hostility to the threat posed by The Workers’ Union to the established order, may have been factors in Tristan’s inability to attract a publisher.94 But to emphasise these factors overestimates both the ease with which she had managed to find publishers previously, and the uniqueness of her situation. Private publication of one’s own works was not unusual, and nor was it unusual for publishers to shift the costs of production by selling subscriptions to a work in advance. What was unusual was the amalgamation of these two practices. Tristan’s decision to publish the work

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independently meant embarking on a major fundraising venture. She had some assistance from workers supportive of her ideas,95 but much of the money came from her own door-knocking campaign. Having signed up for 100 francs herself, and enlisted her daughter, her maid, and her water-carrier for small contributions, Tristan began to call on those with a proclaimed interest in the welfare of the working classes, making altogether more than 200 visits.96 The contribution lists, which Tristan later published in The Workers’ Union, combined a ‘who’s who’ of the social, artistic, and socialist elite of Paris, with the names of anonymous urban workers.97 Tristan’s efforts had produced 1,548 francs by May 1843, with a further 1,100 francs obtained by January 1844 for a second edition.98 She attempted to supplement donations with income from her writings, appealing to Considerant to help her fund the reprint: I really wish that you would take a story signed by me, or in another name, I don’t care. I must say that I am in dire need of money and this is why—I am going to print the second edition of the little book on the union at 10,000 copies—with additions, etc.—it will cost 2,400f and I only have 1,400—I am looking for a publisher, but it is impossible to find one—those characters are all virtuous, religious men who refuse me because I attack virtue and religion.99 A total of 14,000 copies of The Workers’ Union was printed from these funds. A third edition of 10,000 copies, financed entirely by a fundraising campaign coordinated by Tristan’s working-class supporters in Lyon, brought the total number of books printed to 24,000: a highly significant number by contemporary standards.100 In fact, it far outnumbered the print runs of better-known political tracts of the period: in 1840 the print run of the first edition of Proudhon’s What is Property? was only 500 copies, and the second 3,500; and in 1848 the print run for The Communist Manifesto was only 2,000 copies.101 Tristan assumed the main role in negotiating with printers, even for the third edition in Lyon. This proved no easier than dealing with publishers, most notably when the printer Worms refused to return the plates used for the second edition to facilitate production of the third.102 And as a privately-published work, The Workers’ Union also required private distribution. Once again Tristan’s energy and organisational skills came to the fore. Ensuring a broad readership amongst workers was important, so the book sold for only 50 centimes in order to keep it within the reach of as many as possible. Workers helped to place copies with their friends, and artisanal trade associations were also asked to assist with distribution.103 Tristan also sent unsolicited copies to prominent middle-class social critics, asking Victor Schoelcher to sell ten copies and Antoine-Laurent-Appollinaire Fée fifty.104 Tristan’s ‘tour of France’ in 1844 was also an opportunity to distribute the book more widely throughout France. She wrote at Saint-Etienne: ‘I’m becoming a travelling book-seller. I spent the whole morning running around town placing my book in the bookshops.’105 In some towns, like Bordeaux and Avignon, they were reluctant to stock it, afraid of police action or of attracting the wrong

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clientele. Others were more receptive, with several bookshops in Avallon, Sémur, and Saint-Etienne, for instance, taking copies.106 No publisher could have provided the type of distribution for The Workers’ Union which Tristan managed herself. In terms of her dealings with the publishing industry—getting her works into print and ensuring they were distributed—Tristan might be defined as a particularly successful woman writer of the period. Nevertheless, the reception of Tristan’s writings reflected the suspicion and disparagement which befell women authors generally. To express an opinion in writing presupposed that the writer had something to say and the right to say it, both of which were problematic for women. Male authors were amongst the harshest judges of their female peers, Balzac asserting, for instance, that they stepped outside their sex, and Baudelaire that their works were at best ‘sacrilegious parodies of male genius’.107 Since the capacity for rational analysis and for intellectual creativity were regarded as masculine gifts, the woman author defied the laws of nature. Revealingly, Balzac drew attention to her ‘virginal and untamed’ character: it was the unsubjugated woman whom men saw in the woman author, and this largely explains their response.108 Insofar as Tristan’s writings purported to be true accounts of her experiences, and critical of society, the main priority was often to rebut them. She was aware even before the book appeared, for example, that her veracity in Peregrinations would become a subject of contention, hence her efforts to explain and justify her position in the introduction. However, her claims to representativeness were the main target of her critics. Some countered her by highlighting the personal character of her book: this was indeed the story of her life, they declared, and it was a very unusual life. Le Commerce noted: How could you think that a young woman, with a noble heart, an overwrought imagination, would not interest us when she described to us in scrupulous detail the events which composed her twenty-sixth year…. Despite the wise Boileau, and his cautious axiom, the truth is never plausible. Her ‘abnormal’ experiences could be attributed to personal vagaries and a pointless but fortunately rare hostility to society.109 The Journal des Débats likewise insisted: ‘Women in France continue to adapt very well to their situation.’ Tristan was the exception: ‘Fortunately, this fatal gift of great intelligence directed against the social order is extremely rare, and generally writers, by calling for the most bizarre innovations, only damage themselves.’110 Generally, however, the question was not whether particular claims which Tristan made in her writings were true. Rather, it was whether she had any credibility at all as a woman author. Reviewing one of Tristan’s books in 1844, the Legitimist Gazette du Bas-Languedoc observed: Although the author tells us time and again that faith, courage, charity have no sex, we shall be excused for seeing in [her] a woman, which is enough to say that the truth will always be expressed with personal respect and tactfulness.111

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Such a literary code of chivalry could, as in this instance, preface a particularly vicious attack on a woman writer. Alternatively, it could announce that the writer was not to be taken seriously, and therefore did not warrant a genuine critical review. In either case, responses to Tristan’s writings, whether favourable or hostile, were expressed with reference to masculine and feminine characteristics and roles. As a writer she was unmistakably perceived as a woman; yet at the same time she was unsexed by the act of writing. Critics frequently commented upon Tristan’s powerful imagination, but this was not necessarily a compliment, as contemporary concern about the popularity of the novel revealed. Social observers expressed alarm that novels played on their readers’ attachment to fantasy, and thus encouraged their unrealistic desires (a view that Tristan herself shared).112 This readership was represented as ‘feminine’, comprising not only women but also children, the elderly, and the lower orders: all those whose intellectual weakness excluded them from reading the ‘virile’ works of philosophy, history, and science which shaped the citizen.113 Tristan’s ‘imaginative’ talents thus underlined her ‘femininity’ as a writer, and raised fears about her influence on other ‘weak’ minds. Imagination was also linked with feelings rather than with reason, so insofar as it might be construed as positive, it was read as a sign of feminine sensibility rather than of literary creativity. The critic for Le Commerce, for instance, had some praise for Tristan’s Peregrinations: she had described her life experience well enough, he remarked, although simultaneously revealing typical female character flaws like duplicity. Jules Janin agreed: the persuasiveness of the work stemmed from the fact that such a life could not have been imagined.114 In other words, the book was simply an account of Tristan’s life, a record of events, not a work of literature at all. Needless to say, the novel Méphis was judged an utter failure since a novel required ‘creative power’ which Tristan clearly lacked.115 As a serious social investigation, Promenades in London raised the question of which genres were acceptable for a woman writer. The notion of the woman author was absurd enough in itself, but the degree of absurdity increased with the level of seriousness of the work attempted. In venturing into a literary field deemed the particular province of men, then, Tristan exposed herself to the particular scrutiny of critics almost all of whom were men, and almost all of whom were hostile. Reviewers frequently commented on how daring Tristan had been in writing Promenades in London. One favourable review began by noting that it ‘[was] not the book one would have expected from a woman’. It was a serious study revealing some ‘rather important facts’ rather than a set of anecdotes about fashion and the theatre.116 Her book was certainly no more daring than works by men, such as Parent-Duchâtelet’s study of prostitution, but the rules were different for a woman writer. Jules Janin questioned Tristan’s right to undertake such a study at all: But by what right, I ask, does a young woman, who could and should live in her private bourgeois world, and who is not forced to,…why does she go wallowing in the depths of debauchery beyond all decency, beyond all moral limits? All this

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is horrifying even to recount, and one wonders whether exposing oneself to such reckless adventures does not reveal a curiosity that is actually deranged.117 Even those active in the socialist and workers’ movements were alarmed by the fact that its research, which involved studying the immoral and disreputable aspects of society, exposed the woman writer to experiences inappropriate for her sex. The workers’ newspaper, La Ruche Populaire, noted the ‘male and energetic’ language with which Tristan condemned social exploitation in that study, highlighting the fact that ‘this author, my friends,…is a woman [sic]’.118 La Fraternité noted that there were some passages it ‘would not dare to reprint’.119 Le Nouveau Monde, a socialist paper, expressed astonishment at the venture, voicing its alarm that the author’s ‘white hands’ and ‘delicate ear’ might have been damaged by it. This type of study was ‘the duty of a man’, it declared.120 To write about debauchery and prostitution was to break the code which kept respectable women silent about such things. As the writer Fée commented, ‘there are limits to what [a woman’s] mouth should express’.121 Had Tristan confined herself to the realm of ‘feminine’ writing, such as the novel, her activities as a writer might have been understood, perhaps even tolerated. However, in producing works such as Promenades in London and The Workers’ Union, Tristan entered the ‘virile’ world of social and political economy. What could a woman know of such things? The general reaction was hostile or uncomprehending. Antoine-Laurent-Appollinaire Fée noted that the reception of The Workers’ Union was seriously hindered by the sex of its author: If the book of the workers’ union had come from O’Connel [sic] or Owen, who have rarely had such sensible ideas; if some great writer, Chateaubriand, La Mennais, or Lamartine, had published it, it would have created an enormous sensation.122 Instead it was dismissed as a ‘parody’ of O’Connell’s scheme for gaining political rights for Ireland, a second-rate imitation of Charles Fourier’s socialist ideas, or a Utopia lacking the genius of Thomas More or Fénélon.123 Insofar as Tristan possessed any literary merit, therefore, she did so not because she was a woman but despite it.124 Those who acknowledged her talent frequently did so by defining her as a ‘manly’ woman. Those who dismissed her did so by defining her as inadequate by comparison with male authors. Her husband’s lawyer belittled her in court by drawing unfavourable comparisons with the giants of the male literary canon, from Homer through Rousseau to Chateaubriand. Her own discussion of some of those writers was reduced to an absurd attempt to rank herself amongst them.125 And since it was essential for women writers to be ranked against each other, her novel Méphis was also declared to be a ‘parody’ of those of her better-known contemporary, George Sand.126 Moreover, if a woman was inevitably an inadequate writer, a female writer was necessarily an inadequate woman: an accusation made frequently against Flora Tristan. Critics of her writing condemned her not just as the author of ‘several bad

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novels’,127 but as a woman in revolt. In many instances, male critics proved incapable of assessing rationally what she had written because their understanding was blocked by the sight of ‘the feminist’. They responded emotionally to the threat she was perceived, as such, to represent.128 Ridiculing feminists was staple fare for the periodical press, and like other women writers who challenged social norms she was branded ‘a revolutionary bluestocking’.129 Le Commerce observed some redeeming features in this particular author: She’s the 19th century bluestocking, if you like: but the bluestocking without her narrowmindedness, without her hypocritical calculations, without her petty egoism: the bluestocking remains a woman and such that one can still love her.130 The satirical Charivari Lyonnais made no such concessions: ‘What is a bluestocking?’ the writer asked. ‘A bluestocking is a woman author.’ Naming this particular example of the species, the paper noted: Oh, you know this lady, I like to think, if not through her literary works, which nevertheless are not few in number, at least through her very unpleasant encounter in Paris, about a year ago, with her brutal husband who took the liberty of dealing out to her (a woman author!!!) the sort of blows that petty thieves normally reserve for their other halves.131 The connection between the writing and the life was made explicit here. Tristan was the butt of the joke because she stepped outside accepted norms on both counts: by being a ‘woman author’ and by challenging her husband’s power over her. As a woman writer Tristan not only threatened literary boundaries but social boundaries, and so invited assault. Tristan’s failure to conform to the conventions of domesticity, to live the life of a modest wife and mother, was once again the fundamental criticism. As an indignant Jules Janin observed, she had rejected a respectable domestic life, refusing to be ‘at home, in her household, the song, the smile, the tenderness, the consolation and the hope’ of husband and children. She had chosen the life of a ‘woman of letters’: A true pariah’s trade, nevertheless, even the books that this unfortunate woman has left behind should be read…because they will serve to give you a clear idea of the fabrications which can emerge from minds racked by loneliness and abandonment.132 If a woman writer was mentally unbalanced, of course, there was no need to address the substance of her complaint. The critic’s desire to undermine the veracity of the woman writer was thus continually reasserted. The very existence of writings by women, even if they appeared to be quite innocuous, called into question the social conventions and assumptions which deemed the woman author an aberration. However, the fact that writings by women so often focused on women’s lives—the only subject on

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which many felt capable of speaking—meant that they assumed a political dimension, often questioning social expectations and the bases of social organisation itself.133 When the author was avowedly socialist and feminist, like Tristan was, her impact if unchallenged could be even greater. The task she assumed as a writer was to confront the reader with the portrait of a society which cried out for reform. The contest was engaged in action, as Tristan’s life showed. But it was also engaged as a contest in and over language; a battle for the right to speak; a contest to define the meaning, truthfulness, and significance of the written word. As the narrator observed in Tristan’s novel, Méphis: Denying real evils can be due to error; refusing to address them is always inhuman.—That is why so many stories are described as fantasies. If they were acknowledged as true, it would be necessary to set about redressing the evils they identify.134

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We must leave the songs of the poet for happier days, for this is not the time to amuse oneself reading novels, poetry, stories or plays. Useful works, first of all; useful works. Indeed, it is imperative that the workers inform themselves about the causes of their sufferings and the means to remedy them…. To this end, they must make it a duty, even an obligation of conscience to read and reflect on the works of their defenders.1 If ‘art for art’s sake’ was the slogan of some in the literary world in the 1830s, Tristan shared the contrary view that emphasised the social function of literature, and its role in expressing a moral and political message.2 In the hands of a social reformer and political radical, such as Tristan had become by the mid-1830s,3 literature could be directed to the task of promoting change. The ‘useful works’ which Tristan recommended were those that explained ‘the causes of the misfortunes which afflict society’,4 that is, they were works of ‘social science’, as the methodical study of social conditions was beginning to be called. Tristan’s studies of French, English, and Peruvian society can be seen not merely as works of literature, then, but as ventures into ‘social science’, as she sought to expose the ‘facts’ she observed about those societies, and the reforms which were essential. This, in turn, justified the political stance she adopted as a socialist, engaged on a mission of social change. Unlike some women of her day, Tristan did not feel excluded from the emergent scientific discourse about society,5 but engaged with it in order to give greater credibility to her arguments.While she never abandoned the literary discourse, because its descriptive and metaphorical power aided the achievement of her didactic and political goals, she also employed the methods and language of social science, utilising participant observation, the recording of mathematical and statistical data, and the citation of learned commentators whose views had authority. Nevertheless, Tristan’s engagement with social science illustrated the very contentious nature of the ‘facts’ which it uncovered, and the political agendas which underlay its claims. While she engaged with social science she also questioned and criticised its assumptions, offsetting its rationalist methods with others more conducive, in her view, to gaining a true understanding of society. Reason had its place, she acknowledged, but so did emotion. Tristan’s prime concern as a social scientist, then, was to defend an understanding of ‘social science’ which promoted humanistic 79

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rather than abstract ‘scientific’ values. Only this, she argued, would offer a morally acceptable answer to the social question. Tristan first outlined her methodology as a social scientist in her study of Peru, when she described her intentions in exploring the Chilean port of Valparaiso: Completely relieved of all inner turmoil, I could devote myself to my role of observer: I then explored the town in every sense of the word; to portray a town, however unimportant it may be, it is necessary to make a prolonged stay there, to converse with all classes of its inhabitants; to see the countryside which supplies it; by simply passing through it one cannot appreciate its morals and customs, understand its inner life.6 Her investigative studies would rely on seeing in person and listening to what was said by her subjects, examining the conditions in which they lived, and the social structures which shaped and were shaped by them. This in turn revealed their moral condition, and suggested appropriate lines of social policy, and appropriate patterns of social organisation. Despite Tristan’s commitment to prolonged and wide-ranging investigation, however, her observations during this voyage did not meet these criteria.7 Tristan related that she had planned to leave the ship and live in the port when the ship called at La Praya in Africa, ‘so as to be in a good position to study the manners as well as the customs of the country, to see everything and to take accurate notes on the things which seemed to warrant the effort’.8 But her account exhibited the characteristic features of Western descriptions of non-Western peoples in this period.9 Her portrait of the Africans was a portrait of ‘savagery’: All these creatures, barely clothed, were repulsive-looking: the men wore a hard, even ferocious expression, and the women one of brazenness and stupidity. As for the children, they were horribly ugly, completely naked, thin and puny; one might have mistaken them for little monkeys.10 This description distanced the Western observer from the primitive ‘others’ by placing them at a point far removed from Europeans on the scale of civilisation, in the ranks of the barely human. Tristan was not immune from Europe’s unquestioned assumption of its own normative status. Her analysis revealed her commitment to the ‘ladder of civilisation’, popular in eighteenth and early nineteenth century Europe, and supported explicitly in her introduction to Peregrinations of a Pariah: Mankind has only been permitted to progress slowly. However, if we were to compare the ills to which savage peoples are prey with those which still exist amongst peoples more advanced in civilisation, the pleasures of the former with those of the latter, we would be astonished at the immense distance which separates those two extreme phases of human society.11

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This evolutionary model of social development also drew on an organic concept of society for its explanatory power: just as humans developed from infancy to adulthood, so society developed from an infantile stage to maturity.12 This model allowed Europeans to explain the differences between their own and other cultures, and to claim the superior position. They could also assume a tutelary role over those ‘child-like’ peoples who still had much to learn from more ‘advanced’ societies. Like other social observers and would-be anthropologists faced with alien ‘objects’ of study, Tristan found distance the only means by which to overcome her disgust.13 As well as distancing herself discursively from the people of La Praya, she distanced herself physically, fleeing back to the ship which remained a refuge in an unfamiliar and unpalatable world. Tristan made only one more brief foray into that alien territory a week later. Consequently her observations of La Praya focused on the most European aspects of life in this town, gleaned from two brief visits. This was not an auspicious beginning for someone who had determined to conduct a comprehensive investigation of society. Tristan proved somewhat more capable of implementing her method of enquiry in the relative familiarity of Peru, where she studied the natural and built environment, and examined the lifestyle and customs of the inhabitants. This analysis reflected, as we have seen, the cross-cultural comparisons made in many travellers’ accounts of foreign societies.14 Tristan appears to have believed quite genuinely that, as a disinterested outsider removed from the powerplays of the local elites, and as an observer blessed with the advantage of hailing from the more advanced society of Europe, she was well placed to undertake an objective analysis of Peruvian society. But as in La Praya, this observer carried with her the ‘cultural baggage’ of her European past, despite acknowledging that the world might be understood from other, non-European points of view. She was interested in the history of the indigenous population, for instance, and regretted that no one bothered to investigate it. Passing some extensive ruins between Callao and Lima she remarked: One could probably find out, from Indian traditions, what this town was and what caused its destruction; but until now, the history of this people has not inspired enough interest in their masters to make them undertake this research.15 Similarly, she aimed to create an account of Peru which extended beyond the lifestyle of the elite. Historians had focused on ‘the greats of the social order’, she noted, ‘and have rarely depicted for us the people of the various callings which comprise human society’.16 But Tristan’s account of Peru made no breakthroughs in this respect. She was able to make some first-hand observations of the Peruvian masses, but her limited information about the indigenous and slave populations apparently came from Creole or foreign observers.17 Language was no doubt a barrier, but since she was so closely identified with the ruling elite, they were probably unwilling to assist her social investigation. She attempted, for instance, to engage some slaves in

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conversation at Chorrillos, and appeared rather put out that ‘[she] could only extract yes and no from them, uttered curtly or indifferently’.18 As an observer of Peruvian society, Tristan’s halting attempts at ‘objectivity’ sometimes concealed unexamined conflicts of interest too. Her discussion of slavery provides a good example of this. The Tristan household derived its wealth and leisure from slave labour. Tristan herself was assigned a slave who tended to her needs, slept in her room, and even carried her across the river on her walks with her cousin Carmen.19 But despite the intimacy of Tristan’s acquaintance with the slave system, and the fact that she benefited from this as a member of the Tristan family, her analysis remained impersonal and abstract. She condemned the criminality of depriving other human beings of their freedom, and could hardly contain her revulsion for Mr Tappe, the La Praya slave-trader she termed a ‘cannibal’.20 Nevertheless, she was silent on the situation of slaves within her own family, and gave no sign of being uncomfortable about the personal service she received from ‘her’ slave. Nor did she seem to recognise that, insofar as her claims on the Tristan fortune were partly successful, they made her a beneficiary of the immoral system she condemned. Given the sorts of questions which had preoccupied Tristan as she wrote about Peru, her approach to the investigation of French and English society from 1839 was not an entirely new departure, but a development of her earlier interests in social analysis.21 In these studies she examined ‘the condition of the workers’ and proposed solutions to the problems she identified. Her focus reflected contemporary concerns, as commentators perceived the emergence of a new impoverished underclass in the towns, created by the accelerating processes of economic change. Understanding and remedying this problem became an urgent priority for observers of all political viewpoints, since society itself appeared to be under threat. A number of important studies of the ‘condition of the workers’ were published in the first half of the nineteenth century, not only by social critics like Tristan but also by public officials, doctors, and economists.22 Tristan’s study of London, first published in 1840, and her unpublished account of conditions in a number of French towns in 1843–4, thus form part of a large corpus of works on a similar theme, and reflect the spirit and concerns of the time.23 These studies were usually intended to guide policy decisions. But whereas critics like Tristan sought to spark social change, more conservative observers rejected any suggestion of State intervention or social re-organisation.24 They utilised similar methods in their investigations, but interpreted the ‘facts’ in ways consistent with their different world views. Both groups believed that what they saw was ‘reality’, but the debates between them were debates to establish the truth of certain visions of society and social order rather than others.25 The widely-held belief in the inter-relationship between the material and moral spheres shaped investigations of society in this period.26 This assumption underlay Social Catholicism, as it developed a critique of industrial capitalism and sought to redress its inequities. It inspired, too, the works of the ‘moral economists’, whose support for industrial capitalism was tempered by concern about its social

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costs and moral consequences.27 Concerns about social fragmentation, the destabilising effects of individualism and competition, and moral degeneration, were expressed by a wide variety of commentators. But whereas some feared popular politics and sought to stave off potential unrest by reforms of various kinds, others like Tristan looked to the ultimate creation of a new social order. In studying ‘the condition of the workers’, Tristan insisted again that close observation and personal experience were essential methods of enquiry: a belief also held by other social investigators of the period. First-hand knowledge was believed to convey an authentic picture of the external world, as Tristan indicated in the preface to her study of London: I have not allowed myself to be dazzled by appearances; I have not been seduced by the glittering and sumptuous props of the English stage; I have ventured behind the scenes, I have seen the paint on the actors’ faces, the falseness of their finery, and heard what they really say. Confronting reality, I have appraised the true value of things. My book is a book of facts, of observations gathered with all the precision of which I am capable.28 Since the ‘true value’ of what was seen had to be ‘appraised’ from the evidence, the truth was not self-evident. Nevertheless, Tristan’s claim asserted that a work based on direct observation enabled the ‘facts’ to be revealed. Their significance for society could then be assessed. The ‘facts’ were documented by Tristan in accounts which provide a glimpse into the human impact of accelerating industrial development in both England and France. Her study of London, based largely on her 1839 visit, aimed to contrast ‘the destitution of the poor and the hypocrisy and egoism of the upper classes’; to show ‘at what price such enormous wealth was acquired’. 29 Consequently, much of the book was devoted to the socially marginal—the poor, the criminal, prostitutes, the insane—in what was unquestionably the richest, most industrialised, and most powerful state in Europe. Interest in developments in England was common amongst French commentators at the time, because the growth of industrial capitalism and the sway of liberal economics were significantly greater there than in France.30 Those who advocated a similar direction for France found England a useful place to study, but the poverty, the increasing crime, and the hardening of class divisions, were widely reported and regretted. For more critical observers, England served as a foil, offering a warning to the French. Tristan’s claim that she had ‘pointed out the vices of the English system, so that people on the continent could endeavour to avoid them’31 reflected a widely-held view, especially amongst political radicals.32 Debates about ‘the condition of the workers’ in both England and France were stimulated by new methods of organising production and the mechanisation of industrial processes from the late eighteenth century: developments which are commonly referred to as ‘the industrial revolution’. Like many other visitors to Britain, Tristan was both fascinated and repulsed by the new industry she observed there. If much of her 1839 study was devoted to London, she also visited places like

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Sheffield and Birmingham, where the ‘industrial revolution’ had made its greatest mark. Her detailed description of a Birmingham factory suggests the enormous mental adjustment required by populations entering the emergent ‘industrial age’: I saw a steam engine producing five hundred horsepower! There is nothing more fearfully awe-inspiring than the sight of the operation of these iron masses whose colossal proportions beggar the imagination and seem to overwhelm the might of man! This machine with its extraordinary power is situated in an enormous building where it drives a large number of machines working iron and wood. These massive pistons of polished iron, which rise and fall forty or fifty times a minute and make the tongue of the monster shoot in and out as it seems to suck up, to devour everything, the frightful groans it emits, the rapid rotation of the huge wheel which emerges from the depths to return there forthwith, never displaying more than half its circumference, bring terror to the soul. In the presence of the monster, you see only him, you hear only his breathing.33 Similarly, the railway lines spreading from London like the ribs of a spider’s web; the massive chimneys ‘which spew their black smoke into the sky and announce the presence of great factories’;34 the spectacle of the English capital lit at night by thousands of gas lamps: all these signs of industry and wealth were described vividly. Tristan had been to England before, and these developments had not all occurred since her last visit in 1835. But her previous visits were not consciously devoted to a study of ‘the condition of the workers’. Besides, the 1840 account was presented to a readership which did not have prior experience of England to draw on, and was written from that perspective. Tristan’s study emphasised elements which she believed would be novel for her readers. It was intended to raise questions and highlight contrasts, and was presented as a ‘fine lesson which workers of the entire world should keep constantly in their minds’.35 In particular, it highlighted the moral questions raised by the new mode of production, which reduced workers to appendages of machines and seemed to make intelligence redundant: ‘with machines and the division of labour, nothing but motors is necessary: reason, reflexion are useless’.36 The mechanisation of production occurred slowly in France and the ‘factory’ did not represent the typical French workplace during the nineteenth century. A broader threat to French workers was presented by less dramatic innovations which nevertheless transformed work processes and undermined the traditional craft system of production.37 Tristan’s account of ‘the condition of the workers’ was most fully developed for France, and focused on the situation of artisanal workers. But when this is put alongside her discussion of workers in English factories, her analysis points to similarities in workers’ experiences, whether they worked in new-style or old-style workplaces. It also highlights the same issues raised by other contemporary observers like Villermé, Buret, and Engels. For instance, Tristan pointed out that primary consideration was always given to the requirements of production, disregarding the human beings doing the producing. This created a harsh working environment, whether the site was a small workshop

