Flora Tristan

Flora Tristan

Flore Célestine Thérèse Henriette Tristán y Moscoso (born 7 April 1803 in Paris; died 14 November 1844 in Bordeaux, France), better known as Flora Tristan, was a French-Peruvian writer and socialist activist. She published in French.

Quotes

Le Tour de France (1843–4)

translation from the French by Doris and Paul Beik in Flora Tristan, Utopian Feminist (1993)

• In former times when the King of France was the nation—there were found from century to century a few men sufficiently courageous and devoted to their duties as citizens to dare to speak, despite peril to their lives, the truth to the king! Today when the working class, the productive class, is in reality the nation I believe I am accomplishing a duty and rendering the country an eminent service—in daring to speak, at the risk of all that it may cost me—the truth to the working class! (from Dedication)

• with all individuals one always finds the same need: to eat. Give to all men and all women the right to work (the possibility of eating), the right to education (the possibility of existing through the mind), the right to bread (the possibility of living completely independently), and humanity, today so vile, so repulsive, so hypocritically vicious, will be gradually transformed and will become noble, proud, independent, free! and beautiful! and happy. (September 16, 1844)

L'Union ouvrière (1843)

Translations from the French by Lynn McDonald in Women Theorists on Society & Politics (1998)

• Workers, you must leave behind this division and isolation as quickly as possible and march courageously and fraternally down the only appropriate path: unity. My union plan rests upon a broad base and its spirit is capable of fully satisfying the moral [social] and material needs of a great people... Its goals are: (1) To establish the solid, indissoluble unity of the working class; (2) To provide the Workers' Union with enormous capital through the voluntary subscription of every worker; (3) To acquire a real power backed by this capital; (4) By means of this power to prevent poverty and eradicate abuse by giving working-class children a solid, rational education which will make them educated, reasonable, intelligent and able men and women in their work; (5) To remunerate labour as it ought to be, generously and fairly.

• Workers, think about this: the first thing you have to do is to get yourselves represented before the nation.

Promenades dans Londres (1840)

Translated from the French by Dennis Palmer and Giselle Pincetl with the title Flora Tristan's London Journal

• In order to eliminate evils at their source, to discredit prejudices, to put a stop to abuses, one must trace them back to their causes and, without hesitation in the face of weariness or of any sort of sacrifice, assure the greatest possible publicity for one's investigations with all the intrepidness which characterizes the true apostle. (Preface)

• Slavery appears in the early stages of all society; the harm it engenders makes it fundamentally transitory, and its duration is in inverse proportion to its harshness. (VII Factory Workers)

• To the best of my knowledge not one owner of a factory, similar to the one I have just described, has had the humanity to fit up a room decently heated, provided with tubs of warm water, mattresses, woollen blankets where the stokers could go and wash as they come out of the furnace room, where they could rest, warmly covered, and where the temperature would be more in keeping with the one they have just left. Truly, it is a shame, a disgrace for a nation to let the sort of things I have just related happen. (VII Factory Workers)

• Prostitution is the most hideous of the afflictions produced by the unequal distribution of the world's goods; this infamy stigmatizes the human species and bears witness against the social organization far more than does crime. (VIII Prostitutes)

• Never have I been able to see a prostitute without being moved by a feeling of compassion for our societies, without experiencing contempt for their organization and hatred for rulers who, strangers to decency, to any respect for humanity, to all love of their fellow creatures, reduce her whom God created to the lowest degree of abasement! Lower than the level of beasts. (VIII Prostitutes)

• As long as man continues to put all his trust in the power of his reason, in the affection of his loved ones, and to disregard the subordination of all things to the universal order, frustration will continue to destroy man's vainglorious intelligence, which seeks to dethrone Providence, and man's heart, which shuts out God! (XIV Bethlehem)

• If painting reproduces forms and colours, the countryside and its animals, men and their habitations, if it renders the physiognomy proper to each individual and the impression with which he is affected; if music excites every passion, delights, enraptures, lifts us toward God, plunges us to earth and resounds to the very heavens; if it is beyond doubt that the signs created by the mind to represent thought make up the most powerful of languages, then that art which makes use of all these means together must act with irresistible force! (XV English Drama)

