Remembering and Forgetting Flora Tristan's Biographer: Puech's Contribution to French Labour History

Abstract

Although a relatively minor figure to emerge from nearly two centuries of an intricate history of French activism, Flora Tristan (1803-44) is an original thinker noteworthy for her outstanding synthesis of feminism and socialism that still has resonance. For scholars and activists alike, Jules-Louis Puech has been an indispensable source. This article looks at how Puech gained his expertise: he deserves more recognition for his life's work that encapsulates the diversity, richness, and tensions of socialism and feminism in French history. By contextualizing Puech's 1925 biography of Flora Tristan using hitherto overlooked evidence, this article will offer new insights into socialist interpretations of her and a better understanding of the workings of past generations of academics and activists in French labour history. Puech's biography contains unique awareness of a complex relationship of feminism and socialism in labour history in the first half of the twentieth century: a vexed question that remains p...