Capitalism-and-Its-Critics-A-History-From-the

Tristan herself was a Christian believer with a strong sense of personal mission, and Chabrier’s outburst didn’t change her opinion of him. In fact, she strongly agreed with the leveling sentiments that he had expressed. “As I saw it, these were not the words of a madman: Jesus, Saint-Simon, and Fourier had all spoken thus,” she recalled in her book. Before leaving the hospital, she spotted Chabrier for a third time. He was kneeling on the same spot where he had accosted her, praying. “In this attitude, he looked so beautiful that I thought of him as a new St. John,” she wrote. “Can this man be mad?… His soul is in revolt against every sign of baseness, corruption and hypocrisy and he cannot restrain his holy indignation. I saw in him all the signs of exaltation but none of madness.”3

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Flora Célestine Thérèse Henriette Tristán y Moscoso was born on April 7, 1803, in Paris. Her mother, Anne-Pierre Laisnay, was a middle-class Frenchwoman whose family fled the country during the revolution and settled in Spain, where she met and married Don Mariano de Tristán y Moscoso, a Spanish Peruvian military officer who was serving as head of a Peruvian division of the Spanish army. Don Mariano’s family had moved from Spain to the South American colony in the seventeenth century and grown rich and powerful. In 1802, he and Anne moved to the outskirts of Paris and settled in the upscale Vaugirard neighborhood, which would later be assimilated into the fifteenth arrondissement. The couple had two children: Flora and a younger brother.4

Several years later Don Mariano died suddenly, leaving no will and no French marriage certificate to prove that Anne-Pierre was his wife. It seems that the marriage had been officiated by a refugee priest who hadn’t registered it with the authorities. Technically a single mother, Anne-Pierre was deprived of her inheritance rights. She and her children were forced to give up their family home and move to the countryside. In 1818, when Flora was fifteen, they moved back to the city and took a garret apartment near Place Maubert, on the Left Bank, then a gritty area inhabited by artisans, shopkeepers, and students.

Flora took a job as an assistant for a young printmaker, André Chazal, whose brother Antoine was a well-known artist. In 1821, when Flora was seventeen, the pair married. Flora later claimed her mother forced her into a union with a man she never loved. The marriage produced two children, but it quickly degenerated into fighting and bickering. In early 1825, after discovering that she was pregnant for a third time, Flora left Chazal and moved back in with her mother. Since the government of Louis XVIII, the restored Bourbon monarch, had voided a divorce law introduced during the revolution, legal separation wasn’t an option. In 1828 Flora’s elder son died, leaving her with a daughter, Aline, and a younger son, Ernest.

As an illegitimate daughter and impecunious mother who had abandoned her spouse, Tristan came to view herself as an outcast from respectable society, a pariah. For lengthy periods, according to some accounts, she left her children with her mother and went to England to work as a lady’s maid.5 Having been deprived of a higher education, she educated herself by reading widely. Living on the Left Bank, she encountered some followers of Henri de Saint-Simon, who had died in 1825, and attended some of their meetings. According to one of her biographers, Dominique Desanti, the speakers that she heard included Barthélemy-Prosper Enfantin, a charismatic figure who had taken Saint-Simon’s technocratic ideas in a more spiritual direction.6 An early supporter of women’s rights, Enfantin demanded the legalization of divorce and the replacement of “the tyranny of marriage” with a system of “free love.” (In 1832 the authorities sentenced Enfantin to a year in jail for endangering public morality.)

Such encounters exposed the Roman Catholic Tristan to more radical and secular dogmas. Although she retained her religion, she would eventually incorporate some of these progressive ideas into an early form of Christian socialism, which combined belief in God with a profound concern for the masses. In what turned out to be a life-changing meeting, she also ran into a Peruvian man who knew her father’s family in South America.7 Afterward, she wrote to her uncle, Don Pío de Tristán y Moscoso, who had once been provisionally appointed as the Spanish viceroy to Peru. In her letter, she identified herself as Don Pío’s niece, included a copy of her birth certificate, and described her straitened circumstances. Don Pío wrote back acknowledging Tristan as “my brother’s natural daughter.” He said he would send her silver from his mother’s fortune, which she could invest to provide a modest income for her family, and that he was sending her 2,500 francs to tide her over in the meantime. But he refused to recognize the marriage of Flora’s parents as legitimate.8

