Flora Tristan (1803-44)
Flora Tristan was bom in Paris on April 7, 1803, and died at Bordeaux on November 14, 1844. Her mother, a middle-class French woman named Thérèse Laisney (or Laine), had fled to Spain during the French Revolution and there met Don Mariano de Tristan de Moscoso, a Spanish Peruvian officer of aristocratic family claiming royal Indian ancestry. Against the wishes of Don Mariano's family and without the required military approval, they were married by a priest who failed to give them proper certification of the marriage. For the first years of Tristan's life, the family lived comfortably on an estate near Paris, where among the guests on occasion was a friend of Don Mariano, Simón Bolívar, later the hero of Latin American independence. But Don Mariano died suddenly in 1808 and his property was confiscated by France, then at war with Spain. Flora’s mother was left without resources other than a small allowance from her brother, and she was unable to claim her inheritance because Don Mariano's family refused to recognize the legitimacy of the marriage. Thus Tristan grew up in relative poverty, first in a country village, later in a garret apartment on the Left Bank in Paris. She was almost entirely self-educated. In 1818 she learned for the first time of the technical illegitimacy of her birth, which abruptly terminated her youthful hopes of marriage and enforced upon her the sense that she was to be a pariah forever.
In 1820 Tristan went to work for a lithographer, André François Chazal, whom she soon married, under pressure from her mother and uncle, and to whom she bore three children. Aline, the third child, was closest to her mother in temperament and interests; through Aline, Flora was grandmother to the artist Paul Gauguin. But in 1825 she left a miserable marriage, beginning a prolonged battle for custody of her children and freedom from Chazal. She was then doubly a pariah, being bom “illegitimate” and having abandoned her husband and left her children in the care of others in order to support herself, at first by going into domestic service (traveling to England and Italy as a chambermaid), later by writing. In 1837 Tristan published a petition, submitted to the Chamber of Deputies, for the reinstatement of divorce (which had been legalized during the Revolution in 1792 but abolished in 1816). In 1838 Chazal attempted to kill her by shooting her in broad daylight in the street. Tristan survived, and Chazal went to prison for eighteen years, but even under these conditions, divorce remained impossible.
Tristan voyaged to Peru in 1833, in a vain attempt to secure her inheritance from her uncle, Don Pío de Tristan de Moscoso, one of the most influential men in the new republic. On this journey she witnessed with horror sights of black slavery and the oppression of the Indian population, and she saw at close hand the civil war and chaotic political struggles of the early years of Peruvian independence. Tristan came away with only a small legacy from her grandmother, but with a wealth of new knowledge and experience and the extensive journals on which she drew for her later success as a writer, an activist, and a theorist.
In the politically volatile France, England, and South America of the 1820s and 1830s, Tristan encountered the ideas of late-eighteenth-century radicals such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Mary Wollstonecraft and early-nineteenth-century “utopian socialists” and workers' advocates, including Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon, Prosper Enfantin, Charles Fourier, Victor Considérant, Louis Blanc, P. J. Proudhon, Robert Owen, and William Lovett. Saint-Simon had died in 1825, but Tristan met the others at various times in Paris and London and plunged into the sometimes clandestine world of revolutionary debate and politics in cafés, journals, and salons. Her writings were greeted with acclaim and serialized in the socialist press.
Her first signed pamphlet in 1835 addressed the mortifications and difficulties faced by “women who are among strangers,” including women traveling alone in a foreign country, unaccompanied women traveling in their own countries for education or business, women who choose or are forced to seek their own livelihood, and women cast off by society. Here Tristan put forward several ideas presaging her subsequent writings, including the need “to ameliorate the lot of women, of that part of humanity whose mission is to bring peace and love to mankind,” and the need “for new institutions adapted to new needs, a demand for associations working by common consent to bring relief to the many who suffer and languish without being able to help themselves; for, divided, they are weak, unable even to struggle against the last efforts of a decrepit, dying civilization” (Flora Tristan: Utopian Feminist, 2). Doubting the prospects of creating “another brilliant utopia” without a clear means for its realization, she advocated “amelioration by degrees,” to be undertaken by each person focusing on a particular aspect of the need for change. Her proposal at this time was an association of mutual aid and reciprocal hospitality to make it possible for women to travel freely for their own support, education, or other goals. The pamphlet was remarkable for its analysis of the different factors affecting Page 206 →women by class, and her internationalist hope for a day “when we shall all be mankind, without distinctions as English, Germans, French, etc” (ibid., 7). As she wrote later in her London Journal (1840), “I long ago renounced any notion of nationality, a mean and narrow concept which does nothing but harm” (Cross and Gray, 49).
