Touchstones

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  When she was twenty-two, Flora committed the boldest act of her life, which would definitively mark out her destiny as a pariah and a rebel: she left her home, taking her children with her, which not only brought her into great disrepute because of the prevailing moral sanctions of the time, but was also an illegal act for which she could have been imprisoned if André Chazal had reported her. From this time on, between 1825 and 1830, we enter an unclear period in her life about which we know very little, and the little that we do know comes from her and has probably been doctored to hide the depressing truth. What is clear is that in these years she was living on the run, in hiding, in very difficult circumstances – her mother did not approve of what she was doing and from that time their relationship appears to have ended – living with the constant fear that André Chazal, or the authorities, would catch up with her. Two of her three children would die in the following years; the only survivor was Aline Marie (the future mother of Paul Gauguin), who spent most of her childhood in the country, being looked after by different women while her mother hid and earned a living in whatever way she could. Later she would say that she was employed as a travelling companion (it is very likely that she was a mere servant) for an English family whom she accompanied throughout Europe, making her first trip to England. None of this is certain, and anything could have been possible in these years. What is absolutely certain is that they must have been very hard for Flora and must have shaped her strong character, her limitless courage, her bravery and her conviction that the world was badly made, unjust, brutal and discriminatory, and that the main victims of the prevailing injustice were women.

  Flora’s trip to Peru – where she was to live for a year – was, according to her, quite accidental, something out of a romantic novel. At an inn in Paris she had run into Zacharie Chabrié, a ship’s captain who often travelled between France and Peru. In Arequipa he had met the wealthy and powerful Tristán family, whose head was Don Pío Tristán y Mocoso, the younger brother of Don Mariano, Flora’s father. It was Chabrié, she said, who convinced her to write to her uncle. She did so in a heartfelt, imploring letter, referring to the hardship and difficulties that she and her mother had endured since the death of her father, due to her parents’ irregular marriage, and asking for assistance and even for recognition. Months later Don Pío replied with an astute letter in which, alongside the expressions of affection for his recently appeared little niece, and protesting his love for his brother Mariano, he firmly states that he will not legally recognise a woman who, by her own admission, had been born in an illegal union. But he sent her some money of his own and some other money from her grandmother, who was still alive.

  After three years of matrimonial disputes with Chazal and repeated attempts to escape, in April 1833 Flora finally embarked, in Bordeaux, on the boat that would take her to Peru. Her captain was none other than Zacharie Chabrié. The six-month crossing, in the company of sixteen men – she was the only woman – had a Homeric element to it. Flora stayed in Arequipa for eight months and in Lima for two months before returning to France in the middle of 1834. This is the transitional moment in her life, which separates the rebellious, confused young woman who fled her husband and dreamed of a stroke of fortune – to be recognised as the daughter of Don Mariano by her Peruvian family and thus suddenly acquire legitimacy and fortune – from the social militant, the writer and the revolutionary who would resolutely direct her life to fighting, with her pen and her words, for social justice, for the emancipation of women.

  In Arequipa, her uncle Don Pío dashed her hopes of being recognised as a legitimate daughter and thus claiming her birthright. But this frustration was to some extent alleviated by the good life that she had in the family house, surrounded by servants and slaves, spoiled and flattered by the Tristán tribe, and sought after and courted by Arequipa’s ‘good society’, which was turned upside down by the arrival of this young and beautiful Parisian with her large eyes, her long dark hair and very fair skin. She had hidden from everyone, beginning with Don Pío, that she was married and the mother of three children. There is no doubt that suitors must have swarmed around her like flies. Flora doubtless enjoyed all this comfort and security, this first taste of the good life. But she also observed and noted down, with fascination, the life and customs of this country that was so different to her own, which was just beginning its life as an independent republic, although the institutions, prejudices and conventions of the colonial period remained almost intact. In her memoir, she would paint a splendid portrait of that feudal, violent society, with its tremendous economic contrasts and its great racial, social and religious divisions, its convents and religious practices verging on idolatry, and its political turmoil, where caudillos fought for power in wars which, as she herself witnessed on the plains at Cangallo, were often bloody and grotesque. This book, which the citizens of Arequipa and Lima would burn in their indignation at the cruel way they were depicted, is one of the most fascinating testimonies that exists, amid all the chaos, pomp, colour, violence and frenzy, of life in Latin America after independence.

