LYON, MAY AND JUNE 1844
In Chalon-sur-Sa?ne as well as in Macon, where Flora spent the last week of April and the first few days of May 1844, her tour relied almost entirely on the help of her friendly foes, the Fourierists. They offered their assistance so generously that Flora's conscience pricked her. How to make plain her differences with these disciples of the deceased Charles Fourier, when they received her and saw her off at stagecoach stations and river landings, and did everything they could to arrange meetings and appointments for her, without offending them? Nevertheless, although it pained her to disillusion them, she did not hide her criticisms of their theories and conduct, which to her seemed incompatible with the task that consumed her: the salvation of humanity.
In Chalon-sur-Sa?ne, the Fourierists organized a meeting for the day after her arrival, in the vast hall of the local Masonic lodge called Perfect Equality. A glance around the crowded room, into which two hundred people were crammed, was enough to make her heart sink. Hadn't you written them that the meetings should always be small, thirty or forty workers at most? A small number permitted dialogue, personal engagement. An audience like this was distant, cold, unable to participate, obliged merely to listen.
"But madame, there was enormous curiosity to hear you. You come preceded by such fame!" protested Lagrange, the head Fourierist in Chalon-sur-Sa?ne.
"I care nothing for fame, Monsieur Lagrange. I seek effectiveness. And I cannot be effective if I am addressing an anonymous, invisible mass. I like to speak to human beings, and to do that I need to see their faces and make them feel that I want to talk to them, not impose my ideas the way the Pope imposes his on his Catholic flock."
More alarming than the number of listeners was the social composition of the audience. As Monsieur Lagrange introduced her from the stage, decorated with a little jar of flowers and a wall of Masonic symbols, Flora discovered that three-quarters of those present were bosses, and only a third workers. To come to Chalon-sur-Sa?ne to preach the Workers' Union to these exploiters! There was no hope for the Fourierists despite the intelligence and honesty of Victor Considérant, who, since the death of the founder in 1837, had presided over the movement. Their original sin, which opened an unbridgeable chasm between you and them, was the same as that of the Saint-Simonians: not believing in a revolution waged by the victims of the system. Both distrusted the ignorant, poverty-stricken masses and maintained with beatific na?veté that society would be reformed thanks to the goodwill and money of bourgeois citizens enlightened by their theories.
The amazing thing was that even now, in 1844, Victor Considérant and his followers were still convinced that they would win over to their cause a handful of rich men who, once converted to Fourierism, would finance a "societary revolution." In 1826, Charles Fourier had announced in notices in the Paris press that he would be at home every day in Saint-Pierre Montmartre from twelve to two in the afternoon, to explain his social reform projects to noble-minded and justice-seeking industrialists or persons of independent means interested in providing financial assistance. Eleven years later, on the day of his death in 1837, the goodhearted old man with kindly blue eyes, in his eternal black frock coat and white tie—it saddened you to think of it, Andalusa—was still waiting punctually from twelve to two for the visit that never came. Never! Not a single rich man, not a single bourgeois, took the trouble to go and ask him questions or listen to his plans for ending human suffering. And none of the famous names to whom he wrote requesting support for his projects—among them Bolívar, Chateaubriand, Lady Byron, Dr. Francia of Paraguay, and all the ministers of the Restoration and King Louis Philippe—deigned to answer him. And the Fourierists, blind and deaf, continued to trust in the bourgeoisie and mistrust the workers!
Seized by a sudden access of retrospective indignation, imagining poor Charles Fourier sitting in vain every midday in his modest dwelling in the twilight of his life, Flora abruptly changed the subject of her talk. She had been describing the functioning of the future Workers' Palaces, and now she moved on to sketch a psychological portrait of the present-day bourgeoisie. As she declared that masters were ungenerous, narrow-minded, petty, fearful, mediocre, and wicked, she noticed with glee that her listeners were squirming in their seats as if they were being attacked by squadrons of fleas. When it came time for questions, there was a barbed silence. At last, a furniture factory owner, Monsieur Rougeon, still young but already sporting the comfortable belly of the victor, stood up and said that, given the opinion Madame Tristán had of bosses, he couldn't explain to himself why she bothered to invite them to join the Workers' Union.
"For a very simple reason, monsieur. The bourgeoisie has money and the workers don't. To realize its plans, the Workers' Union will need funds. It is money we want from the bourgeoisie, not the bourgeoisie themselves."