Tristans first major work was the Peregrinations of a Pariah (serialized in 1836, published as a book in 1838). She described this as her autobiography, defending herself and other outcast women, such as dona Pencha Gamarra, the exiled Peruvian general and political leader who played a prominent role in the civil war during Tristans stay in Peru. As Kathleen Hart has argued, Gamarra personified for Tristan “the reality of a woman who had sought to provide leadership for her country, but was finally calumnied and humiliated by its people,” who, like the people of France in the Revolution of 1830, had “failed to recognize at once the leadership capabilities of women and the principle of association” (Hart, 62, 61). Addressed “To the Peruvians” as a contribution to their “present prosperity and future progress,” the book presented an unflattering portrait of a country in which “the upper class is profoundly corrupted” and “the degradation of the people is extreme in all the races of which it is composed” (Utopian Socialist, 10). Don Pio had the book burned in Arequipa and cut off the small annuity he had been sending his niece, but the book was later translated into Spanish, and Tristan is now warmly remembered in Latin America and claimed as a Peruvian writer and early feminist socialist.
Several other important publications by Tristan appeared in 1838. Lettres de Bolivar, her edition of the letters between Bolívar and her parents, was serialized that July. A Petition for the Abolition of the Death Penalty to the Chamber of Deputies appeared in December. Tristan's only novel, Méphis, was also published that year. Though seen as of uneven literary merit, Méphis was an important expression of Tristan's ideas on class antagonisms and the image of the femme guide, the woman guide to humanity, sometimes identified with the “woman messiah” prefigured in Saint-Simonian socialism, yet significantly different from that concept (Cross and Gray, 38-43).
Tristan's commitment to the principle of association, particularly in the context of working-class struggles in the capitalist system of her time, was confirmed and sharpened by her return to England in 1839, where she walked through many streets and visited factories, foundries, gasworks, and the miserable living quarters of workers. She observed prisons, prostitution, and the ghettos of the Irish and the Jews. She met with Robert Owen, William Lovett, and others associated with the London Working Mens Association and the Chartist movement, and she returned to France to write Promenades dans Londres (1840, later translated as Flora Tristan's London Journal).
An immediate success, the book portrayed for the first time a broad view of the desperate conditions of life for the working classes and the poor at the center of the industrial revolution. It was an impressive contribution to the early history of sociology not only in its factual observations of social conditions but in its analysis of social structures and alienation. It preceded Friedrich Engels’s Condition of the Working Class in England by five years and though shorter, it offered a more comprehensive —and materialist—critique of inequalities, prejudice, and oppressive conditions affecting various groups including women, prisoners, and despised minorities.
Engels, for example, asserted that poverty in Ireland “is owing to the character of the people” and described the Irish in England in vituperative language (“filth and drunkenness,” “the lack of cleanliness ... which is the Irishmans second nature,” “his crudity, which places him but little above the savage”), lamenting that English workers’ wages are driven down by competition with workers of this alien savage “race” who, having “grown up in filth, . . . have a strong, degrading influence on their English companions in toil....” (Condition, 559, 366-67). But Tristan had already rejected such views—that the poor “themselves are the cause of their suffering”—as excuses by Malthus, Ricardo, “and the whole English school of economists” to dismiss and obscure the unbearable conditions of poverty. She insisted that one must go into the Irish quarter “to realize in all its horror the poverty which occurs in a rich and fertile country when it is governed by, and for, the aristocracy.” Appalled by what she saw as she entered the quarter, she was about to turn back “when suddenly I remembered that these were human beings, my fellow men, all about me.... I overcame my distress ... and I once again felt up to the task I had set myself, to examine these evils one by one” (London Journal, 134-36).
