The Flora Tristan Project
Flora Tristan (1803–44) is most remembered for her contribution to feminism and socialism. In her Union Ouvrière she proposed an international workers’ organisation as the way to overcome the appalling working-class conditions, and to free workers from a cycle of poverty and crime. In an unprecedented move for a woman of her standing, she undertook a Tour de France to persuade workers across the country to sign up to her groundbreaking union. During this voyage Flora maintained a broad range of correspondence to spread her ideas, to organise the distribution of her books and to gain access to people and places for the propagation of her Union Ouvrière. It was this corpus of letters that formed the AHRB-funded project designed with the following tools: (D)/(X)HTML The nature of XML allows implicit references in the text to be at the researcher’s fingertips. During the course of the project images of the documents were obtained in digitised form thereby adding a further dimension and complexity to the transcription of the letters. Advances were made in the design of an electronic publication of the transcribed letters but the addition of the original letters has widened the scope of the project considerably. The principal investigator has since moved to Newcastle University where further research is being conducted into text of the original manuscripts and the design of the electronic edition. |
Research papers‘Political Authority and Empowerment of Flora Tristan, femme de lettres’, Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge, March 2007 ‘Spreading the Word. Flora Tristan and Robert Owen’, Society of French Historical Studies, Houston, Texas, March 2007 Keynote Speaker, ‘Flora Tristan, une vision utopique’, Conference of Canadian Association of French Studies, Toronto, May 2006 ‘Flora Tristan and George Sand, A Conflicting but Corresponding Pair’, George Sand Conference on Intertextuality, Dublin City University, Ireland, 21–23 June 2006 ‘Des palais pour des ouvriers et des ouvrières : la route vers un Eden universel’, Utopies et Expérimentations urbaines, International Conference, Université de Tours, France, 8 March 2006
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PublicationsBook: Máire Cross, The Letter in Flora Tristan’s Politics, 1835–1844, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2004 Book: Caroline Bland and Máire Cross (eds), Gender and Politics in the Age of Letter Writing 1750–2000, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2004 Chapter: ‘Tuning into Politics. Flora Tristan's Songs for the Union ouvrière’, Ian Coller, Helen Davies, Julie Kalman (eds), French History and Civilization, Papers from the George Seminar, Vol. 1 2005, University of Melbourne, Australia, ISSN 1832-9683, pp. 82–97 Chapter: ‘To Beg, Borrow or Steal: Alternative Schemes in the Pursuit of Money in July Monarchy France’ in Sarah Capitanio, Lisa Downing, Paul Rowe and Nicholas White (eds), Currencies, Fiscal Fortunes and Cultural Capital in Nineteenth-Century France, French Studies of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (20), Berne, Peter Lang, 2005, ISBN 978-3-03-910513-7, pp. 73–91 Chapter,: Máire Cross and Caroline Bland, ‘Gender Politics: Breathing New Life into Old Letters’ in Caroline Bland and Máire Cross (eds), Gender and Politics in the Age of Letter Writing 1750–2000, pp. 3–14 Chapter: ‘The Correspondence of a “sister in humanity”’, in Caroline Bland and Máire Cross (eds), Gender and Politics in the Age of Letter Writing 1750–2000, pp. 93–111 |