Tracing the Origin of Flora Tristan Studies

Chapter 1 begins with the reasons for the dispersal and obscurity of Flora Tristan papers and their subsequent retrieval in the Puech archives in Castres. The interplay of family and institutional recovery of the past in a regional context of France in the 1980s contrasts with the national and international evolution of history. Such archives elucidate the work of lesser-known actors both in gender and academic terms exploited most effectively by asserting more multidimensional and diverse interpretations than has been the case either in biographical studies or in twentieth-century scholarship on feminism and socialism. The research journey through Flora Tristan and Puech papers occurred over twenty years during which time archive retrieval methods evolved considerably and was as timely as becoming familiar with the Tristan-Puech-Castres context.

Conclusion

On 18 June 1925, Marie-Louise Bouglé addressed a letter to the publisher Marcel Rivière: Monsieur Rivière je ne saurai trop loué [sic] l’auteur et l’éditeur du merveilleux ouvrage sur Flora Tristan. Si, comme je le pense, vous avez l’occasion de voir M. Puech, voudriez-vous lui faire connaître ma bibliothèque et lui dire que sa visite me ferait beaucoup plaisir. Je me trouve avoir l’édition populaire « Promenades dans Londres » de Flora Tristan annoncé comme n’étant pas à la Bibliothèque Nationale et la 3e édition de « l’Union ouvrière ». Ceci ne l’intéresse naturellement plus mais peut lui faire voir que j’ai rassemblé là des documents intéressants. Je serai en vacances à partir du 24 juillet. J’en profiterai donc pour passer chez vous dans la journée et voir si vous avez quelques ouvrages féministes en réserve et pourrait [...

The Curious Circumstances of Flora Tristan’s Death

How Jules Puech obtained the papers of Flora Tristan that were on her person when she died in November 1844 in Bordeaux is vital to show the intergenerational transmission of knowledge of ideas and papers among activists that has shaped the construction of this double biography. Until the 1980s, Puech’s papers were kept by his descendants in the family home in Borieblanque, unlike those of Flora Tristan which were removed immediately after her death to Lyon and beyond. Borieblanque held vital clues about the custodial role of Eleonore Blanc, the spiritual daughter who inherited Flora Tristan’s papers. Puech’s account to his family of where Flora Tristan fitted into his busy schedule is invaluable as we read of his response to the opening opportunities from journal editors asking for further publications on Flora Tristan and of the complex network of his acquaintances in activist and university circles that led him to find the Blanc family and their activist connections in the republican and socialist circles of the late nineteenth century.

Introduction: A Political Biography

Beginning with a recapitulation of Flora Tristan’s short but tumultuous life from 1803 to 1844, the introduction explains that although now known as one of the foremost French predecessors to the feminist and socialist movement, historiographical analysis of her legacy in both labour and feminist history has been neglected to the extent that there is nothing on how Jules Puech became her first major historical biographer. The timely discovery of Flora Tristan in his papers has made it possible to enrich our knowledge of both their lives and their activism. By intertwining their lives beyond the grave and using material gleaned from generations of activists as historians, and historians as activists, the double biography reveals more about French history than the two separate lives.

The Whirlwind Effect of Flora Tristan

The results of a trawl of Jules Puech’s abundant unpublished letters to his parents and his wife, and his published works of the 1900s to find references to Flora Tristan reveal how Puech worked and how he preferred to develop his career as a writer-historian rather than taking up any option suggested by family or academic mentors. His increasing involvement in Paris academic circles was related in his letters and intrinsic in his accounts of progress and constraints in his personal and professional difficulties. By examining the context of his completion of a doctoral thesis, we can establish that it was his decision to work on the theme of internationalism in the labour movement that Puech discovered there was more to Flora Tristan than her authorship of Union Ouvrière and that such advance in his unique knowledge made him the ideal biographer.

The Long Wait

Chapter 6 explains how the 1925 biography was well received but that Puech was personally and professionally affected by the impact of further international conflict and the defeat of France in 1940. Through Flora Tristan however, he became embroiled in the further growth of international networks and their endangered existence with the rise of fascism. Puech’s correspondence reveals his opposition to the armistice negotiated by Pétain. Although he was confined to his home in Borieblanque during the Occupation and after the Liberation, the intersectionality of feminism, socialism and pacifism of his life had moved on to a transnational plane.

War and Peace for the Flora Tristan Biographer

Puech’s wartime correspondence with his wife Marie-Louise show how his writing of the biography of Flora Tristan grew in fits and starts, suspended as was his committee and editorial work for the pacifist movement, La Paix par le Droit. So affected by the horrors of war was he that when he resumed writing after demobilisation in 1919, he prioritised his publication of a work in 1921 promoting the League of Nations. He linked it to nineteenth-century utopian socialist internationalism and worked in a team of academics editing Proudhon’s complete works for publication. The letters and the references to the expanding feminist suffrage campaign in his work demonstrate the significant presence of Marie-Louise, who since their marriage in 1908 had assisted Puech as his full-time researcher. She followed up leads on Flora Tristan, translated and corresponded in German and English, and was his mentor, both in the peace movement and in encouraging his completion of the biography that was finally published in 1925 when he submitted it as a doctoral thesis to the Sorbonne. Thanks to her typed transcriptions, Puech used much of the original material from the Flora Tristan papers adding intellectual value to the biography.

Flora Tristan in the Press

The growth of Flora Tristan’s contribution to political ideas of her day ran concurrently with the development of the press in the nineteenth century. The digital tools of the twenty-first century enabled me to broaden knowledge of her presence as a controversial figure in newspapers including some outside France. The press survey from 1838 to the present illustrates how attitudes to her changed. Antagonism was frequent during her lifetime, especially in reports in the British and Irish press about the arrest and trial of her husband André Chazal after his attempted murder of the author in September 1838. By contrast she inspired admiration from activists such as Hélène Brion who celebrated her originality in founding the universal workers’ union. While political militants, feminist and socialists alike, lamented the lack of attention paid to Flora Tristan, by the twentieth century, her story was increasingly attractive to a new generation of historians of socialism of the mid-nineteenth century sensitive of her feminist aspirations. The circumstances of Jules Puech’s first press articles of 1909–11 are thus portrayed as a contextualisation of the beginning of his authority as an author on Flora Tristan.