  But it was not just racism, savagery and privilege that predominated in her father’s country. To her great surprise, there were also some rare customs that Flora had never witnessed before in Paris, precisely in an area that was very important to her: the world of women. Society women, for a start, enjoyed considerable freedom: they smoked, bet, rode on horseback when they liked and, in Lima, women with faces half-covered by a veil – the most sensual garb that Flora had ever seen – went out alone to flirt with men, had autonomy and were treated with a considerable lack of prejudice, even from a Parisian standpoint. Even the nuns in the cloistered convents that Flora managed to slip into enjoyed great freedom of behaviour and committed certain excesses that were not at all in keeping with their nun’s vocation or with the image of the humiliated, downtrodden woman, the mere appendage of father, husband or head of family that Flora carried in her head. Of course, Peruvian women were not free in the same way as men, nothing like it. But in some cases they could compete with men, as equals, in their own spheres. In wars, for example, the women known as rabonas accompanied the soldiers, cooked and washed for them and nursed their wounds, fought alongside them and had the responsibility of attacking villages to get food for the troops. Without their knowing it, these women had, in fact, a life of their own, and destroyed the myth of the helpless, weak woman, useless in a man’s domain. The figure that, for Flora, personified this emancipated, active woman, invading the areas traditionally considered to be exclusively male, was Doña Francisca Zubiaga de Gamarra, the wife of Marshal Gamarra, an Independence hero and President of the Republic, whose figure paled alongside the dominant personality of his wife. Doña Pancha, or La Mariscala as the people called her, had taken over running the Prefecture of Cuzco when her husband was out of the country, and she had put down conspiracies through her guile and courage. Dressed as a soldier, and on horseback, she had been involved in all the civil wars, fighting shoulder to shoulder with Gamarra, and had even led the troops that had beaten the Bolivians in the battle of Paria. When Agustín Gamarra was president, the word on the street was that she had been the power behind the throne, taking the main initiatives and causing some wonderful scandals, like whipping, in an official ceremony, a soldier who had boasted of being her lover. The impression that La Mariscala made on Flora, whom she met briefly when she was about to be exiled, was enormous, and there is no doubt that she helped Flora to realise that it was possible for women to rebel against their marginal status, and that she herself should work to change society. These are the decisions that Flora brought back from Peru when she returned to Paris at the beginning of 1835 and threw herself enthusiastically into a new life, very different from her earlier one.

  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 wo
rk, 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.

  Even though some of these aspirations might today have been met by Social Security, we should not lose sight of the fact that these proposals were very daring, almost fantastic, in the context of the mid-nineteenth century, as can be seen from the criticisms and the reservations of the workers themselves to Flora’s ideas, which they regarded as most unrealistic. But she was convinced that there were no obstacles that will-power, energy and action could not overcome, because she was both – and this was an unusual mixture – a romantic dreamer, capable of being caught up in fantasies completely disconnected from reality, and a formidable activist, with a contagious power of persuasion and a passion that led her to confront every difficulty. From the time that she conceived of the Workers’ Union in 1843, until her death, some two years later, Flora Tristán was a real volcanic spirit, incessantly active and versatile: instead of artists and writers, her flat in the Rue du Bac was now full of workers and leaders of friendly societies and unions, and when she went out, it was to appear in workshops or to publish in proletarian publications, attending interminable meetings and sometimes getting caught up in heated discussions with those that objected to her ideas. It could not have been easy for a woman, with little experience of this work and unfamiliar with the political climate, to cope with these proletarian venues, which were not used to the involvement of women in activities which had until then been the domain of the men. And yet she threw herself into the task. For even though she saw that among the workers there were also many bourgeois prejudices and discriminatory attitudes towards women (which were also shared on occasion by the women workers themselves, some of whom insulted her, thinking that she was looking to seduce their husbands), she was not intimidated and she did not soften her message or her approach, that mystic, redemptive energy that fuelled her Union crusade.