Monsieur Rougeon reddened. Indignation made the veins in his forehead stand out.
"Am I to understand, madame, that if I join the Union, I won't have the right to enter the Workers' Palaces or use their services, despite paying my dues?"
"Exactly, Monsieur Rougeon. You don't need those services, because you are able to pay from your own pocket for the education of your children, medical care, and an old age without worries. That isn't true of the workers, is it?"
"Why should I give my money without receiving anything in return? I'd have to be a fool."
"Out of generosity, altruism, a spirit of solidarity with the downtrodden. Sentiments that you have difficulty comprehending, I see."
Monsieur Rougeon left the lodge in a huff, muttering that such an organization would never count him among its supporters. Some people followed him, in accord with his sentiments. From the door, one of them remarked, "It's true: Madame Tristán is a subversive."
Later, at a dinner hosted by the Fourierists, upon seeing their hurt and disappointed faces, Flora made a gesture to pacify them. Whatever her differences with Charles Fourier's disciples, she said, she had so much respect for the learning, intelligence, and integrity of Victor Considérant that once the Workers' Union was established, she wouldn't hesitate to put his name forward as a candidate for Defender of the People, the first paid representative of the working class, chosen to defend workers' rights in the National Assembly. Victor would be a popular spokesman, she was sure, as good as the Irishman O'Connell in the English Parliament. This show of deference toward their leader and mentor lifted their spirits. When they bade her farewell at the inn, they had made peace, and one of them said jokingly that, hearing her speak that night, he had at last understood why she was called Madame-la-Colère.
She couldn't sleep well. She was upset by what had happened at the Masonic lodge, and she lamented having let herself be carried away by the urge to insult the bourgeoisie rather than concentrating on bringing her message to the workers. You had a foul temper, Florita; at the age of forty-one, you were still unable to control your outbursts. But it was your stubbornness and fits of ill humor that had allowed you to maintain your freedom, and win it back each time you lost it. When you were Monsieur André Chazal's slave, for example. Or when you became little more than an automaton, a beast of burden, living with the Spence family, at a time when you still knew nothing about the Saint-Simonians, Fourierism, Icarian communism, or the work of Robert Owen in New Lanark, Scotland.
The four days she spent in Macon, home of Lamartine, the celebrated poet and member of parliament, her bodily ills beset her again, as if to test her fortitude. To the crippling pains in her uterus and stomach was added fatigue; she was tempted to cancel appointments, visits to the newspapers, and meetings to recruit workers—who were more elusive here than elsewhere—and simply fall onto the little flowered bed in her room at the lovely H?tel du Sauvage. She resisted the temptation with a Herculean effort. At night, exhaustion and nerves kept her awake, remembering—she liked to torture herself with these thoughts sometimes, as penance for not being more successful in her struggle—her three years of calvary in the service of the Spences. The family must have been well-to-do, but except on trips its members hardly enjoyed their prosperity, due to thrift, puritanism, and lack of imagination. The husband and wife, Mr. Marc and Mrs. Catherine, must have been in their fifties, and Miss Annie, the younger sister of the former, around forty-five. All three were thin, gawky, rather forbidding in their perpetually black attire, and entirely devoid of curiosity. They hired her as a companion to accompany them on a trip to the Swiss mountains, where they would breathe pure mountain air and scour their lungs, blackened by the soot of London factories. The salary was good; it allowed her to pay the wet nurse for the care of her children and left her something for her personal needs. Her designation as a companion proved to be a euphemism; in truth, she was the trio's servant. She served them breakfast in bed—their inedible porridge, their toast, and the weak cups of tea that all three drank three or four times a day—washed and ironed their clothes, and helped the horrible sisters-in-law, Mrs. Spence and Miss Annie, to dress after their morning ablutions. She ran errands, took their letters to the post office, and went to the market to buy the insipid biscuits they took with their tea. But she also dusted rooms, made beds, emptied chamberpots, and at mealtimes suffered the daily humiliation of seeing that her portions were half the size of the Spences'. Some staples of the family diet, like meat and milk, were perpetually denied her.