The enthusiastic reception of her London Journal inspired Tristan to move beyond her observations and critique of society and expound more fully her own proposals for social change and action. In introducing the third edition of the book, she wrote in the introduction: “the reader will find on every page the thought of unity that guides me in everything . . . envisaged from the point of view of European unity and of universal unity” (Schneider, 211). This was to be a central theme of her efforts in her few remaining years.
In 1842 Tristan completed her best-known work, Page 207 →The Workers’ Union, which proposed the creation of an International Association of Working Men and Women to “constitute the working class" as a self-conscious force of solidarity among working people across national and gender boundaries. This proposal preceded by more than five years Marx and Engels’s famed calf in the Communist Manifesto, that “Workers of the world, unitel” And it preceded by more than twenty years the actual founding in 1864 of the International Workingmen’s Association, which largely ignored Tristan’s concern for working women. Neither Marx nor Engels, nor any of their disciples, acknowledged her influence, but Marx and Engels made clear in The Holy Family that they were aware of her Workers’ Union in 1845.
The Workers’ Union was met at first with incomprehension and disbelief by publishers, and Tristan was obliged to publish it by subscription, which yielded sufficient contributions from a broad range of writers, socialist intellectuals, and workers to underwrite publication of the first edition. Next Tristan set out to carry the word to workers throughout France. By this time she had come to see herself in the role of the femme guide or the woman messiah. Whether Tristan’s inspiration for this was fundamentally Christian, as some scholars argue, may be doubted in view of her critical stance toward religion and her intensely anticlerical positions on many points ranging from oppression of women to observations of “Christian” institutions of slavery in Peru. But she clearly had adopted the role of apostle of a new era of society, whose principles would be radical egalitarianism, feminism, cooperative organization, and working-class solidarity.
A powerful speaker driven by a sense of urgency and mission, Tristan succeeded in drawing audiences and gaining adherents to her cause in a whirlwind lecture tour, described in her posthumously published Tour of France. But her health, which had been poor for years, broke down completely under the strain, and at age forty-one she died in 1844 at Bordeaux, whence she had set out on her journey to Peru a little more than a decade before.
In testimony to the power and durability of her ideas and her influence, Tristan’s works today are the subject of numerous debates, particularly as to whether to characterize her as primarily feminist, socialist, socialist-feminist, Christian socialist, or liberal individualist; whether to claim her as a romantic, a revolutionary, a Christian, a free thinker, a patriot, French or Peruvian, egomaniacal or selflessly dedicated. These debates will surely persist, but it may be well to recall, as Steven Hause notes, that “she spent her last days on a lecture tour exhorting workers and socialists to organize,” and that “a carpenter and a tailor spoke at her grave.” In 1848, ten thousand workers gathered for the unveiling of a monument, paid for by subscription, inscribed: “To the memory of Madame Flora Tristan, author of The Workers’ Union. The grateful workers—Liberty-Equality-Fratemity-Solidarity.” And following her dates of birth and death, the word “Solidarity” was inscribed again (Schneider, 249).
The following selections are from the 1983 edition of The Workers’ Union, translated by Beverly Livingston.
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Sources and Suggested Readings
- Cross, Maire, and Tim Gray. The Feminism of Flora Tristan. Oxford: Berg, 1992.
- Desanti, Dominique. Flora Tristan: Oeuvres et Vie Mêlées. Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1973.
- Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England [1845]. In Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works. Vol. 4. New York: International Publishers, 1976.
- Grogan, Susan K. French Socialism and Sexual Difference: Women and the New Society, 1803-44. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992.
- Hart, Kathleen. “An I for an Eye: Flora Tristan and Female Visual Allegory.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 26, 1 & 2 (Fall-Winter 1997-98): 52-65.
- Hause, Steven C. Review of M. Cross and T. Gray, The Feminism of Flora Tristan. European History Quarterly 24 (April 1994): 314-16.
- Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism. In Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works. Vol. 4. New York: International Publishers, 1976.
- Moon, S. J. “Feminism and Socialism: The Utopian Synthesis of Flora Tristan.” In Socialist Women: European Socialist Feminism in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, ed. Marilyn J. Boxer and Jean H. Quataert. New York: Elsevier, 1978.