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experiencing competitive pressures, or one of the mills and mechanised workplaces of the new industrial centres. In the textiles industry, she noted, the peculiarities of the fibres being processed meant that workers were required to work in oppressive conditions. Like Villermé describing the poorly-ventilated and damp cotton mills of northern France,38 Tristan described English factories where the air was heavy with cotton or linen dust, and French workers confined in cellars where there was no ventilation to spoil the fibre.39 She described extreme temperatures in the workplace, contrasting the cold maintained in Saint-Etienne’s ribbon-weaving workshops, lest heat or even oil lamps endanger the product, with the extreme heat of the coke furnaces in London’s gas works, and the fabric workshops of Roanne.40 Tristan’s accounts emphasised the inhuman conditions to which workers were subjected in the workplace. Physical confinement and discomfort, the exhausting length of the working day, intolerable noise levels, noxious odours, and the risks of injury from dangerous machinery and procedures, were reported continually in her accounts.41 Tristan described the dyers of fabric at Roanne working in slippery conditions, at risk of falling into the boiling cauldrons they tended; London’s furnace workers facing similar dangers as they emptied the coke ovens; laundrywomen in Nîmes confronting a more subtle threat, spending their working hours waist-deep in water: At Nîmes at least 300 to 400 laundrywomen are condemned to spend their lives with their bodies in water to the waist, and in a water which is poisonous since it is heavy with soap, potash, soda, bleach, fat and indeed with all sorts of dyes like indigo, madden, saffron, etc., etc.—So in order to earn their living numerous women are condemned to uterine disorders, to acute rheumatism, to painful pregnancies, to miscarriages, indeed to every suffering imaginable!42 Concern about the employment of women was widespread in the early nineteenth century, and most debate focused on the dangers posed by the new industry, particularly the textile mills, to women’s moral and physical wellbeing. Tristan’s discussion drew attention to the fact that conditions in traditional occupations were often just as hazardous. Nevertheless, like other commentators, Tristan viewed the role of women workers in reproductive as well as in productive terms, expressing concern about the likely impact of employment on their reproductive health.43 The representation of women workers in maternal terms exerted a strong emotional appeal: They are women, they are mothers—who are so entitled to the solicitude of generous hearts.’44 It enabled commentators and critics to tap into deeply held sentiments, not only about femininity and female roles, but about social wellbeing in general, so that the metaphor of ‘the suffering woman worker’ became a tool of social criticism. The working women of Nîmes remained real human beings for Tristan, however, not an abstract collectivity. Similarly, her discussion of child labour emphasised children’s exploitation as workers rather than the sexual dangers of mixed workplaces which preoccupied Villermé.45 She noted that hard physical

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labour from a young age tested poorly-fed and poorly-rested bodies to breaking point. Hospitals for the poor were crowded with prematurely aged and exhausted workers whose lives were spent, as at Lyon: I have seen many young girls dying of consumption, young boys too—poor children who have been put to work too young, worn out by excessive labour, by lack of nourishment and exercise, they wilt and die before they reach the age of 20.—It’s frightful to behold!46 Tristan’s accounts of the ‘condition of the workers’—men, women, and children—were marked by compassion for their suffering as human beings, and hence by condemnation of the inhumanity and immorality of a system which allowed such abuses to continue. Given the diversity in workers’ experiences, the level of working-class misery and oppression which was revealed in observers’ accounts depended, firstly, on which sector of the workforce was investigated. Furthermore, as Scott and Sewell have argued, accounts of ‘the condition of the workers’ reflected observers’ prior understanding of what was being seen.47 For instance, observers like Villermé and Dupin emphasised the moral failings of workers, believing that this was the cause of the destitution which gripped them. The responsibility for improving their lives was assigned to workers themselves, who were called on to reform their own behaviour.48 Socialists and workers reversed the pattern of causation, seeing poverty and deprivation as cause rather than effect of degradation. They contrasted the dignity of labour, and the workers’ heroic efforts to maintain that dignity, with the brutalised state to which they were reduced by factors beyond their control. Tristan’s admiration for the mariners who maintained ‘the demeanour of free men’, or for the impoverished ironworker, dressed in rags and with no shoes, who was nevertheless ‘full of dignity’, drew such an implicit contrast, as did her portrait of the silkworkers of Lyon: ‘What men!’, she wrote, ‘they are generally intelligent, speak fluently and with an eloquent turn of phrase—all dress well and in their appearance do not resemble at all what is vulgarly called a worker.’49 These laudatory images may have romanticised and idealised workers, but they simultaneously condemned as an unnatural creation the degraded and demoralised figure produced by the forces of capitalism. Insofar as accounts like Tristan’s emphasised misery and degradation, then, they did so to highlight the impossibility of living otherwise under the circumstances. For Tristan, the squalor of the Irish Quarter in London became the benchmark of degradation against which she compared the working-class districts of other towns: We entered an unpaved muddy alleyway, covered with little stagnant pools of foul-smelling soapy water, household waste and even more fetid things…. Imagine barefoot men, women and children treading in the stinking filth of this cesspool; some leaning against the wall for want of a seat to sit on, others crouched on the ground; children sprawling in the mud like pigs. No, without having seen it, it is impossible to imagine such an appalling misery! such a profound abasement! a more complete degradation of the human being!!!50

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The debasement of workers had moral consequences, reflected in the problems of prostitution, crime, and drunkenness that plagued working-class life. ‘Prostitution is the most hideous of the afflictions which are produced by the unequal distribution of wealth in this world,’ she wrote in discussing London. ‘So, let your society take responsibility for this monstrosity,’ she challenged its male rulers, ‘and let woman be absolved!’51 Similarly, she attributed crime to the hunger and poverty which co-existed with ostentatious wealth.52 Overall, the causes of social problems lay in an inequitable and unjust social order, and workers were the victims rather than the perpetrators of social evils. While Tristan was deeply sympathetic to the plight of the workers, then, and absolved them from blame for their condition, she also reacted with horror and disgust at times, as she had done previously in confronting the black population of La Praya. Her encounter with the urban poor in all their misery was yet another encounter with those ‘others’, whose lifestyle and behaviour were ‘foreign’ to the middle-class observer, and who therefore evoked a horrified reaction. This was evident in her description not only of London’s Irish Quarter, but also of the French peasant workers newly-arrived in urban centres: The majority of these men and women are in a state of utter brutality, they cannot be compared in any way to those of Lyon. They speak patois, wear clogs and all that.—Absolute country bumpkins.—You can read in their faces the most complete stupidity…. What’s more, the shape of their heads reveals clearly what is inside; it exhibits all the characteristics of idiocy.53 Tristan explained their condition by noting the brutality and the religious superstition imposed by others. However, the observer’s alienation from her subjects in these encounters reflected the gap between the imaginary worker and the real worker; between the ideal world and the real world.54 Similarly, while Tristan deplored the social and economic factors which led women to resort to prostitution, she found it impossible to empathise with the women themselves, since their lifestyle and behaviour filled her with disgust: I will never understand the prostitute! Surrendering herself! Stifling her will and her feelings; delivering her body to brutality and suffering, and her soul to contempt! The prostitute is an incomprehensible mystery to me…. Confronting death is nothing, but what a death faces the prostitute! She is betrothed to sorrow, doomed to degradation! Endlessly repeated physical tortures, constant moral death! and self-loathing!!!55 Despite the sympathy with which Tristan recorded the sufferings of workers, then, the demands of her project of enquiry required the encounter to be framed as one between the investigator and the investigated, and this necessarily had a class dimension.56 Tristan did not present herself to workers as one of their own, but as one of the ‘enlightened bourgeoisie’, as she described herself.57 Like other middle-

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class investigators, she asserted her authority in the investigative relationship, and became the ‘expert’ who acquired the right to invade the privacy of her subjects. She placed workers in the position of informants, and did not recognise the power relationship within these encounters. Tristan appeared to believe that her positive motives for investigating workers’ lives gave her the right to undertake that investigation, regardless of the wishes of her subjects. Privacy was the only protection remaining for the dignity of a destitute silk-weaving couple at Lyon, for instance, after the ravages of unemployment, hunger, and the pawnshop. But having persuaded the concièrge that it would be ‘useful’ for her to establish ‘the real condition of workers in Lyon’, Tristan entered their dwelling unannounced: We entered a room serving simultaneously as bedroom, kitchen and workshop, lit on one side only. The woman was at one loom, and the man at another. On catching sight of me the man became quite embarrassed, quite startled, the woman also seemed to be very flustered.—Not understanding their agitation at first, I hastened to assure them of the purpose of my visit in very reassuring terms.—The man came up to me and I saw that he was almost naked… he muttered a few excuses and finally after a moment’s hesitation during which the face of his wife was contorted with emotion, she said to me with what seemed like a desperate effort:—Heavens, Madame, you caught us by surprise.58 The weaver, without a shirt to preserve his self-respect before Tristan and her entourage, tried to hide his shame by retreating to the shadows, but he nevertheless became a subject of the intrepid social investigator, and his tears of embarrassment were recorded as part of the evidence of the case.59 Being able to say ‘I have seen’ was the first demonstration of proof for social investigators like Tristan, but she also claimed veracity by linking her account with studies by recognised experts. The need for such supporting testimony was brought home to Tristan by the response to her Promenades in London when it first appeared in 1840. Having been accused of exaggerating or even lying in her description of the situation in England, she strengthened the third edition of 1842 with references to the works of other scholars whose judgements supported her own. She added an array of lengthy footnotes, and a foreword which explained the changes: My Promenades in London appeared in 1840…. I was accused from several quarters of having defamed England, of having sought to undermine it in French opinion out of partisanship or national rivalry. I would say, in responding to these accusations, that the facts which I am presenting are public knowledge and are supported by authentic documents…; so my truthfulness cannot be questioned.60 She referred doubting readers to books such as Buret’s, which quoted ‘official documents, reports of English commissions, enquiries, memoirs, petitions, etc.’,61 although she did not use such sources herself.

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As Tristan’s claim to exactitude indicated, she sought to engage in ‘scientific’ enquiry based on observation of the world, rather than in philosophical speculation. She therefore recognised the need to utilise figures whenever possible, given the contemporary fascination with quantifiable data, and the growing conviction that it possessed a greater reliability than other forms of information.62 The works of Engels, Parent-Duchâtelet, and Dupin, amongst others, were laden with figures and statistical tables to support their claims, and even novelists responded to contemporary tastes by utilising statistics in their narratives. The publication in the newspapers of data on such things as crime rates, population growth, and the social distribution of different diseases, evoked wide interest amongst the literate classes.63 In London in 1839, then, Tristan recorded the numbers of prostitutes, prisoners, and asylum inmates, and collected data about life expectancy, prison sentences, and recidivism rates. Her most developed statistical study, however, concerned the wages of French workers in 1844.64 She gathered data from a variety of occupations and locations, and compared the rates paid men, women, and children. Tristan also realised that wage rates were meaningless on their own, and she recorded the relative costs of living in each town. Male workers in Roanne earned lower wages than those in Lyon, for instance, but were better off because costs were lower, as were Lyon workers in comparison with those of Paris.65 The regularity of work was a further consideration, since most workers were employed by the day and lengthy periods of unemployment were common. At Roanne, for example, lack of water to power the textile mills meant summer closures of up to four months, while dye workers in Avignon had five workless months to survive.66 Consequently, the real incomes of workers measured across the year were frequently well below subsistence. Tristan estimated that three-quarters of the workers in Lyon earned less than enough to live on, while the remaining quarter could barely survive. At Avignon Tristan asked herself: ‘How do all these people live?’ She answered her own question: ‘Here like everywhere else, with a little work, a little theft, a little charity and much prostitution. That is the formula for these lives which consist of debasement, degradation and unimaginable suffering.’67 The collection of data on wages and conditions was meant to establish with certainty that workers were exploited. She used it to contest the claims of Church leaders that workers in France lived well, that they ‘earned good wages, that if they were needy it was their own fault, that they went on drinking sprees on Sundays, on Mondays’.68 This was a claim she also heard first-hand from employers, that ‘if [the worker] was only thrifty, orderly, religious, it would always be easy for him to put aside something in order to buy a little cottage for his old age’.69 Tristan’s discussion of wage rates was therefore part of the broader debate about ‘the condition of the workers’ in which she challenged arguments that poverty was due to workers’ bad habits, rather than to an unregulated labour market, the irregularity of employment, and the absence of workers’ rights. But there was no simple dichotomy between bourgeois condemnation of workers, and socialist condemnation of the system. Social Catholics and moral economists also

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expressed concerns about the fact that the new economic system created not only new wealth but also new poverty. Bourgeois moral values, as well as those of workers, were thrown into question in their analyses too.70 Tristan was not unique, then, in directing her charges of ‘immorality’ at those whose wealth and power were responsible for the plight of the poor, rather than at workers. The solution she envisaged, however, would mark the distance between the socialist and the conservative moral critic.71 Since the facts about ‘the condition of the workers’ were disputed amongst those who investigated them, such investigations clearly did not uncover valuefree information, but provided powerful interpretations of the world. To control the data was to control the interpretation of reality they conveyed. Tristan may not have recognised fully that the data she gathered reflected her own presuppositions and convictions. However, in criticising the errors in her opponents’ data she did reveal her awareness of the limitations of the scientific method. For instance, Tristan was particularly critical of the statistics compiled by the economists. Their focus on ‘averages’, especially average wages, completely distorted the real poverty of the majority of workers: When I think of the pronouncements uttered and published by our salaried economists, determining the averages…I tremble with rage!—A master-cutterbootmaker earns 6 fr., a leading hand 3 fr., a good worker 2 fr.—If following Mr. Dupin and Blanqui I want to establish an average from these three figures, I get 3 fr. 65 cent.—which is a very satisfactory day’s pay.—But for the three workers cited here, there are 40 or 60 who earn 1 fr. Indeed it is time to speak out truthfully about this.72 The ‘great science of the average’, in Tristan’s opinion, was simply a device for fooling the public. ‘I’ll leave each person his daily rate,’ she wrote, ‘since each one has his own stomach.’73 If Tristan presented herself as a ‘social scientist’, then, she was also a renegade in this role. She was strongly critical of the rationalism of her ‘positivist century’, writing in her first pamphlet in 1835: When the entire populace is purely devoted to calculation, considering things only with numbers at the ready, and speculating on the probability of their future happiness with a cold arithmetic, we believe that it is essential to speak to everyone in his own language.74 ‘But,’ she observed, ‘those who are sensitive have understood me already.’ It was sometimes necessary to play the rationalist game, then, but Tristan also challenged the ‘scientific’ discourse, emphasising its shortcomings and the ‘mathematical spirit’ which drove it. For Tristan, the ‘mathematical spirit’ described the person who relied on reason but was devoid of feelings. The army officers at SaintEtienne represented the type perfectly, and Tristan spelled out her view of the problem they represented:

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I regard them as dangerous men, for every person whose heart, whose sensibilities and inner feelings are atrophied and withered, is dangerous to society.—Well! the science of mathematics affects the heart, the sensibility and the feelings of man as fire affects a corn field, it burns it down to the roots.75 The calculating mind was closed to ‘sensibility’: the sensitivity that enabled one to feel empathy for others and provided the basis for living in community. Tristan’s scepticism about ‘cold arithmetic’ reflected the fact that, while a ‘scientific’ approach to understanding society had considerable credence at this time, its sway was not unchallenged. She exhibited the ambivalence in early nineteenth century culture as faith in reason’s ability to explain the universe was challenged by a resurgence of mysticism, fascination with the irrational, and admission of the role of sentiment in human life.76 Critics protested that ‘rationalism’ exerted undue influence, at the expense of ‘sentiment’ and feeling. This argument was put forcefully by the Saint-Simonian socialists from the 1820s, as they sought to restore ‘sentiment’ to its proper place. But sentiment mattered to Tristan, not just because it was a dimension of the human personality which had been suppressed, as the Saint-Simonians argued, but because through its prism things took on a different hue and assumed a different worth. There was therefore a moral dimension to this analysis. Instead of a soulless rationalism, then, Tristan favoured ‘scientific passion’, which she understood to mean a science enlivened by human emotion and sensibility. ‘Passion’ implied commitment and dedication, giving a purposefulness and inspiration to science that ‘cold reason’ could never achieve. The person fired with passionate devotion to a cause might not pass the test of reasoned objectivity but, in Tristan’s view, this was a false criterion. Being emotionally uninvolved and thus ‘objective’ simply meant leaving out of calculation factors that were vitally important to the analysis; disallowing evidence that was crucial to understanding the situation. In the hands of Tristan’s ‘mathematical’ economists, for instance, the situation of the Lyon weavers, who possessed only the clothes they stood up in despite working an eighteen-hour day, might have been presented simply as a matter of statistics: supply and demand.77 But, in Tristan’s view, its significance lay in the human suffering it revealed and the moral situation it highlighted: that in her society some people could not earn enough to live no matter how hard they worked. If the logic of the marketplace condemned this couple to starve, human compassion and a morality which valued human life over profits challenged its priorities. She sought to emphasise the element of choice involved in establishing social priorities, and argued that moral calculations rather than ‘mathematical’ calculations ought to prevail in the making of such choices. This conviction helps to explain Tristan’s attraction to a number of contemporary ‘sciences’ like mesmerism, physiognomy, and phrenology. Despite their claims to scientific certainty, these ‘sciences’ eschewed rationalism to different degrees, incorporating mystical and spiritual elements along with intuition, belief in the power of the human will, and hence in the capacity for choice and moral judgement. Their popularity in the early nineteenth century, like the renewed appeal to ‘sentiment’, reflected another dimension of the reaction against ‘reason’ and the

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search for more holistic ways of understanding the human experience. Tristan utilised these ‘sciences’ in preference to the ‘science of mathematics’, and in doing so demonstrated the significance she attributed to emotional and moral forces— not merely reason—in her analysis of society. The most important of these ‘sciences’ was mesmerism or ‘animal magnetism’. Anton Mesmer’s discovery in 1778 of the ‘imponderable fluid’ which permeated the universe, and which could be controlled by applying the principles of ‘animal magnetism’, remained extremely influential in France in the first half of the nineteenth century.78 Some of its earlier practices had disappeared, but its ‘electric shocks’, its haunting ‘gazes’ and projections of powerful ‘fluids’ from the eyes, its ‘trances’, ‘crises’, emotional ‘ecstasies’, somnambulist adventures, and conversations with the dead pervaded Romantic literature. Novels and plays on magnetism were best-sellers, and the works of social theorists across the political spectrum were also suffused with these ideas. Their attraction as explanatory tools lay in the linkages they established between the material and moral orders. Tristan’s utilisation of these theories in her analysis of society reflects the importance she attributed to these moral elements. For mesmerists, the eyes acted both as mirrors of the soul, enabling inner feelings and state of mind to be read, and as the weapons by which the ‘magnetic’ personality could influence and control the wills of others. The impact of these mesmerist beliefs can be seen, firstly, in Tristan’s claim to ‘read’ the inner natures and beliefs of others by examining the expressions in their eyes. For instance, while Tristan welcomed the direct eye-contact of workers who thereby expressed pride, selfrespect, and dignity, as at Lyon,79 she nevertheless found many workers whose lowered eyes and furtive glances revealed demoralisation and defeat. She noted when observing the factory workers of England in 1839: This furtive glance, that I observed in America amongst the slaves, is not confined to the millworkers in the British Isles. It is found everywhere in those who are dependent, subordinate; it is one of the characteristics of the twenty million proletarians.80 Tristan also believed that her mesmerist powers enabled her to communicate with those of compatible ‘fluids’, and to control the wills of others. She claimed that ‘God has endowed me with an extremely strong magnetic power’, and described herself ‘magnetising’ others to spur them into action; using the power of her gaze to acknowledge devoted supporters, or to dominate opponents. In Nîmes, where she felt so alien amongst a resigned and superstitious populace, she spoke of a battle between her ‘fluids’ and those of the locals who were hostile to her: ‘If I could have struck them down with a glance! I would have done so with unparallelled satisfaction!’ she noted.81 Alternatively, Tristan herself was open to the influence of other compatible souls. She was ‘magnetised’ on several occasions to cure her illnesses, asserting that ‘Magnetism is the only effective remedy for nerve complaints.’82 Tristan and her friend Eléonore Blanc were also bound together by powerful magnetic ‘fluids’ which united them in spirit even when they were physically separated. Tristan wrote in her diary:

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Every time she looked at me glances of ineffable love were projected from her beautiful black eyes…. The magnetism of these glances affected me so powerfully that the separation of our bodies could not destroy it.—The coach left speedily. Eléonore disappeared—but I carried her gaze with me.—The gaze is evidently the manifestation of the soul and this manifestation is so powerful that in our imagination it assumes a form, a body which becomes palpable to us.—The fluid projected by the eyes is a reality.83 According to Tristan the phenomenon at work in the mesmerist encounter was quite straightforward: ‘simply the superiority of the fluids of one individual over those of another’.84 Together with the power of ‘second sight’, or the ability to read the inner thoughts and sentiments of others, it enabled her to assess instantly the mood and attitude of those around her, she believed, and assert her power over them.85 The parting banquet hosted for her by the workers of Lyon became a mesmeric event, complete with electric shocks, emotional crises, and fainting fits. The spark was provided when she dissolved into tears during her farewell speech: This was the electric shock, my emotion, my love spread to everyone according to the degree of love within them—and then there took place one of the most beautiful, most novel, most unexpected, most religious scenes you could ever imagine.—Eléonore, the little Nîmian Guillaume, Jacob, Lina, Meynier, Augier, the comp[agnons], all overcome spontaneously by the outburst of sublime sensibility which had taken possession of me, unable to prevent it, experienced the same outburst of passion, and all were touched with emotion, trembling, crying with joy, with happiness, with love for humanity!…This magnificently religious scene must have been strangely beautiful. I cannot describe it, because overcome myself by the delirium of love, which I feel so strongly, I was no longer composed and was incapable of observing.86 As Tristan noted, the ‘magnetic’ experience in which emotion was unleashed ran counter to the rational dynamic of observation. Mesmerist practices may not have facilitated Tristan’s task of social analysis, then, but the love and emotion they sparked were vital to the project of reform nonetheless. By the 1840s, Mesmer’s magnetism intersected with Gall’s phrenology and Lavater’s physiognomy which looked respectively to the shape of the human skull, and the patterns of the facial features, for a guide to character. These two ‘sciences’ argued that moral phenomena revealed themselves in the physical order, and therefore offered diagnostic tools to the social investigator. Tristan found these ideas appealing, and she made a will leaving her body for dissection and her head to the phrenological society.87 But her interpretation of these ‘sciences’ emphasised free will and moral choice, and rejected the potential for determinism which they contained. In discussing phrenology, for instance, she argued that the protuberances on a person’s skull did not determine character and behaviour, but merely reflected that behaviour. Responding to the claim of the English phrenologist, Dr John Elliotson, that a murderer ‘killed because he has two extremely well-developed

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protuberances, that of pride and that of vengeance’, Tristan replied, ‘but have you spoken to him, doctor, and do you know what reasons lay behind his actions?’88 This reconstructed (and perhaps fictitious) conversation enabled Tristan to put the phrenological view of behaviour, and to supplement it with an interpretation which emphasised human choice and volition. Human beings were not animals driven by innate instincts, but sentient beings whose ability to reason and make choices gave their lives a moral dimension. If this belief had methodological implications for the social investigator, it also opened up the possibility of changing human behaviour, and of changing society. Tristan also utilised the ‘science’ of physiognomy in observing others, believing that their moral choices were reflected in their physical features. ‘Except for a few very rare exceptions’, Tristan claimed, ‘a beautiful soul is never contained in an ugly body’: goodness shone through in people’s physical features, and depravity could not be concealed behind a pleasant exterior.89 Tristan’s physiognomic judgements about individuals often contradicted the prevailing ones, reflecting her belief that moral criteria were awry in her society. Thus she saw moral strength in the physiognomies of certain prisoners whose crimes she regarded as motivated by principle or need rather than malice; in certain asylum inmates judged insane, but in her view driven by spiritual forces poorly understood by others; in workers like those at Lyon, poor but proud, and determined to fight for their rights.90 These were all, in different ways, society’s victims rather than its victors, but they shared an inner spirit which Tristan regarded as the sign of moral goodness. This transformed their physiognomies, giving them a beauty born from within. Tristan’s description of a woman imprisoned at Newgate for stealing food for her children summed up her view: Ah! only elevated spiritual qualities give beauty its influence…. Her soul was pure; I saw it in her eyes, in the angle of her head, in her entire being. Strength of passion could have driven her to commit the crime; but this creature made in the image of God was aware of her dignity and she had not become degraded.91 By contrast, Tristan was repulsed by other physiognomies, such as those of hardened criminals whose inherent depravity was etched on their physical forms. The rapist and murderer at Coldbath Fields, whom she described as a ‘satyr-like creature’ with ‘a head like a pig’, and a ‘lascivious expression’, revealed in its most extreme form the debasing effects of uncontrolled sensuality.92 This character flaw was also present in less virulent form in many others whom Tristan found repulsive, such as the Jesuits at Lyon: The physiognomies of these men are stupid (the fat ones) or sly.—Do not seek either love or goodness or vitality or intelligence on their faces, or even lively, that is to say noble and beautiful passions[,] for you will not find any trace of that; but on the contrary you will find there inscribed in bold characters vanity, greed, that vulgar sensuality which attests to atrophied senses and ingrained shameful vices.93

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Tristan’s descriptions reveal the extent to which the mesmerist and physiognomist usually saw what she expected to see in those she observed. Like the claims of statistics, the claims of these ‘sciences’ were prejudiced by prior assumptions and expectations, and reflected the value judgements of their practitioners. However, the popularity of the ‘sciences’ which eschewed rationalism and admitted emotion as a legitimate and useful guide to the world revealed the strength of the challenge to the positivist tendency of the period. For Tristan, impartiality had its place, but only if informed by consideration of human feelings, not simply by abstract calculations. Emotion was the force that brought people together and enabled them to relate to one another, and hence was one of the marks of being human. To ignore it was to create or aspire to an unreal world of automatons, not human beings. As Tristan remarked: ‘The ideal that the economists imagine is a robot, a brute, working without understanding, existing without feeling, procreating without love.’94 This perspective on society might be seen as a particularly ‘feminine’ one in the context of the times. The contemporary understanding of the human personality emphasised the dichotomy between rational men and emotional women, between the capacity for analysis and the capacity for empathy. Since Tristan believed that emotion made possible an understanding of the world as it really was, she did not regard the capacity for feeling in women as a limitation, or men’s supposedly greater rational power as an advantage. In fact, although men were usually the butt of her condemnation of ‘mathematical’ and ‘positive’ types, she recognised and valued sentiment in men, too, as her respect for the worker Touron demonstrated: I greatly admire this worker Touron. He is what I call a phenomenon! A man who cannot read, who has had no education, who cannot express himself and who despite all these obstacles has extraordinary powers of comprehension! And the cause of this fine intelligence? This man is tender-hearted, he has feelings and he is aware of his dignity: reaching out to his brothers. He loves! that is the secret. He understands all because he loves!95 Despite her appeal to the emotions, however, the manner in which Tristan presented herself as an observer of ‘the condition of the workers’ does not suggest that she felt excluded from the emergent scientific discourse about society which may have alienated some women.96 Instead, she engaged with the scientific constructions employed by male critics and commentators, utilising their techniques but undermining their positivism with other methods of analysis. Her redefinition of ‘social science’ to include emotional engagement as well as rational analysis affirmed women’s capacity for the task. Significantly, too, her scepticism about the claims of what might be called ‘pure’ social science, that is, social science which relied on mathematical and statistical methods, meant that she stood apart from the tendency within socialism itself to claim ‘scientific’ credentials in this period.97 Nor did Tristan fit the feminine model of the ‘visitor of the poor’, expanding at this time due to concern about the ‘social question’. Within this tradition women visited prisons and hospitals, but their role was essentially to be agents of social

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stability by bringing comfort and encouraging self-help.98 By contrast, Tristan assumed the role, not of ‘moraliser’ of the poor, but of ‘moraliser’ of a society which created and oppressed the poor. Tristan’s ‘scientific’ investigation of society established the grounds for radical change rather than for modifying but maintaining the status quo. This distinguished her findings from those of a number of other contemporary investigators. Villermé placed his faith in the paternalism of the upper classes, as did the economist Dupin.99 Eugène Buret went further, rejecting charity in favour of higher wages and extensive small property ownership. But while he favoured reform, he was nevertheless fearful of the social divisiveness which would be created by worker organisation, which he opposed.100 However, Tristan turned to workers themselves as the key to the future. She sought ways to empower them to transform their lives, and ultimately the society overall. If the discoveries of science could point to new and ultimately beneficial developments in the workplace, then, the discoveries of a well-informed ‘social science’ proved the need to manage those developments for the good of all: I soon saw the immense improvement which would result from these scientific discoveries: brute force abolished, physical labour performed in shorter time, and more leisure left for man to cultivate his intelligence; but, a social revolution is needed for these great benefits to be realised. It will come!101 Tristan looked to socialism to bring about that social revolution.

