War and Peace for the Flora Tristan Biographer

Puech’s wartime correspondence with his wife Marie-Louise show how his writing of the biography of Flora Tristan grew in fits and starts, suspended as was his committee and editorial work for the pacifist movement, La Paix par le Droit. So affected by the horrors of war was he that when he resumed writing after demobilisation in 1919, he prioritised his publication of a work in 1921 promoting the League of Nations. He linked it to nineteenth-century utopian socialist internationalism and worked in a team of academics editing Proudhon’s complete works for publication. The letters and the references to the expanding feminist suffrage campaign in his work demonstrate the significant presence of Marie-Louise, who since their marriage in 1908 had assisted Puech as his full-time researcher. She followed up leads on Flora Tristan, translated and corresponded in German and English, and was his mentor, both in the peace movement and in encouraging his completion of the biography that was finally published in 1925 when he submitted it as a doctoral thesis to the Sorbonne. Thanks to her typed transcriptions, Puech used much of the original material from the Flora Tristan papers adding intellectual value to the biography.