Thinkers Timeline

Flora Tristan was a French-Peruvian writer and activist. She was one of the earliest voices to link women's liberation with workers' liberation. She was born on 7 April 1803 in Paris. Her father, Mariano Tristán y Moscoso, was a Peruvian colonel in the Spanish army and came from a powerful family in Arequipa, Peru. Her mother, Anne-Pierre Laisnay, was French. Her parents were married in a church in Spain but never registered the marriage with civil authorities. This made the marriage legally invalid under French law. When her father died suddenly in 1807, the family lost its wealth. Flora, now legally illegitimate, grew up poor. At 18, her mother pushed her into marriage with her employer, a print engraver named André Chazal. The marriage was miserable. Chazal was violent. Flora left him in 1825, taking her children. This was almost impossible in France at the time. Napoleon's laws had banned divorce. A separated wife had no legal rights to her children or her earnings. Flora spent the next years as a working-class single mother, on the run. In 1833, she sailed to Peru, hoping her father's wealthy family would recognise her. Her uncle Pío welcomed her warmly but refused to give her the inheritance. She stayed almost a year, observing Peruvian society closely. On her return, she wrote a famous travel book, Peregrinations of a Pariah (1838). The same year her book came out, Chazal tracked her down and shot her in the street. The bullet stayed lodged near her heart for the rest of her life. He was sentenced to 20 years. She visited London twice and wrote Promenades in London (1840), describing the horrors of English factories. Her most important book, The Workers' Union (1843), called for a global organisation of workers, men and women together. In 1844, she toured France by stagecoach to build this union. She fell ill in Bordeaux and died of typhoid on 14 November 1844, aged 41. Ten thousand people followed her funeral.

Aimé Césaire (1913-2008) was a poet, playwright, and political thinker from Martinique, an island in the Caribbean that was, and still is, a French territory. He was born into a poor family but won a scholarship to study in Paris, where he became one of the most brilliant students of his generation. In Paris in the 1930s, he and other Black students from Africa and the Caribbean came together to talk about their shared experience of being treated as inferior by French colonial culture. From these conversations came the Negritude movement: a literary and political project that celebrated African and Black culture, history, and identity as something to be proud of, not ashamed of. Césaire returned to Martinique and became its most important political figure, serving as mayor of the capital Fort-de-France for nearly fifty years and as a member of the French parliament. He is best known for two works: his poem Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, and his political essay Discourse on Colonialism, published in 1950. He died in 2008 at the age of 94, still celebrated as Martinique's greatest son.

Albert Camus (1913-1960) was a French-Algerian novelist, playwright, and philosopher. He was born in Mondovi in French colonial Algeria into a poor working-class family: his father was killed in the First World War when Camus was less than a year old and his mother was partially deaf and nearly illiterate. He grew up in poverty in Algiers, where he was a gifted student whose high school teacher, Louis Germain, helped him win a scholarship that changed the course of his life. He studied philosophy at the University of Algiers but contracted tuberculosis, which prevented him from taking his final examinations and recurred throughout his life. He worked as a journalist in Algeria and then in Paris, became involved in the French Resistance during the German occupation, and published his most important works in the 1940s: the novel The Stranger, the philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus, the plague novel La Peste, and the philosophical essay The Rebel. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, when he was forty-three years old. He died in a car accident in 1960. He was forty-six.

Annie Ernaux is a French writer. In 2022 she became the first French woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. She was born Annie Duchesne on 1 September 1940 in Lillebonne, a small town in Normandy. Her parents had grown up poor. Through hard work they had pulled themselves up to run a small grocery store and café in nearby Yvetot. Annie was their only surviving child. An older sister had died before she was born. Her parents earned just enough to send her to a private Catholic school. There she met middle-class girls and felt for the first time the shame of coming from the working class. This shame would become one of her main subjects. She studied literature at the universities of Rouen and Bordeaux. She trained as a secondary school teacher. She married Philippe Ernaux in the 1960s and had two sons. In 1964, while a student, she had an illegal abortion. The experience became one of her most important subjects. Her first novel, Cleaned Out (1974), was about it. She wrote the book in secret, pretending to her husband that she was working on a doctoral thesis. For decades she taught school and wrote her books. She divorced in 1984. She published more than twenty books, mostly autobiographical. The Years (2008) became her most famous work. The Nobel Prize came in 2022 when she was 82. The Swedish Academy honoured her 'for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory'. She still lives in a Paris suburb.