Eventually Tristan decided to travel to Peru. Leaving Aline in the care of a friend (Ernest was living with Chazal at the time), she set sail from Bordeaux on April 7, 1833, her thirtieth birthday, and didn’t return to Europe until early 1835.9 On the outward journey, which took several months, she was the only female on board the ship. According to her subsequent account, the captain fell in love with her and asked her to marry him. When she reached Arequipa, her uncle invited her to stay with the family. Don Pío still wouldn’t recognize the legitimacy of Flora’s parents’ marriage despite her protests, but he reminded her of the silver he had already secured for her, worth 15,000 francs—a considerable sum. Although Tristan didn’t come away with the full inheritance to which she felt entitled, the journey to Peru exposed her to her upper-class heritage and spurred her development as a writer. Throughout her travels, she kept detailed notebooks, which formed the basis of her first full-length book, the travelogue Peregrinations of a Pariah, which was published in 1838.10

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The Peru that Tristan wrote about had recently gained its independence from the Spanish Empire, but its society reflected the country’s brutal history under the rule of the conquistadors and their descendants. Independence hadn’t removed the rigid divide between the colonial elite and the impoverished Indigenous population. Peru was predominantly an agricultural country. However, its mountains contained vast deposits of silver, which were dug up by Indigenous laborers who were forced to leave their homes and work in the mines. In a brief foreword dedicated “To the Peruvians,” Tristan noted that she had been greeted with great warmth, but addressing the Peruvian elites directly, she also indicated that her portrait would be an unsparing one. “The upper class is profoundly corrupted,” she wrote, and “from cupidity, love of power, and other passions, its egotism leads it into the most antisocial endeavors.”11

Tristan went on to highlight the poverty and “degradation” of ordinary Peruvians, and she called on rich Peruvians to help the poor to advance themselves, rather than oppressing them and fearing their potential political power. “When all individuals will have learned to read and write,” she wrote, “when the public press will have penetrated to the very huts of the Indians, then, upon encountering in the people judges whose censure you will fear and whose votes you will seek, you will acquire the virtues that you now lack.”12

The body of Peregrinations combined detailed accounts of Tristan’s adventures, which included witnessing a short civil war, with broader analysis. She attributed the pathologies of Peruvian society to the exploitative nature of Spanish colonialism, which had left the elite disdainful of productive work. Before independence, many of them had made their fortunes “in government offices, in illegal commerce, and, finally, through exploitation of the mines; very few of these fortunes had as their origins the cultivation of the land,” she wrote. She contrasted this colonial heritage to “English America,” where “wealth  … was acquired only by agriculture or regular commerce, [and as a result] there was considerable equality in its distribution.”13 Doubtless, this analysis was a bit oversimplified, but in 2001 the Harvard scholars Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson would make a similar argument about the economic impact of colonialism, distinguishing between extractive institutions of the sort that the Spanish created in Latin America and more inclusive institutions, including an independent legal system, that the British established in North America and Australasia.14 Tristan was an autodidact rather than an academic, but she had a very sharp eye. (In 2024, Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson were awarded an economics Nobel.)

To an even greater extent than the British in India, the conquistadors in Peru and other Latin countries had been primarily interested in extracting wealth as quickly as possible and shipping it back to Spain, rather than developing the territories they occupied for the long term. The Spanish Crown granted monopolies to favored interests, imposed trade restrictions to keep out competitors, and—under the notorious encomienda system— forced the Indigenous people to pay tributes to their colonial overlords, often in the form of forced labor. Outright slavery was never as prevalent in Peru as it was in some other South American colonies, particularly Brazil. Nonetheless, many thousands of Africans had been transported there to work in silver mines and on agricultural plantations. In 1821 General José de San Martín, whose army liberated Peru, had outlawed the slave trade, but he hadn’t freed people who were already enslaved.