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‘People here are entirely ignorant of what has happened in the world since human society began,’ Tristan wrote at Avignon in July 1844: They are unaware that in 89 our fathers died for these three words: Liberty— Equality—Fraternity or death! They are unaware that we socialists, continuing the great work of our fathers, will die to see these three words become a reality.1 Frustrated at the conservatism of provincial France, Flora Tristan nailed her political colours to the mast. Avignon epitomised for her the regional backwater in which people were either uninterested in politics, or clung to causes—Royalist or Napoleonic—which she opposed. This judgement reflected the development of her own views on politics, but it also shows that in identifying herself as a socialist, Tristan specifically placed herself within the tradition of the French Revolution, which she (like many other socialists) believed had set the agenda for socialism. The emergence of socialism as a political force during the 1830s and 1840s reflected increasing social discontent as economic changes accelerated, and political inequalities remained intact.2 It also reflected opposition to the ‘individualism’ which underpinned the regime of King Louis-Philippe.3 Socialists were not opposed to ‘individual rights’, which had been championed by the French Revolution and hence were part of the socialist inheritance.4 But in the early nineteenth century ‘individual rights’ had become the prerogative of a minority. ‘Socialism’ sought to restore the principle of universality, so that the ‘rights’ of some as individuals could not be preserved at the community’s expense. It sought greater economic equality through a reordering of property relationships, and greater political equality through amended suffrage laws, or by organising society in ways that made electoral politics redundant. Tristan’s socialism is best understood in the context of these developments rather than by its proximity to ‘Marxism’, which did not exist at the time of her death.5 As a socialist she expressed some of the main concerns and perspectives of her generation, voicing the contemporary optimism that social change was possible; that compassion and humanitarianism could prevail over selfishness and cruelty; even that the classes could work together to transform society. But her ambivalences also reflected the 97

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doubt being cast on these assumptions in the 1840s, as a fledgling ideology became a fledgling political movement, and one in which working people began to play a significant role. Her debates with her contemporaries reflected an emerging issue, as socialists sought to reconcile the ‘romantic idea’ of socialism,6 as a critique of society and vision of the future, with its emergence as a political force, with effective strategies for implementing that vision. The point at which Tristan became committed to socialism, and the processes by which that commitment came about, are difficult to identify. The poverty of her adolescence, when she and her mother returned from the countryside to the insalubrious rue du Fouarre in Paris, may have been a factor in shaping her views.7 But hardship might as easily have produced a resigned conformist or a petty criminal, since Tristan lacked the intellectual tools to evaluate her own experience. Working in isolation in Chazal’s workshop or at home, she probably had little exposure to political ideas at that time. As she reflected on her adolescence in later life, the formative experience Tristan singled out for mention was not poverty but social rejection. She was stigmatised as illegitimate and hence as a poor marriage prospect, and this injustice provoked both outrage and a sense of powerlessness.8 Again, there was no necessary connection between adolescent anger and adult activism, but Tristan’s sense of being victimised by society was aggravated when the prohibition on divorce prevented her from escaping her unhappy marriage. The tribulations of marriage helped to shape her as a feminist, then, but they may also have led her to question social institutions and power structures more generally. Tristan singled out the Revolution of 1830, when a popular uprising overthrew Charles X and installed King Louis-Philippe in his place, as the event which marked her political initiation. A generation of young adults was politicised by these ‘Three Glorious Days’, and the widespread sense of expectation was expressed by Tristan when she wrote: ‘I was present during the July Days of 1830, but then I was excited by the heroism of the people and did not think about the danger.’9 But many were soon disillusioned by the ‘betrayal’ of 1830, which influenced the subsequent development of workers’ organisations, and Republican and socialist politics. Tristan’s later memory of 1830 was not just of a moment of hope but of a moment of choice. She wrote in September 1843 as she prepared for her tour of France: ‘I have never regretted what I did 13 years ago, when I abandoned a calm, secure, peaceful life, for a life which is unsettled, precarious, turbulent.—Today I regret less than ever the decision I made’.10 If Tristan shared the popular enthusiasm for ‘Liberty’, the precise nature of her political philosophy in 1830 is unclear. Perhaps she encountered Saint-Simonian ideas around that time, for after four years spent abroad, Tristan had returned to Paris just as the followers of Henri, Comte de Saint-Simon, were beginning to make their mark. Their public lecture series in 1828–9 had gained considerable notoriety, with its controversial pronouncements on property, work, and marriage,11 and their activities were widely reported in the press. Their call for the abolition of property inheritance clearly did not convince Tristan, since she set out shortly afterwards to pursue her own inheritance claims in Peru. But their call

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for marriage to be based on mutual affection and compatibility echoed the sentiments she was soon to express herself. Nevertheless, the marital problems which might have attracted her to the movement meant that she could not have become involved had she so desired, as the conflict with Chazal disrupted her life in 1829–31 and finally drove her out of Paris. Tristan’s interest in socialism only becomes visible historically on her return to Paris from Peru in 1835. At that point she deliberately sought to make contact with the socialist community and to evaluate what their theories had to offer, and it was Charles Fourier who attracted her initial interest. She wrote to him enthusiastically: ‘Each day I am more persuaded of the sublimity of your doctrine.’ She wanted to be of use to ‘the cause’ and was eager to read his next work as soon as it was published, asking him to send her a copy.12 However, this initial enthusiasm for his theory proved shortlived. As Tristan’s own views on socialism developed she became more convinced of the shortcomings of the ideas of others, and after Fourier’s death in 1837 her relations with his followers, while they remained friendly, were to diverge along theoretical and tactical lines. Tristan’s critique of the Fourierists (also called the ‘phalansterians’ or the ‘societary school’) was outlined in a letter to their newspaper, La Phalange, in 1836: I tell you, sir, that many people, amongst whom I count myself, find the science of Mr Fourier very obscure. No doubt for you, and for many of his followers, educated in colleges where the advanced sciences are taught and from which one graduates with a master’s degree…, the science of Mr Fourier is lucid and clear; but then,… how many years have you spent studying this science? Well, sir, you will understand perfectly that if, to be a phalansterian, one must first of all have spent four years at university, understand in depth astronomy, mathematics, physics, etc. etc.; then spend another four years studying Fourier, oh! you will understand, sir, that by this score very few people will be suited to become phalansterians.13 The Fourierists’ complex ‘scientific’ approach to socialism confused the great majority, in Tristan’s view, and meant that they would never mobilise the masses. Just as importantly, however, the rationalism of their approach conflicted with Tristan’s emphasis on an approach from the heart: an objection consistent with her mistrust of the rationalist social sciences.14 She insisted that passionate commitment to the socialist cause was more important than theoretical sophistication for creating activists. The Fourierists that drew her most fulsome praise in 1844, for instance, were those she met at Chalon-sur-Saône. They were filled with compassion and a sense of brotherhood, she noted, ‘if not very strong from the scientific and intellectual point of view’.15 The ‘scientific’ approach also established an implicit claim to possession of the socialist ‘truth’, which Tristan rejected. As she explained to the editor of La Phalange in 1837: ‘I am not a phalansterian, but the extreme tolerance which I profess, allows me to adopt what seems good, and capable of implementation, from each system. I have always taken a lively interest in all ideas for social renewal.’16 Consequently, she

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had contacts not only with Considerant’s ‘societary school’, but with a wide variety of socialist and radical figures throughout France, and with the leading British socialist, Robert Owen. During his visit to Paris in the summer of 1837 she identified herself publicly as a supporter of his theories,17 and given her criticism of the Fourierists, it is not surprising that what Tristan admired most about Owen was his deep humanitarianism. She summed up her view in 1840, in Promenades in London: Never has a man appeared on the world’s stage endowed with a higher degree of love for his fellows; finding the remedy for their ills has been for him the goal of forty years of observation, experience and labour. God has crowned his efforts, and now the practical philanthropist, become an apostle of the principle of love, consecrates the remainder of such a full life to showing the proletarians the benefits for each individual of fraternal union.18 Nevertheless, despite Tristan’s fulsome praise for Owen’s ideas in Promenades in London she insisted that she was ‘neither a Saint-Simonian, nor a Fourierist, nor an Owenite’, and was critical of Owen for paying insufficient attention to people’s spiritual needs.19 Given the diversity of the radical community in this period, disagreements in philosophy and approach were inevitable and Tristan was not immune from them. She was critical of destructive sectarianism, which allowed theoretical debate to degenerate into personal attack as socialists competed for support. Tristan summarised this view at Lyon in 1844: The great mistake…is to concentrate on the individual, one is for Cabet, the other is against Fourier, they spend their time arguing over men and over words—instead of concentrating on The Idea’.20 However, Tristan was far from seeing eye to eye with other socialists on every point, and did not always maintain the disinterest she herself advocated. Her dealings with Etienne Cabet, leader of the Icarian communists, were particularly antagonistic. In reviewing Tristan’s book, The Workers’ Union, in 1843, Cabet described her ideas as ‘the most fanciful of all those we know of, establishing this claim by a creative misuse of quotation marks. Tristan indignantly demanded a correction, which Cabet refused. A bitter exchange followed in the working-class press, tarnishing Tristan’s relations with Cabet, and with his followers throughout France.21 Despite her claims to tolerance Tristan dismissed the Icarians as stupid, arguing that Cabet had ‘captivated that portion of the workers who are essentially ignorant and lifeless[,] whom no other doctrine has been able to capture’.22 ‘Is it Mr Cabet’s system which has the virtue of making people stupid?’, she asked hypothetically in her diary, ‘Or is it that only stupid people are attracted to Mr Cabet’s system; that’s a question I can’t decide on.’23 Cabet, whose theory emphasised strict egalitarianism and the abolition of private property, drew most of his support from workers in trades like shoemaking and tailoring, which were severely strained by competitive pressures. But these groups were highly literate: their

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‘stupidity’ referred less to their personal qualities than to Tristan’s judgement of the Icarian theory itself.24 And behind the barbs of invective lay a serious consideration. The appeal of Cabet’s vision of the ideal world of ‘Icaria’ diverted his followers from taking constructive action: they contemplated their future paradise rather than working to achieve it. ‘In this respect Mr Cabet has done much harm to the workers,’ Tristan wrote, ‘he has paralysed all action in them— today the workers see only the world of Icaria, they stay riveted before this vision. They wait rather than working actively to bring about this wondrous reign.’25 Tristan also rejected the regimented character of Cabet’s ideal society, in which the inhabitants would dress the same, live in identical houses, and be expected to marry, and the Icarians’ practice of vetting their members’ reading matter.26 Similarly, she was hostile to the authoritarian tendency in the Saint-Simonian movement, with its hierarchical structure and its members’ adulation of the leader, Prosper Enfantin. This was partly a reflection of her own personality, for she was not one to accept the authority of others. As she had noted when discussing the Saint-Simonians in 1835: ‘I don’t want to be anyone’s apostle. I want to be myself.’27 But beyond the level of personal antipathy, her critique of the SaintSimonian doctrine was quite perceptive: Their particular hobby-horse is authority; it’s a kind of grand and sublime abstraction which has neither body nor soul…. Then, to make things even more ridiculous, this great authority is never accompanied by and never has at its disposal any coercive force.—This great phantom assumes control, orders obedience, classifies each individual according to his capacity (and judges those so-called capacities),…and what is more amazing, this authority never supposes for an instant that people won’t obey…, [sic] not accept their classification. Truly if it wasn’t so stupid—it would be amusing!28 The Saint-Simonians’ emphasis on authority caused Tristan, like many workers, to discount Enfantin as a potential defender of the workers’ interests.29 Tristan never claimed a sound knowledge of Saint-Simonian theory, and reported to a friend in 1835 that she had not read their works.30 But by the 1840s she was clearly familiar with some of their main ideas, and found their positive view of women appealing. The Fourierists sought to distance themselves from the radical pronouncements of their founder on such matters, but many SaintSimonians retained their earlier commitment to women’s equality. Besides, former Saint-Simonians that Tristan encountered in the provinces imagined her as ‘The Woman’ destined to bring a new moral law, whose coming had been prophesied by Enfantin a decade before.31 At Dijon, Saint-Simonians who remained ‘avowed supporters of the emancipation of woman’ encouraged her to pursue her mission.32 Similarly, she was welcomed with great emotion at Lyon by the Saint-Simonian silkworker, Pérelle: This man has retained only a single idea from the Saint-Simonian panoply[,] that of the woman.—He denies progress, forgetting that the Saint-Simonian

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school has affirmed it, he forgets about the rehabilitation of manual labour although he is a worker…, a single idea remains, it is the rehabilitation of woman, the superiority of woman, the coming of the woman.33 But if the Saint-Simonians’ hope in a female saviour was admirable, like the Icarians’ vision of a Utopian paradise it encouraged inactivity in the present.34 Likewise, Tristan insisted that the Fourierists’ ‘science of society’ was divorced from any immediate attempt at social transformation. This was not entirely true, for they did try several times to establish a trial community founded on Fourier’s principles, and Tristan herself twice donated money to fundraising appeals.35 But Tristan believed that, despite these projects, the Fourierists’ capacity to change society was limited by the lack of political will. Time and again she noted the same problem in her diary in 1844. The Fourierists were timid, politically cautious, afraid of being seen as subversives. Those at Dijon ‘like everywhere else [were] only good for talking’. In several towns they refused to associate with her, afraid of compromising themselves with the authorities.36 Tristan was scathing about their political irrelevance. ‘Ah! my brave fourierists,’ she wrote at Lyon, ‘you can indeed do, say, and see whomever you like [sic], the authorities are not afraid of you and they are right!’37 It would take ‘40,000 years’ for the Fourierists to change the world, Tristan concluded.38 The negative features Tristan identified in other socialists’ policies and practices—sectarian rivalry, authoritarianism, an unclear plan of action— highlighted what she regarded as the positive features of her own approach: an openness to ideas, a dedication to ‘liberty’, and a passionate and energetic pursuit of change. If she tended to be dismissive of the efforts of others, her criticisms did highlight a key problem confronting socialism in that period: how to put theory into practice. Tristan had raised this difficulty with Considerant in 1836 when she first began to explore socialist ideas. She argued that Fourier’s theories did not explain precisely the means by which change would occur, and that his followers seemed incapable of doing so too: Explain clearly your means of implementation, what we must do to assist you in your great work…. Provide us with a complete plan which the mind can seize at a glance; so that the straightforwardness and accuracy of its calculations might convince the most incredulous.39 Tristan resisted a form of socialism which she saw as lost in abstract theory. As she would reiterate in the years that followed, it was time for socialists to place less emphasis on defining the shape of the ideal society of the future, and focus on finding the method by which socialism might be implemented. The social structures appropriate to that system would only gradually emerge, and could not be ‘invented’ in advance.40 While Tristan was in many respects a visionary, therefore, she was also a pragmatist.41 She shared the socialist vision of a world remade, but she resisted the tendency to allow this ideal to distract from engagement with the present reality; the tendency to become ‘riveted before the vision’. The acceptability of ‘reformist’ measures, which would later become a

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very divisive issue in European socialism, was not in doubt for Tristan. No sudden leap into Utopia was possible, and it was time to move from system-building to a politics of the present. Tristan’s project for the ‘workers’ union’, which she devised in the early months of 1843, was motivated precisely by this consideration. It was not conceived as ‘The Grand Plan’ for socialism, but as a ‘transitional mechanism’ by which the movement towards socialism might be accelerated. The idea of a ‘union’ in itself was not new,42 and workers had already begun to realise what Tristan would assert in 1843: that workers’ goals remained inadequate since they were focused on individual trades. They would never ‘change the precarious, miserable situation of the working class’ overall.43 Tristan’s appeal for ‘union’, therefore, resembled workers’ proposals for ‘fraternal associations’ of all trades. Tristan argued further, however, that while the trade remained the focus of worker militancy, vast numbers of non-artisanal workers would be ignored and remain without a voice. The ‘working class’ included not only artisanal workers but the broad spectrum of labouring people: We understand by working man and woman every individual who performs manual labour no matter what kind. So domestic servants, porters, messengers, labourers and all so-called labouring people, will be regarded as workers.44 The radicalism of this proposal lay in the fact that it extended beyond skilled workers, and that it specifically included women workers, a special chapter being devoted to this subject in The Workers’ Union. Not only did Tristan emphasise that women should have the same basic rights in society as men, she also stressed the fact that little change in working men’s lives was possible if working women remained ignorant and oppressed. In making this point to male artisans, the main readership for her book, she deliberately echoed the wording of the French Revolution’s ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’, which formed the theoretical underpinning for men’s rights: I demand rights for woman because I am convinced that all the misfortunes of the world stem from the scorn and neglect of the natural and imprescriptible rights of woman which have prevailed until now…because it is the only way that people will attend to her education, and that on her education depends that of man generally, and of the man of the people in particular.45 A union of workers conceived in the broadest possible way, Tristan insisted, would create a sense of cohesion and shared experience which would motivate and mobilise workers. But if the workers’ union was conceived as a psychological entity, the fact that it was also intended to be a political organisation added another innovative aspect to the proposal.46 An organised working class, which would be a political force because of its visibility and the pressure it could exert, was the key to achieving a significant change in workers’ social position.47 As an organisation, the workers’ union would address both the immediate problems and the long-term objectives of workers. Firstly, it would collect small subscriptions

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from workers which would provide them with the means for taking their situation into their own hands. They could break the cycle of poverty by building establishments to educate the young and shelter the old and infirm. Children would be taught a range of marketable skills, but receive a broad education designed to shape intelligence and instil a sense of social solidarity.48 Beyond these immediate and pressing problems, the key requirement of the working classes was political representation. With a governing assembly elected on a narrow property franchise, workers’ needs went unheeded. The only immediate answer, Tristan suggested, was a paid representative of workers’ interests, whose efforts in the halls of power would be backed up by the visible presence of an organised working class. She cited other examples where lobbyists successfully supported particular interest groups, drawing especially on the role of Daniel O’Connell in fighting for the rights of the Irish in the English Parliament.49 By these measures, she suggested, some real and immediate change in workers’ situation might be achieved peacefully, and they would then be in a better position to contemplate more far-reaching changes to social organisation: ‘This union is a bridge erected between a dying civilisation and the harmonious social order foreseen by superior minds,’ she suggested.50 Tristan’s concept of a ‘universal union of working men and women’ reflected her belief that workers had to organise to defend their own interests: an opinion she reiterated in her talks to working-class audiences in 1843–4. ‘[I]t is absolutely essential that the people depend on themselves alone,’ she wrote, ‘if they entrust their interests to the bourgeoisie they will lose out once again.’51 In fact, she saw one of her primary tasks as instilling the idea of self-directed action into the minds of workers. ‘What they lack is the habit of action.—This incapacitates them completely and subordinates them totally to the bourgeoisie…. I must concentrate on making them grasp this point’.52 There was nevertheless a fundamental contradiction in her insistence that socialism had to be the construction of workers themselves while she, a non-worker, filled a leadership role. Touring France to promote the workers’ union in 1844, Tristan sought to counteract the influence wielded by bourgeois philanthropists and reformers. As she established ‘Circles of the Workers’ Union’ Tristan insisted that the bourgeoisie be excluded: an idea that some workers rejected. She wrote to the Circle at Toulon: You have not understood that to constitute yourselves [as a Circle of the Workers’ Union] you must exclude all the bourgeois…. Are not all the bourgeois against the union of workers by virtue of their position! They are[,] because divided they can exploit you but once you have established your unity, they will no longer be able to exploit you.53 Similarly, she exhorted her trusted supporter, Carpentras, at Marseille: ‘If the discussion turns to the admission of bourgeois, I beg you, dear brother, stand firm, and don’t allow yourself to be swayed by reasons of circumstance.’54 Tristan thus preached autonomy to the workers, yet contested their desire to collaborate with bourgeois reformers—except herself. She was committed to the

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creation of a self-directed workers’ movement, but she also believed that socialist leaders like herself had an important role to play in educating and advising them. Workers should reflect on the analyses of others, hence the emphasis Tristan placed on reading. In 1842, in her ‘popular’ edition of Promenades in London, and again in 1843 in The Workers’ Union, she recommended that they read the works of socialists and working-class leaders, and suggested they form small reading groups to purchase and study texts in common.55 Tristan presented herself and other bourgeois leaders as educators of the workers, instructing and aiding those less advanced on social issues than themselves. ‘Humanity is still just a child,’ she wrote. ‘It is clear that children need schoolmasters to guide them— without these guides they would commit even more stupidities than they do.—So let us accept the task and stay to guide them.’56 But Tristan realised that socialist propaganda which relied on the printed word would never reach all its desired audience. Social reformers had to enter the oral culture which their audience inhabited, employing verse and song. If, as Tristan suggested, ‘Song has an extraordinary effect which derives from magnetism on workers assembled together,’57 a song about the workers’ union would have a particularly powerful effect. Tristan therefore requested the noted poet Béranger to produce a song on the theme of ‘union’, to form part of her Workers’ Union and assist its promotion amongst workers. When he declined she held a competition which attracted four entries, the winner receiving a gold medal donated by Eugène Sue.58 Tristan’s desire to organise workers as a separate and self-directed political force, though one paradoxically under the sway of socialist leaders like herself, needs to be seen in the context of the changing direction of radical politics during the July Monarchy. In 1843–4, ‘class’ had not yet acquired all the resonances associated with it by later Marxist analysis. Both Fourier and Saint-Simon had emphasised class co-operation and inter-dependence, developing theories of socialism which promised to increase the happiness of the rich as well as the poor. Tristan, too, remained attracted by the notion of class co-operation and bourgeois goodwill, as her appeal for the co-operation of the ‘enlightened bourgeoisie’ indicated.59 As she set out on her tour of France in 1844, the picture was encouraging as she was welcomed sympathetically by bourgeois in Auxerre and Dijon.60 But on a number of occasions Tristan also expressed her fears about the social conflict which appeared to be looming, and admitted that a co-operative approach to social change might be a vain hope. In this she was not alone. An alternative view of class relations was developing by this time which emphasised the antagonism between social groups with opposing interests.61 This reflected the conflictual political history of the 1830s in France, and the gradual emergence of a more independent workers’ movement. The political and economic gains workers expected from the 1830 Revolution did not eventuate. Violent confrontations between workers and the authorities punctuated the 1830s, and revolts, which generally ended with the massacre of workers by government troops, erupted in 1831, 1832, 1834, and 1839. Not surprisingly, perhaps, these years saw the outpouring of a large body of literature seeking to explain the social

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crisis, and to identify the solution. Workers’ sense of themselves as a group with distinct interests and needs also increased, and their writings called for unity and solidarity in pursuit of those interests.62 It is not necessary to resort to psychological explanations, then, to explain the references to class conflict in Tristan’s writings, or indeed in the writings of the many others who expressed similar views at the time.63 She belonged to a generation of socialists who were increasingly disillusioned about the possibilities of class co-operation which had inspired Fourier and Saint-Simon, and for whom ‘class antagonism’ described the current reality. The term was used to represent the ills of society, rather than to refer to a transformative historical process in the Marxist sense.64 Tristan remained ambivalent about class relations, but the more she involved herself in political life, and the more she observed the dynamics of class relations at close quarters, the more radical became her pronouncements on the politics of class. Tristan’s visit to England in 1839 had produced a pessimistic vision of how social change would come about there: The great conflict, the one which is destined to transform the social structure, is that engaged, on the one hand, between the landowners and capitalists who possess everything, wealth, political power, and in whose interests the country is governed, and, on the other hand, the workers of town and country, who possess nothing, neither land, nor capital, nor political power, who nevertheless pay twothirds of the taxes, provide the conscripts for the army and the navy, and whom the rich starve, at will, in order to make them work for a cheaper rate.65 Her observation of working-class life, and her encounter with the social elite as she travelled in France in 1843–4, sharpened her sense of class conflict there too. Tristan’s opinion of the bourgeoisie became increasingly hostile as she encountered them at close quarters, and her descriptive metaphors became increasingly colourful. The bourgeoisie were lambasted as small-minded, avaricious scoundrels who would sell humanity in its entirety for five francs.66 At Toulon Tristan wrote: What good-for-nothings those people are—in other words I can no longer bear to see a single bourgeois, it affects me like a turnip reheated for the third time. They understand nothing, know nothing about what is happening in their town, their stupidity always leaves me utterly astonished…. What an impious, halfwitted, nauseating race!67 The physical contrast between the well-fed bourgeoisie and the under-nourished workers, which was constantly before her as she travelled, was reflected in the terms she employed to describe the relationship between these groups. The bourgeoisie were likened to ‘cannibals’ who fed on the flesh and blood of the workers. Those at Avignon were ‘housed like princes, fed, clothed like English lords! And all that with the life of the worker.’ At Marseille they ‘fattened themselves with the blood,

