The Whirlwind Effect of Flora Tristan

The results of a trawl of Jules Puech’s abundant unpublished letters to his parents and his wife, and his published works of the 1900s to find references to Flora Tristan reveal how Puech worked and how he preferred to develop his career as a writer-historian rather than taking up any option suggested by family or academic mentors. His increasing involvement in Paris academic circles was related in his letters and intrinsic in his accounts of progress and constraints in his personal and professional difficulties. By examining the context of his completion of a doctoral thesis, we can establish that it was his decision to work on the theme of internationalism in the labour movement that Puech discovered there was more to Flora Tristan than her authorship of Union Ouvrière and that such advance in his unique knowledge made him the ideal biographer.