Tristan described visiting a sugar plantation owned by a “Monsieur Lavalle,” which had nine hundred enslaved workers: four hundred men, three hundred women, and two hundred children. Since the ban on purchasing enslaved workers had gone into effect, Lavalle told Tristan, his workforce had been reduced from fifteen hundred, and he was having difficulty restocking it. Lavalle also defended the violence that was routinely inflicted on enslaved workers: “It is unfortunately too true that one can drive them only with the whip.”15 As Tristan left the plantation, she stopped at a hut, where she encountered two young Black women who had recently given birth to babies that died. “One was eating raw corn,” Tristan recounted, “the other, young, and very beautiful, looked at me with her large eyes; her look seemed to say: ‘I let my baby die because I knew he would not be free like you; I preferred him dead to being a slave.’”16

When Tristan visited Lavalle’s plantation, the United Kingdom Parliament was in the process of abolishing slavery in the British Empire. On August 1, 1834, the Slavery Abolition Act went into effect, outlawing the owning, buying, and selling of enslaved workers. The British law didn’t apply to Peru, of course, but Tristan described how she tried to persuade Lavalle that emancipating his workers and providing them with an education would turn them into more productive employees—the same argument that Adam Smith had made. “All these beautiful dreams are superb as poetry,” Lavalle replied. “But for an old planter like me, I am sorry to tell you, not one of your fine ideas can be realized.”17

Tristan’s positive descriptions of Peruvian society were largely confined to its female citizens, whom she described as “much superior to [Peruvian men] in intelligence and moral force.”18 Although most Peruvian women were in traditional marriages, they retained their own names and their autonomy, Tristan noted, going out by themselves to the theater, public meetings, and even bullfights. She credited some of this individual initiative to the traditional clothing that many Peruvian women wore: a saya, which wrapped around the hips and midriff, and a long scarf, or manto, that covered most of the upper body, including parts of the face. European women “from childhood are slaves to laws, values, customs, prejudices, styles, and everything else,” Tristan wrote. “Under the saya, the Lima woman is free [and] enjoys her independence  … never is she subject to constraint.”19

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After Tristan returned to Paris, she used her newfound financial independence to find more comfortable living quarters for herself and her children. Eventually they settled on Rue du Bac, in the seventh arrondissement, where Tristan worked on her writing and renewed her acquaintance with some of the freethinking groups that had grown up in the French capital. As well as Enfantin and his band of devotees, these included the followers of the aging Charles Fourier, who had their own charismatic leader, Victor Prosper Considérant, a young ex-military officer who had resigned his commission to devote his life to activism. Considérant was the founder and editor of a political journal, The Phalanx, as well as the author of a three-volume exposition of Fourierist ideas.20

Tristan also met some feminist writers, including the novelist George Sand. Tristan was sympathetic to the causes of emancipating women and reorganizing society on a cooperative basis, but as yet she didn’t have much of a platform for her views. In August 1835 she took matters into her own hands and paid a visit to Fourier, who was then in his early sixties, at his home in Montmartre. She presented the philosopher with a draft of a pamphlet she had written that called for the establishment of public hostels where women visiting from foreign countries could stay for a time. (The idea had come to Tristan during her own travels.) The following month Tristan sent Fourier a follow-up note enclosing a finished copy of her pamphlet, the printing of which she had paid for, and offering her services in the cooperative cause. The note said: “I can assure you that you will find in me a strength uncommon to my sex, a need to do good, and a deep gratitude to all those who procure for me the means to be useful.”21

Tristan was ambitious and practical-minded. Although she followed the debates between Fourier’s followers and the Saint-Simonians, her primary concern was translating progressive ideas into concrete action. In October 1835 she sent Fourier another note, in which she asked him to introduce her to Considérant “and to two or three other ladies who share our ideas.”22 A meeting took place,23 and on September 1, 1836, The Phalanx published a lengthy letter from Tristan, in which she expressed some reservations about the Fourierist movement and its highfalutin language: “I tell you, sir, that many people, amongst whom I count myself, find the science of Mr Fourier very obscure,” she said. And she went on to argue that the key challenge facing progressives was institutional rather than intellectual. They needed to build a mass organization—“an organization that allows man, in satisfying all the demands of his nature … to find happiness.”24