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the sweat, the tears of their poor brothers’.68 If someone discovered that the fat of young girls was an elixir of youth, Tristan suggested, the bourgeoisie would have no qualms about establishing factories to process the product.69 By using the metaphor of ‘cannibalism’, Tristan attempted to represent the extremity of the workers’ exploitation, which could hardly have been worse had they been physically annihilated. In this sense, she suggested, the manufacturer was simply the modern embodiment of the cannibal, revivified through the word of Malthus and the classical economists.70 The metaphor also represented the manufacturers as monsters who were out of place in the ‘civilised’ world, and whose actions were morally indefensible. Similarly, the metaphor of slavery encapsulated Tristan’s outrage at workers’ subjection to the power of their employers. Widely used in workers’ discourse in the 1830s and 1840s, it relied on a contrast with the ‘natural rights’ of free men, embedded in the popular consciousness during the French Revolution when the slaves of the French colonies had been freed.71 The discourse of ‘slavery’ or ‘serfdom’ protested against the new forms of exploitation which beset the propertyless classes at the turn of the nineteenth century. Tristan made the point that employers, like the slave-owners of the Americas, exercised power of life and death over workers since they controlled workers’ access to the means of subsistence. Workers suffered their oppression first and foremost in their maltreated bodies, through deprivation of food and sleep, offensive living and working conditions, and for women, through sexual assault and rape.72 In addition, Tristan condemned the ‘thought control’ exercised by employers and officials, who censored workers’ reading and limited their rights of association.73 But it was the workers’ disposability that most offended Tristan and which was captured through the ‘slavery’ analogy. They existed simply to be sacrificed for the monetary gain of others. In fact, slaves were actually more fortunate than proletarians, Tristan argued, since they were valued by their masters and thus were fed, whereas proletarians were not even guaranteed subsistence.74 Tristan found it incomprehensible that this new and extreme form of slavery did not preoccupy the reformers and philanthropists whose energies were focused on other causes beyond their own shores. Speaking of the prominent anti-slavery campaigner, Victor Schoelcher, Tristan observed: Here is a philanthropist who has been to Africa to study the condition of the negroes, who has written 3 thick books on liberating the white slaves…. A man with the ability to see the suffering of the blacks in Africa and who lacks the ability to see the suffering of his poor compatriots and brothers! I swear I don’t understand that at all[.] I was able to see the suffering of the blacks in America, the suffering of the whites in England—which doesn’t prevent me from seeing the suffering of my compatriots in France.75 The sense of outrage captured in the language of ‘slavery’ and ‘cannibalism’ revealed the extent to which a strong moral imperative lay at the heart of Tristan’s socialism. She was first and foremost an ethical socialist, inspired by a deep sense

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of social justice, who rejected the amorality of contemporary social relations and was committed to creating a society based on sound moral principles. If the suffering of the workers was inscribed first of all in their bodies, the socialist impulse for Tristan was also experienced through the senses in the first instance, as a deeply-felt emotional response to that suffering. Compassion and empathy evoked the call for justice, and posed the intellectual and practical challenge of finding an alternative pattern of social organisation. To Tristan’s way of thinking, the moral principles on which a transformed society might be constructed had been incarnate in the French Revolution, whose aspirations of ‘liberty, equality, and fraternity’ she espoused. Like the radical community in general during the July Monarchy, she claimed the legacy of the Revolution for herself. ‘Liberty, equality, and fraternity’, enshrined within the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1791, summarised the ‘natural and inalienable rights’ which everyone possessed at birth—at least in theory. The French Revolution did not stand alone, however, but marked one significant historical moment when the ‘spirit of liberty’ had made progress. The second great moment came with the Battle of Waterloo when Napoleon Bonaparte, the enemy of the Revolution, was defeated,76 and the third with the Revolution of 1830, when ‘liberty’ gained further headway. Since that time, Tristan argued, the role of defending ‘the spirit of liberty’ and promoting its principles had passed to the socialists. As she declared at Avignon: ‘we socialists, continuing the great work of our fathers, will die to see these three words become reality’.77 The emphasis on ‘liberty’ was not an indication that Tristan was essentially a ‘liberal’ rather than a ‘socialist’, as some have argued,78 because individual freedom was a principle as intrinsic to socialism in the early nineteenth century as was ‘equality’. However, given the misuse to which ‘liberty’ had been put, some socialists preferred to emphasise ‘equality’ by the 1840s.79 Tristan adopted a different strategy, arguing that all the revolutionary principles remained only abstract sentiments. She attempted to define what the ‘rights of man’ might mean in concrete terms, and thus to identify clearly what remained to be achieved: These three rights evidently correspond to the three slogans of the revolution of 1789:1—equality—the first right to work, 2—liberty—the second right to bread—3—fraternity—the third right to instruction.—Because to be equal all must work—to be free all must be able to live—to be brothers all must have received the same education to enable them to sympathise with each other.80 The ‘liberty’ which she espoused was not the individualism of the ‘liberals’, therefore, but one which recognised the liberties and rights of others. Moreover, while the right to survive was fundamental, survival alone was not enough. To live a fully human existence required nourishment of the intelligence. This was the prerequisite not merely for individual development but for social existence, because without the capacity to empathise with others, people’s ability to create structures for harmonious social life would remain inadequate. In addition, Tristan insisted on making specific provision for the ‘rights of

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woman’. The task for ‘the sons of 89’, she announced, was to ‘proclaim the rights of woman, in the same terms as your fathers proclaimed yours’. 81 Women’s inclusion within the programme of social transformation was fundamental to its achievement, but the genealogy of socialism, as she presented it, was largely a male one. The only female revolutionary Tristan identified was Charlotte Corday,82 but the works of others like Olympe de Gouges were well known to socialists of this period.83 Besides, Tristan was familiar with a range of Revolutionary publications, including some of its most radical literature, suggesting some familiarity with women’s role in Revolutionary politics. When super-vising the political education of one of her followers, for instance, she advised a detailed study of the political writings of the time, recommending not only ‘the Political Memoirs of Mme Roland’, and newspapers like the Moniteur and Père Duchêne, but also the works of ‘Marat, Robespierre, St-Just etc’.84 Although Tristan was not usually intimidated by the likely unpopularity of her ideas, her silence may reflect the fact that she was addressing a predominantly male audience in The Workers’ Union, and they were not necessarily sympathetic to the idea of ‘revolutionary’ women.85 It may have made good tactical sense to use an approach with which they sympathised, but in the process Tristan gave the impression that, as a child of the Revolution, she had ‘fathers’ to emulate but not mothers. If the ‘spirit of liberty’ had been incarnate in the Revolutionary struggle at various moments in the past, this did not mean that revolution was the tactic to be advocated by socialists in the present. Although Tristan sometimes feared that revolution was imminent, she opposed violence and argued that workers’ uprisings brought needless suffering and retarded the cause.86 She was constantly in conflict with Republican militants in 1844.87 In her view, they were enemies rather than allies of the workers; at best misguided, at worst dishonest. For every Castel, who argued that ‘men of ideas and intelligence’ could take over from the soldiers once the battle was over, there were many who envisaged no such transfer of power, as Tristan reminded him: ‘Castel have you never reflected on what happened at Brumaire and in 1830[?] but remember that on the day of revolution the soldier is master, and the next day he makes himself king.’88 She also disagreed with those she labelled ‘the so-called democrats’ over the proper objective for the struggle. While she always defended the goal of suffrage for both men and women, she insisted that suffrage alone was not sufficient: I am not one of those who see in universal suffrage a remedy for all our problems; political forms are only a means, but there is reason to believe that the suffrage would send to the Chamber men really devoted to social interests and that they would outnumber the representatives of private interests. It is in this hope that I desire universal suffrage, so as to arrive at a better order of things.89 This was the message she took to the workers of France. Mobilisation around political issues was preferable to political apathy, but it was less desirable than

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mobilisation around ‘the social question’, that is, in pursuit of a more far-reaching social transformation. Tristan found a widely varied level of political consciousness amongst French workers in 1844. Those at Avignon and Nîmes exhibited little interest in either political or social questions. At Bordeaux, Saint-Etienne, and Montpellier, they were ‘up to their ears’ in the suffrage struggle. At Lyon, however, Tristan was thrilled to find workers who had ‘abandoned the political domain for the social domain. So they are all “socialists”.’90 And at Agen a worker was even able to articulate what this meant, as Tristan recorded in her diary: One of them said something extremely good.—[‘]I have renounced political agitation because I realised that it’s pointless. Political measures stir people up, but they won’t work any longer.[’] This is superb!…And it proves the people’s good sense. Why do you think that a worker should struggle for universal suffrage and political rights?—He says to himself—after all what will I get out of it?—Nothing, I will be cheated again. It’s not worth the risk or the effort. And he does nothing. Whereas with the right to work and the right to instruction, he realises very well that he and his family will get something out of it—and so he acts.91 If Tristan was at odds with many in the Republican movement by 1844, her views on class relations also distanced her from some of her more moderate socialist colleagues. She was critical of the Fourierists, for instance, who insisted that their mission was to the bourgeoisie as well as to workers, and claimed that the ambiguities of their class position had not been resolved. They were ‘as bourgeois as the best bourgeois’.92 By contrast, she placed herself in the camp of the ‘enlightened bourgeoisie’: Today the bourgeoisie is divided into two quite distinct camps.—On one side are the deaf and blind…. On the other side are the intelligent bourgeoisie. I will call them the enlightened ones. In the camp of the enlightened, they listen with compassion, with love, to the great voice of humanity which calls out: Brothers! make room for us!…I myself belong to this camp.93 Tristan did not regard her own class position as problematic, since her dedication to the interests of the masses was obvious to all. In this respect she was more honest or self-aware than Enfantin, who claimed proletarian status.94 Manual workers were rare amongst socialist leaders, who generally belonged to the professional middle classes in this period, and who benefited from the wealth, education, and leisure this afforded to devote themselves to socialism. This was true of Tristan herself who, whatever her mixed social origins, became quite a wealthy woman. Her uncle’s shortlived pension had provided an initial nest egg, and it had grown quickly to a significant size. By 1835, before she began to earn money from her writings, she had enough capital at the ready to lend a substantial sum to a friend. Her investment portfolio at the time of her death included a 17,000 franc share in a loan raised by her notary for another client, at five percent interest; thirteen City of Paris municipal bonds, worth about 20,000 francs; 2,253

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francs deposited in the Paris savings bank; and seven shareholder’s certificates for the Paris-Lyon railway company, which were sold for more than 26,000 francs after her death. When probate was granted on her will in 1846, her two children received a legacy of more than 23,000 francs each.95 This did not place her amongst the ranks of the very wealthy, but in a society where more than seventy percent of people left nothing at their deaths it was a small fortune.96 The fact that Tristan was a socialist did not mean that she had to become poor: her aim was to raise the impoverished to a level of comfort compatible with their dignity as human beings, rather than to reduce all to misery. While she lived in more salubrious circumstances than the workers whose lives she aimed to transform, then, she accumulated few possessions. At the time of her death, the contents of her apartment consisted mainly of books, and her furniture and effects were valued at only 368 francs.97 Nevertheless, Tristan must have realised the value of her investments. Her notary would surely have reported to her at intervals on the state of her finances, and instructions she issued to sell her municipal bonds (and later to buy them back) suggest that she read reports on the market in the newspapers.98 There was thus a certain irony in the fact that, as Tristan sold and repurchased those bonds, in July 1844, she simultaneously reflected upon the iniquities of wealth. ‘Indeed money is Satan on earth, money is egoism[,] vice, corruption, rottenness,’ she wrote. ‘If I were a painter and I were asked to portray all the vices I would depict an immense pile of money on an immense canvas.’99 Her mistrust of wealth stemmed from a belief that it bred acquisitiveness, miserliness, and materialism, and hence gave rise to destructive social relations. She claimed to be detached from worldly possessions,100 but her critique of wealth was largely divorced from a reflection on her own situation. Besides, the fact that she appealed to workers for funds to publish The Workers’ Union because she could not afford to do so rings rather hollow under the circumstances.101 There was also a tension between Tristan’s belief in a ‘labour theory of value’ and her role as an investor and shareholder. Like a number of other socialists and workers of the period, Tristan argued that only labour enabled capital and raw materials to bear fruit. Employers and investors made profits by paying labour less than its true worth and pocketing the difference.102 This analysis pervaded Tristan’s writings in the 1830s and 1840s. She was scandalised, for instance, that ‘it is quite legal that those who produce nothing possess everything and that those who work 16 hours a day to produce everything possess nothing.’103 The contrast between the rewards accruing to ‘idlers’ and labourers was represented most starkly for her at Lyon in 1844. The suave and well-dressed Mr Arquillière, a cloth merchant and President of the Labour Bureau, presented a stunning contrast with the penniless weaver, whose only shirt, drenched with sweat, was hanging out to dry: The sight of [Arquillière] dressed in the best cloth, the finest linen, epitomising in himself and applying to his daily use the marvels of industry, the sight of this man and the shocking contrast which existed between him, the bourgeois, and that other man with no shirt, the producer, made me feel faint.104

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A small investor like Tristan may not have been in the same league as the merchant-employer Arquillière. Nevertheless, a gulf remained between her insistence on the right of labourers to the full product of their work, and her role as an investor whose financial gains relied on the denial of that principle. Tristan may not have examined her own financial situation in a critical way, but she did reflect in abstract terms on the inequities of the distribution of wealth in her society. She condemned the system of property ownership which disadvantaged and exploited workers, echoing the sentiments expressed in the working-class press of the day. The rights of capital were held as sacred, it objected, but the worker’s property—in a secure job and a living wage—was not protected or even recognised. This was seen as inequitable because the Revolution’s defence of the rights of property ownership had been based on the argument that property was gained through labour, yet what workers saw was that some possessed extensive property without labouring, and that others laboured incessantly without ever acquiring property.105 Like other socialists and working-class activists, then, Tristan asserted that the law should defend the worker’s right to security of employment just as it defended the property owner’s right to security of tenure. After all, work was not merely the basis of all wealth, but essential to survival: Reading the 1830 Charter, one is struck by a serious omission. Our constitutional legislators forgot that preceding the rights of man and citizen, there is an imperious, imprescriptible right engendering all others, the right to live. Now, for the poor worker who possesses no land, shelter, capital, absolutely nothing except his labour power, the rights of man and the citizen are of no value if his right to live is not recognised first of all…. For the worker, the right to live is the right to work, the only right that can give him the possibility of eating, and thus, of living. The first of the rights that every person enjoys at birth is precisely the one they forgot to enshrine in the Charter. This first right has yet to be proclaimed.106 Since ‘the right to work’ was the most fundamental of all rights, Tristan urged workers to make that their key objective. In Tristan’s view, to focus on schemes for co-operative production before having the principle of ‘the right to work’ accepted was putting the cart before the horse.107 The fact that property rights were sacrosanct while workers had few protections also meant in practice that workers were reduced to commodities for barter, effectively giving employers power of life and death over them.108 The immorality of this situation explains Tristan’s condemnation of property rights in 1844: I now understand that one cannot repeat too often that property is theft… and that all property is theft—property in land, in capital, in women, in men, in children, in families—in ideas, in other words all property. A terrible curse must be pronounced on property!—Within ten years the greatest insult must be this: ‘You are a property-owner.’109

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The socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon had coined the slogan ‘property is theft’, but his belief that large-scale property ownership was achieved at the expense of the property rights of others was widely shared at the time. Tristan’s aim (like Proudhon’s) was not to create a society from which all private property was eliminated, then, but to define the bases of property ownership more justly. The right of some to make a profit could not be allowed to override the right of all to live in dignity. Tristan thus insisted that she was not seeking to destroy property but to re-establish it on the basis of social merit, and thus of justice: I attack property as it exists today by virtue of the very principle of property.— I attack it in order to preserve it.—I attack property in the name of the most sacred of rights—the rights of labour!…The right to work attacks property; it’s the only way to attack it legally and justly.—Because what is more legal and more just than work!110 In engaging in debates over the meaning of ‘property’ and ‘work’, Tristan was part of the wider struggle by workers and socialists to define the meanings of these concepts, and thus to control the power relations implicit in and designated by them. Like her colleagues, too, she fought this struggle with the tools of discourse as well as through her actions in the political sphere. Words and ideas were important, the ideological heritage of the French Revolution providing the key concepts which were shaped as answers to ‘the social question’ of the day. But Tristan was never one to settle for words. Enough had been said, she insisted; now it was time for action. The trouble was to find a form of action which was effective given the constraints on political activity under the July Monarchy. The ‘workers’ union’ was designed to serve this purpose. Tristan insisted repeatedly that it offered a peaceful path to social change, utilising persuasion and moral pressure rather than more militant tactics to achieve its ends. Since Tristan’s ultimate objective was to give workers political influence equivalent to their numbers in society, however, the ‘revolutionary’ potential of her project was greater than she admitted. Besides, the authorities were adamantly opposed to any organisation of workers for political or economic ends. A well-organised system of undercover surveillance had Tristan in its sights as soon as she began to promote her ideas. At Bordeaux, where she made a brief visit in 1843, the police investigated her lifestyle and sought the names of her contacts. This was but a prelude to what awaited her in 1844, as her campaign amongst the workers swung into action. At Lyon, where the authorities were wellpractised in dealing with subversives, a contingent of police searched her room, confiscated her papers, and summoned her to appear before the examining magistrate. She was interrogated, and although the magistrate decided not to press charges, the police kept a close watch on her activities from the adjoining hotel room. Further south, in Marseille, Toulon, Carcassonne, Toulouse, Agen, she was kept under surveillance, visited by the police, warned against holding meetings. At Agen the police commissioner, who arrived at a meeting with a contingent of troops, put an end to her activities in the town.111

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If outrage at the personal injustices she had suffered had contributed to Tristan’s initial politicisation, then, her outrage clearly did not remain limited to her own concerns. She shared with her contemporary radicals a critique of the society which had been put in place by the French Revolution. The view that it had seen the ascent to power of the bourgeoisie, which today is out of favour in academic circles, was widely shared amongst both radicals and conservatives in the nineteenth century. It inspired socialists like Tristan to seek to spread the benefits of the Revolution’s message more broadly. That required not merely a reinterpretation of the ‘liberty’ it was held to have initiated, but an emphasis on ‘equality’ and ‘fraternity’ as well. In these values lay the promise of a new ethical basis for society, and one which could provide justice, dignity, and wellbeing for all.

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From the mid-1830s, and especially from 1843 when she devised her plan for the workers’ union, Tristan believed she had something of importance to say to the world. The problem was how to articulate that message in a way which would be heard, understood, and received. This dilemma was not unique to her, but it was particularly acute for a woman who wished to enter political debate, and assume a role of leadership. The metaphor of motherhood provided one vehicle for a woman to represent herself in a significant role, given the centrality of the mother-figure to representations of womanhood in the early nineteenth century.1 While ‘the duties of motherhood’ provided one justification for insisting that woman’s role was primarily domestic, the maternal discourse was also open to interpretations which construed woman’s role as a social one. The mother—the symbolic heart of the family, peacemaker, and counsellor—might well exert a positive influence in social life more generally, as feminists noted in contesting the construction of a restrictive ‘private sphere’. Motherhood could thus be interpreted as a source of liberation for women, and a vehicle for social transformation.2 Tristan has been accused of rejecting her maternity, detaching herself from her children and rejecting her own maternal body, to represent herself in ‘paternal’ terms.3 This oversimplifies the complexities of her relationships with her own children, and the material circumstances which helped to shape them. It also ignores the evidence that shows her representing her social role in maternal terms, and her maternal role in social terms. The discourse of motherhood which Tristan employed took several forms and served a variety of purposes over time. If it expressed her role as the biological mother of her own children, it also enabled her to represent her relationship with others, particularly the workers to whom she took her plan for ‘the workers’ union’. Through the ‘maternal’ image she defined her relationship with them as life-giving and nurturing: the central characteristics of maternity. But the mother-figure was also a figure of authority, whose role was to guide and lead her children. It could thus be a vehicle for claiming authority and expressing a notion of female power which was recognisable and even acceptable. It provided one language through which Tristan could express her aspirations as a female leader, in a society which offered few models to represent such a figure. For Tristan, as for most women of her generation, marriage carried with it the prospect of 115

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motherhood. She gave birth to three children in her four years of marriage: a son, probably born in 1822, who died in childhood; a second son, ErnestCamille, born in 1824; and a daughter, Aline-Marie, born in 1825. While she is sometimes criticised as a negligent mother,4 her childrearing methods reflected the prevailing practices of the urban artisans amongst whom she lived at that time. Each of her children was placed with a wet nurse soon after birth, Ernest (for instance) being sent to the town of Dammartin, in the countryside near Paris.5 Wet nursing was commonplace in France in the early nineteenth century, indicating that less intense forms of mother-child relationship were then accepted amongst broad sectors of society. They were altered only slowly by the exhortations of middle-class educators and doctors, intent on redefining the maternal role. Rousseau’s admonitions on maternal breastfeeding in the 1780s had already begun to influence the behaviour of the well-to-do, and the articulation of the ‘mother-educator’ model in the 1820s and 1830s strengthened that trend.6 For the wage-earning classes, however, economic factors surpassed ideological or emotional ones in shaping the mother’s role. In the cities breastfeeding was a sign of comfortable wealth or of abject poverty, and Tristan fitted into neither of these categories at that time.7 Wet nursing enabled artisanal wives like Tristan to continue to play their role in the family business, and this was probably the expectation when her sons were born. By the time Tristan’s third child was born, after her marriage had failed, breastfeeding had become a choice she could not afford. Her role became that of ‘breadwinner’ rather than ‘nurturer’, and took her away from them for lengthy periods. Aline was only about two months old when Tristan left France, having failed to find satisfactory employment in Paris. The extent to which Tristan loved and missed her children is not easy to determine. Even to ask such questions suggests expectations about the motherchild bond which are not necessarily appropriate to different historical and cultural circumstances. Besides, the sources which might uncover such personal sentiments do not exist. For instance, we know virtually nothing about Tristan’s elder son, not even his name or the dates of his birth and death, because the records have been lost. The only glimpse into Tristan’s feelings for him is provided by a solitary reference in a letter to her publisher, Ladvocat, shortly after the death of his own child: ‘No consolation is possible for such suffering,’ she wrote. ‘I have been through that myself.’8 Rather than being raised ‘like orphans’,9 however, Tristan’s children were frequently in the care of their maternal grandmother, Anne-Pierre Laisnay. This was not uncommon for the period. Amongst urban workers a grandmother’s presence freed a younger woman to contribute to the family’s income, and allowed the older woman to make a significant contribution to family wellbeing. Even in middle-class families it was not unheard of for children to be raised by their grandparents.10 In Tristan’s case, co-operation with her mother in 1825–8 ensured the children stable care financed by her own money-earning efforts. Even after Tristan returned to France her mother continued to play a significant role in the children’s upbringing, and seems to have had a particularly close relationship

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with Ernest. However, Tristan took her daughter to live with her in 1829, and this arrangement still prevailed in 1832. Ernest, then 8 years old, was in boarding school at Arpajon, near his maternal grandmother’s Bel-Air home. From 1831, Tristan’s childcare arrangements were determined not merely by financial considerations, but also by her conflict-ridden relations with Chazal. Given Tristan’s desire to cut her ties completely with Chazal, her ability to maintain her relationship with her son was particularly problematic. Chazal demanded to have his son back in 1832,11 and Tristan’s chance of keeping custody of a growing boy against the claims of his father were unlikely to succeed under the provisions of the Civil Code. In handing over Ernest to Chazal in 1832, then, she may have believed she was confronting the inevitable, and she may also have thought that Chazal would not maintain his newfound rush of paternal affection. In fact, Ernest seems to have lived at least intermittently with his grandmother over the following years: a fact which increasingly embittered Chazal.12 Evidence presented at Chazal’s trial also suggests that mother and son did see each other without Chazal’s knowledge, and it was Ernest who alerted Tristan to Chazal’s intention to murder her. This indicates not only communication between them but a son’s concern for his mother’s welfare.13 Custody contests and criminal trials provide poor scenarios for testing parental love, since genuine affection is usually combined with less noble emotions. However, most of the evidence pertaining to this couple’s feelings towards their children was produced for these two purposes. Tristan’s desire to keep Aline out of her husband’s control was part of a broader power struggle between them. Aline had been born after Tristan’s departure from the marital home, and Tristan used every available means to keep her hidden from Chazal. This was relatively simple while her husband showed no interest in his children. However, Chazal began seeking custody of Aline as soon as Tristan had accepted his paternal claim to Ernest in 1832. Tristan therefore left Paris with her daughter, finally placing Aline in boarding school at Angoulême as she headed for Peru. A little girl’s confinement to boarding school at the age of 7 was certainly unusual, unlike the experience of Ernest, but Tristan could not keep her daughter out of Chazal’s control if she left her with her mother. Nor could she take Aline to Peru with her, because she believed that the chances of success in her quest were greatest if she presented herself as a demoiselle. Chazal did not meet his daughter until she was 10, when he finally abducted her on her way to school. He needed to have Ernest with him to identify Aline, and to assure her that he was indeed her father. Since Tristan was determined not to surrender her daughter, gaining legal custody of Aline now became essential if she were to lead a separate life and have nothing to do with her former spouse. The likelihood of winning custody of her son had seemed remote in 1832, although Tristan reasserted that claim before the courts in 1838.14 But the ethos of a special mother-daughter bond, and the assumption that this link was both natural and desirable, was likely to work in Tristan’s favour in a custody battle over Aline. Chazal accused Tristan of favouring her daughter over her son:

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Why has she never felt any affection for her son? Why does she want to disinherit her son to give everything to her daughter? Why does she never enquire about what he is doing? Why? Why? but he’s a boy, and she feels nothing for him.15 He was seeking to make capital out of these claims, just as Tristan sought to do in protesting her attachment to Aline and highlighting Chazal’s paternal failings. But most of Tristan’s references to her daughter which have survived the passage of time are difficult to interpret since they were not private communications to Aline, but were written for public consumption. This is true, for instance, of her references to her daughter in Peregrinations of a Pariah, where Tristan’s sense of social alienation was conveyed largely by reference to her separation from Aline. Her unhappy marriage had transformed her into a cold and unresponsive creature, she argued, who abandoned her daughter in despair: Oh! wretched woman, I said to myself, what have I done? Sorrow has made me cowardly, unnatural; I have fled, unable to bear its weight; I have left my daughter in the care of strangers; perhaps the poor little child is ill, perhaps she is dead!16 Maternal duty triumphed in this account, as the repentant mother confessed her error and returned to her daughter’s side. But Tristan called on assumptions about the depth and endurance of maternal love to portray its loss as the ultimate betrayal; the ultimate sign of social malfunction. This is not to suggest that Tristan was lying and did not miss her daughter. However, the context and the terms in which she described her sense of loss also served other purposes. The account was part of her critique of the indissolubility of marriage, reinforcing her claims about its destructive effects. It also formed part of Tristan’s campaign to establish her credentials as a worthy woman, and was shaped by her readers’ expectations about the maternal role. Tristan’s references to Aline highlight the fact that she did not have a single and straightforward view of motherhood. Rather, her ideas took different forms according to the different purposes for which they were presented. Tristan would later reject the assumption that women’s lives should be child-centred, preferring to see their ‘maternal’ talents exercised on a broader social stage. But at other times a defence of motherhood as the right and duty of individual women served to challenge patriarchal power, as it affected Tristan’s own life and the lives of women in general. This representation of motherhood played a major role in justifying her claims for custody of Aline. Tristan’s 1838 deposition seeking a legal separation was designed to establish her maternal reputation, and the strength of her bonds with Aline, against the challenge of an unworthy (but legally privileged) father. Her submission to the courts constructed a history of maternal devotion which challenged not only Chazal’s paternal credentials, but the patriarchal legal code which advantaged him regardless of his merit.

