Flora Tristan

Flore Célestine Thérèse Henriette Tristán y Moscoso (7 April 1803 – 14 November 1844), Her father, Mariano Eusebio Antonio Tristán y Moscoso, was a colonel of the Spanish Navy, born in Arequipa, a city in Peru. His family was one of the most powerful families in the south of the country; his brother Pío de Tristán became viceroy of Peru. Tristan's mother, Anne-Pierre Laisnay, was French; the couple met in Bilbao, Spain.

When Tristan's father died in 1807, before her fifth birthday, the family's situation changed drastically from the high standards of living Tristan and her mother were accustomed to. In 1833 she travelled to Arequipa to claim her paternal inheritance, which was in possession of her uncle, Juan Pío de Tristán y Moscoso. She remained in Peru until 16 July 1834. Though she never secured her inheritance, Tristan wrote a travel diary about her experiences in Peru during its tumultuous post-independence period. The diary was published in 1838 as Pérégrinations d'une paria (Peregrinations of a Pariah). Around this time, Tristan met and was influenced by the philosophy of the androgynous mystic Simon Ganneau, as well as the occultist writer Éliphas Lévi, her longtime friend.

Her married name was Chazal, legally changed to Tristan after separation in 1838.

Contributions Tristan's writings and her personal contact with worker activists across France influenced the social struggles around the period of the revolutions of 1848. After her death, her followers tried to implement her plans for a Workers' Union, with little success. But her influence was key in the 1845 strike at the Toulon arsenal, a key moment in the story of French labour movement. According to the French historian Maurice Agulhon, Tristan's visit to Toulon during her travels radicalised its workers, contributing to the gestation of the strike. French workers placed a monument on her tomb in October 1848, in the wake of the French Revolution of 1848, with close to eight thousand workers marking the occasion by marching to her grave singing a song from The Workers' Union.

Seeing the failure of the promises of capitalism, Tristan wrote from a deep desire for social progress—combining the women's struggle with socialism. Tristan highlighted themes and ideas that give primacy to worker's rights. She was the first one to conceive the idea that the emancipation of the proletariat would be the synthesis of the people's struggle against the bourgeoisie. Tristan was “the first woman to try to merge the proto-feminist and social discourses into a critical synthesis, opening the way leading for the future shape of feminism of a proletarian class character, which finds it inconceivable that there exist oppressed women who are capable of oppressing other women”. She organized the fragmented ideas of women's equality at that time, brought by the French Revolution, providing a platform for the later rise of first wave feminism in the late 19th century.