• The greatest drama for man is man himself! And knowledge of man can be arrived at only through knowledge of one's self. When we have arrived at such self-knowledge, which instantaneously reveals to us the motives of our actions, then we see not only our passions but also the most hidden tendencies of our hearts, the aspirations whose existence we recognize in our souls, reflected both in historical narrations and in the events which happen around us; then everything is of interest to us, everything takes life and breathes with our own breath. "Bread and circuses!..." All mankind repeats the Romans' cry. Great inspiration, strong emotion, the process of thought correspond respectively to the soul, the heart and the mind, which, like the body, are in need of sustenance. We all seek to be moved and to move others. Emotion spurs thought, and thought has no power except through the emotion it inspires. All that can inspire feeling and thought is therefore reproduced by art; that is why dramatic representations have been common to all peoples, whatever the level of civilization they may have attained. The man incapable of comprehending the sermon from the pulpit or the speech from the rostrum will be deeply moved by misfortune's thoughts, grief's tears and passion's cries. How indeed can the written word or its translation upon the canvas compare with the spoken word! (XV English Drama)

• Shakespeare offers striking proof that genius is independent of merely "bookish" learning, and that he is gifted with genius which knows how to read the great book of nature. (XV English Drama)

• Let peoples mingle; let them impart their thoughts to one another; let them exchange talents as well as things, and quarrels between nations, which are always instigated by the mighty, will become impossible. The masses ask only to live in peace. (XVI Tribulations of Life in London)

• Great discoveries are always directly related to the needs of the time; this truth is revealed over and over again by history. The hand of God is seen in the establishment of infant schools, and I am convinced that, of all recent institutions, it is the richest in results, the one which best responds to the needs of Europe and of the whole world. (XVIII Infant Schools)

• Art does not progress in a nation until it descends into all classes of citizens, for the artist needs to be inspired by the enthusiasm he engenders; and if some are born with a love of art and with artistic discernment, almost anyone can acquire them. But how can a taste for great works of art take root in a nation where the individual is judged according to his address, his living quarters, his tailor, his servants and his spending habits? What inspiration can the artist derive from the world around him in a country where individual merit has no value, can claim no respect, if it is not accompanied by wealth? (from "A Word on Art in England")

• O lords, repent, beware the people's vengeance, appease their wrath and remember these words, which are as old as the world: "Vox populi, vox Dei". (from "The Iron Dipper")

Quotes about

• She was a very strange apostle of working-class unity. Of great beauty and appeal to men, she was imperious and, with all her sympathies for the workers, very conscious of her family connections. She felt bitter humiliation in being forced to work with her hands and to become a servant, and also deep indignation at the laws which denied her legitimacy. In her personal relations she revolted against any acceptance of inferiority or subordination - including subordination to her husband. Her marital relations turned her violently against the institution of marriage. She became an ardent advocate of women's rights, but was not interested in the right to vote, which she regarded as unimportant in comparison with the equal right with men to labour and to education. Uneducated and untrained herself, because of her mother's plunge into poverty, she came to lay the greatest stress on the education of the workers, always careful to insist that it must be both intellectual and technical. With all this, she was a most remarkably good observer of men and things, a great keeper of diaries, and a very graphic narrator of her own experiences. L'Union Ouvrière came to nothing: her plan was chimerical, and her acquaintance with business nil. But she has a right to a place In this record because, so far as I have been able to discover, she was the first person to put forward a definite plan for an all-inclusive proletarian International. She said again and again that whereas the great French Revolution had emancipated the 'Third Estate' - and made a tyrant of it - the mission of the new revolution was to set free the 'Fourth Estate', les ouvriers; and she saw, however dimly, that this meant comprehensive organisation internationally as well as within each nation.
  • G. D. H. Cole, History of Socialist Thought: The Forerunners, 1789–1850 (1953)

• Darwin asks himself how species will continue to evolve, what forces will change the shape of a butterfly's wing. Flora Tristán wants to know how society will evolve, what forces will change the consciousness of working women and men, release them from passivity, and turn them toward revolution. Darwin continues to study and conduct experiments. Tristán takes to the roads, conducting her own experiment, talking with workers, writing essays, arguing about the future and the rights of women, barely escaping from her husband's murderous attacks, going out again and again, hastening the day.
  • Aurora Levins Morales, Remedios (1997)

External links

• Archive of Flora Tristan Papers at the International Institute of Social History
• WikiSource (French)
• Works by Flora Tristan at the Marxist Internet Archive (in Spanish)
• GoodReads page