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Chazal’s abduction of Aline from school in 1835, and the court’s subsequent confirmation of his paternal rights over the child, were portrayed as mere hindrances to the maternal bond and the moral duty it imposed: ‘A mother’s heart doesn’t baulk at such obstacles; the complainant heeded only her solicitude, she resolved to take her daughter back whatever the cost.’ Tristan did snatch the child back, ‘strong in her maternal devotion’, and tracked her down again ‘with maternal solicitude’ when her father removed her from the school in which they had then agreed she should be placed.17 When the child ran away from that school to her mother in 1836, Tristan’s response had been to respect not the law of the land, she asserted, but the laws of a mother’s heart: she had decided ‘to defend [Aline] against all attacks, to contest her [custody] at every level of jurisdiction if necessary, finally not to surrender her except to force, and when all resistance had become impossible’.18 Although Chazal’s alleged sexual abuse of Aline had been dismissed in 1837 for lack of evidence, it nevertheless became the key incident in the spouses’ separation case, as each sought not only vindication as the innocent party but custody of the child. The focus was less on Chazal’s behaviour as a father, however, than on Tristan’s credentials as a mother. In denying the charges Chazal turned the spotlight on his wife, outlining his efforts to defend his children against the woman who was an unfit mother. Chazal insisted that all his actions were motivated by a desire to protect his children, especially his daughter, from Tristan’s bad example. He accused her of leading her daughter down the path to prostitution, and argued that Tristan would trade even ‘the virginal reputation of her daughter’ to gain custody of the child.19 If proof of incest would have indicated the ultimate paternal betrayal, a mother could stoop no lower than to imperil her daughter’s innocence. Chazal argued that Tristan was feigning maternal love,20 but Tristan emphasised her maternal devotion. On receiving her daughter’s letter alleging sexual abuse, she claimed, her protective response was never in doubt: ‘Could this appeal remain unanswered? Ask every mother, the replies will not vary[.]’21 And when Chazal arrived at her door that evening seeking to reclaim his fugitive daughter, Tristan became demented by grief and anger: ‘The mother, in a state of emotion impossible to describe, placed herself like an insuperable barrier between her daughter and the one who had dishonoured her.’22 Like any good mother, she would defend her daughter to the death. Tristan insisted, then, that her maternal credentials were impeccable. Since the threat faced by her daughter was a sexual one, the account also highlighted the vulnerability of women even to those men legally designated their protectors. The reassertion of maternal protection was also a reassertion of the moral guardianship which women claimed; a superior claim to custody than that which the courts recognised. Tristan’s critique of the injustices inflicted on mothers in contemporary society was a recurring theme in her published writings from 1835. In Tristan’s writings maternal suffering became a metaphor for more far-reaching inequities which demanded her attention, illustrating the distorted values and priorities of society.

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In her accounts of both English and French working-class families, for instance, she expressed concern for individuals, and a broader social message. Tristan outlined the impossible situation in which women found themselves, forced to support a family or contribute to family income, but at the expense of caring for their children. Describing the poor districts of London in 1840, Tristan noted that children were left locked indoors or roaming the streets while their mothers worked, running the risk of accidents or of being led into mischief.23 The model mother that she described there was actually in prison, having been arrested for stealing to feed her children. This woman’s lot formed the basis for a parable about the injustices and failures of the social order. The prisoner’s action in putting the welfare of her hungry infants before the admonitions of the law illustrated not only the strength of the maternal bond, but the failure of society to attend to the cries of its needy children: This was a mother who had felt the stomachs of her poor children torn apart by the terrible sufferings of hunger…. [sic] She had stolen! Yes, no doubt, this was a culpable act which the unfortunate woman had committed in a moment of emotion and despair. But who was guiltier, she or that society which, with no justice and no humanity, leaves the poor person exposed to a terrible death and drives him thus to madness, to crime?24 The mother and her children were victims of a heartless social order in which the laws of humanity were subordinated to the laws of property; to the defence of inequity. This mother whose children needed bread had no difficulty in distinguishing between crime and virtue. In Tristan’s account she was a saint, divinely inspired to flout an immoral law. But she would be judged by men with other values: Men incapable of feeling, of understanding the sanctity of the duties of motherhood! and who, their eyes fixed on property, forgetting that they themselves owe the preservation of their life to the affection of a mother, would sacrifice maternal devotion to the respect due to property.25 Man’s law was heartless and materialistic; woman’s law maternal and compassionate. Male values and structures predominated in the current order, but the mother’s heart enshrined a superior moral code which gave priority to the protection of life, and pointed the way to the ideal future. Similarly, Tristan argued in The Workers’ Union that poverty made the experience of motherhood a frustrating and exhausting one for French working women, leaving them with little scope to envisage it as a personally fulfilling or morally useful role: And following the acute sufferings caused by the husband come the pregnancies, the illnesses, the unemployment and poverty, the poverty which is always there planted by the door like Medusa’s head. Add to that the endless irritation created by four or five loud, boisterous, and bothersome children clamouring about their mother, in a small worker’s room too small to turn

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round in. Oh! one would have to be an angel incarnate not to be irritated, not to become brutal and mean in such a situation.26 This description reiterated the theme of domestic disorder which marked many middle-class accounts of workers’ lives. But its picture of the harrassed and violent mother also established a negative model against which Tristan’s proposed social reforms might be compared, highlighting the impossibility for most women of filling the idealised maternal role under current conditions. In this respect it challenged contemporary definitions of motherhood, and also criticised social relations in general. In these examples the image of the mother became both a tool of social criticism, and the archetypal image of the altruistic and compassionate society in which the needs of all were met. In that ‘maternal’ society empathy and social commitment would replace the heartlessness of individual and competitive values, which disadvantaged the weak and powerless. Tristan made motherhood a metaphor for social responsibility and communal (rather than individual) values, pointing to a future in which the private maternal role, as advocated in the dominant discourse of the day, might no longer exist. For Tristan, as for other French social critics of the period, England represented the worst features of the new order of competitive individualism.27 English middleclass families, who were the beneficiaries of this system, thus served to illustrate the moral vacuum at its heart. Middle-class mothers abandoned their children to nannies and maids, Tristan charged, denying emotional sustenance to their children. In particular, the emotional deprivation of girls both highlighted and ensured the death of maternal love, since daughters became incapable of conveying the affection which had been denied them: Since the poor little girl is deprived of affection, her loving faculties remain inert; she is entirely ignorant of the sweetness of intimacy, of trust, of confiding in another, which every little girl is naturally inclined to feel for a mother who loves her.28 The failure of mothering was not simply a personal or private affair, but a symptom of social dislocation and a symbol of the moral bankruptcy of the bourgeois social order. In singing the praises of maternal virtue and advocating a reinforced ‘maternal’ role for women, Tristan did not envisage confining them to the family. In fact, she regarded with considerable suspicion the idealised family model, in which women were encouraged to devote themselves to the maternal role, since it promoted its own private interests over those of the collectivity. Within the bourgeois family, mothers were tempted to indulge their children and become absorbed in domestic matters, ignoring the needs of society. The maternal role idealised by the bourgeoisie was thus anathema to her:

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This family life seems atrocious to me and so immoral!—Forgetting humanity to devote oneself to one’s daughter, one’s son. I was sickened to see the comforts which Madame Goin takes pleasure in providing for her children. I couldn’t have lived like that for a week—it got on my nerves.29 Tristan’s critique of motherhood was not intended as a call to women to become better mothers within the bourgeois paradigm, then, but to justify a broader vision of the roles of women in society. She aspired to a new social order based on ‘maternal’ values; on an ethic of compassion, social interdependence, and mutual support. Society should treat its children like a loving mother would, with compassion and concern for all, but with particular attention to the weakest and most dependent. Like the Saint-Simonians before her, Tristan envisaged a society governed by ‘the compassion of a mother’,30 not the laws of the market. And since women were the guardians of maternal values, this vision enabled Tristan to challenge the limited physical and social parameters envisaged for them in the model of bourgeois domesticity, and open new spaces to women. In her more cynical moments, as she tried to mobilise the workers and get her project for the ‘workers’ union’ up and running, Tristan expressed the view that anyone who married was thereafter lost to the social struggle.31 Women’s ability to play a significant part in that struggle depended, then, on their preparedness to abandon ‘private’ family life for a life centred on the ‘social’ family. This was Tristan’s hope for Eléonore Blanc, the Lyon worker whom she nominated her successor: Perhaps one day she will emerge from this dirty and dark little street from this confined and mean little shop as a woman of the people powerful in her love and her faith! casting off the ties of family, of society[,] to devote herself entirely to the service of humanity.32 Tristan may have been describing here the exceptional role of the militant leader rather than one envisaged for all women. However, a transformed working-class practice pointed the way to the future, since the ‘working mother’, not the bourgeois housewife, was the model to be imitated. Tristan apparently favoured a form of socialised childrearing, although her views on this matter are not entirely clear. She was a strong advocate for kindergartens, such as she had observed in England, suggesting that they fostered habits of ‘association’, rather than the ‘egoism’ of the private family.33 This opened the possibility for all women to adopt a broader social role. Moreover, she wrote in 1840: If children were placed in public institutions from two years of age, there would be less need for the household; woman, given the nature of the education which she would have received, could, like man, provide for herself by her own labour, and this state of affairs would lead us towards the phalansterian system.34 This referred to Charles Fourier’s proposal for a society organised around selfcontained communities—phalansteries—where domestic life was replaced by

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communal living, children were raised in communal crèches, and women and men co-operated in all social tasks. But Tristan’s brief statement failed to explain who would mind the children until they turned 2, and how they would be supported during that time. Nevertheless, it was the clearest statement that Tristan was attracted by proposals for the abolition of the family as it was currently organised. However, Tristan was more circumspect in painting a picture of an idealised family for her artisanal clientele in 1843. The importance of incorporating women’s rights within the workers’ programme was justified by the promise of superwomen as wives: ‘You would have skilful workers for mothers, earning good wages, educated, wellraised and very capable of educating you, of bringing you up well,’ she wrote. The maternal dimensions of woman’s role were highlighted in this account: With her theoretical and practical knowledge, she will devote all her intelligence to running her house in an orderly, economical and understanding way.—Educated and appreciating the usefulness of schooling, she will put all her ambition into raising her children well. She will lovingly teach them herself, watch over their schoolwork, place them in apprenticeships with good employers; and finally, she will guide them in all matters with care, tenderness, and discernment.35 In this account children would be raised in communal establishments from the age of six rather than two,36 though how that would equate with the childrearing duties assigned to women remained unclear. This account is often cited as proof that Tristan idealised domesticity and held narrow views on women’s role in society.37 But the portrait of maternal devotion and domestic bliss in The Workers’ Union may have been designed to appeal to working-class men, whom she believed comprised the lion’s share of her audience, and whose artisanal organisations she saw as a starting point for her larger project of union. In fact, for some of them, the discussion of women in The Workers’ Union was too radical and suggested a public role which was unacceptable.38 It is difficult to say how representative this view was amongst workers, but it needed to be taken into account. At this point, too, Tristan had little faith in working women’s participation in social reform, since she believed their lack of education limited their social awareness. While she addressed both men and women in her text, then, it was aimed predominantly at men, who were charged with enrolling their wives and daughters in the union. This male-centred approach contrasts with the Saint-Simonian women’s appeal to women themselves to initiate change, and illustrates the social distance separating Tristan from working women. However, Tristan’s ‘tour of France’ would lead her to adopt a more positive view of women workers, and to encourage them to play a leading role in the union: a role that some, at least, were ready to embrace. Furthermore, since Tristan had no faith in a sudden and miraculous leap into Utopia, her focus in The Workers’ Union was also on transitional processes. The distinction between how motherhood might be exercised in the present and in the future explains some of the apparent contradictions in her writings on this subject.

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Moreover, the role she attributed to women as mothers complemented, and provided a model for, institutions which would socialise maternal functions in the future, and thus prepare children to be part of the wider social family. A condemnation of the selfishness of family life thus coexists in her writings with a critique of the poor mothering skills of women, and a lament for maternal deprivation. Tristan’s occasional appeals to the values and virtues of motherhood also contrast significantly with her own life, in which she played the role of mere de famille rarely. Her vivid portrait of the little English girl deprived of a mother’s affection recalls the early years of Aline, so often separated from Tristan even if by necessity, not to mention the experience of Ernest, whose primary relationship seems to have been with his grandmother rather than his mother. Little evidence remains by which to assess Tristan’s relationship with her children as they grew to adulthood. However, one letter from 1841 reveals a mother struggling to deal with a 17-yearold son with a mind of his own, whose behaviour was a cause of concern: I placed Ernest in a good boarding school where he learnt his language, a little drawing, mathematics, in short, he received an education sufficient for the condition of an artisan…but now Ernest exhibits an extreme repugnance for all the crafts.—Nevertheless, about six weeks ago, he decided to start with a printer in order to learn the trade of type-setter. But already he writes that he is giving up this trade; and, what’s more, he informs me that he wants neither it nor any other because it doesn’t suit him to be a worker.39 Fearing that Ernest would amount to no good (like his father, she pointed out), Tristan sought the assistance of her brother-in-law, the artist Antoine Chazal, to place her son in the civil service. She was particularly concerned that she had little maternal influence over her son, noting the degree of estrangement between them: Ernest, who left me at the age of seven years, no longer knows me, he doesn’t obey me, and I have no authority over him;—How could he respect and love a mother whom he has been taught to despise?—That would be a nonsense; and children are too logical to commit errors like that.40 The few surviving glimpses into Tristan’s relationship with Aline suggest that it remained a more affectionate one. Scattered references indicate that Tristan and Aline corresponded frequently during their separations, though no letters have survived. They at least exhibited the concern for each other’s welfare which illustrates an affectionate bond. Mother nursed daughter through an illness in 1839, and in 1843–4 the situation was reversed. When Tristan fell ill whilst travelling in the South of France, Aline made her mother promise to rest for a week to recover, and Tristan obeyed.41 But, like most such relationships, this one was not without its tensions. The strong-willed mother provoked resistance in her growing daughter, especially when it came to recruiting her into her political campaigns. Aline seems to have

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had some doubts about her mother’s undertakings, and may have shared her mother’s stubborn streak as well. In 1843, Aline wrote a twelve-page letter to her from Amsterdam outlining her own views on The Workers’ Union. Tristan described the letter ironically as ‘a masterpiece from the philosophical point of view, and on social and political economy’,42 recording her mixed feelings about her daughter in her diary: I am reasonably pleased with Aline, she understands the significance of the idea well enough—she takes an interest in it, at least in thinking and talking about it—that’s all she can do for the moment—of all those who know about the idea to this point, she is very certainly the one who has understood it best.—However, she is far from satisfying me.—What she lacks is faith, love, enthusiasm, devotion, action…. The lack of faith, of love creates an iron wall between us. The more she grows up, the thicker this wall becomes…. What madness then to count on making friends, disciples, successors of your children!43 Had she been able to settle for friendship with her daughter rather than insisting on making her a disciple, however, their relationship may have been more successful. By 1843, Tristan had discovered the ties of ‘spiritual motherhood’, a relationship which she deemed more satisfying than biological maternity. As Tristan turned her attention to the organisation of French workers, she discovered a new daughter in Eléonore Blanc, who became a devotee of Tristan’s ‘workers’ union’. Their relationship developed quickly, and Tristan soon began to refer to Blanc as her ‘child’, and envisaged her as her successor at the head of the union. Blanc reciprocated this affection, according to Tristan, thanking her ‘mother’ for giving her ‘such a beautiful life’. She was eager to assume the mission which Tristan sought to entrust to her.44 If Tristan was sometimes disappointed by Blanc’s lack of understanding,45 she nevertheless found in Blanc the qualities which were missing in Aline: unquestioning devotion and utter dedication to the cause, and a zeal and enthusiasm which came from the heart.46 Unlike Aline, who gave only an intellectual (and limited) assent to the merits of her mother’s project, Blanc surrendered herself to the demands of Tristan’s mission. Tristan’s vision became Eléonore’s vision. Tristan described ‘becoming incarnate’ within Eléonore.47 She took possession of her spirit and her life in a way which Aline had resisted. Blanc remained the ‘daughter’, Tristan the ‘mother’; unlike the child of the flesh, the child of the spirit did not challenge her wisdom or authority. This may explain Tristan’s ambivalence towards her biological daughter, and her closeness to Eléonore Blanc: I love and admire my poor daughter. There is much good in her. But I love my spiritual daughter more.—It’s a different kind of love.—So I would make sacrifices for Aline that I would not make for St John (that is what I will call Eléonore from now on) but I love St John better. I live more within her, she within me.—It would grieve me more to lose St John than Aline.—

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That evidently proves that I live more through the spirit and in the spirit than through the flesh and in the flesh.48 If Tristan’s relationship with Eléonore was special, her relationship with other workers was also conceived increasingly as one of spiritual affinity and kinship, for which an idealised notion of family ties provided the model. Simultaneously their ‘sister’ and their ‘mother’, Tristan was linked to them all within the social family. By describing herself in ‘sisterly’ terms, Tristan expressed both her identification with the ‘fraternal’ ideology of the workers’ movement, whose ideal of a society united by the bonds of brotherhood she shared, and her ambiguous place within its masculine confines. In the 1840s ‘fraternity’, along with ‘equality’, remained a radical slogan. Artisans, in the tradition of corporate solidarity, labelled their trade associations ‘fraternal’ societies as they sought to challenge the ‘liberty’ which was the dominant value of the new order.49 While women could be encompassed within such a fraternal ideal, their position was uneasy. They lived their lives outside the masculine sites where men enacted its rituals. To be a ‘sister’ was not the same as to be a ‘brother’, then, but Tristan’s claim to sisterhood indicated that a ‘spiritual sister’ could harbour the same aspirations for society as her brothers. Tristan claimed ‘sisterly’ status in her letters to those whose political aspirations she believed she shared. In particular, her letters to other militants in 1842–4 almost always bore the salutation ‘your sister in humanity’. However, the metaphor of motherhood added new dimensions to Tristan’s representation of her relationship with the workers. Rather than rejecting a maternal self-image,50 Tristan described herself as the workers’ ‘mother in the idea’, that is, in the idea of the workers’ union,51 and was recognised in this guise by a number of those workers.52 This representation may have served several purposes. Firstly, it may have helped to create a dignified perception of her intentions, as she went from town to town recruiting people to her ‘workers’ union’, when some were highly suspicious of her: In the evening I went to three taverns to speak to these men.—Well, I realised that I was an object of suspicion to them; they didn’t dare say anything to me, but it was easy for me to fathom their thinking.—The unfortunates, in their ignorance of men and of public affairs, not being able to distinguish true from false, took me for a schemer who wanted to get their signatures in order to exploit them.53 Even in more respectable venues than the tavern, the danger of being mistaken for an ‘adventuress’ might have been deflected by representing herself in terms which most decidedly denied the sexual overtones of a woman’s appearance before audiences composed principally, and often solely, of men. By presenting herself as the ‘mother’ of the workers, Tristan also evoked models already familiar to them through their artisanal organisations. The compagnonnage system, which organised many craftworkers in trade associations, enshrined the place of the ‘mother’ in its rituals. These organisations for journeymen workers (that is, for single young men recently qualified in their trade) allowed them to

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travel from town to town exercising their craft. In each town on their ‘tour of France’ the ‘mother’ of the local branch of the association welcomed them into lodgings. She provided meals and saw that they were looked after, and was often held in deep affection.54 Tristan’s own ‘tour of France’ in 1843–4 was modelled partly on the compagnonnage tour, and when she left Paris in April 1844 she was armed with letters of introduction to the main compagnonnage societies.55 Tristan formed links with the ‘mothers’ of the compagnons in the towns she visited. She sought information from them about the workers of that town, and sometimes held her meetings on their premises in an effort to avoid police intervention and police spies.56 In accepting her as ‘mother’, workers often interpreted her role within the compagnonnage framework too. This was particularly evident at Marseille, where she was given a formal compagnonnage farewell: It’s the first town where the workers have given me an escort.—Everybody proceeded to Erin, one league from Marseille, on the road to Aix and there, I said my last good-byes to them.—Waiting for the coach was something special and very touching.—When I was in the carriage they clapped hands crying: Good-bye! Good-bye, mother! Good-bye!57 From Tristan’s perspective, the ‘maternal’ image also captured the strength of the emotional bond she felt with the workers. She portrayed her relationship with them as one in which she brought them the ‘words of life’, the ‘idea’ which was the key to the remaking of society. She believed it was particularly significant that she, a woman, should take a message of hope to the people, since this role was linked in her discourse to the life-giving function of maternity.58 The workers’ reception of her idea, the understanding which she saw dawning on their faces, was presented by her as the moment at which they came to life. It was described in a complex set of images through which Tristan presented herself simultaneously as the lover, father, and mother of her disciples, planting the seed of life within their hearts in an explosion of passion, and delivering them into the world as rejuvenated beings: With what delirious passion my soul embraced their soul, when I felt the word of life which the Gods sent them through my mouth become incarnate in them and give life to their soul and ennoble their being!…When I saw one of them ready to receive life, my strength increased a hundredfold to make him great, beautiful and magnificent. Oh! this childbirth[,] however arduous it may have been[,] was filled with pleasures for the heart! Giving spiritual life to a brother! but that is being God creating in the universe!—Oh! it is the supreme joy!59 In this mixture of metaphors, with their contradictory gendered images, Tristan presented herself simultaneously in masculine terms, impregnating the receptive and thus ‘feminised’ workers, and in feminine terms as the mother of her sons. In the secret world of her diary, her passionate attachment to the workers could be

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expressed safely, sexual overtones jostling with maternal ones as she sought to find a language to express herself and to articulate her understanding of her social role. The maternal dimensions of Tristan’s relationship with the workers were less ambiguous in her account of her solicitous attention to their welfare. She portrayed herself as a loving mother, caring for and consoling them, listening to their troubles and easing their pain. They confided in her ‘their misfortunes, their sufferings’;60 they told her their stories of hardship and wept in shame at the indignity of poverty, while she consoled them as best she could.61 Like a mother, too, she proudly noted their talents and achievements, taking pleasure in any signs of capability and intelligence. Those who failed to live up to her expectations might evoke an outburst of frustration, but they were frequently exonerated as she identified external causes for their shortcomings. Their weakness and greater need elicited outpourings of maternal affection: I am unfair to these unfortunate men, I demand more than they are capable of.—I behave just like those mothers who, heeding only their passionate love for their children, stuff them with food in the hope of making them grow more quickly, and by dint of giving them too much, choke them and weaken them by making them ill.62 Above all, Tristan demanded passion, commitment, and enthusiasm from her worker ‘sons and daughters’, as she did from Aline and from her ‘spiritual’ daughter Eléonore. It was the ardour and devotion of the Lyon workers that drew her admiration, and the same qualities impressed her at Avignon and Marseille.63 This points to another dimension of the maternal image which Tristan adopted, for it indicates that her ‘maternal’ relationship with the workers was also a hierarchical one: a ‘sister’ was not an authority figure, but a ‘mother’ could be. As Aline and Eléonore had found, then, the price for maternal approval was surrender to the priorities and demands of the ‘mother’. Relations were difficult with those who questioned her authority, and her dealings with working-class leaders, in particular, were marked by a degree of conflict. ‘My frankness, my severity, my firmness terrify everyone who comes near me’, Tristan admitted. 64 Her confrontational personal style alienated a number of the proud, independent men whose credentials in the workers’ movement far surpassed her own, yet whom she challenged to submit to her better judgement. It was Tristan’s Promenades in London which had first brought her into contact with French working-class leaders. Agricol Perdiguier, head of one of the carpenters’ associations, had reviewed the book favourably in the artisanal paper, La Ruche Populaire, sending Tristan a copy with his compliments. She in turn suggested that they meet. Perdiguier had recently published his Livre du Compagnonnage, in which he argued for reform of the compagnonnage system and for a reconciliation between the warring trade associations. Tristan admitted that it was this book which had first given her the idea for The Workers’ Union.65 She then read the works of other leaders of the compagnonnage movement, notably those of the ironworker Gosset, and the locksmith Pierre Moreau, both of

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whom had also published proposals for reform.66 As she worked on the manuscript of The Workers’ Union, Tristan also sought the advice and reactions of workers, meeting with those asssociated with the paper La Ruche Populaire to read chapter drafts, and sending copies of drafts to workers outside Paris. Workers’ own ideas therefore played a significant role in the shaping of Tristan’s understanding of the problems workers faced, the sorts of organisations which existed to aid them, and the limitations of those organisations. Yet Tristan’s contention was that she brought them the ‘saving idea’ on which they must pin their hopes for the future. Her expectation that others would see the superior merit of her proposal and devote themselves henceforth to its implementation, understandably irritated many. In January 1843, for instance, she approached the stonemason and poet, Charles Poncy: I am very keen…to take possession of your soul, your heart and your spirit, because I would like to be able to make use of all that is fine and good in you to carry out my great and beautiful task!67 Poncy’s precipitate departure from Toulon before Tristan’s arrival may have reflected not so much a lack of ‘faith’, as Tristan suggested, as an unwillingness to be ‘possessed’ by this woman, however well-intentioned. Similarly, her early approaches to Agricol Perdiguier assumed her own superior position: Monsieur Agricol I am counting on you a great deal—we are going to see, if when someone comes bringing you a means of salvation, you workers stay there in the water, not to say the mud…[sic] without even reaching out a hand to grasp the plank which will save you!—save you from misery and ignorance[,] the two ulcers which are gnawing away at the working class.68 The unflattering image of workers floundering and helpless misrepresented the efforts of activists like Perdiguier, a militant not only in the compagnonnage movement but also in the Saint-Simonian socialist movement. Insofar as the ‘mother’ spoke to her ‘sons’ in these communications she spoke as an authority figure, and invited the resistance which soon eventuated. Tristan declared that she was willing to learn from leading workers, and asked for criticism of her own proposals. Sending a copy of part of her manuscript for The Workers’ Union to Pierre Moreau, for instance, she urged: As soon as you have read, and meditated upon my work, write me a letter, and let your letter be frank, unambiguous. That’s how I like people to speak to me.— If something shocks you tell me plainly; the same for everything you think is very good—It is very important to me to know what you find good and bad.69 Her correspondents took her at her word and pointed to a number of problems they envisaged with the proposal. Some doubted the practicality of the scheme. A number objected to her dismissive treatment of other social reformers. Some also

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rejected her desire to appeal for bourgeois assistance for the project, and her limited emphasis on demanding the suffrage.70 Essentially, workers argued that Tristan thought and wrote as an outsider: she did not really understand working people and see the situation from a worker’s point of view. They insisted that she should not publicly criticise workers’ lifestyle and habits: a reference to her description of the disorderliness of workers’ domestic lives and their drinking habits. ‘We can admit our faults amongst ourselves,’ one commented, ‘but we cannot permit strangers to come and lecture us.’71 Nor did she really understand at what price workers attempted to organise for social reform, as Gosset pointed out: You are engrossed by your correspondence, and Achille [François], president of a society, often goes to bed at 2 o’clock in the morning…. He then works from six in the morning until eight at night, and you will always find him at his workshop so that his comrades cannot accuse him of indifference to manual labour. There is a man who shows devotion. Explaining how much work went into organising the meeting she had requested, he pointed out that ‘On top of all that I have a job which is not a bed of roses, and the obligations which my role as head of the conjugal community impose.’72 Tristan’s claims of exhausting herself on the workers’ behalf, then, were put in context. However, Tristan rejected workers’ criticism of her ideas, regarding it as stupid and ill-informed. Perdiguier’s response to her analysis was condemned as a sign of vanity,73 Louis Vinçard’s and Louis Vasbenter’s objections as marks of ignorance.74 Gosset turned such charges back against her: ‘You point out our faults’, he wrote. ‘But in passing judgement without listening to us, do you believe you are infallible?’75 But Tristan remained undaunted. She noted in her diary: I devote myself to the principle and not to individuals.—Individuals are unintelligent, vain, stupid, ignorant, presumptuous, in fact they have all the faults of ignorance, but what does the repugnance that individuals provoke matter, we must think of them as dung with which to fertilize the young generation of workers.76 When a group of workers established a committee to study and rework her proposal, Tristan attempted to dissolve it. Their reply was swift and pointed: Do you think that we only exist through you, for you[?]…Did you not come to ask our opinions, these are the ones we wanted to give you. But you do not seem to want not only to act on them but even to hear them. When you came seeking us out, did you think you would find among us hired clappers [claqueurs] to applaud your work blindly? If that was your intention, you were very much mistaken. Nevertheless despite your rupture with the committee it thanks you no less for having electrified its soul with an idea which must one day ensure the happiness of humanity.77

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Like her biological child, then, workers chafed at and rejected the childlike and submissive attitude expected of them by Tristan. Her dismissive and high-handed comments may have been outbursts of frustration, but the certitude of her own correctness made it difficult for Tristan to accept criticism, let alone to modify her ideas accordingly. Convinced that she knew what was in workers’ best interests, convinced of her own guiding role as their ‘mother in the idea’, she remained impervious to their criticisms. Insofar as Flora Tristan exists historically as a ‘maternal’ figure, the maternal image conjured up by the sources foregrounds her relationships with her ‘spiritual children’. ‘Maternal’ representations in her writings privilege the latter stages of Tristan’s life over the earlier, and the many years when she and Aline lived together as mother and daughter do not feature in the historical record. But Tristan entered a ‘maternal’ relationship with others at a stage of her life when her relationship with her biological children—aged 19 and 18 in 1843—had become an inter-adult relationship. They were both economically independent, and no longer needed her presence and attention. However, the fact that Tristan came to envisage as her children others with whom she had no blood relation, suggests not so much the denial or rejection of those primary relationships, but their centrality in shaping her thinking about relationships in general. The maternal metaphor captured one of the meanings which Tristan sought to bestow on her relations with workers, her identity as a ‘maternal’ figure emphasising her lifegiving mission. She brought them the ‘idea’ which would open a new world to them, and she offered nurturance and guidance to her spiritual sons and daughters. But Tristan’s maternal self-representation differed significantly from that of the Saint-Simonian socialist women who were her contemporaries. In their writings the ‘Mother’ generally stood for the maternal qualities of the ‘feminine sex’ in general. It was a collective concept through which they projected a vision of women’s role in society.78 In envisaging her own ‘maternal’ role, however, Tristan placed herself apart from other women. Besides, if Flora Tristan’s maternal presence was at times a loving and compassionate one, tender and kind, it was at other times a stern and repressive one. In this sense the ‘mother-figure’ was a persona which enabled her to assert her authority over others, and thus to stand in a ‘paternal’ relationship to her ‘children’ within the symbolic family.79 Both personal experience and contemporary social discourse led women like Tristan to think of themselves as maternal beings, the notion of social ‘maternity’ featuring strongly in bourgeois models, as well as in socialist representations, of women’s role. Tristan’s appeal to a metaphorical ‘motherhood’ was thus a reinterpretation of the maternal ideal which occupied her more conservative contemporaries. The bourgeois conception of the maternal model sought to provide a basis for stability and order. The home, with the mother at its heart, was perceived as a bulwark against the tide of waywardness and social disruption which had erupted in 1789 and again in 1830. Motherhood was no longer merely women’s biological destiny, from this perspective, but their social mission in a world seeking to recover from the ravages of Revolution. In this context, in

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construing her mission as one of preaching ‘union’ and peaceful social reform to her ‘sons’, Tristan may have been guilty not so much of neglecting the social imperative of maternal duty, as of taking the rhetoric of maternity too seriously.

