- Women Writers
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- Sand vs. Tristan
- --Rebels I
- --Rebels II
- --George Sand
- --Flora Tristan
- --Beaumont
Works Consulted
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Fighters For
The Working Class
At first glance it would seem that Victor
Hugo's Les Miserables has nothing in common with the writings
of Flora Tristan. In fact, the romantic idealistic style of his
writing could even be compared to that of George Sand, Flora
Tristan's rival. But whereas Sand and Hugo shared novel writing,
Tristan and Hugo shared a passion to raise the working class.
| Both Hugo and
Tristan felt that the workers deserved better treatment than
they were receiving in the 19th century. Both felt that poverty
was to blame for driving workers to thievery and women to prostitution.
Both felt that something had to be done to help the poor people
who were in unfortunate circumstances. |
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Hugo used the character of Monsieur Madeleine,
in Les Miserables to be the hero to the people. He was
a fair boss who had risen himself from a worker to become the
owner of a factory and eventually the mayor of the town. He cared
for his workers and in return, they loved and respected him.
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- If Tristan had survived to the publishing
of Les Miserables in 1862 she would have surely criticized
Hugo, despite his support for the common people. While Tristan's
writings encouraged the working men to rise up and demand civil
rights for themselves, Hugo's Les Miserables made the
workers seem weak or childlike, susceptible to the whim of their
boss/father figure. Although Monsieur Madeleine represented what
Tristan would have considered the appropriate attitude that a
boss should have towards his workers, Tristan would most likely
have criticized Hugo's romantic and idealistic nature in creating
this character. To her, it would
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have seemed like false hope
that #1: a common man could save himself from poverty and start
an industry and #2: that this new bourgeois man would ever help
the common men he had left behind. In Tristan's l'Union
Ourvriere (The Workers Union) she wrote that those
writers who had tried to aid the workers "have failed to
awaken the government to the dangers facing society |
from some seven or eight million workers
exasperated by suffering and despair, many of whom are being
forced to choose between suicide or theft!" (Beik,
104) She went on to tell the workers to stop waiting for
someone to save them (such as the character Hugo would later
create) and to create unions to save themselves. "Abandon
your isolation: unite with each other! Union makes for strength.
You have numbers on your side, and numbers are everything."
(Beik, 105)
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