Flora Tristan. Pilgrimages of an outcast

Long before the feminist movement of the 1960s brought up the issue of women's fundamental rights; Long before the workers of the world, with their fists raised, waved the flags of Marxism-Leninism, demanding labor demands, a woman "a pariah, as she defines herself" shook the feminine and proletarian spheres of Europe and America in the first half of the 19th century with a lucid diatribe about the abuses that were the rights and possibilities of both. It was Flora Tristán (1803), "future grandmother of the painter Paul Gauguin", daughter of a Peruvian nobleman and a young French woman, who as a child had heard at home narrate the dreams of a sleepless and crazy South American named Simón Bolívar, and who, in light of the revolutionary legislation of France, was illegitimate because her parents, who had contracted a Catholic marriage in Bilbao, had omitted the civil formula, the only one valid before the French State. This woman, who in search of her father's legendary fortune moved to the family possessions in Peru, only to be rejected and humiliated, and who the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa turns into the protagonist of his next novel, stated in a diary the memories of that heartbreaking journey. And it is precisely that journal "Peregrinaciones de una pariah" that now, on the 200th anniversary of its author's birth, is published by Villegas Editores, in its golden series, with a lucid introductory note written years ago by the distinguished Colombian Americanist and historian Germán Arciniegas.