8

Lover of humanity

If you are not capable of attaining glory, draw lasting pleasure from your heart …, do good to your brothers, love humanity; this lover will never betray you, and both at twenty and at sixty you will be able to love it passionately.1 In the early pages of Tristan’s novel, Méphis asked Maréquita: ‘Why are you suffering?…Why does life no longer hold any attraction for you?’ She replied: ‘I am suffering because I want to be loved passionately, and nobody loves me…. Life without love is sterile, it is cold, empty…, and I would rather die than live in this tomb any longer.’ One subsequent story-line of the novel told of Méphis’ attempt to convert Maréquita to a new way of understanding love and her purpose in life. ‘You must kill this heart, this wretched kind heart, source of tears and immoderate desires,’ he advised her. Besides, he added: Do you think that man’s only mission on this earth is to love a woman, or that hers is to be loved by a young fool?…If that were the case, we would all die at thirty or thirty-six, because, after that, few people maintain enough illusions to fall in love. Oh! no, Maréquita, we have other things to do.2 As a woman, Maréquita had been taught to see herself reflected through the eyes of others, so that her happiness depended upon winning and maintaining the affection of another individual. Méphis sought to persuade her that a life of achievement in the public domain, or of devotion to the public good, promised greater fulfilment. This lesson was to be a difficult one, consuming another 600 pages of text, and would eventually defeat Maréquita. Only her daughter, educated differently, would be capable of living according to this new precept. Since Méphis is a work of fiction, it might well be seen as bearing little relationship to Tristan’s own life and her own views on love. But similar sentiments about love are expressed elsewhere in Tristan’s private correspondence and nonfiction, and she herself asserted that her novel represented her personal views on the subject.3 It therefore offers some insights into her attitude to love and sexuality, and in particular, into her increasingly passionate love for ‘humanity’. Such sentiments 133

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have given rise to much speculation amongst scholars about Tristan’s own sex life: a speculation which was also rife during her lifetime. Some commentators have focused on Tristan’s personal psychology, detecting signs of sexual dysfunction such as frigidity, a confusion over her sexual identity, or a tendency towards sadomasochism.4 Others have found a political explanation for her apparent rejection of sex, given the associations between sex and male power.5 Yet others have seen the problem as a problem of representation, emphasising the difficulties a woman faced in representing herself as a sexual being in that era, particularly if she wished to challenge her assigned position within the sexual order.6 Arguments on such subjects remain highly speculative, since the evidence surrounding these private matters is extremely fragmentary. This explains why Tristan has been seen in such contradictory terms: as frigid and as promiscuous; as heterosexual and as lesbian. Nevertheless, while her personal sexual behaviour will always remain largely hidden from prying eyes, her portrait of herself as the ‘lover of humanity’ provides another insight into her articulation of her social role. This concept expressed, at one level, her detachment from individuals, as least as far as sexual relations were concerned. But by seeing herself as ‘lover of humanity’—an idea she explored in her private diary—she simultaneously freed herself to express a sensual and passionate side of her nature through her ‘spiritual’ relationships with her followers. She found in their love and commitment a bond which satisfied her emotional needs. And as their ‘lover’ she articulated her desire for union with the beloved, her dedication to their happiness and wellbeing, in a form which gave added depth and meaning to her political project. An exploration of Tristan’s views on love and sexuality, her critique of contemporary patterns of sexual relations, and her vision of their reform and renewal, provide some insights into how and why she might have imagined her relationship with her followers in such terms. Tristan was highly critical of patterns of sexual behaviour in her society. She frequently portrayed men as brutes, driven by carnal instincts which they could not or would not control. Unrestrained sensuality was deplored in women, too, since it emphasised women’s physical attributes over their moral qualities, and catered to the male predatory instinct of which Tristan was deeply suspicious. But men’s obsession with their own satisfaction was the nub of the problem. It brought in its wake the debasement and abuse of women, who suffered from male violence and brutality. Sex was a battleground on which victory went to the stronger, as the debauched Jesuit, Xavier, argued in Tristan’s novel: ‘Here on earth man is entirely free to have his own way; men, obeying the instincts of their appetites, take women by force, and [women] retaliate with lies and deception; the scales are level and the harmony perfect.’7 However, the scales of power were not level at all, Tristan insisted, as the experience of the character Maréquita showed. Méphis’ contest with male licentiousness was an intellectual one, as he debated the issue with Xavier, but Maréquita lived it personally. Exceptionally beautiful, she was a victim of male lust. Her love for Olivera, arrested for complicity in a Carbonarist plot, made her agree to sleep with the Duke who could save his life. Unbeknown to her, however,

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this deal had been set up by d’Haczal who was obsessed with her. He offered to marry her, not to save her from disgrace as she believed, but in order to buy favours at court by promising Maréquita’s body in payment. The ultimate indignity befell her when Olivera, saved by her love, repaid her sacrifice by raping her. The scene was described vividly, if melodramatically.8 Maréquita fainted with joy at being reunited with the man she loved but could never marry. He took advantage of this to undress her, at which point she regained consciousness and began to struggle: She tried to put her clothes back on.—Olivera interpreted the fear that she was displaying on seeing her breasts completely exposed as a coquettish ploy and thought he should act as he was accustomed to doing, in other words bring matters to a head. So he adopted the manners and shamelessness of the boudoir to prevent Maréquita from doing up her stays, from fastening her dress…. She realised that she was physically incapable of escaping his lewd caresses, his lascivious gaze, his cynical words, and turned to prayer for assistance.— Inflamed by the young woman’s resistance, Olivera’s frenzy knew no bounds, and aware only of his own burning desire, he did not hesitate to use brute strength to overcome the unfortunate woman who continued to resist him.9 Olivera’s parting words complimented her on her skills as an actress, and assured her that he would happily become her lover: ‘but I would prefer that the preliminaries be briefer than today’.10 The contrast which Tristan established fictionally between Maréquita’s altruism in sacrificing her own pleasure and happiness for the one that she loved, and her three male exploiters’ egocentric focus on their own satisfaction, was a contrast Tristan did not confine to the pages of her novel. It expressed her view of much of the behaviour she saw around her, as well as establishing the basis for comparing real and ideal forms of sexual relations. In real life the rapist remained the archetypal exploitative male. Tristan described a prisoner she saw at Coldbath Fields in 1839, who had raped and murdered his twelve-year-old sister-in-law: He was a veritable faun, he had that grotesque build, with an enormous belly, shoulders like Hercules, a head like a pig and very short legs; his lustful expression, his thick funnel-shaped lips, his bulbous nose, everything about him revealed the satyr, as paintings portray it.11 The man was a brute, not fully human. Faced with such types women not only found themselves on a battlefield, as Xavier had suggested, but were subject to the law of the jungle in which wild beasts pursued their prey. Men’s sexual abuse of women was a subject discussed by other women in the 1830s and 40s also, and Tristan’s critique had much in common with theirs. For instance, the idea of women as the ‘prey’ of men occurred in the writings of George Sand, where the inconsiderate man, seeking his own pleasure, made the sexual encounter one of possession rather than shared passion.12 The fear of sexual attack, evoked by Tristan in Méphis as well as in her account of her travels, also featured in

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the Saint-Simonian women’s writings, where they described women’s vulnerability in their own homes and in the city streets. As Angélique and Sophie-Caroline asked in the Women’s Tribune in 1832: ‘How can [women] escape from the brutality of men?’13 Tristan’s belief that prostitution provided telling evidence of the debased character of sexual relations was also widely shared. Like the Saint-Simonians and the Gazette des Femmes before her,14 she attacked both inadequate female employment opportunities and the sexual dynamics of prostitution. She found pimps almost as abhorrent as rapists. They resembled ‘animals who have only their appetites to drive them’,15 and like rapists they preyed on the weak: ‘Completely oblivious to modesty, to all respect for humanity, to all love for their fellows, [they] reduce God’s creature to the ultimate abjection, debase her below the level of the brute!’16 But while the Saint-Simonians of the Women’s Tribune—working women who shared the same social background as prostitutes—were generous in their judgement of these women whilst distancing themselves from their behaviour, Tristan found prostitutes ‘revolting’, their immodesty an affront to respectable female behaviour: I will never understand the prostitute! Surrendering herself! Smothering both her will and her feelings; delivering her body to brutality and suffering, and her soul to contempt! The prostitute is an incomprehensible mystery to me… [sic] I regard prostitution as a frightful madness, or else it is so sublime that my humanity cannot grasp it. Defying death is nothing; but what a death faces the prostitute! She is betrothed to sorrow, dedicated to humiliation! Endlessly repeated physical tortures, constant moral death! And disgust with herself!!!17 Tristan regretted mainly their lack of dignity and self-respect, and found their voluntary surrender to possession by men, their complicity in their own subjection, alienating and incomprehensible. Men’s attitude to women was deemed ultimately responsible for this dehumanisation. Prostitutes exemplified the fact that men regarded women simply as objects for their own use and pleasure.18 In this sense, the prostitute’s situation in selling her body for money was different in degree rather than in kind from that of the legal wife, who was also ‘sold’ in marriage under the dowry system: a comparison made frequently by nineteenth-century feminists.19 Whether this profoundly negative assessment of relations between the sexes owed anything to Tristan’s personal experiences is difficult to say, since the history of her intimate relations is virtually impossible to trace. She was extremely discreet about her sex life preferring, like most people, to keep such matters to herself. The only man with whom Tristan certainly had a sexual relationship was her husband and, again like most people, she did not leave detailed records of the experience. The one source where Tristan discussed her own sexual feelings, the letter written by Tristan a month before her marriage, can be read in different ways: I was telling you, my dear, that I really wish the evening which I was so looking forward to was still to come, for I experience terrible pains especially when I walk;…but what happy moments too!…[sic] All night long I thought only of

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you, I was still beside you, in fact I saw none but you in all of nature. Farewell friend of my heart until morning[. H]ow this heart was calling you, my eyes were searching for you, my mouth sought yours, my arms sought to clasp you to my breast, to this breast which has known pleasure only through you.20 This statement might be interpreted as evidence that Tristan initially enjoyed her intimacy with Chazal, however unaccomplished the lovemaking may have been, or alternatively that, despite her rather formulaic claims of rapture, her early sexual experience with Chazal was marked predominantly by pain rather than pleasure. After all, a woman was supposed to enjoy a man’s embrace, and to reassure him of that fact. In either case, any sexual compatibility that may have existed in the early days of their relationship disappeared quickly. A worse case scenario suggests that her experiences with Chazal provided a model, even if exaggerated, for the abusive men in her novel: for Olivera, who wanted to speed up the event and not waste time on preliminaries; as well as for d’Haczal (an anagram of ‘Chazal’), who sought to use Maréquita as a prostitute: a charge Tristan also made against her husband.21 The repulsion which Tristan later felt for her husband, her inability to tolerate the sight of him or to be in his presence, was regarded by some as exaggerated. However, it may suggest a deepseated physical abhorrence stemming from earlier violence or disregard for her feelings. The image of Tristan constructed before the courts was one of a sexually promiscuous woman, whose complaints against her husband and demand for a separation reflected her desire for sexual adventure; a woman whose quick succession of pregnancies was evidence of her own rampant sexual instincts rather than of Chazal’s exercise of his ‘rights’ to her body. At the hearing of her request for a legal separation, Chazal’s lawyer, Jules Favre, asserted: I read in the petition some trite phrases about her aversions. On this point hyperbole is smugly taken to the limit there. This fabled abstinence is belied by the facts. Three births in four years bring Mme Chazal down from the platonic heights where she has been so inappropriately placed. She was pregnant when she fled [from the marriage], the only reason for her departure was the need to satisfy her desire for luxury and pleasure.22 The sexual self-image which Tristan constructed, by contrast, was one of restraint. Her defence of her own moral integrity depended upon painting Chazal as a sexual predator who exploited her sexual vulnerability, not merely through the marital relationship, but also by attempting to make it a source of financial reward. Each of these stories conformed in different ways to the prevailing sexual discourses about women: the discourses of ‘Madonna’ and ‘Whore’, of female purity and its negative, female promiscuity. Both Tristan and Chazal sought to establish the ‘truth’ of their claims about themselves and each other by calling on these commonsense yet conflictual discourses.23 Nevertheless, Tristan was not averse to men, but to certain models of male behaviour. She was flirtatious at times, enjoyed the company of men, had a number of devoted male friends, and had the opportunity, at least, for a number

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of sexual relationships with men. But any indiscretion would have played into the hands of Chazal and his lawyer, providing grounds for a prosecution for adultery and destroying any hope of custody of her children. Chazal suggested, for instance, that Tristan’s relationship with her lawyer, Emile Duclos, was an intimate one. He not only blamed Duclos for exploiting all legal loopholes to deprive him of his children, but insinuated that Tristan was Duclos’ mistress. Why else would he have rented a ‘superb apartment’ for her?24 At his trial for attempted murder Chazal asserted that he had also wished to shoot Duclos: ‘her accomplice, the architect of all the evil plots which have reduced me to despair’.25 If Duclos appears as a sympathetic presence in Tristan’s life from 1832, however, there is little to suggest that their relationship was ever more than a professional one, though this does not prove, of course, that it was not. The fact that Tristan’s apartment was rented in Duclos’ name reflected the legal vulnerability of the married woman, who could only keep an estranged husband from her apartment if it were rented in another man’s name. It then became his property and subject to laws of trespass. Similarly, in fleeing to Duclos’ place when pursued by Chazal in 1832, Tristan simultaneously sought the protection of her lawyer, and the refuge of another man’s property where Chazal could not enter. As her lawyer, too, Duclos provided the obvious conduit for Tristan to correspond with her mother without revealing her own whereabouts, at the time when her mother was still on friendly terms with Chazal.26 And when Aline ran home from Chazal’s place complaining of sexual assault, it is hardly surprising that she sought her lawyer’s assistance.27 In all these incidents Duclos’ professional skills were called into play, but there were moments when his assistance went further than Tristan might have been entitled to expect from her lawyer. For instance, he was probably the person who put Tristan in touch with the Bourzac family, where she left Aline as a boarder during her visit to Peru, and he may even have been the one who promised to watch over Aline like his own daughter in her absence.28 The fact that he contributed 10 francs to Tristan’s appeal for funds to publish The Workers’ Union in 1843 may suggest that he had become a friend, but there is no evidence to suggest that he was ever more than this. Tristan’s revelations in Peregrinations of a Pariah about her relationship with Captain Chabrié on board the Mexican were also seized upon by Chazal as evidence of adultery. Again, it is difficult to establish the nature of this relationship, despite the fact that Tristan wrote at some length about it, and she herself suggested that her account would probably be disbelieved: ‘I fear that a portrait of true love, on the one hand, and of pure friendship, on the other, will be regarded as improbable in this materialistic century.’29 Tristan admitted that Chabrié had fallen in love with her, but argued that, while grateful and flattered, she had sought to discourage him because she was already married. She even told him that she was an unwed mother in order to explain her repugnance for marriage. When he insisted on marrying her regardless of this fact she felt trapped, she reported, and since he was so unhappy at her refusal, and since she had

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become so reliant on his protection, she agreed that she would marry him in America. This promise was more difficult to evade than she had expected.30 The image of herself that Tristan created in Peregrinations of a Pariah was of a naïve young woman, unaware at first that Chabrié was in love with her; able to bestow upon him the affection of a ‘sister’—kissing him on the forehead, sitting with his head in her lap, having him in her cabin for hours on end—without misleading him; and feeling for Chabrié not passionate love, but affection and gratitude.31 Again, however, it seems unlikely that Tristan would have admitted in print to having become Chabrié’s lover, if that were the case, given her legal situation. Tristan portrayed Chabrié as a perfect gentleman and a worthy if uninspiring suitor, while her own behaviour appears in a very bad light. Once his usefulness had been exhausted, it seems, she discarded him, on the grounds that it was in his own best interests. She treated Chabrié coldly and cruelly in order to ‘detach him from [her] forever’: hardly the actions of ‘pure friendship’ let alone of love.32 The unrequited passion for Tristan that had turned to hatred in André Chazal, therefore, was also felt by Chabrié—at least according to Tristan.33 A number of other men also reported falling in love with her, only to have their love ignored or dismissed. For instance, a prominent Fourierist and working-class militant at Lyon, Joseph Reynier, was smitten by Tristan too: Oh! dear sister, if only you were aware of the efforts I make to remain calm in your presence, when I am devoured by a desire which consumes me secretly and which I cannot shake off. A glance from you, a favour which I would regard as heaven-sent would be sufficient for my happiness.34 But Tristan had clearly suggested that he pull himself together and control his feelings: ‘Stop telling me that I must do my utmost to crush this part of my being, for God, who is great, no more desires the suicide of the body than that of the soul,’ he replied.35 The student Charles Fillieu’s declaration of love two months later was also dismissed unceremoniously by Tristan as inappropriate.36 Similarly, Alphonse-Louis Constant’s description of Tristan suggests that he himself had felt the pangs of unrequited passion: Love her, on the great and unique condition that she will not love you… for those whom Mme Tristan loves, she destroys (morally, you understand). She is the Circe of antiquity, without her magic wand; she is a siren who does not sing, but devours; she is an adorable vampire who kills your soul and leaves you your blood.37 This image of the castrating and phallic woman, as Desanti describes it,38 says more about Constant than it does about Tristan. She was not responsible for men’s feelings, and certainly had no obligation to surrender to their passion to make them feel better. But the loyalty and affection of other men indicate that not all saw her in this light, and if they, too, were frustrated would-be lovers, there are no records which suggest this.

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Tristan’s relationship with Louis Evrat—doctor, philanthropist, and advocate in France for Robert Owen’s socialist doctrine—was of this kind. Perhaps they first met at the time of Owen’s visit to Paris in 1837, when Evrat played a prominent role as organiser and interpreter, and when Tristan publicly announced her admiration for Owen’s ideas.39 Their paths crossed again in England, where they were ‘foreigners’ together, and in 1843 he accompanied Tristan on her visits to the newspaper La Ruche Populaire to read her proposal for a ‘workers’ union’.40 Evrat reflected nostalgically on their relationship in 1844, when he had moved to Isère, in the south-east of the country, to take charge of an asylum for the insane: It is true, my friend, we will probably never see each other again. That thought grieves me.—Consolation can only be found in the works of charity which you and I propose to perform and also in the memory of our intimacy.—It has been good and beautiful on either side.—I will never forget it.—The danger you faced began [the friendship]—; our encounter on foreign soil in London cemented it, and finally the relationship of frankness and confidence established between us has crowned it. You honoured me with a noble trust in placing in my hands the fate and the guidance of your Aline, and that on several occasions—I was very touched by this honour and my devoted affection for your daughter has continued to grow.41 A similar, apparently undemanding, affection for Tristan marked her relationship with the artist Jules Laure, a shadowy figure in Tristan’s life but a trusted and devoted presence from about 1836, when their names appeared together on a petition opposing capital punishment.42 The origins of Tristan’s relationship with Laure are unknown, but their friendship may have developed out of their political activities, or their mutual interest in art. Tristan published two articles on art in 1838,43 and counted other artists like Charles-Joseph Traviès de Villers amongst her friends in the late 1830s.44 Laure had studied under Ingres and was an accomplished painter. He submitted a portrait of ‘Madame Flora Tristan’ to the Salon of 1837, and their friendship was affirmed by a letter Tristan wrote to another friend in February 1840: My dear Jules, who is working like a trojan in order to finish some paintings for the salon sent for me yesterday morning beseeching me earnestly to spend the whole day with him to give him encouragement—I couldn’t refuse him and I stayed at his place until 10 p.m. The salon closes on Tuesday…and I greatly fear that the poor fellow won’t have completed the two paintings he wants to submit—you see dear friend that it is hard to care for someone without it upsetting your plans.45 Laure’s political background and ideas also gave him much in common with Tristan. He had been associated with the Saint-Simonian movement in the early 1830s, but by the 1840s Tristan and Laure shared an interest in the ideas of Charles Fourier’s ‘Societary School’. Laure’s name appeared in 1840 on a list of artists affiliated with the school, while Tristan was involved in several projects which it undertook in this period.46 Laure also made donations towards the publication of

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The Workers’ Union in 1843, and even helped Tristan to copy out the manuscript, although she was initially sceptical about his understanding of her project.47 Furthermore, he was selected to keep an eye on Tristan’s affairs in Paris when she was absent on her ‘tour of France’. The outlines of Tristan’s relationship with Laure can be traced, then, through the reference points of politics and public activity, but no evidence remains to indicate the tenor of their personal lives. The strongest indication that they felt a special affection for each other is provided by events after Tristan’s death. Her friends in Bordeaux wrote immediately to her children, and to Jules Laure. He became the children’s assistant guardian, protecting their interests in the notarial procedures which settled Tristan’s estate, and was a witness at Aline’s marriage in 1846.48 Friends or lovers, they were there for each other when needed. As in Evrat’s case, the fragments of this relationship indicate a bond marked by broad intellectual compatibility and a preparedness to give, not by sexual demands and by the desire to take, which Tristan condemned as typical of men. These examples confirm the truth of Tristan’s assertion in 1844 that she could have chosen quite a different life: Seeing this family scene of Mr Goin and his wife, whom he loves deeply and who loves him, I thought of the happiness I might have enjoyed had I wished to form a relationship with one of the many men whom I have encountered in my life. Indeed, even today I could still do that, but I would not agree to it for anything in the world.49 She denied being interested in such a selfish alternative at that stage of her life because she was obsessed with the mission to be accomplished. This may explain her irritation with Reynier and Fillieu, who lost sight of the greater goal to focus on a personal relationship with her. She nevertheless noted: ‘After [my tour of France] I resolve to rest for three months.—I will try to get together with someone who pleases me and go with him to collect my daughter and take her to Italy or Spain’.50 Tristan was not hostile to sexual passion either. She was not a prude, and was critical of the mistrust of the passions in the Catholic religious tradition.51 However, she insisted on relating to men on her own terms, that is, not as the object of male desire, but as a subject in her own right. Her novel criticised not only male sexuality, but also the expected pattern of female sexual behaviour in her society: the reluctant and hence exploited woman. Maréquita’s sexual victimisation occasioned a critique not just of the predatory male, but of women’s acceptance of their own objectification. If men cast women as victims, women accepted the role mutely, and both patterns of sexual behaviour needed to change. A superior pattern would see women take the initiative in sexual relations, as the character Méphis explained to Maréquita. He ‘found it shameful and degrading, for a woman, to want to appear as though she only succumbed to force, and to let herself be taken as though by violence’. Women’s submissive role in love was a tacit acceptance of ‘the tyranny of the strong sex’. They hid behind the claim of male seduction, rather than recognising their own desires and their power.52 The narrator remarked:

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In the future, when woman is conscious of her power, she will become liberated from the approbation of others and those little subterfuges, which today help her to deceive men, will become unnecessary to her; when the time has come woman will say:—I choose this man for my lover, because my love will be a powerful influence on his intelligence and because our mutual happiness will reflect on others!53 Tristan thus imagined a woman assuming subjectivity through her sexual assertiveness, naming and acting out her own desire, as Maréquita finally overcame the inhibitions instilled in her and invited Méphis to be her lover. Tristan referred explicitly to these fictionally-developed ideas on sexual relations in her reply to one of her own would-be lovers, Charles Fillieu: Mr Fillieu, if you had read my Méphis you would certainly not send me such a declaration—For you would have known that I have a system of my own in matters of love, and you should be aware for your information that I put into practice in my own life the systems which I publish in my works. Calling for woman’s independence, demanding that she be perfectly free in every respect, I want her to be the one who takes the initiative in love.—I want her to say to the man she loves—‘I love you; do you wish to be mine?’—This explains to you how I understand the love relationships which should exist between woman and man[.]54 She asserted, moreover, that she had always lived according to this maxim: ‘Never in my life have I belonged to any man—for it has always been me who has taken the initiative.’ This was probably an exaggeration, and contradicted her claims about her relationship with Chazal, but it represented at least how Tristan would like to have behaved. Besides, it suggests that, while she rejected the possessiveness with which men approached sexual relations, she herself envisaged love as a demanding passion in which union with the other was strongly associated with power over them. Tristan was a highly passionate woman capable of great emotional intensity. The problem was to find an adequate and acceptable outlet for such feeling. There was a touch of wistfulness about her declaration to another friend, the artist Charles-Joseph Traviès, that she was destined to live her life alone: ‘In all likelihood, my poor friend, you and I are condemned to wander this earth without meeting the one that we desire—that we are calling—that we see passing in our dreams. Ah! that’s a great suffering but sharing it between two already alleviates it by half.’55 The dilemma stemmed from her own dissatisfaction with what love promised; from the sense that no-one could offer her what she was seeking. She expressed a similar sentiment to Olympe Chodzko: I feel an ardent desire to be loved. But I am so ambitious, so greedy or so selective at the same time that nothing that I am offered ever satisfies me—My heart is like the mouth of an Englishman—it’s an abyss where everything that enters is crushed, pulverised [then] vanishes[.]56

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Men generally proved incapable, in her experience, of understanding and reciprocating her passion; of meeting her need for emotional intimacy. Reflecting on her adolescent experiences of love, Tristan recorded her deceptions as reality failed to match her dreams. Her first love, when she was ‘still a child’, was too weak to challenge his father’s disapproval of the relationship: The second time, the young man who had been the object of my undivided attention…was one of those cold, calculating creatures, in whose eyes a great passion looks like madness: he was afraid of my love, he was afraid that I loved him too much.57 Perhaps her own subsequent experience resembled the one she created for Maréquita in her novel: The unfortunate woman had been so wounded by her first experience of love that she did not dare surrender to her loving nature;…she had created an ideal love for herself; with the help of this fantasy, she had rejected without regret all the men who had offered themselves to her; they seemed so insignificant compared to the hero whose image was always present in her imagination, that she did not even deign to cast a glance of pity upon them.58 It was in this context that Tristan examined the prospect of finding fulfilment in a woman’s love. If men were incapable of loving with the force and passion that she desired, with the altruism that overrode a focus on personal satisfaction, perhaps women could offer more. As she wrote to her friend Olympe: ‘woman has such a powerful heart, such a powerful imagination, so much resourcefulness of spirit.’59 Olympe Chodzko and Eléonore Blanc stand out as the two female figures who occupied a special place in her affections. In Tristan’s earliest surviving letter to Olympe, late in 1837, she wrote: ‘I feel at ease with you which, I must say, has never happened before with any other woman, you have understood me.’60 This sense of estrangement from her own sex echoed the experience of some other radical women, alienated from those who represented all they rejected and who, in turn, were often hostile to them as rebels.61 But if her relationship with Eléonore Blanc was to rest on a shared commitment to socialist politics, this was not the case with Olympe. The bonds that united them were primarily personal rather than political. Olympe Maleszewska was French-born and had a French mother, but her father and husband were both Polish. Following the unsuccessful Polish uprising against Russian domination in November 1830, Polish refugees continued the political struggle in exile. Léonard Chodzko, Olympe’s husband, played a leading role in this movement, and Olympe, too, was passionate about Poland and wrote a number of articles in its defence.62 The Polish cause attracted widespread support amongst French people also. Sympathisers contributed money to special ‘Save Poland’ funds. Ladies held auctions to raise money for impoverished refugees, George Sand donating a manuscript for this purpose in 1838.63 A Comité central Franco-Polonais was established in January 1831 to campaign on Poland’s behalf.