- Moses, Claire. French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century. Albany: New York State University Press, 1984.
- Schneider, Joyce Anne. Flora Tristan: Feminist, Socialist, and Free Spirit. New York: William Morrow, 1980.
- Strumingher, Laura S. The Odyssey of Flora Tristan. New York: Peter Lang, 1988.
- Tristan, Flora. Flora Tristan: La Paria et son rêve. Correspondance. Ed. Stéphane Michaud. Fontenay/St. Cloud: E. N. S. Editions, 1995.
- ———. Flora Tristan, Utopian Feminist: Her Travel Diaries and Personal Crusade. Trans, and ed. Doris and Paul Beik. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.
- ———. Flora Tristan's London Journal: A Survey of London Life in the 1830s. Trans. Dennis Palmer and Giselle Pincetl. London: George Prior, 1980.
- ———. Peregrinations of a Pariah 1833-4 [1838]. Trans. Jean Hawkes. London: Virago, 1986.
- ———. The Workers’ Union. Trans. Beverly Livingston. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983.
The Workers’ Union (1843)
To Working Men and Women
Listen to me. For twenty-five years the most intelligent and devoted men have given their lives to defending your sacred cause. In their writings, speeches, reports, memoirs, investigations, and statistics, they have pointed out, observed, and demonstrated to the government and the wealthy that the working class, in the current state of affairs, is morally and materially placed in an intolerable situation of poverty and grief. They have shown that, in this state of abandonment and suffering, most of the workers, inevitably embittered through misfortune and brutalized through ignorance, become dangerous to society. They have proven to the Government and the wealthy that not only justice and humanity call for the duty of aiding them through a law on labor organization, but that even the public interest and security imperiously demand such a measure. Well, for the last twenty-five years, so many eloquent voices have not been able to arouse the Government’s concern regarding the risks to society with seven to eight million workers exasperated by suffering and despair, with many trapped between suicide and thievery!
Workers, what can be said now in defense of your cause? In the last twenty-five years, hasn’t everything been said and repeated in every form? There is nothing more to be said, nothing more to be written, for your wretched position is well known by all. Only one thing remains to be done: to act by virtue of the rights inscribed in the [1830 Constitutional] Charter. Now the day has come when one must act, and it is up to you and only you to act in the interest of your own cause. At stake are your very lives... or death, that horrible, evermenacing death: misery and starvation.
Workers, put an end to twenty-five years of waiting for someone to intervene on your behalf. Experience and facts inform you well enough that the Government cannot or will not be concerned with your lot when its improvement is at issue. It is up to you alone, if you truly want it, to leave this labyrinth of misery, suffering, and degradation in which you languish. Do you want to ensure good vocational education for your children and for yourselves, and certainty of rest in your old age? You can.
Your action is not to be armed revolt, public riots, arson, or plundering. No, because, instead of curing your ills, destruction would only make them worse. The Lyons and Paris riots have attested to that. You have but one legal and legitimate recourse permissible before God and man: THE UNIVERSAL UNION OF WORKING MEN AND WOMEN.
Workers, your condition in present society is miserable and painful: in good health, you do not have the right to work; sick, ailing, injured, old, you do not even have the right to care; poor, lacking everything, you are not entitled to benefits, and beggary is forbidden by law. This precarious situation relegates you to a primitive state in which man, living in nature, must consider every morning how he will get food for the day. Such an existence is true torture. The fate of the animal ruminating in a stable is a thousand times better than yours. He, at least, is certain of eating the next day; his master keeps hay and straw for him in winter. The bee in its tree hole is a thousand times better off than you. The ant who works in summer to live well in winter is a thousand times better off than you. Workers, you are miserable, yes, indubitably; but what is the main cause of your suffering? If a bee or an ant, instead of working with other bees and ants to stock the common dwelling for winter, decided to separate and work alone, it too would die of cold and hunger all alone in a corner. Then why do you remain isolated from each other? Individually, you are weak and fall from the weight of all kinds of miseries. So, leave your isolation: unite! Unity gives strength. You have numbers going for you, and numbers are significant.
