The Peace Palace Library is grateful to professor Máire Fedelma CROSS for her kind book donations.
Book donation 1
Cross, M.F., In the Footsteps of Flora Tristan: A Political Biography, Liverpool University Press, 2023.
(Abstract)
In the Footsteps of Flora Tristan is the first ever study devoted to Jules Puech (1879–1957), and is a double biography that examines his life’s work on Flora Tristan (1803–1844), feminist and socialist. It begins by examining newly found press reports of Flora Tristan during her lifetime and subsequently, then positions Puech’s discovery of her, as a postgraduate student in Paris in the 1900s. It continues with an account of how he embarked on the first in-depth biography published in 1925. Puech was unmatched in his expertise as a writer on Flora Tristan having discovered her papers through his numerous political connections and having become a historian of Proudhon’s legacy on the international aspirations of the labour movement. Together with his wife Marie-Louise Puech, née Milhau (1876-1966), suffragist feminist, he was a militant in the early twentieth-century pacifist movement that advocated international arbitration. His research on Flora Tristan was enriched by his other projects but was thwarted by the wars of 1914–1918 and 1940–1945. The circumstances of the long gestation of Puech's biography are drawn from his letters and papers, hitherto unseen. The correspondence curated brings a new understanding to the multi-faceted nature of Puech’s activism and rate of progress in the publication of his findings on his subject, Flora Tristan.
Book donation 2
Cross, M.F,, and A. Le Bras-Chopard, Jules Puech sur les traces de Flora Tristan: Histoire d’une biographie, Translated by H. Chuquet, Éditions Ampelos, 2022.
(Abstract)
On a vite oublié que, quatre ans avant Marx, une femme avait poussé le cri de ralliement : "Prolétaires de tous les pays, unissez-vous".
Jules Puech, intellectuel pacifiste et internationaliste, fut en quelque sorte "le découvreur" de Flora Tristan, en contribuant à re-diffuser, dans le cadre de l'histoire ouvrière, la pensée de cette pionnière et inventrice du socialisme féministe.
Cette double biographie croise les destins de l'historien Jules Puech (1879-1957) et de Flora Tristan (1803-1844), dont il fut le premier biographe.
Máire Cross suit les étapes de la carrière d'historien de Jules Puech, depuis son doctorat sur Proudhon et le mouvement ouvrier internationaliste jusqu'à la découverte d'archives de la militante et la publication de sa biographie en 1925. Le récit du long "compagnonnage" de Jules Puech avec Flora Tristan repose sur de nombreuses archives inédites de la famille Puech, en particulier l'abondante correspondance de l'historien avec ses proches.
L'ouvrage jette un pont entre différentes générations de militants et d'historiens et nous permet de mieux comprendre la complexité des activités militantes dans les trois mouvements, toujours en évolution, que sont le féminisme, le pacifisme et le socialisme.
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Professor Cross attended the 39th Annual Conference of the Society for the Study of French History, on the them of Peace and Justice. The full programme is available here:
Professor Cross spoke on the panel “War, Peace, and Political Violence from the Belle Époque to the 1930s”. The subject of her paper was “La Grande illusion: 1915-1916 Wartime Letters of the Pacifist Couple Marie-Louise Puech-Milhau (1876-1966) and Jules-Louis Puech (1879-1957).”