Flora Tristan

1803–1844

French writer, traveller and women’s rights activist

Flora Tristan was an exceptional woman and better known as the grandmother of Paul Gauguin. However, she deserves recognition on her own merits. She was born in Paris in 1803 as an illegitimate child and had a difficult and poor childhood and early adulthood but was passionate about improving the life conditions of women and workers in the nineteenth century.

Between 1825 and 1839, she made four trips to London and wrote the book “My Walks around London” based on her observations about the social conditions of women and the effects of industrialization on the working class. She also wrote about the lives in the Jewish and Irish ghettoes and of London prostitutes as well as the conditions in factories, prisons and madhouses.

Paul Gauguin her grandson, introduced her memory to the twentieth century with the publication of his memoirs “Before and after”