Robert Owen was a man with experience in trying to build a popular movement. During a trip Owen made to Paris, Tristan invited him to her apartment, where they discussed his ideas on setting up new schools for working-class children.25 Like Owen, Tristan believed that broadening access to education was key to eliminating social and sexual disparities. But even as she endorsed some of the ideas that Owen and other founding figures of the socialist movement had put forward, she held back from committing herself to one group or creed. “I am neither a Saint-Simonian, nor a Fourierist, nor an Owenian,” she would later write.26

At the start of 1838, Peregrinations of a Pariah, which Tristan had been working on for years, was finally published and established her reputation as a writer. But its impact on her financial fortunes was catastrophic. The allowance that Don Pío sent her each year had enabled her to enjoy a bourgeois lifestyle: she had a spacious apartment, she hosted soirées, and she even had her portrait painted by fashionable young artists. But when Don Pío learned about his niece’s searing descriptions of himself, his family, and his country, he cut off the payments and had a copy of Peregrinations burned in a local square. The pariah was back on her own.27

And her relationship with her estranged husband had gone from bad to worse. For years, the couple battled in the courts over custody of their children. In 1837 Tristan had Chazal arrested for allegedly sexually assaulting their daughter, Aline. The authorities kept him in jail for a month or so, but didn’t end up charging him.28

Chazal was furious at his imprisonment, and the publication of Peregrinations may have unbalanced him further. In the summer of 1838, he purchased a pair of pistols and started stalking Tristan. On the afternoon of September 10, he walked up to her outside a wine merchant’s shop on Rue du Bac and shot her at close range. Staggering into a nearby store, Tristan said to the shopkeeper, “Arrest that man. He’s the one who’s murdered me. He’s my husband.” Chazal was arrested and taken into custody. Somehow, despite the bullet lodged in her chest, Tristan survived. Newspaper reports of the shooting turned her into something of a celebrity, and her book sales increased. Chazal was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to twenty years of hard labor. After the verdict was issued, the courts finally annulled the marriage.29

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As Tristan was recovering from her wounds, she finished a novel: Méphis, a love story about a Spanish singer, Marequita, who bore at least some resemblance to the author (some of Tristan’s friends referred to her as “the Andalusian”), and a mysterious Italian, Méphis, who represented the working classes. In May 1839 Tristan traveled to England and stayed there for a number of weeks, mostly in its sprawling capital. Promenades dans Londres, her second travelogue, was published in 1840. It recorded her impressions and incorporated some materials she had accumulated during previous visits.

The book, which would eventually be published in English under the title The London Journal of Flora Tristan, began: “What an enormous city London is! Its huge size, out of all proportion to the area and population of the British Isles, simultaneously calls to mind the commercial supremacy of England and her oppression of India!”30 Anna Wheeler wasn’t the only local whom Tristan recruited to show her around. Dressed up as a Turkish man, she attended a night session at the House of Commons, where women weren’t allowed. The Irish nationalist Daniel O’Connell, who had created the Catholic Association, which united the impoverished Irish masses behind a successful campaign to allow Catholics to hold public office, impressed her greatly.31 She also went to the horse races at Ascot32 and visited one of the West End “finishes”—late-night drinking clubs where upper-class men consorted with lower-class prostitutes, getting them drunk and then forcing them to drink vinegar and mustard.33 “This drink almost always gives her horrible convulsions, and the jerkings and contortions of the unfortunate thing provoke laughter and intimately amuse the honorable society,” Tristan wrote. “It is horrible! But this life, repeated every night, is the prostitutes’ only hope of fortune, for they have no hold on a sober Englishman. The sober Englishman is so chaste as to be a prude.”34

