Shortly after his first birthday, Paul Gauguin was bundled aboard a ship called theAlbert, to sail some 12,000 miles from the French port of Le Havre to Peru. The year was 1849, and France was no place for outspoken radicals such as Gauguin’s parents. Charles-Louis Napoleon had become president of the French Republic and it didn’t take political genius to foresee that he would segue smoothly from the post of president to that of Emperor Napoleon III of France. Gauguin’s father, Clovis, was an anti-Bonapartist journalist determined to continue the republican fight from Peru, where he planned to start a newspaper on the back of an excellent connection: Simón Bolívar, who overthrew Spanish rule in much of South America and had Bolivia named after him, had been a family friend. Gauguin’s mother, Aline, was also a ‘person of danger’ on the list of the French Republic’s spies and secret police. Aline had not had much time recently to be a national danger. Two years previously, she had given birth to Gauguin’s elder sister Marie, and then Gauguin himself had come along. Her hands had been more than full of babies. But sometimes symbols adhere more firmly to particular names than to their recent activities and Aline Gauguin had inherited the symbolic mantle of firebrand feminist and proto-Communist from her mother Flora Tristan.
Karl Marx met and admired Flora Tristan, whose book advocating an international workers’ movement,L’Union ouvrière, was published four years before his ownCommunist Manifesto calling for the same. A statue of Flora stands in Paris, where she also has a square named after her, and a women’s refuge. She has become an icon of the French feminist movement and in 1984 she was honoured with a postage stamp. The philosopher Proudhon called her a genius, and the conservative French press of the time nicknamed her Madame la Colère, Madame Anger. To her grandson Paul Gauguin, she was a heroine; he described her as a beautiful socialist-anarchist bluestocking who probably never learned to cook, ardent and utterly adorable.1 By the time he was born, she had been dead four years, but there is no doubt that the example of her moral fearlessness spurred him on to wage his own stubborn political crusades.
Gauguin is chiefly known for his Polynesian paintings, the first European pictures to turn their back on the classical and neoclassical ideals on which the Western comprehension of beauty and culture was founded, to celebrate instead a different beauty: the beauty of an indigenous people and their culture. It is less well known that while Gauguin was creating the paintings that gave visual shape to this most enchanting and exotic Eden, he was infuriating Polynesia’s French colonial administrators by fighting for the native Polynesians’ rights against the injustices of their French colonial governors. In Tahiti, he started his own newspaper and wrote satirical articles for the magazineLes Guêpes (The Wasps), delivering sting after sting on the fat flank of the corrupt French administration that ruled over the colony, and lampooning them in merciless cartoons. But Gauguin’s political activism didn’t stop at journalism; he also acted as an advocate for Polynesians in the French colonial courts, demanding justice for them against the high-handed colonial administrators, the corpulent robots with idiotic faces, who governed them oppressively and taxed them mercilessly.
Gauguin credited his grandmother Flora Tristan not only for his own lifelong readiness to battle for the underdog, but also for his talent as a painter. No discernible artistic red thread ran down the family bloodline until Flora came along. Born in 1803, she was as sketchily educated as almost all girls were at the time, but Flora understood line, and had an exceptional eye for colour. This was a commercially valuable talent in the early decades of the nineteenth century when black-and-white prints and engravings drag-anchored the racy and influential