I come to you to propose a general union among working men and women, regardless of trade, who reside in the same region—a union which would have as its goal the CONSOLIDATION OF THE WORKING CLASS and the construction of several establishments (Workers’ Union palaces), distributed evenly throughout France. Children of both sexes six to eighteen would be raised there; and sick or disabled workers as well as the elderly would be admitted. Listen to the numbers and you will have an idea of what can be done with the union.
In France there are about five million working-class men and two million women—seven million workers united in thought and action. To realize a great, communal project for the benefit of all men and women, if each contributes two francs per year, at the end of one year, the Workers’ Union will have the enormous sum of fourteen million francs....
II. How to Consolidate the Working Class
It is very important for the workers to distinguish between the Workers’ Union as I conceive of it and what exists today under the titles of guild associations, the Union, welfare societies, etc. The goal of all these various private groups is simply to give aid, mutually and individually, within each society. Thus they were Page 209 →set up to provide in case of sickness, accidents, and long periods of unemployment.
Given the working class’s current state of isolation, desertion and misery, these kinds of societies serve a purpose. For their aim is to give a bit of aid to the most needy, thereby mitigating some personal suffering, which often surpasses the strength and stamina of those afflicted. So I highly approve of these societies and encourage the workers to increase them and get rid of the abuses they may have. But alleviating misery does not destroy it; mitigating the evil is not the same as eradicating it. If one really wants to attack the root of evil, obviously one needs something other than private societies, since their only goal is to relieve individual suffering.
Let us examine what happens in the private societies and see whether this mode of action can actually improve the lot of the working class. Each society uses its membership fees to give so much per diem (between 50 centimes and 2 francs) to the sick and in some cases to those who have been out of work for a certain length of time. If, by chance, something happens, such as a member’s being sent to prison, aid is available up to the time of the verdict. In the guild associations mutual aid is even more effective: members obtain work for those coming from provincial towns and let the mother know what their expenses are, up to a certain limit, while waiting for work. That is what they do on the material side. To boost their morale, each member of the association makes it his duty to go and visit sick members in their homes or in the hospital, and prisoners, as well. I repeat, given the current state of affairs, these sorts of groups are at least very useful in showing great sympathy and in binding the workers, for they encourage good morals, civilize their customs, and alleviate their awful suffering. But is that sufficient? No! Indeed not, since, in the final analysis, these groups cannot (and do not claim to) change or improve in any way the material and moral condition of the working class.
A father belonging to one of these associations suffers miserably, and finds no solace in believing that his sons will be any better off than he. And in their turn, his sons as members of the same association will live miserably like their fathers, with no hope for their children. Mind you, each society acting in the name of the individual and trying to provide temporary relief invariably offers the same thing. Despite all its efforts, it will be able to create nothing great, good, or capable of notable results. Therefore, Workers, with your private societies as they have existed since the time of Solomon, the physical and psychological condition of the working class will not have changed in fifty centuries: its fate will always be poverty, ignorance, and slavery, the only change being the types and names of slaves.
What is wrong? This kind of absurd, selfish, mean, bastard organization divides the working class into a multitude of small private groups, the way large empires, which we see today as so strong, rich, and powerful, were divided during the Middle Ages into small provinces, which in turn were further divided into small towns with their own rights and freedoms. Well, what rights! That is to say, the little towns and provinces, continually at war with each other (and today war is competition), were poor, weak, and had as their only right the ability to moan under the weight of their wretchedness, isolation, and the terrible calamities inevitably resulting from their divisive state.
So I am not afraid to repeat that the fundamental vice which must be attacked from every point is the system of separation, which decimates the workers and can only foster abuse.
I think this short analysis will suffice to enlighten the workers about the true cause of their ills—division.
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 and material needs of a great people.
What is the aim and what will result from the universal union of working men and women? Its goals are:
1. to establish the solid, indissoluble unity of the working class;
2. to provide the Workers’ Union with great capital through the optional membership 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 labor as it ought to be, generously and fairly....
What is the social position of the French working class today, and what rights remain to be demanded?...