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It comprised prominent politicians, journalists, and literary figures like Hugo and Béranger. Socialists of all persuasions, including Tristan, also supported the cause of Polish liberty. This may have been how she first encountered Olympe Chodzko. Tristan’s relationship with Olympe was one of the most interesting of all her friendships. However, trying to understand what Olympe meant to Flora poses a particular problem. The apparent intimacy between them may reflect Olympe’s special place in Flora’s life. Alternatively, it may reflect the chance survival of an unrepresentative collection of correspondence which gives it an exaggerated importance compared to other relationships, such as Tristan’s relationship with Eléonore Blanc, for instance. Tristan’s letters to Chodzko show a flourishing friendship in 1838–40 which then ends abruptly. But the warmth and closeness between the two women prior to that point, despite disagreements on a number of issues, make it unlikely that the relationship stopped suddenly and unannounced. If letters from later years have almost certainly disappeared, then, so too have other letters to other friends. We are left with a glimpse into moments of a particular friendship which leaves much hidden, about this relationship as well as others. Unlike most of Tristan’s friendships, her relationship with Chodzko did not rest on a shared commitment to radical causes. They were both concerned with the Polish question, of course, but they were not in agreement about it. ‘Let’s leave Poland its aristocracy, its revolutions and the true causes of its ruins,’ Tristan wrote in 1839. ‘I have reflected on these three great questions and my opinion on this matter is as good as any other.’64 In fact, in political terms they agreed on very little, Chodzko being far more conservative than her friend. Tristan despised the Republican leaders with whom Chodzko was friendly, regarding them as unworthy of the name.65 Chodzko condemned Tristan’s petition against capital punishment as imprudent, irrational, and mistaken.66 When her friend lashed out against social progressives in general, and feminists in particular, Tristan took her to task (but gently) for her political naivety, and advised her to be more discreet: There are some things which should only be confided to one’s nightcap—or one’s little dog. If your letter had fallen into other hands your enemies could say Mr Chodzko trumpets his devotion to the Polish cause, look, see what his wife thinks about devotion!67 Tristan apparently gave up hope of bringing Olympe to a more ‘advanced’ position on political issues. Their friendship rested on other ties. In 1835 Tristan had written: ‘I take little part in the social whirl, which I have never enjoyed, and my character, which is melancholy and not very pleasing to society makes it very difficult for me to form close friendships.’68 But her pleasure in mixing with other people generally belies this sober claim to an introverted nature. Through Chodzko, Tristan moved into ‘society’, the fashionable salonnière displaying her beautiful and infamous friend to all and sundry.69 Olympe’s friendship gave Tristan access to people whom she found interesting and sometimes useful. It was through Olympe that she met the actor Marie Dorval, for instance, and possibly Jules Janin, the celebrated literary critic whose obituary of Tristan would be so savage.

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As an attractive woman, made more interesting by a hint of scandal in her life, Tristan could have become a socialite rather than a socialist. However, she insisted that she was not interested in ‘society’ if this meant hours of frivolous entertainment with shallow people. From Tristan’s perspective, the occasional masked ball (all the rage in the 1830s and 1840s) could be enjoyable. At least it provided for an interesting post mortem the morning after.70 An evening with the Marquise de la Carte might also provide interesting company.71 But there was a serious streak in Tristan which made her impatient, or perhaps simply bored, with the social whirl. The ‘eulogies of the salon crowd’ were of little interest to her, she declared.72 Tristan would attend a masked ball to be with her friends, rather than finding her friends by living the high life, as she wrote to Olympe: Indeed, the desire to be in your pleasant company would persuade me to spend an evening in that dreadful chaos—but there are a number of things I don’t have—I don’t have a hood[.] If you could borrow one from one of your friends—I would wear it with my black silk dress and for better or worse that would suffice—for I tell you I am not inclined to outlay money for this single occasion[.]73 Tristan’s friendship with Chodzko also had a more intimate dimension, removed from the artificiality of the salon scene. After she was shot by Chazal, it was Olympe she called to her bedside, later offering her own services as a nurse when Chodzko’s grandmother was ill.74 And when Tristan visited England in 1839, it was Olympe whose affection and company she greatly missed. Even before her departure she wrote of her sense of impending loneliness, looking beyond it to the joy of reunion: ‘If I return I will see you and will love you dearly.’75 The tenderness and passion of Tristan’s letters to Chodzko from London need to be seen in the context of her loneliness and isolation there. While she talked of the people she had met, her invitations to dinner, her social life, she nevertheless expressed her abiding sense of alienation. The kindness of strangers could not replace the affection of loved ones, and this was what Tristan deeply missed. The letters of May to August 1839 therefore have a special intensity unmatched by others before or after. She was longing for affection, and the physical contact which accompanied it: Since I have been in this wretched country I have not met a single woman who is conscious of her womanhood. I am leading a dog’s life here!—I haven’t kissed a man’s cheek or shaken hands with a woman…. I cannot tell you dear friend how much this cold, colourless life devoid of all affection irritates me, suffocates me, crucifies me!76 Flora described her feelings for Olympe in very physical terms in these letters. ‘In my thoughts I devour you with kisses,’ she wrote.77 ‘I kiss you with lips very capable of appreciating a kiss.’78 She delighted, too, in reading Olympe’s declaration of love for her: Understand clearly, strange woman, that your letter sends shivers of pleasure down my spine…[sic]

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You say that you love me—that I magnetise you, that I send you into ecstasy. You are toying with me perhaps?—But be on your guard—for a long time I have had the desire to be loved passionately by a woman—oh!—how I would like to be a man so as to be loved by a woman—I feel, dear Olympe, that I have reached the point where no man’s love could satisfy me—that of a woman perhaps?…[sic] Woman has such a powerful heart, such a powerful imagination, such resourcefulness of spirit.79 To the late twentieth-century reader, these declarations have a poignant and passionate sexual dimension which has been taken as evidence of lesbianism.80 Whether that was perceived or intended in their original context is less clear, since the understanding and articulation of sexual feeling varies across time and place. However, Tristan insisted that ‘real love’ between individuals was not constrained by their sex: But you tell me that since attraction of the senses cannot exist between two people of the same sex, this love[,] the passionate exalted song you dream about[,] cannot materialise between two women—Yes and no—…for me love, I mean real love, can only exist between two souls—and it is very easy to understand love—two women can experience love—two men like wise [.]81 In responding to Olympe’s query, Tristan emphasised a love defined in ‘spiritual’ terms. She thus avoided the question of whether sexual attraction could exist between individuals of the same sex. Lesbianism was not unknown to her contemporaries, and she was probably aware of its existence. From the late 1820s the lesbian character began to appear in French novels. Sometimes female homoeroticism was associated with a strong female character who was independent in other respects as well, like George Sand’s Pulchérie.82 Male descriptions of lesbian relationships more commonly titillated the reader, as in Théophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin and Honoré de Balzac’s Girl With the Golden Eyes. However, the blurring of sexual boundaries aptly represented by the lesbian character also reflected a number of contemporary anxieties: anxiety about the proper boundaries between classes and genders; anxiety about female sexuality and independence. Significantly, its literary revival coincided with the emergence of feminism, and with a renewed emphasis on the proper differentiation between the sexes. Fascination with lesbianism, and speculation about the sexuality of women like George Sand, who wore men’s clothes and (some suggested) had an intimate relationship with Marie Dorval, was combined with condemnation. Lesbianism already bore the stigma of abnormality and deviance, and this may explain Tristan’s attempt to deflect such a charge.83 There is no proof that Tristan formed sexual liaisons with other women, although she would no doubt have concealed such relationships carefully. If physical attraction towards men was taboo given her personal situation, how much more taboo was an attraction towards women? Lesbian historians point out that an impossibly high standard of proof is required before an historical figure can be

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named as lesbian. While any link, however improbable, can be the basis for speculation about a heterosexual affair, only proof of sexual intimacy (which is virtually unobtainable) is acceptable as a basis for suggesting a lesbian relationship.84 It is worth noting, therefore, that several elements in Tristan’s life might suggest a lesbian inclination. Her feeling of repulsion for Chazal might be read as a sign of her rejection of heterosexual sex. Her lamented inability to find a soul-mate and form a meaningful intimate relationship might indicate an inner, perhaps unrecognised, conflict between her own sexual desire and sociallyacceptable behaviour. This is especially true if such expressions are read in conjunction with the physicality of her letters to Olympe. As far as she and Olympe were concerned, only a ‘spiritual’ bond, linking minds and hearts, could be contemplated with equanimity. However, Tristan was keen to explain that she did not interpret her own feelings for women in this way. To define that claim as subterfuge or self-delusion suggests an ability to identify the ‘true feelings’ that Tristan herself either misunderstood or misrepresented: dangerous ground for the historian. Besides, even if we were able to name her indisputably as ‘lesbian’, that term has had several different meanings over time. The question of whether she was or was not ‘lesbian’ is therefore a meaningless question in some respects.85 Furthermore, since understandings of sexuality are anchored in the society from which they emerge, nineteenth-century culture offers another explanation for Tristan’s professed asexual ‘passion’ for women, and one which is more closely aligned with her own articulation of those feelings. This culture emphasised women’s emotional qualities and their domination by love. Such a positive construction of women’s loving nature made it logical for women to consider whether they might not find greater fulfilment in each other’s love than they could find in the less powerful affections of a man. This definition of woman was a dominant refrain in Anglo-European societies in the early nineteenth century, forming an integral part of an emergent bourgeois culture in which the roles of men and women were carefully distinguished. ‘Romantic friendships’ between women were common in this period, though whether these friendships were sexual or not remains unknown and is a subject of debate. Women’s letters frequently expressed intensely passionate feelings for other women. In fact, a letter from Marie Dorval to Olympe Chodzko late in 1838 reveals a tenderness and affection comparable to that of Flora Tristan. Dorval, whose relationship with the poet Alfred de Vigny was collapsing at the time, wrote: ‘It seems that you love me still; yes, you love me, and I need that love so much!…I do not doubt you, I do not doubt your love, and you do not doubt my love, my friendship which is very tender, very true, I swear to you Olympe.’86 Moreover, Tristan’s definition of the nature of same-sex love resembled closely the view of a contemporary American feminist, Margaret Fuller, who wrote in her diary: ‘It is so true that a woman may be in love with a woman, and a man with a man…only it is purely intellectual and spiritual, unprofaned by any mixture of lower instincts.’87 Such intimate relationships often endured well after marriage, and were seen as a part of women’s culture.88 Tristan shared the view of women as the emotional sex and, like other feminists of the period, regarded women’s

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sensibility as a divine gift and a proof of their superiority to men. Like other women of her era, she sought and offered a ‘passion’ that was defined not in sexual terms, but in terms of a spiritual bond: intensity of emotion, depth of feeling, unswerving commitment. Within the constraints of her culture, women were seen as the ones most likely to reciprocate those feelings. This did not necessarily imply sexual contact, but nor did it necessarily exclude it. Tristan’s letters to Olympe Chodzko provide a glimpse into such a close and loving relationship, but after 1840 no further traces of that relationship remain. The relationship that developed between Tristan and Eléonore Blanc during her visits to Lyon in 1844 offers another example of her romantic friendship with a woman. In this case the correspondence has largely disappeared, however, and insights into the relationship are almost entirely confined to comments in Tristan’s diary. Tristan attributed the intensity of her relationship with Eléonore to their shared commitment to the cause of ‘the workers’ union’. She was won over by Blanc’s devotion to this cause, and the passionate terms in which Eléonore expressed it. Tristan noted admiringly in her diary on one occasion: Poor little Eléonore was overcome by such a paroxysm of love that she almost succumbed to a nervous attack…. She was sublime—she cried out: I am not in pain! No, no, on the contrary, I am happy!! happier than I had ever thought I could be!! I love you! she cried, looking at us all with a gaze of indescribable beauty—I am crying with joy to feel that I have the power to love you so much.—Then, in her delirium she thanked me for having given her such a beautiful life!—She embraced me tenderly, kissed my hands in gratitude, blessed me. Oh! this delirium of a sublime love made her so beautiful!!89 The two women shared a special relationship which, according to Tristan, surpassed Blanc’s bond with her husband, and which he therefore resented. Their love was a spiritual, superhuman love, Tristan insisted again, which was independent of sexual feelings: If this was happening with respect to a man we could say: this spiritual possession has been brought about by virtue of the principle of attraction which draws the sexes together unwittingly.—But in this case it’s a woman!—That is a fact which substantiates the existence of the soul more than all the theories do.90 In describing her relationships with both Olympe and Eléonore, Tristan stressed the spiritual dimensions of the passion which drew them together, and which she regarded as independent of physical elements. While her writings on love consistently emphasised her thirst for a ‘great passion’ which would give meaning to her life, she increasingly insisted that sexual pleasure had no attraction without that passion, and moreover, that such a passion might surpass and even be incompatible with the limited enjoyments of a sexual relationship. She imagined the possibility of a new form of love which would supersede a finite and individualised sexual passion. Tristan’s belief that she would never find a person

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whose love would bring her happiness had initially brought a sense of isolation. Later she understood it as a potential for a greater love. She found this love difficult to define except in religious terms, as a desire for union with God. Like the women mystics, she described moments of ecstasy in contemplation of the Divine. However, she rejected their desire to bask privately in God’s love: for her, the love of God found expression in the love of others. She explained this idea to Madame Laure: When I was younger I had placed all my faith in an idea of love but, you understand, loving hearts have difficulty in finding a heart in accord with their own, life is hard for such people, cruel deceptions await them. For people like that, the only true and lasting passion is God! That is my passion now: for me God and the universe are one, in loving and serving my brothers I pay homage to my creator.91 This was a superior form of love, she argued later, because it rose above the individualistic focus of ordinary love relationships, in which people pursued their own personal happiness and satisfaction first and foremost.92 If this was a rationalisation of Tristan’s own situation, a sublimation of her own desires and needs, it was a powerful and persuasive one. To love another man was forbidden; to love a woman was taboo. Love had to be stripped of its corporal and sexual elements, idealised and purified, in order to be admissible to oneself as well as to others. Tristan defined this new form of love as a spiritual bond uniting humanity in general, rather than as a physical union between individuals: Oh! what a sublime love! there will be nothing sexual about it. No sudden passion will tarnish it—People will love each other in humanity, in their brothers, in the very love which makes us act.—And the divine bonds of this love will form from soul to soul, from heart to heart, from one mind to another.93 Love between bodies was inferior and in some cases impossible; love between ‘souls’ was not merely possible but preferable. However, since it was expressed through human relationships (unlike the love of the mystics for God), the physical connection could not be entirely erased. In Tristan’s descriptions of the experience of this new ‘love of humanity’, her struggle against ‘the flesh’ emerged poignantly at times. Desire was present yet denied, rationalised, and transformed into a ‘spiritual’ sensation. At times the physical experience of loving God in others proved extremely powerful: a fact she herself pondered. One striking example occurred at her farewell banquet at Lyon in 1844, when a number of those present were overcome with emotion. Tristan recalled: I remember that drawn by the gaze of the little Nîmian, a celestial gaze! there was nothing earthly about it—that drawn by his tears of ineffable love, I threw myself into his arms and kissed his eyes with a strange passion like a soul embracing a soul.—Oh! our bodies touched without sensation.—Only our souls were trembling!…and dear God, how they trembled!94

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This passage is striking for the intensity of the physical passion which it simultaneously expresses and denies. Perhaps language failed Tristan as she attempted to describe the ‘spiritual’ sensation she experienced: she had to rely on the language of the body to describe metaphorically the experience of the soul. However she did realise, on reflection, that this moment of ‘spiritual passion’ had been marked by physical pleasure too, something which she could not immediately explain or understand: ‘What happiness! what pleasure! I even felt physical pleasure, these were such new feelings that I do not yet know how to describe them, perhaps later I will understand them.’ She thanked God for ‘all the pleasure, all the happiness, all the sensual delight’ that He had given her.95 Tristan’s initial disavowal of the sensory dimension of the new love experience was soon replaced, therefore, by a description which allowed room for it. The new form of love became an all-encompassing one, which was not only spiritually uplifting but physically satisfying and emotionally intense. It was publicly expressed and intellectualised, and it relied on the imagination, as Tristan created or recreated the emotion by writing about it in her diary. Tristan’s diary describes the way she relived the Lyon experience in her mind, as she made the boat trip to Roanne the next morning ‘in a voluptuous slumber’.96 Similarly, she described in her diary the intense passion she felt for the Toulon workers, whose devotion to her was so rewarding: None of them has considered loving me in a sensual way, and yet they love me more than they have ever dreamed of loving.—Their gaze reveals a pure, chaste, noble, happy, intoxicating love which intoxicates me as well.—I entrance them, and I am entranced by them in turn.—In my mind I embrace them, I caress them…and even in these moments of loving ecstasy, I never feel the slightest sensual arousal.—I wish I could embrace them all like I embraced the little Nîmian at the banquet of 7 July…. I wish I could press them all to my breast mingling my tears of love with theirs.97 Precisely because this form of passion did rely on the imagination rather than on the physical presence of the other, however, it was a relationship from ‘soul to soul’. It was also one in which the sex of the loved one became irrelevant, and which was not limited to a single individual. Guillaume, the ‘little Nîmian’, could be loved as fully and as readily as Eléonore; as readily as the whole of humanity, in fact, with great passion and without compromise. Tristan’s writings on love and sexuality can be read in a variety of ways. They do suggest, firstly, that she resisted entering relationships which were shaped within and which reinforced the structures of male power. While this was a rejection of feminine sexuality as it was currently constructed, she clearly articulated an alternative model compatible with women’s independence and dignity, and it was the ‘feminine’ qualities of altruism and compassion which would become the universal within that model. From some perspectives, too, Tristan’s apparent reluctance to enter sexual relationships may suggest a ‘dysfunctional’ sexuality. But as well as assuming that such a choice was

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abnormal, regardless of its motivations, this judgement relies on assumptions about Tristan’s sexual behaviour which cannot be proved. Besides, the type of historical evidence which might be required to indicate ‘normal’ sexual behaviour remains unclear in such analyses, and is almost certainly unobtainable. Tristan did express her passionate feelings, her sensual delight, her physical pleasure in her relationships with others. But she clearly did not regard sexual contact as the most important requirement for happiness, preferring to emphasise love, affection, and commitment. Whatever other meanings might be attributed to Tristan’s writings on the subject, however, the image of the ‘lover’—committed to the wellbeing of the beloved, passionate and intense, caring and devoted—provided one metaphor through which Tristan conceptualised her social mission and her relationship with her followers. It captured the grandeur of a passion which sought to embrace all within its scope, and thus validated a life which failed to conform to the predominant pattern.

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‘The first strong woman’

The Jewish people were dead and debased and Jesus raised them up. The Christian people today are dead and debased and Flora Tristan, the first strong woman, will raise them up again.1 When Flora Tristan wrote these words in 1844, she was referring specifically to her role in radical politics and her activities amongst the workers, which she envisaged in zealous, even messianic terms.2 But she did not emerge in 1844 as a ‘strong woman’, a leader and visionary, suddenly and unexpectedly. Having assured Charles Fourier in 1835 that he would find in her ‘a strength uncommon in my sex’,3 she had demonstrated and developed that strength over a number of years and in a range of social situations. Her proclamation in 1844 thus represented not so much a sudden moment of self-recognition as a succinct statement of how she had long seen herself. If her self-representations as ‘mother of the workers’ and ‘lover of humanity’ showed Tristan adapting and expanding ‘feminine’ roles to endow them with new significance, her vision of herself as a ‘strong woman’ engaged with contemporary debates on womanhood, challenging the norm of feminine ‘weakness’ and the expectations about women’s place which followed from it. As ‘the first strong woman’ Tristan presented herself as a public figure and political leader, and simultaneously foreshadowed a place for other women in ‘public’ life too. Sexual stereotypes in the bourgeois world portrayed ‘woman’ as an ethereal creature, gentle, soft, and quiet. She was revered as inspiration, muse, confidante, and consoler, but this idealisation was offset by assumptions of dependence, incapacity, and inferiority. The caricaturist Gavarni highlighted the contradictions in midnineteenth-century attitudes to women when he wrote: ‘Oh Woman! masterpiece of creation! Queen of humanity, mother of the human race… [sic] polish my boots.’4 Notions of sexual differentiation and hierarchy were not confined to bourgeois circles, but the idealisation of weakness was a bourgeois construct. The image of the ‘weak woman’—physiologically limited and, by extrapolation, intellectually limited, and destined for a limited (though generally respected) role in society—governed expectations about, and often by, bourgeois women. It was shaped by the revised notion of sexual difference which had gained credence during the Revolutionary age, when women’s exclusion from the public sphere proved fundamental to its definition. 152

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In the late eighteenth century, philosophers and doctors began to define sexual difference in complementary terms rather than as a simple hierarchy. Women were no longer inadequate men, but different beings whose qualities and capacities were specific to their sex, ‘incommensurable’ with those of men.5 The qualities attributed to women were those which complemented a male norm, and the contrast between strength and weakness was fundamental. In Rousseau’s famous formula, ‘one [sex] ought to be active and strong, the other passive and weak’, and the latter was not a profile which men found attractive for themselves.6 Rousseau’s representation of the feminine simultaneously encoded political participation in the Republic as a masculine prerogative: an interpretation adopted by Rousseau’s admirers during the French Revolution.7 Attempts were made to limit the participation of some men, too, but as Landes has argued, the ‘bourgeois public sphere’, as it was created through Revolutionary politics, was ‘essentially, not just contingently, masculinist’.8 The counterpoint of the ‘weak woman’ was critical, then, to the definition of the ‘strong, male citizen’, and thus to women’s subordination in the newlyemergent political structures and the structures of civil society. Physical difference became the basis for extrapolating a range of other differences, women’s ‘weakness’ explaining their ‘passivity’ and their predestination for ‘private’ lives under male control.9 Gender hierarchy was thereby legitimated, just when the validity of other social hierarchies was challenged by new concepts of individual rights and social equality.10 But the meaning of difference was also contested, and radical theorists of the early nineteenth century, including Flora Tristan, utilised sexual difference in order to justify a public role for women, whose very difference from men made their participation in every aspect of social life essential. ‘Strong women’ promised to become significant figures in a new altruistic public sphere. And as ‘the first strong woman’ Tristan not only claimed her own autonomy, but foreshadowed a role of influence and leadership which other women were summoned to imitate. If ‘weakness’ was the character attributed to women, to be a ‘strong woman’ was to be a rebel who challenged social conventions. The essence of Tristan’s rebellion lay not simply in the desire for personal freedom, but in the desire to live an active and purposeful life. Tristan’s frustration with the limited role available to her exploded in a letter to a friend in 1836: For active types like us, being reduced to warming our toes by the fire in winter, and strolling aimlessly in the Bois de Boulogne in summer—oh! it’s enough to make us wring our hands in despair! From time to time, when I think of all that I could do, when I feel how much strength and life is in me and that it all serves no purpose except to torment me—oh! when I think about that I feel like banging my head against the wall.11 While some might have envied the idleness which ‘tormented’ Tristan, she was not unique in her frustration. In the climate of anticipation which followed the 1830 Revolution, feminists had actively promoted the participation of women in