But the worst part of those three years in the Spences' service wasn't the mindless drudgery or the numbing routine that kept her on her feet from dawn until dusk. Rather, it was the feeling she began to have soon after she started working for them that the three were making her vanish, robbing her of her status as a woman, a human being, rendering her a lifeless instrument without any sense of dignity or even a soul, to whom the right of existence was granted only in the brief instants she was given orders. She would have preferred that they mistreat her, that they hurl dishes at her head—this, at least, would have made her feel alive. Their indifference—she couldn't remember if they had ever asked her how she felt, or ventured a kind remark or a single affectionate gesture—offended her in the depths of her soul. In her relationship with her employers, it was her job to work like an animal, perform routine duties all day long, and resign herself to abandoning all dignity, pride, and emotion—to renounce even the feeling of being alive. Nevertheless, when the Spences' time in Switzerland came to an end and they proposed bringing her back with them to England, she accepted. Why, Florita? Well, of course, how else were you to continue supporting your children, all three of whom were still alive then? It would be difficult, too, for André Chazal to find you in London, and report you to the police there for running away from home. The fear of prison shadowed you all those years.
Dismal memories, Florita. Her three years as a servant shamed her so much that she expunged them from her life story until, much later, André Chazal's lawyer brought them to public light at the accursed trial. Now the memories assailed her in Macon: because she felt so ill, because she was so frustrated by this hideous city of ten thousand souls, all of whom seemed as ugly to her as the houses and streets they inhabited. Although she visited the four trade unions, leaving at each her address and a pamphlet about the Workers' Union, only two people came to visit her: a cooper and a blacksmith. Neither was of interest. Both confirmed that Macon's trade unions were on the verge of extinction, since now the workshops had found a way to pay lower wages, by hiring farmers and migrant harvest laborers for brief periods of intensive work rather than keeping permanent forces. The workers had left en masse to seek employment in the factories of Lyon. And the farmer-laborers didn't want to be bothered by union problems because they didn't consider themselves members of the proletariat but rather country men occasionally employed in the workshops to supplement their income.
The only source of entertainment in Macon was Monsieur Champ-vans, the head of the newspaper Le Bien Public, which the illustrious Lamartine edited from Paris by correspondence. A distinguished, cultured man, Champvans treated her with a refinement and courtesy that delighted her despite her political and moral reservations about the bourgeoisie. Politely he hid his yawns as she described the Workers' Union and explained the ways in which it would transform society. But he treated her to an exquisite lunch at the best restaurant in Macon and took her to the country to visit Lamartine's estate, Le Monceau. The castle of the great democrat and man of letters struck her as an irritating and tasteless ostentation. She was beginning to tire of the visit when Madame de Pierreclos, widow of the poet's illegitimate son—who, shortly after marrying, had died from tuberculosis at the age of twenty-eight—appeared to show her the grounds. The comely young widow, still a girl, talked to Flora about her tragic love and the state of grief in which she had lived since her husband's death, determined never to enjoy anything again, and to lead a cloistered life of self-sacrifice until death liberated her from her sufferings.
Hearing such talk from this lovely young woman, whose eyes were filled with tears, annoyed Flora beyond measure. As they strolled among Le Monceau's flowerbeds, she immediately began to lecture her.
"It saddens me to hear you talk so, madame, but it angers me, too. You are not a victim of misfortune, but a monster of egotism. Excuse my frankness, but you'll see that I am right. You are young, beautiful, rich—and rather than thanking the heavens for such bounty and making the most of it, you bury yourself alive because a turn of fate saved you from marriage, the worst servitude a woman can endure. Thousands, millions of people are left widows or widowers, and you believe your widowhood is an earth-shattering catastrophe."
The girl stopped walking and turned as pale as death. She stared at Flora incredulously, wondering if she was insane, or had at just that moment gone mad.
"An egotist because I am loyal to the great love of my life?" she asked.
"No one has the right to squander an opportunity like yours," Flora retorted. "Forget your mourning, abandon this mausoleum. Start to live. Study, do good, help the millions of human beings who, unlike you, suffer from very real and concrete problems—hunger, sickness, unemployment, ignorance—and are unable to face them. What you have isn't a problem—it's a solution. Widowhood saved you from having to discover the slavery that matrimony means for women. Don't play at being the heroine of a romance novel. Follow my advice: return to life and concern yourself with more generous things than the cultivation of your own pain. And finally, if you don't want to devote yourself to doing good, enjoy yourself, travel, take a lover. It's what your husband would have done if you had died of tuberculosis."
