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Olympe de Gouges
- Olympe de Gouges (born Marie Gouze; 1745 – =
November 3, 1793) was a playwrig=
ht and
journalist whose feminist=
writings reached a large audience.
- =
A proponent
of democracy, she deman=
ded
the same rights for French
women that French men were demanding for themselves.
- =
In her
![3D"A](3D"I_L_files/image011.jpg")
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Life
![](3D"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:OlympeDeGouge.jpg"){kind=link}
A portrait of Olympe de Gouges
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ddot; =
Marie Gouze was born into a petit bourgeois family in 1748 in Montauban, Tarn-et-Garonne, in the
South-West of France. Her father was a =
butcher, her mother, a
washerwoman. However, she believed that she was the illegitimate daughter o=
f Jean Jacques Lefranc; his rejection of her cla=
ims
upon him may have influenced her passionate defense of the rights of illegi=
timate
children.[1] She married qui=
te
young in 1765 one Louis Aubry, the son of an inn-keeper, but when her husba=
nd
died a year later, she moved in 1770 to Paris with her son, Pierre, and took
the name of Olympe de Gouges.
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ddot; =
In 1774, she wrote the anti-slavery play L'Esclavage des Nègr=
es
(Negro Slavery). Because she was a woman and because of her
controversial subject, the play went unpublished until 1789 at the start of=
the
Fr=
ench
Revolution.[3]. Even then, Oly=
mpe
showed her combativeness when she fought unsuccessfully to get her play sta=
ged.
She also wrote on such gender-related topics as the right of divorce and the
right to sexual relations outside of marriage.
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ddot; =
A passionate advocate of human rights, Olympe de Gouges greeted the
outbreak of the Revolution with hope and joy, but soon became disenchanted,=
in
that the fraternité of the Revolution was not extended to wom=
en
(that is, that equal rights were not extended to women).
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ddot; =
In 1791, she became part of the Cercle Social—an associati=
on
with the goal of equal political and legal rights for women. The Cercle
Social met at the home of well-known women's rights advocate =
Sophie
de Condorcet. Here, she expressed, for the first time, her famous
statement "a woman has the right to mount the scaffold. She must posse=
ss
equally the right to mount the speaker's platform."
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ddot; =
That same year, in response to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and=
of
the Citizen, she wrote the Déclaration des droits =
de
la Femme et de la Citoyenne ("Declaration of the Rights of Woman
and the Female Citizen"), the first declaration of truly universal
human rights. This was followed by her Contrat Social ("Soci=
al
Contract", named after a famous work of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau), proposing marriage based on gender equality.
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ddot; =
She attempted to become involved in any matter she believed to involve
injustice. She opposed the execution of =
Louis
XVI of France, partly out of opposition to c=
apital
punishment and partly because she preferred a relatively tame and
living king to the possibility of a rebel regency in exile. The late 19th
century French historian Jules
Michelet commented "She allowed herself to act and write ab=
out
more than one affair that her weak head did not understand."[4].
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ddot; =
As her hopes were disappointed, she became more and more vehement in her
writings. On 2 June 1793, the Jacobins arrested the Girondins (her allies) an=
d sent
them to the guillotine. Finally, her last piece Les trois urnes, ou le s=
alut
de la Patrie, par un voyageur aérien (3 Novembe=
r
1793, a month after Condorcet had been proscr=
ibed
and several months after the Girondin leaders had been guillotined.
Olympe de Gouges, a Daughter of Que=
rcy
on her Way to the Panthéon
A Genius Ahead of Her Time
- The fact is that, just =
like
Louise Labbé two centuries earlier, Olympe was a genius ahead of
her time--and way ahead of her early critics, including Michelet (whose
criticism was not confined to her Declaration). Olympe is a true heroi=
ne,
a natural subject for a novel, a film, a comic book, or an opera. She =
is a
great figure in the history of humanity, someone in whom a province or=
a
whole country may easily recognize itself, and someone, too, who belon=
gs
not only to the militant feminists who have already quite properly paid
homage to her in many ways. We can only dream of one day coming =
upon
the manuscript that Alexandre Dumas, having already dealt with Olympe =
de
Clèves, never wrote on Olympe de Gouges.
- The very thing that onc=
e made
Olympe an object of scorn, namely the seamlessness of her way of livin=
g,
her dramatic work, and her social convictions, the absence of any
contradiction in her between thought and action, is precisely what most
impresses us today. It is likely that Olympe was not well able to writ=
e,
but gave admirable dictation; she also had a magnificent grasp of the =
fact
that changing just a few words in, or adding one or two paragraphs to =
well
accepted and admired texts can produce truly explosive pyrotechnics. <=
/span>
&nb=
sp;
Olympe in the Panthéon
- The bicentennial of the=
French
Revolution could hardly be the occasion to glorify the guillotine which
beheaded nearly twenty thousand people in a few short months, including
Madame Roland and Olympe de Gouges. Despite its its gaily painted
wood boards, the machine was clearly neither dusted off nor set up for=
the
commemoration. It remained in sad storage in the Conciergerie, dutiful=
ly
inventoried in the files of the Ministry of Justice. It will doubtless
come out, however, for the films now being planned on Olympe's life
journey from Montauban to Parnac, and then from Quercy to the Place de=
la
Révolution (today Place de la Concorde). It is to be hoped that
these films will play their part in the overdue recognition of la belle
Quercynoise and help elevate fer to her deserved eminence, not just in=
the
Panthéon but also in the imagined identity of the French people=
at
large, and first and foremost in the minds all those fortunate enough =
to
dwell in the land of the Tarn and the Lot.