Flora Tristan in the Press

The growth of Flora Tristan’s contribution to political ideas of her day ran concurrently with the development of the press in the nineteenth century. The digital tools of the twenty-first century enabled me to broaden knowledge of her presence as a controversial figure in newspapers including some outside France. The press survey from 1838 to the present illustrates how attitudes to her changed. Antagonism was frequent during her lifetime, especially in reports in the British and Irish press about the arrest and trial of her husband André Chazal after his attempted murder of the author in September 1838. By contrast she inspired admiration from activists such as Hélène Brion who celebrated her originality in founding the universal workers’ union. While political militants, feminist and socialists alike, lamented the lack of attention paid to Flora Tristan, by the twentieth century, her story was increasingly attractive to a new generation of historians of socialism of the mid-nineteenth century sensitive of her feminist aspirations. The circumstances of Jules Puech’s first press articles of 1909–11 are thus portrayed as a contextualisation of the beginning of his authority as an author on Flora Tristan.