The Flora Tristán of the years following her return to Paris is no longer the fugitive rebel of before. She is a resolute woman, sure of herself, full of energy, looking to become better informed and educated — she had had an elementary schooling, as her grammatical errors reveal — and to make her way in intellectual circles, where she could do battle in the name of women and justice. While she was writing Peregrinations of a Pariah, she made contact with the Saint-Simon groups, the Fourierists (she knew Fourier himself, and would always speak of him with respect) and other groups that to a large extent opposed the status quo, she interviewed the Scottish reformer Robert Owen, and began to contribute to important publications like the Revue de Paris, L’Artiste and Le Voleur. She wrote a pamphlet arguing that a society should be established to help women arriving in Paris for the first time, she signed petitions for the abolition of the death penalty and she sent a petition to parliament to re-establish divorce. At the same time, these years witnessed her own legal and personal battle against André Chazal, who even kidnapped her children on three occasions. In one of these kidnap attempts, the youngest child, Aline, accused him of trying to rape her, which led to a famous trial and a social scandal. This incident had such an impact because Flora was now very well known. The publication of Peregrinations of a Pariah in 1837 was a great success, and she was a regular visitor to salons and rubbed shoulders with eminent intellectuals, artists and politicians. Unable to put up with the supreme humiliation of seeing his wife triumph in this way, with a book that laid bare her married life in horrifying detail, André Chazal tried to murder her, in the street, firing at her at point-blank range. He only wounded her, and the bullet remained lodged in her chest, a cold companion on her travels for the six remaining years of her life. At least on these travels she would no longer be haunted by the nightmare vision of André Chazal, who was condemned to twenty years in gaol for his crime.
Flora Tristán could have settled into the celebrity status that she had achieved and spent the rest of her life consolidating it, writing and moving in the intellectual and artistic circles in Paris that had opened their doors to her. She might have become a distinguished salon socialist, like George Sand, who always looked down on this upstart. But despite not having any formal education due to the privations of her early life, and also despite her sometimes explosive nature, she possessed a deep moral integrity which very soon made her realise that the justice and the social change that she so ardently desired would never be won from the refined and exclusive circles of writers, academics, artists, snobs and frivolous people for whom, in most cases, revolutionary ideas and proposals for social reform were mere bourgeois salon games, empty rhetoric.
While recovering from the attempt on her life, she wrote Méphis (1838), a novel full of good social intentions and forgettable from a literary point of view. But the following year she came up with a bold project that showed just how far her thinking had become radicalised, more openly anti-capitalist and anti-bourgeois: to write a book about poverty and exploitation in London, the hidden face of the great economic transformation that had turned Victorian England into the first modern industrial nation. She travelled to London and stayed for four months, visiting all the places that the tourists never saw, some of which she could only enter disguised as a man: workshops and brothels, slum neighbourhoods, factories and insane asylums, prisons and thieves’ kitchens, union associations and schools in poor neighbourhoods run by the parishes. Also, perhaps by way of contrast, she visited the Houses of Parliament, the races at Ascot and one of the most aristocratic clubs. The resulting book, Promenades dans Londres (1840) is a fierce and merciless — sometimes excessive — attack on the capitalist system and the bourgeoisie whom Flora holds responsible for the appalling poverty, the wicked exploitation of workers and children and the condition of women — forced into prostitution to survive or to work for miserable wages, much lower than the modest wages earned by men. Unlike the success of her memoirs of her journey to Peru, this book, dedicated to the ‘working classes’, was received in France with sepulchral silence by the bien-pensant press and received just a few reviews in working-class publications. That is not surprising: Flora was taking on serious issues and attracting powerful enemies.
The journey to the London she loathed also changed her when she returned to France. Because in the capital of England, Flora did not just see young children working fourteen hour days in factories, or serving prison sentences alongside hardened criminals, or adolescent girls in luxury brothels being forced by powerful men to drink contaminated alcohol so that they could watch the girls vomit and fall down drunk. She also saw major demonstrations of the Chartist movement, the way they collected signatures on the street, how they were organised, by district, city and workplace, and she also attended, with characteristic daring, a clandestine meeting of the leaders, in a Fleet Street pub. Due to this experience she conceived the idea, that no one has yet attributed to her, and which some six years later Karl Marx would proclaim to the world in the Communist Manifesto: that only a great international union of workers from all over the world would have the necessary power to end the current system and usher in a new era of justice and equality on earth. In London Flora became convinced that women would be unable to shake off their yoke alone: that, to achieve this aim, they would have to join forces with the workers, the other victims of society, that invincible army of the future that she had glimpsed in the orderly marches of thousands of people organised by Chartists in the streets of London.
Flora Tristán’s personal utopia is expressed succinctly in L’Union Ouvrière (1843) — a small book that, because she could not find a publisher willing to take the risk, she published herself, by subscription, calling on all her friends and acquaintances in Paris — in her correspondence and in the Diary that she wrote during her journey around France, that would only be published many years after her death, in 1973. The objectives are clear and magnificent: ‘Donnez à tous et à toutes le droit au travail (possibilité de manger), le droit à l’instruction (possibilité de vivre par l’esprit), le droit au pain (possibilité de vivre complètement indépendant) et l’humanité aujourd’hui si vile, si repoussante, si hypocritement vicieuse, se transformera de suite et deviendra noble, fière, indépendante, libre, et belle, et heureuse’ (‘Give everyone, men and women, the right to work (the possibility of eating), the right to education (the possibility of living for the spirit), the right to bread (the possibility of living completely independently), and humanity, which is today so vile, so repulsive, so hypocritically dissolute will be transformed and will become noble, proud, independent, free, beautiful and happy’).48
This revolution must be peaceful, inspired by love of humanity and filled with a Christian spirit which (as Saint-Simon also argued) would get back to the values of early Christianity — generosity and support for the poor — that the Catholic Church later betrayed and corrupted by aligning itself with the rich. Even God is reformed by Flora Tristán: God becomes Gods in the plural (Dieux), but would still be a single entity, because the divine being ‘is father, mother and embryo: active, passive and the seed of an unclear future’. The revolution would not be nationalist; it would cross borders and be internationalist. (In her first pamphlet Flora proclaimed: ‘Our country must be the universe.’) The body that would effect this social transformation would be the army of secular, peaceful workers, the ‘Workers’ Union’, in which men and women would participate on an entirely equal footing. Through persuasion, social pressure and working through legal institutions, it would completely transform society. This union would need to be strong economically in order to undertake urgent social reforms straight away. Every worker would contribute two francs a year and, because there are eight million workers in France, that would be a capital of sixteen million with which one could immediately open schools for the sons and daughters of the workers, who would receive a free and common education. The Union, in line with the British Chartists, would demand that the National Assembly elect a Defender of the People — paid for by the Assembly — to promote revolutionary measures within that body: the re-establishment of divorce, the abolition of the death penalty and, the main measure, the right to work, through which the state commits to guaranteeing employment and a wage to all citizens without exception. Similar to the phalanges or ‘phalanasteries’ proposed by Charles Fourier, the Union would create Workers’ Palaces, complex bodies offering many different services, where the workers and their families would receive medical attention and education, where they could retire and live a secure and protected old age, where every victim would be given help, advice and information and where those who spend long hours of the day working with their hands could enjoy culture and educate their spirit.