Flora Celestine Therese Henriette Tristán Moscoso

Flora Tristan was a pioneering socialist and feminist writer who endured a difficult life and devoted herself to the struggle for women's rights and workers' liberation.

(April 7, 1803, Paris/France - November 18, 1844, Bordeaux/France); she was born at a time when the upheaval of the 1789 French Revolution had begun to subside. Her mother, Anine Pierre Laisnay, was a Parisian bourgeois, and her father was a colonel in the Spanish army.

Her father died when Tristan was four years old. Since her parents' religious marriage in Spain had not been adapted to French law before her father's death, she was considered an illegitimate child.

She lived under difficult conditions throughout her life. In 1821, at the age of 18, influenced by her mother and grandmother, she married her employer Andre Chazal. She suffered violence from her "husband" and was even stabbed by him.

In 1826, she started working. She went to London with the family she worked for and began to take an interest in utopian socialist ideas, which would greatly influence her.

In London, she met the Chartists and witnessed the misery of the "working world" and the exploitation faced by Irish workers. After returning to Paris, she began her lifelong dedication to the "Workers' Union" and "Women's Liberation" movements.

F. Tristan described herself as "a fallen aristocrat, a perceptive bourgeois, a socialist woman, and a feminist worker."

She dedicated her short and painful life to the cause of the working class and women's freedom until the day she died of typhoid fever.

Major Works

• Les Pérégrinations d’une Paria - The Peregrinations of a Pariah (1838)
• Mephis (1838)
• Nécessité de faire un bon accueil aux femmes étrangères - On the Necessity of Welcoming Foreign Women (1836)
• Promenades dans Londres - Walks in London (1840)