... From the Charter’s standpoint, [the worker’s] social position is as desirable as he could want! By virtue of the recognized principle, he enjoys absolute equality, complete freedom of thought, and the guarantee of security for his person and property. What more can he ask? But, let us hasten to say that to enjoy equality and freedom in theory is to live in spirit. And if he who brought the law of the spirit to the world spoke wisely, "Man can not live by bread alone,” I believe it is also wise to say, "Man does not live in spirit alone.”
Page 210 →Reading the 1830 Charter, one is struck by a serious omission. Our constitutional legislators forgot that preceding the rights of man and the citizen, there is an imperious, imprescriptible right engendering all the others, the right to live. Now, for the poor worker who possesses no land, shelter, capital, absolutely nothing except his hands, the rights of man and the citizen are of no value if his right to live is not recognized first of all (and in this case they are even bitterly derisory). 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 being enjoys by being born is precisely the one they forgot to inscribe in the Charter. This first right has yet to be proclaimed.
Today the working class must be concerned with this single claim, because it is based on the strictest equity. And anything short of granting this claim is an abrogation of fundamental rights. So, what is to be demanded? THE RIGHT TO WORK. The working class's own property and the only one it can ever possess is its hands. Yes, its hands. That is its patrimony, its sole wealth. Its hands are the only work tools it has. Therefore they constitute its property, and I do not think its legitimacy or utility can be denied. For if the earth produces, it is thanks to manual labor.
To deny that the worker's hands are his property is to refuse to understand the spirit of Article 8 of the Charter. Yet this property is uncontestable and, as soon as it comes under discussion, there will be a unanimous voice in support of it. To guarantee the working class’s property (as Art. 8 indicates), this right and its free enjoyment must be recognized in principle (as well as in reality). Now, the exercise of this free enjoyment of property would consist in being able to use its hands when and how it pleases. And for that, it must have the right to work. So the guarantee of this property consists in a wise and equitable organization of labor. The working class thus has two important demands to make: The right to work and the right to organize....
Workers, you see, if you want to save yourselves, you have but one means, you must unite. If I preach unity, it is because I know the strength and power you will find. Open your eyes, look around you, and you will see the advantages enjoyed by all those who have created unity in the goal of serving a common cause and common interests....
In 1789 the bourgeoisie gained its independence. Its own charter dates from the capture of the Bastille. Workers, for more than two hundred years the bourgeois have fought courageously and ardently against the privileges of the nobility and for the victory of their rights. But when the day of victory came, and though they recognized de facto equal rights for all, they seized all the gains and advantages of the conquest for themselves alone.
The bourgeois class has been established since 1789. Note what strength a body united in the same interest can have. As soon as this class is recognized, it becomes so powerful that it can exclusively take over all the country’s powers. Finally in 1830 its power reaches its peak, and without being the least bit troubled by what might occur, it pronounces the fall of France’s reigning king. It chooses its own king, proceeds to elect him without consulting the rest of the nation, and finally, being actually sovereign, it takes the lead in business and governs the country as it pleases. This bourgeois-owners class represents itself in the legislature and before the nation, not to defend its own interests, for no one threatens them, but to impose its conditions and commands upon 25 million proletarians. In a word, it is both counsel and judge, just like the feudal lords it triumphed over. Being capitalists, the bourgeois make laws with regard to the commodities they have to sell, and thereby regulate, as they will, the prices of wine, meat, and even the people’s bread. You see, already more numerous and useful, the bourgeoisie has succeeded the nobility. The unification of the working class now remains to be accomplished. In turn, the workers, the vital part of the nation, must create a huge union to assert their unity! Then, the working class will be strong; then it will be able to make itself heard, to demand from the bourgeois gentlemen its right to work and to organize....
III. Why I Mention Women ...
In the life of the workers, woman is everything. She is their sole providence. If she is gone, they lack everything. So they say, “It is woman who makes or unmakes the home,” and this is the clear truth: that is why it has become a proverb. However, what education, instruction, direction, moral or physical development does the working-class woman receive? None. As a child, she is left to the mercy of a mother and grandmother who also have received no education. One of them might have a brutal and wicked disposition and beat and mistreat her for no reason; the other might be weak and uncaring, and let her do anything. (As with everything I am suggesting, I am speaking in general terms; of course, there are numerous exceptions.) The poor child will be raised among the most shocking contradictions —hurt by unfair blows and treatment one day, then pampered and spoiled no less perniciously the next.