From being cadaverously pale, Madame de Pierreclos flushed bright red. And all at once she began to laugh hysterically, and couldn't stop for some time. Flora watched her, amused. When she took her leave, the little widow, still stunned, stuttered that although she wasn't sure whether Flora had been speaking seriously or in jest, her words would cause her to reflect.
Upon boarding the ship for Lyon, Flora felt freed of a great weight. She was tired of towns and villages, anxious to be in a great city once again.
Her first impression of Lyon, with its grim mansions like barracks, following one upon the other as in a nightmare, and its cobbled streets, which hurt the soles of her feet, was not pleasant. The grayness of the city, the contrast in it between the extremely rich and the desperately poor, and the way it seemed to serve as a monument to the exploitation of workers reminded her of London with the Spences. This depressing first-day sensation would gradually vanish as she attended more and more gatherings, meetings, and appointments, and as she was, for the first time in her life, hounded by the police. Here at last she had innumerable meetings with workers from every sector: weavers, shoemakers, stonemasons, blacksmiths, carpenters, velvet makers, and others. Her fame had preceded her—many people knew who she was and looked at her on the street with admiration or disapproval; some eyed her as a queer fish. But the reason she would remember her six weeks in Lyon all through the remaining months of her tour—in Lyon she marked two months since her departure from Paris—was that, in the crowded schedule of those weeks, she overwhelmingly confirmed not only the excessive exploitation of the poor but also the reserves of decency, moral purity, and heroism of the working classes despite the absolute degradation of their living conditions. "In six weeks in Lyon I learned more about society than in all the rest of my life," she wrote in her journal.
In the first week she gave more than twenty lectures in the workshops of the Croix-Rousse silkworkers, the famous canuts who, a short time before—in 1831 and 1834—had led two workers' revolutions that the bourgeoisie crushed with terrible bloodshed. In the narrow, dark, and dirty workshops perched on the mountain of Croix-Rousse, its interminable steps making her gasp for breath, Flora had difficulty associating the men half hidden in the shadowy dark, barely illuminated by an oil lamp—the meetings took place at night, after the day's work—with the fighters who had faced with sticks and stones the soldiers' bayonets, bullets, and cannon blasts. They were timid, barefoot, dressed in rags, their faces blank with exhaustion; they worked from five in the morning until eight at night, with a small break at midday. Many doubted that she had written The Workers' Union. Prejudice against women had permeated all social classes. Because she wore skirts, they believed her incapable of conceiving ideas for the redemption of the working class. After a certain awkwardness, due to their surprise at discovering she was a woman, they asked many questions, and when she quizzed them about their problems, they generally expressed themselves with great self-assurance. There were plenty of limited types among them, but also intelligences in the rough who were prevented by society from polishing themselves. She left these meetings nearly collapsing from exhaustion, but in a state of spiritual incandescence. Your ideas were taking hold, Florita—the workers were adopting them, the Workers' Union was beginning to become a reality.
On the ninth day of her stay, four police officers and the police commissioner of Lyon, Monsieur Bardoz, appeared at the H?tel de Milan with a search warrant. After spending a few hours rummaging through her things, they took away her papers, notebooks, and private letters—among them a passionate one from Olympia—and the copies of The Workers' Union that she hadn't yet distributed to bookstores. As they left, they handed her a summons to appear before the King's Counsel, Monsieur A. Gilardin.
Gilardin was a man as thin as a knife, dressed in a suit like a religious habit. He didn't rise to greet her when she entered his office.
"The work you are doing in Lyon is subversive," he said icily. "An investigation has been opened, and you may be charged as an agitator. Consequently, while we await the results of the investigation, I prohibit you to continue your meetings with the canuts of Croix-Rousse."
Flora studied him slowly from head to toe, with disdain. She made a great effort not to explode. "Do you consider it subversive to exchange ideas with the people who weave the cloth for the elegant suits you wear? I'd like to know why."
"Those filthy holes are no place for ladies. And it is a dangerous business to speak to the workers when one has inflammatory ideas about the social order." The lipless mouth of the King's Counsel barely moved as he spoke. "I must warn you: so long as this investigation continues, you will be under observation. But if you like, you may leave Lyon immediately."
