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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 Declaration of the Rights of Wo= man and the Female Citizen (1791), she challenged the pract= ice of male authority and the notion of male-female inequality. She lost h= er life to the guillo= tine due to her revolutionary ideas

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&mi= 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.

&mi= 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 Because she was a woman and because of her controversial subject, the play went unpublished until 1789 at the start of= the Fr= ench Revolution.^[3].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.

&mi= 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).<= /p>

&mi= 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."<= /p>

&mi= 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.

&mi= 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].

&mi= 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>

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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.