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all spheres of society, on the basis of their common rights with men.12 They sought to have their demands for personal autonomy, as well as for citizenship, recognised. But few people saw the political rights associated with ‘liberty’ as relevant to women. François Guizot, prime minister in the 1840s, specifically rejected women’s capacity for public roles of any kind: ‘Neither women nor minors are capable of directing the interests of [society]. Providence has destined the former for domestic life.’13 Notions of sexual difference and separate roles were also deeply embedded in the more radical political philosophies of the July Monarchy. Men’s identity as free and equal citizens in Republicanism was constructed specifically by the exclusion of women, confined to a life within the family and represented by men.14 Nor did Socialists provide an effective challenge to the predominant ‘separate spheres’ ideology, although they frequently envisaged broader roles for women in the socialist future. Saint-Simonian innovations in opening leadership opportunities to women were shortlived; Fourierists preferred not to affront public opinion; the Icarians subscribed to a ‘separate spheres’ ideology themselves.15 The political ‘left’ thus differed relatively little from the political ‘right’ in its views on women’s unsuitability for public life, at least in the present. Any attempt to redefine women’s social roles, therefore, was a battle against great odds in the 1830s. Tristan’s literary works provided a forum in which to advocate a new model of ‘strong’ womanhood. In her publications she worked on two fronts, interweaving her criticisms of the ‘weak woman’ model and the powerlessness it justified, with her vision of a ‘strong woman’ wielding power in a new ‘feminised’ manner. Establishing the shortcomings of the former model was critical to validating the creation of the latter, so the two portraits of womanhood were inter-related, and each fed off the other. Tristan’s first extended critique of the ‘weak woman’ model was developed in 1838 in her novel Méphis, where the deficiencies of Clotilde and Maréquita pointed to the shortcomings of women’s socialisation in her own society. Clotilde was portrayed as a virtuous child, educated to submit and obey rather than to be strong and to follow the dictates of her heart. Her blind obedience to her mother’s wishes led her to an unhappy marriage, to prostitution, and finally to insanity. Maréquita’s story portrayed other evils of girls’ socialisation: their creation as the passive objects of men’s desire and their acceptance of male domination. Maréquita had not been ‘raised to become the strong woman such as [Méphis] imagined her’.16 Like Clotilde, she was captive to the bonds of an unhappy marriage, to men’s selfish lust, and to social expectations which prevented her from seeking true happiness with Méphis. Both Clotilde and Maréquita thus reflected different dimensions of women’s lack of integrity and autonomy. The ‘weak woman’ model was presented as inherently destructive for women themselves, and as the source of a range of social ills. Tristan extended her critique of the ‘weak woman’ in her study of London by incorporating the insights of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), which she appears to have encountered for the first time in London in 1839. Tristan greatly admired Wollstonecraft, and found in the Vindication many ideas that conformed with her own, and which she then reiterated.17

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Wollstonecraft condemned the inculcation of weakness, fragility, and dependence in girls, which was achieved by physical and social constraints on their behaviour from infancy. ‘Dependence of body’, she noted, ‘produces dependence of mind.’18 Flora Tristan argued a similar case, specifically commending Wollstonecraft’s criticism of Rousseau: She produced a very legitimate criticism of Rousseau, who argued that woman must be weak and passive, man active and strong; that woman has been shaped to be subject to man, and finally that woman must make herself pleasing and obey her master.19 Tristan insisted, as Wollstonecraft had done before her, that ‘weakness’ in women was not a dictate of nature, but a social construct which served specific ends. Girls were deliberately confined and restricted from childhood, in contrast with boys, in order to train them in acceptable patterns of behaviour and to limit their expectations. In her novel she had already linked this constraint to the wearing of corsets, which in the mid-nineteenth century became a marker of female respectability.20 The physical image of the ‘hour-glass figure’ captured the restricted and unnatural life of the bourgeois woman, which Tristan discussed in Promenades in London. Having been deliberately formed as the decorative adornments of bourgeois life, Tristan argued, these women were then subject to a range of social limitations which were supposedly a consequence of their own physical and intellectual shortcomings. Women’s weakness became a selffulfilling prophecy, and a justification for subordination and social powerlessness: Man, used to seeing woman as nothing but a little doll, whose entire worth resides in the larger or smaller size of her waist, inevitably cannot regard this creature as his equal; he detects in her neither bodily strength, nor moral vigour, and cannot request of her either assistance in his labours, or inspiration for his ideas;—in his eyes, woman amounts to a pretty toy, which must be kept under a glass dome, like a bouquet of artificial flowers which the dust might spoil.21 For Tristan, the ‘weak woman’ was an objectified woman, lacking specific individuality. Reduced to an existence as the embodiment of a closely-defined aesthetic, she was not a person, a reasoning and moral creature, but an object, and an artificially-created one at that. The denial of rights and responsibilities to such a creature was therefore readily justified. This analysis may have mistaken the theory for the practice, and ignored the busy and productive lives led by many bourgeois women. But by dramatising the condition of ‘weakness’ to which bourgeois women could be reduced, Tristan set the scene for other, more attractive, options which would acknowledge and validate women as active and useful members of society. Some of those options were set out in The Workers’ Union, which devoted a special chapter to women’s place within that union and in society generally. But before arguing for a leadership role for women within the union, Tristan returned to the analysis of the present situation, this time emphasising the implications for

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the daily lives of working women of the pundits’ pronouncements on female nature. Science, religion, and philosophy joined forces to establish woman’s ‘natural’ inferiority: Then the wise philosopher says to her:—Woman, it has been established by science that, you are inferior to man in your constitution.—Thus, you have no intelligence, no understanding of elevated questions, no logic in your ideas, no capacity for the so-called exact sciences, no aptitude for serious works;—in fact, you are a creature weak in body and in mind, timid, superstitious; in sum, you are nothing but a capricious, headstrong, frivolous child…that is why man must be your master and have complete authority over you.22 Woman was cast in the role of ‘the most humble servant’ of her family in workingclass circles, Tristan argued, and as an uneducated and overburdened ‘servant’ she could not be a fitting partner for her husband. Again the purpose was persuasive rather than descriptive: she sought to highlight the failings of the present system in order to justify an alternative. Just as Tristan’s writings sought to establish the shortcomings of the ‘weak woman’ ideal, they also presented images of the ‘strong woman’. Tristan’s first attempt to convey other possibilities for women’s lives came in 1836 with the publication of an article on ‘The Women of Lima’.23 ‘There is nowhere on earth where women are freer, stronger than in Lima’, she wrote.24 Unlike European women, corsetted and physically inhibited, they enjoyed a freedom of action, aided by the local costume of saya and manto which concealed their identity: European women…from childhood, are slaves of laws, morals, customs, prejudices, fashion [while] under the saya the Liménienne is free, enjoys her independence, and confidently relies on that true strength which everybody feels within, when he can act according to the needs of his own being.25 Physical integrity and personal autonomy made the woman of Lima distinctive, but in extending this discussion for her book a year later Tristan also criticised her undeveloped moral qualities: ‘Instead of being the guide, the inspiring genius of man, of perfecting his morality, she seeks only to seduce him, to reign over his senses [and] her empire evaporates with the desire she creates.’26 Similarly, the other ‘strong women’ that Tristan encountered in Peru, the ravañas (or raboñas), the female supply force of the Peruvian army, were notable for their physical rather than their moral qualities. Like the women of Lima, the ravañas exhibited some of the characteristics of ‘strong womanhood’, particularly in their physical strength and personal independence.27 However, in discussing both groups Tristan emphasised that social evolution towards higher forms would see a corresponding development in women’s moral qualities. The ‘strong woman’ in the future, then, would dominate primarily by way of her moral, not her physical, qualities. Tristan’s visit to Peru also brought her close to people in positions of power,

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and thus provided an opportunity to examine what might be seen as the epitome of ‘strong womanhood’: female power and political leadership. In particular, Tristan began to consider how the exercise of power by women might diverge from the current male model. The events described in Peregrinations of a Pariah occurred in 1833–4, but the account of those events was written during 1836–7 when Tristan had already begun constructing a public role for herself as writer and political activist. Her interest in these questions was more than academic, then, though the extent of her political ambitions at that time remains unclear. Peru in 1833 was still struggling to find stability in the wake of the wars of independence which had freed South America from Spanish control. This was the era of the caudillos: the strong men who commanded personal loyalty in a social system based on patron-client relations, and whose tenure of power generally relied on keeping other contenders at bay by force of arms.28 Tristan charged that selfinterest and personal ambition governed political behaviour in post-colonial Peru, and the Civil War which erupted during her visit in 1834 illustrated her point. President Gamarra’s term of office expired in that year. Since he was ineligible to stand for re-election, he sought to keep his grasp on power by ensuring the election of a protégé, General Bermudez. When Congress chose the more liberal and highlypopular General Orbegoso instead, Gamarra turned to the coup d’état to maintain his hold on power. The Civil War which resulted lasted for four months. Initially Gamarra’s forces reigned supreme and Arequipa (where Tristan was staying) was overrun, but Orbegoso’s generals gradually gained the upper hand, and the war ended with Orbegoso victorious and Gamarra chased into exile in Bolivia. Tristan’s family were heavily involved in these events, given their status as major landowners, political office-holders, and military leaders. Pio had to throw his weight (and his family’s wealth) behind one of the candidates. On Flora’s advice, she asserts, he selected Orbegoso, and her cousins, Emmanuel and Althaus, became officers in Orbegoso’s army.29 Her uncle, Domingo Tristan, was named Prefect of Ayacucho province by the president-elect, and mobilised public support there for the cause of legitimate government.30 Tristan was therefore close to events and surrounded by key participants. She witnessed some of the fighting at first hand, and it seems likely that her claim to have met several of the main powerbrokers was true. Peregrinations provided a largely accurate account of the events of the Civil War,31 but in addition Tristan’s discussion of that event enabled her to express some of her own ideas about politics and about women’s political role. She achieved this goal by an account which was partly factual and partly parable. If the role of the other Tristan women during the war was limited to nursing the wounded, Flora Tristan portrayed herself playing a far more significant part: the part of a ‘strong woman’, but of a ‘strong woman’ still in the process of defining that role. In her account, she was the advisor of her uncle Pio and her cousin Althaus, both experienced military men.32 Tristan also claimed to have acted as go-between, passing messages from the temporarily victorious supporters of Gamarra to the apparently vanquished Arequipans who supported Orbegoso: The second day, I was still alone when two officers came asking to speak to

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señor don Pio. I didn’t want to admit that my uncle was still in hiding…. I chatted at length with these gentlemen, and found them very congenial. When they had left, I ran to Santo-Domingo to alert my uncle and those who were taking refuge there; as soon as they knew that San-Roman was dead and colonel Escudero in charge in his place, they began to feel reassured.33 These reported interventions asserted Tristan’s superior courage and political insight, compared with the rest of the family, at a time when she was still smarting from their rejection of her legitimacy, and implicitly staked a claim for a more direct role in proceedings. But Tristan also made that claim directly, for her account of the Civil War, which highlighted the personal ambitions and power plays of selfish individuals, included an admission of her own ambition and desire for power. She described herself as having been seized by an ‘infernal force’ as a result of disappointment and despair at her family’s treatment of her. Rather than remain a victim of society, she determined to adopt the self-interest, selfishness, and ambition which characterised its victors: I resolved to enter the social struggle too, and after having long been the dupe of society and its prejudices, to try to exploit it myself, to live like others did, to become greedy, ambitious, pitiless, to make myself the focal point of all my actions like they did; not to be restrained by the slightest scruple, any more than they are themselves.34 She resolved ‘not merely to join the political movement, but even to play a leading role’.35 Peruvian politics offered a precedent for this fledgling ‘strong woman’ in the person of Doña Francisca Zubiaga de Gamarra, wife of the ex-president, whom Tristan identified as her role model. Major participants in the Civil War, like General Orbegoso himself, attest to her impact, and support Tristan’s claim that ‘the lady marshall’ was a key figure in the Gamarra faction’s efforts to prevent the transfer of power.36 Gamarra’s career, as recounted by Tristan, had a significant part to play in her own political education, and in the parable through which she expressed her ideas about women’s place in public life. Tristan’s account emphasised Gamarra’s ambiguous political role. On the one hand, it stressed Gamarra’s extraordinary talents: ‘Everything about her announced a woman out of the ordinary, and as extraordinary in her willpower as in the breadth of her intelligence.’37 On the other hand, Tristan pointed out that, despite her exceptional qualities, Gamarra needed a male figurehead to be the vehicle for her authority: she could not assume power in her own right. Her husband became the official president, and she maintained her indirect hold on power by personal alliances, especially that with Colonel Escudero, her assistant. Tristan realised she would need to imitate Señora Gamarra’s tactics if she were to play a role in Peruvian politics herself: Only by the power of the sabre could one succeed in such a project. I felt

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extremely aggrieved at being forced to rely on the strength of another, when I felt that I was capable of action myself. I had to set to work to find a military man who, by his vigorous nature, his influence over the soldiers, was suitable to support me; I had to inspire love in him, spark his ambition and make use of it, in order to embark on anything.38 Tristan’s choice was Colonel Escudero, the right-hand man of ‘the lady marshall’ herself: ‘I realised that he was perhaps the only one, in Peru, who was capable of assisting me in my ambitious plans.’39 According to Tristan’s account, then, she not only contemplated the possibility of replacing Gamarra, but of doing so with the assistance of Gamarra’s aide. She claimed to possess even stronger willpower than Señora Gamarra, implying that she would have made an even more successful leader.40 And if Gamarra appeared a worthy successor to Bolivar,41 Tristan had the personal ancestry, the links with Bolivar, which perhaps indicated such a destiny for her too. But having recounted the remarkable achievements of Gamarra, and her own inclination to step into her shoes, Tristan ultimately rejected Gamarra’s style of leadership as flawed and presented another in its place. Firstly, she insisted that Gamarra had succumbed to the corrupting influence of power, but that she herself was soon repelled by the tactics which would be needed to take and hold power in the Gamarra style: Assailed, when I was alone, by sinister reflections, I imagined the many victims who would have to be sacrificed in order to succeed in seizing and keeping power. I sought in vain to deceive myself with beautiful plans of public welfare …already I could see before me the spirits of my murdered opponents: my womanly heart filled with emotion, my hair stood on end, and I suffered anticipated pangs of remorse.42 Furthermore, if Gamarra was clearly a failed leader having been defeated, Tristan examined the lessons of that failure for the notion of female leadership in general. She attributed to Gamarra a lengthy speech where she explained that, unable to match the men on an equal footing, she had been forced to resort to ‘feminine wiles’ to maintain her power. ‘To compensate for the weakness of our sex,’ she said, ‘I have had to preserve its allures and to use them, as need dictated, to arm myself with male support.’43 It was not simply that men did not recognise authority in a woman, but that her female body proved unsuited to the demands of the role. She lacked physical strength in a context in which ‘brute strength’ reigned supreme. Since political power in Peru rested on military supremacy, a ‘strong woman’ needed to be a military leader, but Gamarra’s epilepsy, understood at the time as an emotional illness, seemed to confirm that women were physiologically incapable of such a role: This illness has greatly hindered me in everything that I have sought to do: strong emotions always bring on an attack; you can imagine then what an obstacle this illness has been to my career…. Often, at the height of battle, the anger which I felt on seeing the laziness, the cowardliness of the men I

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commanded made me tremble with rage, and then I would have an attack …. Well! Florita, my enemies have used this cruel affliction against me, in order to discredit me in the eyes of the army: they spread the word that it was fear, the sound of the cannon, the smell of gunpowder which shattered my nerves, and that I would faint like a little marquise de salon.44 If Gamarra’s story—that of the female military leader—might be seen as having limited application for a discussion of the possibilities of female power, in likening Gamarra to the aristocratic women of the past it recalled more general debates about women’s ‘usurpation’ of power, their ‘illegitimate’ influence over men, and their ‘interference’ in male affairs of state. The story of Gamarra was essentially a morality tale: a tale which was simultaneously a critique. Gamarra’s failings as a leader were represented in gendered terms: she did not possess a ‘womanly heart’ and she was not so much a ‘strong woman’, as a woman attempting to be a ‘strong man’ and failing. As a woman wielding authority in the male manner, Gamarra exhibited the same faults as her male rivals. She was ambitious, pitiless, and ruthless; she ‘shrank at nothing’ in order to achieve her objectives.45 Gamarra’s ultimate fall from power enabled Tristan to emphasise the price paid for such power. As Gamarra supposedly exclaimed on her departure into exile: ‘Ah! glory, what a price you demand! How insane it is to sacrifice life’s happiness, one’s entire life to gain you.’46 Tristan’s account of her voyage to Peru ended with her boarding ship at Lima shortly after Gamarra had set sail into exile, seriously ill from the effects of her epilepsy. Gamarra’s masculine military uniform had been exchanged for a European silk dress, restoring her to an impotent, feminine vulnerability.47 This final scene might appear to suggest Tristan’s rejection of the possibilities for female power, because Gamarra’s career demonstrated that women’s leadership was incompatible with their femininity. She might have succeeded as Bolivar’s successor, Tristan suggested, ‘if her woman’s body had not been an obstacle’. Despite her courage, ‘brute force’ had won out in the end.48 As Tristan moved into the cabin on the William Rushton recently vacated by Gamarra, then, she perhaps suggested that she was assuming Gamarra’s mantle, returning to France as the new ‘strong woman’. But Tristan clearly envisaged a new model of power in women’s hands, one for which the ‘strong woman’ Gamarra served as a foil rather than a precursor. This model was outlined in Tristan’s next work, her novel Méphis, which defended women’s social authority by arguing that power would rest on new criteria in the future. The hero told a moral tale via an art competition to illustrate this point. While his competitor’s two tableaux were entitled respectively ‘Man, Strength’ and ‘Woman, Pleasure’, Méphis portrayed on his first canvas ‘THE PAST. Clerical power and brute force are crushed’. The second looked to the future: It was the idealisation of woman as I envisaged it, leading humanity towards perfection by her power of attraction. This woman…to my mind represented her entire sex, as source of life and motor of progress…following the woman guide of humanity was a host of individuals, amongst whom one could identify

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those who, like Rousseau, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, etc., have been sufficiently superior to admit the inspiring influence which the counsels of woman have had on their actions, and to acknowledge that this is the moral role which has been allocated her by Providence, to counterbalance the muscular strength of man. Méphis labelled this painting: ‘THE FUTURE, intellectual power replaces brute force’.49 The ‘Woman Guide’ portrayed by Méphis was not a strong woman in the Gamarra tradition, then, but one whose feminine virtues would find their proper influence on society as muscular strength gave way to moral force. She personified the moral power which Tristan had sought unsuccessfully in the ‘strong women’ of Lima, and the feminine character which Señora Gamarra had lacked. This characterisation of womanhood as moral force and inspiration was not new, but reflected current Romantic sensibilities. Women’s moral strength was central to the Saint-Simonians’ theory of sexual difference, too, and like them, Tristan echoed contemporary assumptions in envisaging the perfected women of the future as primarily intuitive and emotional beings. In fact, she had Méphis exclaim rhapsodically: Oh! [woman’s] mission is beautiful and holy!—To make man great, to double his strength, to inspire in him the idea of great deeds, to have him carry them out, in sum to be the intermediary between God and man, is there anything greater?50 This representation opened Tristan’s portrait of the new woman to considerable ambiguity, since it was unclear whether this woman would play an active leadership role in her own right or remain a subsidiary of man. The latter possibility was reinforced by the appeal to Rousseau and Bernardin de SaintPierre, theorists who had envisaged women’s ‘inspirational’ role in strictly domestic terms. But Tristan subverted their authority by presenting them as the followers of the ‘Woman Guide’, rather than her creators. Her imagined ‘inspirational woman’ was not the impotent figure of bourgeois rhetoric but a leader playing a public role. For if Méphis, the male character in the novel, aspired to create the ideal woman as his inspiration and assistant, the female character, Maréquita, put a different slant on the ideal in preparing her daughter for the part. In issuing instructions for the education of her daughter as a woman of the future, Maréquita ignored the Rousseauian option of creating Mary as muse, and advised an active social role: Raise her according to [Méphis’] teachings; let the defence of the oppressed be the object of her existence, and the dearest wish of my life will be accomplished.—From the heavenly abode, Méphis and I will hear the voice of this daughter of Eve calling the myriads of pariahs and proletarians to share in the joys of life;—and we will bless God for the time will have arrived, and the words of liberty and equality will cease to be empty sounds.51

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Méphis’ writings became the inspiration and guide for Mary’s own social mission, rather than serving to shape her as the inspiration of man. The role assigned to Mary in Tristan’s novel also foreshadowed the role Tristan assumed herself as ‘the first strong woman’. Her tour of France in 1844 took her into the public domain, transforming her from author and theorist into political activist, implementing her ideas of female leadership, ‘calling the myriads of pariahs and proletarians to share in the joys of life’. As she promoted her plans for a ‘universal union’ of workers, she addressed meetings, set up ‘circles’ of the workers’ union, debated politics and tactics with other militants, and challenged local authorities to assist her project of social reform. Not only was she independent and assertive, revealing considerable talent for organisation and leadership, but the role she had embarked upon was an overtly political one. In attempting to justify this role she had to confront the fact that public life and respectable womanliness were regarded as incompatible, contravening not just contemporary expectations of the sexes, but the realities of politics. To succeed in legitimating such a role for herself, and for women in general, required a redefinition of the nature of the political enterprise itself, as the SaintSimonians had already suggested in the early 1830s. Like them, and like the feminists of 1848 after her, Tristan claimed femininity as the ideal qualification for a new model of public life based not on an ethic of selfishness, personal ambition, and the power of the strongest, but on an ethic of altruism and social responsibility. This view of women’s wider public role endorsed contemporary views of femininity, but challenged accepted notions of women’s roles and women’s place within bourgeois society. Tristan’s plan for the workers’ union made provision for a political leader elected by workers to represent their interests in the Chamber of Deputies and campaign publicly for their rights. Tristan perhaps harboured the desire to play such a role, but as a woman she was unenfranchised like the workers themselves, so there was no prospect of her doing so. Outside the Chamber, however, the tasks she envisaged for that person were ones she could easily have managed. She listed them as writing and publishing material; organising publicity and advertising in the press; travelling around France as a speaker to promote the cause; entertaining and cultivating influential figures; and generally enlisting supporters: a job description in many ways similar to what Tristan was already doing.52 Periodically in her diary she noted measures she would take ‘if I ever come to power’, from attacking the influence of the clergy and organising the provisional government, to seeking out and rewarding those who assisted her during her tour of France.53 ‘And who knows where I will be in 10 years?’ she wrote. ‘Perhaps I will be at the head of this great European people.’54 In that case, she had a sweeping vision of reform: When I am ‘general servant’ of Europe, I will have in my employ a black team whose job will be to demolish certain towns as the only way to make their prisoners leave, the poor galley slaves who live there to the shame of humanity. Then I will have another white team who will always follow the black team, its

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task will be to build magnificent palatial settlements in order to house the owners of the razed shanties comfortably, in clean and healthy conditions.55 No doubt this was fantasy, with its Fourierist undertones of harmonious communal living, but her belief that she could achieve much good if given the opportunity remained uppermost in her mind. The sense that her talents were not being utilised, that she had not fulfilled her potential or found a role worthy of her capabilities, remained as strong in 1844 as in 1836. Tristan explicitly defined her campaign amongst the workers as part of a new politics, transformed by women’s participation. She saw herself as ‘the first strong woman’, the embodiment of the ‘Woman Guide’ announced earlier in her fiction. A positive response to her project from male workers at Lyon led her to observe: Oh! yes what is happening here is a subject and a scene which deserves to attract attention.—We see in it the seeds of a new order of things—here we have men who no longer have confidence in men, whether deputies or intellectuals or priests or kings…so these men guided by their common sense have said to themselves: here is a woman who comes to us to serve us, God has sent her, let’s go and listen to her and they all come no matter what party they belong to.—Here I am without premeditation as the Woman-Guide, as I too had sensibly imagined her.56 This ‘new order’ was one of feminine power, as she explained in a speech at her farewell banquet there: I spoke first and I briefly said a few well-chosen things on what could be expected from women, from their love, devotion, intelligence, action, if one wished to call them into the social movement.—I pointed out to them that we had reached the reign of women—that the reign of war, of brute force, had been that of [men] and that now women could achieve more than men because they had more love, and today love alone must govern.57 Assigning a predominant role to women was a logical consequence of the significance she accorded to empathy and compassion in her vision of socialism. Women’s superiority in matters of the heart signalled their leadership potential, since empathy was the key to social commitment. This view of women reiterated a contemporary stereotype, but since Tristan emphasised the superiority of ‘feminine’ qualities, she gave it a new significance. It became the basis, not for women’s confinement to private influence within the family, but for their public involvement and leadership. Despite her sense of being ‘the first strong woman’, Tristan had no desire to be the only strong woman, and the phrase made a claim not so much to uniqueness as to leadership. Writing to an admirer in 1837, she had noted: ‘We have finally reached the time when women of a certain merit, will work to form an alliance with each other which will result in strength and power for them and happiness

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and harmony for all.’58 She was continually on the lookout for others who might join the cause of women’s emancipation, and was hopeful at that time that her friend, Olympe Chodzko, might prove an ally: Tor a woman of the world you are stronger than I hoped—you have what it takes and with another two or three nice little misfortunes you will be almost ready to throw down the gauntlet to society.’59 However, Olympe remained a critic of ‘progressive women’, and Tristan found it pointless to debate the issue with her: ‘I cannot take up the defence of progressive women here, against you, because I am at the forefront of this party—we have enough to do attacking society without also using up our strength replying to critics from the old world.’60 Tristan’s sense of being the ‘first strong woman’, and thus of working alone, perhaps reflected the fact that she joined the social struggle at a time when women activists were dispersed and embattled. During the optimistic years from 1830 to 1834 Tristan was frequently absent from Paris. By 1835 the optimistic projects of the early 1830s had failed, the forces of reaction were in the ascendancy, and even those sympathetic to women often defined women’s lives within a narrow domestic context. Nevertheless, Tristan’s claim dismissed the other women of her own and earlier generations who had braved public opinion and sometimes even death itself, to assert their own independence and to claim rights for women. Like Tristan’s claim to be ‘the pariah’, shunned as the first woman to have argued for marriage reform, 61 her claim to be the ‘first strong woman’ showed her obliviousness to the contributions of others, and her difficulty in forming the alliances with other women that she advocated. It also ignored the one outstanding public figure of her own day who might have contested her claim to pre-eminence: George Sand. Sand’s notoriety stemmed not simply from her achievements as a writer, but from the fact that she challenged social boundaries in her own life. Like Tristan, she had proclaimed herself the ‘Spartacus’ of her sex.62 Her fame far exceeded that of Tristan, and if there was a ‘first strong woman’ to be found at the time, Sand was perhaps the obvious choice. The record of Tristan’s relationship with Sand is fragmentary, but the surviving evidence indicates that it was polite rather than friendly. Tristan was keen to make Sand’s acquaintance in 1837, sending her a copy of her Peregrinations.63 Sand appeared willing to assist Tristan in getting her work placed in the Revue indépendante, of which she was a director, and contributed 40 francs to the publication of Union ouvrière in 1843.64 But Sand came to regard Tristan as a comédienne: an actor, or even a sham,65 exasperated, perhaps, by Tristan’s exaggerated and melodramatic personal style. Tristan wrote Sand a lengthy letter in March 1844, seeking letters of introduction for her tour of France, and in the process outlining the different roles of ‘poets’ like Sand, and ‘apostles’ like Tristan: ‘You are king, idol, you fortunate poet!—and I, a great apostle, am despised and martyred!—so you see that I need your assistance.’66 Sand’s reply has not survived, but Tristan’s lengthy justification in a subsequent letter67 indicates that Sand rejected this dichotomy and the self-dramatisation of its creator. While Sand acceded to Tristan’s request for letters of introduction, therefore,

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she secretly warned her friends against Tristan. Sand wrote to Jules Boucoiran at Nîmes: I couldn’t refuse her a letter of introduction to you…. If you believe that she has something good and useful to achieve in your town, for the popular classes…offer her your help. If not, decline politely.68 She refused to modify her critical opinion once Tristan died: ‘When people die everyone bows to their memory, it’s good to respect the mystery of death, but why lie? I would not know how to.’69 Sand’s re