"The only way you'll make me leave is by force. I like this city very much. And I must warn you of something too: I will move heaven and earth so that the press here and in Paris let the people know the outrage that is being perpetrated upon me."
She left the office of the King's Counsel without bidding him farewell. The three opposition newspapers—Le Censeur, La Démocratie, and Le Bien Public—reported the search and the seizure of her papers, but none of them dared to criticize the measure. And from that day on, two police officers were stationed at the door of the H?tel de Milan, taking note of the visitors Flora received and following her in the street. But they were so lazy and clumsy that it was easy to give them the slip, thanks to the complicity of the chambermaids at the hotel, who helped her leave through a kitchen window that opened onto a back alley. Therefore, despite the prohibition, she continued to hold meetings with the workers, taking every possible precaution, always fearing that the police would appear, alerted by some traitor. They never did.
At the same time, she undertook an intense labor of social research, visiting workshops, hospitals, poorhouses, madhouses, orphanages, churches, schools, and finally brothels in the neighborhood of La Guillotière. On this last expedition, accompanied by two Fourierists —they had behaved very well, finding her a lawyer to defend her case before the King's Counsel—she was not disguised as a man, as in London, but covered in a cape and a rather ridiculous hat that hid half her face. Although it wasn't as Dantean as the enormous Stepney Green in London, La Guillotière presented a spectacle that unnerved her: prostitutes clustered on corners and in the doorways of taverns and bawdy houses with cheery names—The Bride's House, The Warm Arms. She asked the ages of many of the youngest: twelve, thirteen, fourteen. Children, barely developed, playing at being women. How was it possible that men could be aroused by these creatures of skin and bone, who were not yet out of childhood and were threatened by consumption and syphilis, if they hadn't already contracted them? Her heart shrank; rage and sorrow struck her dumb. Just as in London, here too there was something part monstrous and part comic: in the midst of depravity, children two, three, and four years old crawled among the prostitutes and their clients (many laborers among them), playing on the dirt floors of the houses of ill repute, left there by their mothers while they worked.
Though profoundly disgusted, she made these visits out of a sense of moral obligation—she couldn't reform what she didn't know. From the early days of her marriage to André Chazal, sex had repelled her. Even before she acquired political awareness or an understanding of social problems, she had intuited that sex was one of the primordial weapons for the exploitation and control of women. This was why, although she didn't preach chastity or monkish reclusion, she had always distrusted theories that extolled the sexual life and the pleasures of the flesh as the objectives of a future society. It was one of the reasons she had distanced herself from Charles Fourier, for whom she nonetheless felt admiration and fondness. Curious, the case of the master; he had always led, at least in appearance, a life of complete austerity. He was thought to be a misogynist. But in his design of the society of the future—the coming Eden, the period of harmony to follow civilization—sex took pride of place. It was hard for her to accept this. Such a project could end in true chaos, despite the master's good intentions. It was unnecessary, absurd, impossible to organize society around sex, as certain Fourierists pretended to do. In the phalansteries, according to Fourier's design, there would be young virgins who would entirely forgo sex; and vestals, who would practice it moderately with the vestels or troubadours; and women with even more freedom, the damsels, who would pair off with the minstrels; and so on, up a rising scale of freedom and excess—odalisques, fakiresses, bacchantes—up to the bayaderes, who would make love as a charitable act, sleeping with the old, the sick, travelers, and in general beings who were otherwise condemned by an unjust society to masturbation or abstinence. Although every aspect of this system might be free and voluntary—each person could choose which sexual body of the phalanstery they wanted to belong to, and abandon it at will—to Flora it seemed improper. It made her fear that under its shelter new injustices would spring up. The plans for her Workers' Union included no sexual formulas. Except for establishing the absolute equality of men and women and the right to divorce, it avoided the subject of sex.
What alarmed her most about Fourier's doctrine were his claims that "all fantasies are good in matters of love" and "all passionate obsessions are just, because love is essentially unjust." His defense of the "noble orgy" made her dizzy, as did his espousal of coupling in groups and his assertion that in the society of the future, minority tastes—unisexual, as he called them—like sadism and fetishism shouldn't be suppressed but rather encouraged so that each person might find his perfect match and be satisfied in his weakness or whim. All this, of course, would harm no one, since everything would be freely chosen and approved. These ideas of Fourier scandalized her so much that she secretly rather agreed with Proudhon, the puritanical reformer who not long before, in his 1840 pamphlet What Is Property?, had accused the Fourierists of "immorality and pederasty." The scandal had recently led Victor Considérant to temper the sexual theories of the movement's founder.
