Compared with its neighbours, Chile is today a very boring country. By contrast, we Peruvians, Bolivians, Argentines and Ecuadorians live dangerously and never get bored. That is why we get what we get. Not like the Chileans, who now have to get their kicks through literature or the movies or sport rather than in politics.
Lima, January 2006
The Odyssey of Flora Tristán
The nineteenth century was not just the century of the novel and of nationalism: it was also the century of utopias. The fault lay with the French Revolution of 1789: the upheavals and social transformations brought about by the Revolution convinced both its supporters and its opponents, not just in France but throughout the entire world, that history could be fashioned like a sculpture, until it reached the perfection of a work of art. There was one condition: a plan or a theoretical model should be outlined in advance, that could then be neatly imposed on reality. This idea can be traced back a long way, at least to classical Greece. In the Renaissance, it appeared in such important works as Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, which established a genre that continues to this day. But it was in the nineteenth century that the idea was at its most powerful and seductive, generating daring intellectual projects and inflaming the imagination and idealism (and sometimes the madness) of so many thinkers, revolutionaries or ordinary citizens. It was the conviction that, with the right ideas, carried through selflessly and courageously, one could create paradise on earth and establish a society without contradictions or injustice, where men and women could live in peace and order, sharing the benefits of the three principles of 1789 in a harmonious blend: liberty, equality and fraternity.
The whole of the nineteenth century is full of utopias and utopian thinkers. Alongside groups committed to violent action, like those formed by the disciples of François-Noël Babeuf (1746–97), we find remarkable thinkers like Saint-Simon (1760–1825) and Charles Fourier (1772–1837), daring businessmen like the Scot Robert Owen, men of action and adventurers, among whom the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin (1814–76) stands out, flamboyant dreamers like Etienne Cabet (1788–1856) or delirious examples of the genre like Jules-Simon Ganneau (1806–51), the messianic founder of Evadisme. The most important of all the nineteenth-century utopian thinkers, in historical terms, was, without doubt, Karl Marx, whose ‘scientific’ utopia would incorporate much of this earlier thought and end up overriding it.
Flora Tristán (1803–44) belongs to this lineage of great nonconformists, radical opponents of the society that they were born into, believing fanatically that it was possible to reform society root and branch, eradicate injustice and suffering and establish human happiness. She was a bold and romantic campaigner for justice who, first in her difficult life, plagued by adversity, then in her writings and finally in the passionate militancy of the last two years of her life, offered an example of rebelliousness, daring, idealism, naïvety, truculence and adventurousness which fully justifies the praise she received from the father of Surrealism, André Breton: ‘Il n’est peutêtre pas de destinée féminine qui, au firmament de l’esprit, laisse un sillage aussi long et aussi lumineux’. (‘There is perhaps no feminine destiny that, in the firmament of the spirit, has left such a long and luminous trace.’) The word ‘feminine’ is key here. Not just because in the vast panoply of nineteenth-century social utopian thinkers, Flora Tristán is the only woman, but also, fundamentally, because her desire to reconstruct society in its entirety stemmed from her indignation at the discrimination and servitude that women of her time suffered and which she herself experienced more than most.
Two traumatic experiences and a trip to Peru were the decisive events in the life of Flora Tristán, who was born in Paris on 7 April 1803 and christened with the long, grandiose name of Flora Celestina Teresa Enriqueta Tristán Mocoso: her birth and her marriage. Her father, a Peruvian, Don Mariano Tristán y Mocoso, belonged to a very prosperous and powerful family and served in the armies of the King of Spain. Her mother, Anne-Pierre Laisnay, a Frenchwoman, had fled the Revolution and taken refuge in Bilbao. It was there that they met and apparently were joined — there is no proof of this — in a religious marriage conducted by a French priest, another exile, which had no legal status. For that reason, Flora was born as an illegitimate child, a shameful condition which, from the cradle, condemned her to life as a ‘pariah’, a term that she would later use insolently in the title of the most famous of her books, Peregrinaciones de una paria (Peregrinations of a Pariah, 1837). When her father died in June 1807, when the child was not yet five, mother and daughter, since they lacked any legal status, were evicted from the elegant property they lived in, in Vaugirard, and all Don Mariano’s possessions reverted to the family in Peru. After a few years, as their situation declined, we find Flora and her mother living in a poor neighbourhood in Paris — around the Place Maubert — and the young girl beginning to work mixing colours in the print shop of the painter and printer André Chazal, who fell in love with her. Their wedding, on 3 February 1821, was, for Flora, a catastrophe that would affect her life even more dramatically than her illegitimacy.
This was because, from the outset, she felt that this marriage made her a mere appendix of her husband, a child-breeder — she had three children in four years — someone completely deprived of her own life and freedom. It was from this time that Flora became convinced that matrimony was an intolerable institution, a commercial transaction in which a woman was sold to a man, thus becoming to all intents and purposes his slave, for life, because divorce had been abolished with the Restoration. And, at the same time, she began instinctively to reject motherhood and to develop a deep distrust of sex, which she saw as part of women’s servitude, of their humiliating subjugation to men.