Instead of being sent to school, she is kept at home in deference to her brothers and so that she can share Page 211 →in the housework, rock the baby, run errands, or watch the soup, etc. At the age of twelve she is made an apprentice. There she continues to be exploited by her mistress and often continues to be as mistreated as she was at home.
Nothing embitters the character, hardens the heart, or makes the spirit so mean as the continuous suffering a child endures from unfair and brutal treatment. First, the injustice hurts, afflicts, and causes despair; then when it persists, it irritates and exasperates us and finally, dreaming only of revenge, we end up by becoming hardened, unjust, and wicked. Such will be the normal condition for a poor girl of twenty. Then she will marry, without love, simply because one must marry in order to get out from under parental tyranny. What will happen? I suppose she will have children, and she, in turn, will be unable to raise them suitably. She will be just as brutal to them as her mother and grandmother were to her....
Poor working women! They have so many reasons to be irritated! First, their husbands. (It must be agreed that there are few working-class couples who are happily married.) Having received more instruction, being the head by law and also by the money he brings home, the husband thinks he is (and he is, in fact) very superior to his wife, who only brings home her small daily wage and is merely a very humble servant in her home.
Consequently, the husband treats his wife with nothing less than great disdain. Humiliated by his every word or glance, the poor woman either openly or silently revolts, depending upon her personality. This creates violent, painful scenes that end up producing an atmosphere of constant irritation between the master and the slave (one can indeed say slave, because the woman is, so to speak, her husband’s property). This state becomes so painful that, instead of staying home to talk with his wife, the husband hurries out; and as if he had no other place to go, he goes to the tavern to drink blue wine in the hope of getting drunk, with the other husbands who are just as unhappy as he....
And following the acute chagrins caused by the husband come the pregnancies, illnesses, unemployment, and poverty, planted by the door like Medusa’s head. Add to all that the endless tension provoked by four or five loud, turbulent, and bothersome children clamoring about their mother, in a small worker’s room too small to turn around in. My! One would have to be an angel from heaven not to be irritated, not to become brutal and mean in such a situation. However, in this domestic setting, what becomes of the children? They see their father only in the evening or on Sunday. Always either upset or drunk, their father speaks to them only angrily and gives them only insults and blows. Hearing their mother continuously complain, they begin to feel hatred and scorn for her. They fear and obey her, but they do not love her, for a person is made that way—he cannot love someone who mistreats him. And isn’t it a great misfortune for a child not to be able to love his mother! If he is unhappy, to whose breast will he go to cry? If he thoughtlessly makes a bad mistake or is led astray, in whom can he confide? Having no desire to stay close to his mother, the child will seek any pretext to leave the parental home. Bad associations are easy to make, for girls as for boys. Strolling becomes vagrancy, and vagrancy often becomes thievery....
Are you beginning to understand, you men, who cry scandal before being willing to examine the issue, why I demand rights for women? Why I would like women placed in society on a footing of absolute equality with men to enjoy the legal birthright all beings have? I call for woman’s rights because I am convinced that all the misfortunes in the world come from this neglect and scorn shown until now for the natural and inalienable rights of woman. I call for woman’s rights because it is the only way to have her educated, and woman’s education depends upon man’s in general, and particularly the working-class man’s. I call for woman’s rights because it is the only way to obtain her rehabilitation before the church, the law, and society, and this rehabilitation is necessary before working men themselves can be rehabilitated. All workingclass ills can be summed up in two words: poverty and ignorance. Now in order to get out of this maze, I see only one way: begin by educating women, because the women are in charge of instructing boys and girls....
Workers, in 1791, your fathers proclaimed the immortal declaration of the rights of man, and it is to that solemn declaration that today you owe your being free and equal men before the law. May your fathers be honored for this great work! But, proletarians, there remains for you men of 1843 a no less great work to fin-ish. In your turn, emancipate the last slaves still re-maining in French society; proclaim the rights of woman, in the same terms your fathers proclaimed yours:
"We, French proletarians, after fifty-three years of experience, recognize that we are duly enlightened and convinced that the neglect and scorn perpetrated upon the natural rights of woman are the only cause of unhappiness in the world, and we have resolved to expose her sacred and inalienable rights in a solemn declaration inscribed in our charter. We wish women to be informed of our declaration, so that they will not let themselves be oppressed and degraded any more by man’s injustice and tyranny, and so that men will respect the freedom and equality they enjoy in their wives and mothers.