Although she recognized and admired his revolutionary daring, Flora was intimidated by Fourier's libertine tolerance in sexual matters. She was also amused at times. She and Olympia had laughed until they cried one afternoon in the midst of lovemaking, remembering the master's confession that he had an "irresistible passion for lesbians," and his claim that, according to his calculations and research, he could prove that there were twenty-six thousand "like-minded individuals" in the world, with whom he could form an "association" or "body" in the future world of Harmony, in which he and those like him would freely and unabashedly enjoy sapphic displays. The lesbians exhibiting themselves before these happy voyeurs would do so of their own accord, because the performance would allow them to exercise their exhibitionistic talents. "Shall we invite him to join us, my dear?" Olympia laughed.
You could poke fun at Fourier's classificatory mania now, Florita, but ten years ago, upon returning from Peru, how overjoyed you were to discover his teachings, which recognized the unjust situation of women and the poor, and proposed to alleviate it by encouraging the formation of a new society, which would emerge with the establishment of more and more phalansteries. Humanity had progressed beyond its early stages—Savagery, Barbarism, Civilization—and now, thanks to new ideas, it would soon enter the last: Harmony. The phalanstery, with its four hundred families of four members each, would constitute a perfect society, a small paradise organized in such a way that all sources of unhappiness would disappear. Justice was useless, at least in bringing happiness to human beings. Fourier had foreseen this and prescribed everything. In each phalanstery the most tedious, stupid, and unrewarding jobs would pay best, while the most enjoyable and creative would pay least, since working at the latter would constitute a pleasure in and of itself. As a result, a coalman or a tinsmith would be better recompensed than a doctor or an engineer. Each limitation or vice would be turned to its best advantage for the good of society. Since children liked to play in the mud, they would be assigned the task of picking up garbage in the phalansteries. At first, this seemed the height of wisdom to Flora. So did Fourier's formula for ensuring that men and women did not tire of always doing the same thing: they would rotate from job to job, sometimes in a single day, to keep routines from growing stale. From gardener to professor, from bricklayer to lawyer, from laundress to actress, no one would ever be bored.
And yet she ultimately found alarming many of the categorical statements made by the kind and compassionate Fourier. To maintain that "on my own I have managed to gainsay twenty centuries of political imbecility" was an exaggeration. The master presented unverifiable assertions as scientific truths: that the world would last exactly eighty thousand years, and that in that time each human soul would transmigrate between the earth and other planets 810 times and live 1,626 different lives. Was this science or sorcery? Wasn't it ludicrous? By the same token, though she knew that she was not nearly as wise as the founder of Fourierism, she said to herself that the Workers' Union program was more realistic than its Fourierist counterpart, precisely because it was more modest.
After her visit to the brothels, her tour of La Antigualla, a madhouse and hospital for prostitutes suffering from shameful diseases, was even worse. The ill and the insane, intermingled, were supervised by cruel, moronic warders who beat the madmen when they screamed too much as they walked half naked and in chains around a courtyard full of filth, amid clouds of flies. In the corners, ruined women spat blood or displayed the pustules of syphilis as they tried to sing hymns under the direction of the Sisters of Charity, who ran the infirmary. The hospital's director, a pleasant man with modern ideas, admitted to Flora that in the majority of cases it was poverty that caused the alienation of these wretches.
"It makes perfect sense, doctor. Do you know how much a working woman earns in Lyon for fourteen or fifteen hours in the workshop? Fifty centimes—a third or a quarter of what a man makes for the same job. How are they to live on that much a day, if they have children to feed? That is why many turn to prostitution, and are driven mad."
"Don't let the sisters hear you." The doctor lowered his voice. "In their view, madness is a punishment for sin. Your theory would seem hardly Christian to them."