Tristan was determined to see all London had to offer, including its teeming working-class districts. In St. Giles, an impoverished Irish neighborhood, she saw “old men huddled in a little straw that had become a dung heap, young men covered in rags,” and “hovels” that “rarely have paved floors,” where “father, mother, sons, daughters, and friends sleep pell mell.”35 On Horseferry Road, Westminster, Tristan visited the world’s first public gas works, which supplied the fuel for streetlights. The gas was produced from coke—specially treated coal—burned in vast furnaces. Tristan described how the “stokers … armed with long pokers, opened the ovens and took out the flaming coke, which fell in torrents.” With no protections from the heat or the dust, many of these workers developed chest ailments and died of “consumption”—tuberculosis—Tristan reported, citing a foreman as her source.36

She also ventured outside London. “Unless you have visited the factory towns,” she wrote, “and seen the workers of Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow, Sheffield, Staffordshire, etc., you cannot appreciate the physical sufferings and moral debasement of this class of the population.”37 She reported that the workers were poorly paid and “shut up twelve to fourteen hours a day in mean rooms where they breathe in, along with foul air, cotton, wool, and linen fibers, particles of copper, lead, iron, etc., and frequently go from insufficient nourishment to excessive drinking.”38 They looked “pale, rickety, and sickly,” Tristan wrote, adding, “I do not know whether the painful expression that is so general among [them] should be attributed to permanent fatigue or to their utter despair.”39

The regimentation and discipline of the British factories struck Tristan as dehumanizing. “In English factories you don’t hear, as in ours, singing, chatter, and laughter,” she wrote. “The master doesn’t want a memory of outside existence to distract the workers from their task for one minute: he requires silence, and deathlike silence reigns, the worker’s hunger gives such power to the master’s word.” If the factory owner has no work to offer, “the worker dies of hunger; if he is sick, he succumbs on the straw of his pallet, unless, near death, he is received in a hospital; for it is a favor to be admitted there.”40

Even as Tristan lamented how English factory owners treated their workers, she acknowledged the stupendous power of the new machinery they were employing. Echoing Jean-Baptiste Say a generation earlier, she wrote: “I have seen a steam engine with the power of 500 horses! Nothing is more awe-inspiring than the sight of motion imparted to these masses of iron whose colossal forms frighten the imagination and seem to go beyond the power of man … Upon recovering from your stupor and fright, you look for man. He can hardly be seen, reduced by the proportions of everything else around him to the size of an ant.”41

As a disciple of the free market, Say had an unrestrained admiration for the productive power of industrialization. Tristan also recognized the enormous potential of mechanization, but she couldn’t bring herself to believe that an economic system based on the pursuit of profit was capable of exploiting new technology for the good of all. “If at first I felt humiliation at seeing man annihilated, no longer functioning except like a machine,” she wrote, “I soon saw the immense improvement that would one day come from these discoveries of science; brute force wiped out, physical work executed in less times, and more leisure to man for cultivating his intelligence.” Instead of stopping there, she added: “But if these great benefits are to be achieved, there must be a social revolution; and that revolution will come, for God has not revealed such admirable inventions to men only to have them remain the slaves of a handful of manufacturers and landed proprietors.”42

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Despite the language that she used sometimes, Tristan wasn’t a revolutionary. In Paris, of course, there were some genuine insurrectionists. One group of them was associated with the tradition of Gracchus Babeuf, the proto-communist who was executed in 1797 for conspiring to overthrow the Directory. (“We aspire to live and die equal, the way we were born: we want real equality or death,” Babeuf and his comrades declared in their “Manifesto of Equals.”)43 In May 1839 hundreds of members of the Société des Saisons, a Babeufist entity, tried to storm the National Assembly, the Hôtel de Ville, and the Palace of Justice. Their goal was to overthrow the July Monarchy of Louis Philippe, which had taken power in 1830 and boasted the wealthy bourgeoisie as its primary social base. The French authorities easily put down the attempted rising. Then they sentenced to death two of its leaders, Louis-Auguste Blanqui, a journalist of Italian descent, and Armand Barbès, a lawyer. (The sentences were later commuted to life in prison.) Tristan had little sympathy for the conspirators. As a Christian, she opposed violence. She also thought that the Blanquist coup attempt and earlier violent protests in Lyon had provided cover for the French government to clamp down on legitimate protest groups.