Page 212 →1. The goal of society necessarily being the common happiness of men and women, the Workers’ Union guarantees them the enjoyment of their rights as working men and women.
2. Their rights include equal admission to the Workers’ Union palaces, whether they be children, or disabled or elderly.
3. Woman being man’s equal, we understand that girls will receive as rational, solid, and extensive (though different) an education in moral and professional matters as the boys.
4. As for the disabled and the elderly, in every way, the treatment will be the same for women as for men.[”]
Workers, rest assured, if you have enough equity and justice to inscribe in your Charter the few lines I have just traced, this declaration of the rights of woman will soon become custom, then law, and within twenty-five years you will see absolute equality of man and woman inscribed at the head of the book of law.
Then, my brothers, and only then, will human unity be established.
Sons of ’89, that is the work your fathers bequeathed to you!...
IV. Plan for the Universal Unionization of
Working Men and Women
71. The results the Workers’ Union ought to have are immeasurable. This union is a bridge erected between a dying civilization and the harmonious social order foreseen by superior minds. First of all, it will bring about the rehabilitation of manual labor diminished by thousands of years of slavery. And this is a capital point. As soon as it is no longer dishonorable to work with one’s hands, when work is even an honorable deed, the rich and the poor alike will work. For idleness is both a torture for mankind and the cause of its ills. All will work, and for this reason alone, prosperity will rule for everyone. Then, there will be no more poverty; and poverty ceasing, ignorance will too. Who causes the evil we suffer from today? Isn’t it that thousand-headed monster, selfishness? But selfishness is not the primary cause; poverty and ignorance are what produce selfishness....
73. Only when all men and women work with their hands and are dignified by it, will this great, desirable productivity take place. And this is the only way to eradicate the vices fostered by selfishness, and consequently to civilize men.
74. The second, but not lesser, result necessarily brought about by the Workers’ Union will be to establish de facto real equality among all men. In fact, as soon as the day comes when working-class children are carefully raised and trained to develop their intellects, faculties, and physical strength—in a word, all that is good and beautiful in human nature—and as soon as there is no distinction between rich and poor children in their education, talent, and good manners, I ask: where could there be inequality? Nowhere, absolutely nowhere. Then only one inequality will be recognized, but that one must be experienced and accepted, for God is the One who established it. To one, he gives genius, love, intelligence, wit, strength, and beauty; to the other, he denies all these gifts and makes him stupid, dull-minded, weak-bodied, and ill-shapen. That is natural inequality before which man’s pride must humble itself; that inequality indiscriminately touches the sons of kings as well as the sons of the poor.
75. I stop here, wanting to leave my readers the sweet joy of counting for themselves the important and magnificent results the Workers’ Union will doubtless obtain. In this institution the country will find elements of order, prosperity, wealth, morality, and happiness, such as they can be desired....
Summary of the ideas in this book,
the goals of which are:
1. Consolidation of the working class by means of a tight, solid, and indissoluble Union.
2. Representation of the working class before the nation through a defender chosen and paid by the Workers’ Union, so that the working class’s need to exist and the other classes’ need to accept it become evident.
3. Recognition of one’s hands as legitimate property. (In France 25,000,000 proletarians have their hands as their only asset.)
4. Recognition of the legitimacy of the right to work for all men and women.
5. Recognition of the legitimacy of the right to moral, intellectual, and vocational education for all boys and girls.
6. Examination of the possibility of labor organizing in the current social state.
7. Construction of Workers’ Union palaces in every department, in which working-class children would receive intellectual and vocational instruction, and to which the infirm and elderly as well as workers injured on the job would be admitted.
8. Recognition of the urgent necessity of giving moral, intellectual, and vocational education to the women of the masses so that they can become the moral agents for the men of the masses.
9. Recognition in principle of equal rights for men and women as the sole means of unifying humankind.