It wasn't only at La Antigualla that Flora encountered priests and nuns. They were everywhere. Lyon, city of rebellious workers, was also a clerical city, stinking of incense and the sacristy. She went in and out of many churches, which were full of poor fanatics praying on their knees or listening passively to the obscurantist tripe spilled out by priests who preached resignation and obedience to the powerful. Saddest of all was to see that the poor made up the immense majority of the faithful. To study fetishism, she climbed up to Lyon's highest point, nearly expiring in the process, where Notre Dame de Fourvière was worshiped in a small chapel. The ugly figure of the Virgin impressed her much less than did the abject idolatry of the mass of parishioners who had climbed so high and were now on their knees pushing and elbowing to approach the glass case holding the statue of the Virgin and touch it with a fingertip. It was the Middle Ages in the heart of one of the most industrialized and modern cities in the world!
Returning to the center of Lyon, halfway down the mountain she tried to visit a poorhouse where old people with no home or job could take refuge and be given a roof over their heads, a bowl of soup, and a Christian burial. She couldn't get in. The place was guarded by policemen with muskets. Through the bars, she saw the Sisters of Charity, who also ran schools for the poor in the city. Of course! Nuns and officers arm in arm, keeping the poor trapped from childhood to old age, teaching them submission through prayers and sermons, or imposing it by force.
Compared to these research forays, how different were her meetings with the small groups of canuts from the silk factories, and other Lyonnais workers. Sometimes the discussions were violent. Flora always left them strengthened in her convictions, feeling rewarded for her efforts. One night, at a meeting with some Icarian workers, followers of étienne Cabet—whose novel, Travels in Icaria, had converted many in the region to his doctrine, called communist—Flora fainted in the middle of an ardent dispute. When she opened her eyes, it was dawn. She had spent the night in a weavers' workshop, lying on the ground. The workers who slept there had taken turns watching over her, massaging her hands and wetting her forehead. She had seen one of the workers, Eléonore Blanc, at other meetings. Flora had noticed that the young woman listened devotedly and had an agile mind. Something told her that she might become one of the leaders of the Workers' Union in Lyon. She invited her to the H?tel de Milan for tea, and they talked for hours under the placid gaze of the policemen charged with watching her. Yes, Eléonore Blanc was an exceptional woman, and she would form part of the organizing committee of the Lyon Workers' Union.
By the time the examining magistrate called her in, Flora had become even more famous in Lyon. People flocked to her in the streets, and although some men averted their eyes and some women dared to say, "Go away and leave us alone," most greeted her with friendly words. Perhaps it was this popularity that made the magistrate, Monsieur Fran?ois Demi, decree—after interrogating her for two hours in a most agreeable conversation—that there were no grounds on which to charge her, and that the police should return the papers they had seized.
"These last few weeks I've been simply superb," Flora said to herself upon recovering her notebooks, letters, and diaries, which Commissioner Bardoz himself sullenly delivered. Yes indeed, Florita. In five weeks in Lyon you had preached to hundreds of workers, enriched your knowledge of social injustice, set up a committee of fifteen people, and on the suggestion of the workers themselves ordered a third edition of The Workers' Union, to be sold at a very low price in order to put it within the reach of the humblest of pocketbooks.
Her words had even reached the heart of the enemy, the Church. Her last meeting in the region came as a surprise. In great secrecy, some priests who lived in a community in Oullins, under the leadership of Abbot Guillemain de Bordeaux, invited her to visit, since "many of our ideas are the same as yours." She went out of curiosity, expecting little of the meeting. But to her astonishment, she was received in the castle of Perron at Oullins by a group of religious revolutionaries. They called themselves the rebel priests. They had read and discussed Proudhon, Saint-Simon, Cabet, and Fourier. But their guiding spirit and mentor was Father Lamennais, who had lived a generation before. Rejected by the Vatican, he had been a supporter of the Republic, an opponent and scourge of the monarchy and the bourgeoisie, a defender of freedom of worship and social reform. Like Saint-Simon and like Flora, these rebel priests believed that the revolution should preserve Christ and a Christianity untainted by the authoritarianism of the Church and the privileges of power. The evening was pleasant, and as Flora took her leave, she told the rebel priests that there would be a place for them in the Workers' Union too. She counseled them, half in jest and half seriously, that since they had taken so many important steps they should take one more and rebel against ecclesiastical celibacy.
Her parting with Eléonore Blanc, on the day she left Lyon, was very hard. The girl burst into tears. Flora embraced her and whispered in her ear something that frightened her even as she said it. "Eléonore, I love you more than my own daughter."
