Flora Tristan and Jeanne Deroin: Socialist Feminists
Flora Tristan was born in Paris in 1803, her father being a colonel in the Spanish navy and brother of the Spanish viceroy, her mother being French. After a failed marriage and giving birth to four children, having failed to claim her inheritance in Peru, she travelled through Europe, publishing in 1838 her travel narrative as Peregrinations of a Pariah. Covering her attempt to divorce her husband and keep her children it caused a scandal. A diary of her visits to London was published in French in 1842 and eventually published in English in 1982. This included sections on the Chartists, the Houses of Parliament, prostitutes, prisons, the poor of St Giles parish, the Jewish quarter, Bethlem hospital and infant schools.
She returned to France in 1834 and associated with artists and radicals, including Charles Fourier, Victor Considerant, Proudhon, Louis Blanc, Arnold Ruge and possibly the young Karl Marx. Her first pamphlet argued for better facilities for women travellers. This was followed by a petition to the chamber of deputies for the restoration of divorce and a second petition calling for the abolition of the death penalty, the latter being after a failed attempt by her husband to assassinate her. In 1843, she published her manifesto for socialism- Union Ouvriere (The Workers Union). The manifesto called for an international association to be funded by workers’ subscriptions and for equality for women given their double exploitation at home and at work. She set out on an extensive tour of French cities to promote her ideas and sell her book, but exhausted by the numerous meetings including several hostile audiences, died in November 1844 at the age of 41. Her diaries of her last months were published posthumously as Tour de France.
Jeanne Deroin
Jeanne Deroin was born in Paris in 1805 and was a seamstress. A follower of Saint Simon, she was also influenced by the feminist, Olympe de Gouges and saw marriage as equivalent to slavery. Rejecting the hierarchical structures of the Saint Simonian organisation, she joined the Fourierists, publishing the first women’s journal in France – La Femme Libre. Qualifying as a schoolteacher, she brought up her own children and those of Flora Tristan. With the onset of the revolution in 1848, together with other feminist Fourierists, she set up a women’s club – The Voix des Femmes. This was followed by a feminist journal Politique des Femmes and an association to provide mutual support for working women.
Campaigning for women’s suffrage, in 1849 she was the first woman to stand for the legislative assembly, though unsuccessful. Deroin was seeking to convert cooperative associations into worker unions which could control industry. However, in 1850, she was imprisoned and having returned to teaching on her release, continuing her feminist campaigns, but fearing re-arrest, she fled with her two children to London. Living in Shepherds Bush as a teacher and seamstress, she published women’s almanacs and supported local cooperatives. She set up a school for the children of French exiles. In the 1880’s she joined the Socialist League, with William Morris giving the oration at her funeral in 1894.
Extract from Flora Tristan: The Workers Union.
“Now the day has come when it is necessary to act. It is to you, and to you alone, that it falls to act in the interests of your own cause. That way lies your life… or your death from that horrible end which kills in every instant: poverty and hunger.”
“Workers, your condition in present society is miserable and distressing. In good health, you do not have a right to work. Sick, infirm, wounded or old, you do not have a right to hospital. Lacking everything, you do not have a right to beg, because mendicancy is prohibited by law.”
“Workers, put aside all your petty rivalries of trade and, outside of your particular associations, form one compact, solid indissoluble Union. Tomorrow, immediately, may all hearts be lifted up spontaneously in a single unique idea. Union! May the cry of union resound throughout France, and in one year, if you steadfastly desire it, the Workers Union will be established. In two years you will have forty million francs of your own in the banks to build a palace worthy of the great labouring people.
Further Reading:
Schneider, Joyce – Flora Tristan: Feminist, Socialist and Free Spirit (William Morrow 1980)
Pilbeam, Pamela – French Socialists Before Marx (Acumen publishing 2000)
Corcoran, Paul (ed.) – Before Marx: Socialism and Communism in France 1830-48 (Macmillan 1983)
Grogan, Susan – French Socialism and Sexual Difference (Macmillan 1992)
Moses, Claire – Feminism, Socialism and French Romanticism ( Indiana University Press 1993)
Crosse, Marie and Gray, Tim – The Feminism of Flora Tristan (Berg 1992)
Tristan, Flora – The Workers Union (University of Illinois 1983)
Tristan, Flora – The London Journal of Flora Tristan (Virago 1982)
Tristan, Flora – Peregrinations of a Pariah (Virago 1986)