Olympe de Gouges: 1748–1793

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Wikipedia introduction:

Olympe de Gouges (French pronunciation: [olɛ̃p də ɡuʒ]; 7 May 1748 – 3 November 1793), born Marie Gouze, was a French playwright and political activist whose feminist and abolitionist writings reached a large audience.




She began her career as a playwright in the early 1780s. As political tension rose in France, de Gouges became increasingly politically involved. She became an outspoken advocate for improving the condition of slaves in the colonies as of 1788. At the same time, she began writing political pamphlets. Today she is perhaps best known as an early feminist who demanded that French women be given the same rights as French men.

In her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen (1791), she challenged the practice of male authority and the notion of male-female inequality. She was executed by guillotine during the Reign of Terror for attacking the regime of Maximilien Robespierre and for her close relation with the Girondists.

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Wikipedia:

-Marie Gouze was born into a petit bourgeois family in 1748 in Montauban, Tarn-et-Garonne, in southwestern France. Her father was a butcher and her mother was the daughter of a cloth merchant. She believed, however, that she was the illegitimate daughter of Jean-Jacques Lefranc, Marquis de Pompignan and his rejection of her claims upon him may have influenced her passionate defense of the rights of illegitimate children.

-In 1765 she married Louis Aubry, a caterer, who came from Paris with the new Intendant of the town. This was not a marriage of love. Gouze said in a semi-autobiographical novel (Mémoire de Madame de Valmont contre la famille de Flaucourt):

"I was married to a man I did not love and who was neither rich nor well-born. I was sacrificed for no reason that could make up for the repugnance I felt for this man."

Her husband died a year later, and in 1770 she moved to Paris with her son, Pierre, and took the name of Olympe de Gouges.

-In 1773, according to her biographer Olivier Blanc, she met a wealthy man, Jacques Biétrix de Rozières, with whom she had a long relationship that ended during the revolution. She was received in the artistic and philosophical salons, where she met many writers, including La Harpe, Mercier, and Chamfort as well as future politicians such as Brissot and Condorcet. She usually was invited to the salons of the Marquise de Montesson and the Comtesse de Beauharnais, who also were playwrights. She also was associated with Masonic Lodges among them, the Loge des Neuf Sœurs that was created by her friend Michel de Cubières.

Surviving paintings of de Gouges show her to be a woman of beauty. She chose to cohabit with several men who supported her financially. By 1784 (the year that her putative biological father died), however, she began to write essays, manifestoes, and socially conscious plays. Seeking upward mobility, she strove to move among the aristocracy and to abandon her provincial accent.[

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-1784, she wrote the anti-slavery play Zamore and Mirza. For several reasons, the play was not performed until 1789. De Gouges published it, however, as Zamore et Mirza, ou l'heureux naufrage (Zamore and Mirza, or the happy shipwreck) in 1788. It was performed as L'Esclavage des nègres in December of 1789, but shut down after three performances. Subsequently, it was published in 1792 under the title L'Esclavage des noirs.

-She also wrote on such gender-related topics as the right of divorce and argued in favor of sexual relations outside of marriage.

-As an epilogue to the 1788 version of her play Zamore et Mirza, she published Réflexions sur les hommes nègres. In 1790, she wrote a play, Le Marché des Noirs (The Black Market) which was rejected by the Comédie Française; the text was burned after her death. In 1808, the Abbé Grégoire included her on his list of the courageous men who pleaded the cause of "les nègres."

-A passionate advocate of human rights, Olympe de Gouges greeted the outbreak of the Revolution with hope and joy, but soon became disenchanted when égalité (equal rights) was not extended to women.

-In 1791, she became part of the Society of the Friends of Truth, an association with the goal of equal political and legal rights for women. Also called the "Social Club", members sometimes gathered at the home of the well-known women's rights advocate, Sophie de Condorcet. Here, De Gouges expressed, for the first time, her famous statement:

"A woman has the right to mount the scaffold. She must possess equally the right to mount the speaker's platform."


-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). This was followed by her Contrat Social (Social Contract, named after a famous work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau), proposing marriage based upon gender equality.

-She became involved in almost any matter she believed to involve injustice.

-She opposed the execution of Louis XVI of France, partly out of opposition to capital punishment and partly because she preferred a relatively tame and living king to the possibility of a rebel regency in exile. This earned her the ire of many hard-line republicans, even into the next generation—such as the comment by the nineteenth century historian Jules Michelet, a fierce apologist for the Revolution, who wrote, "She allowed herself to act and write about more than one affair that her weak head did not understand." Michelet was also part of a generation of men who opposed any political participation by women. He disliked de Gouges for this reason.

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-As the Revolution progressed, she became more and more vehement in her writings.

-On 2 June 1793, the Jacobins arrested her allies, the Girondins, imprisoned them, and sent them to the guillotine in October. Finally, her poster Les trois urnes, ou le salut de la Patrie, par un voyageur aérien (The Three Urns, or the Salvation of the Country, By An Aerial Traveler) of 1793, led to her arrest. That piece demanded a plebiscite for a choice among three potential forms of government: the first, indivisible republic, the second, a federalist government, or the third, a constitutional monarchy.

-After being arrested, the commissioners searched her house for evidence. When they could not find any in her home, she voluntarily led them to the storehouse where she kept her papers. It was there that the commissioners found an unfinished play titled La France Sauvée ou le Tyran Détroné (France Preserved, or The Tyrant Dethroned). In the first act (only the first act and a half remain), Marie-Antoinette is planning defense strategies to retain the crumbling monarchy and is confronted by revolutionary forces, including De Gouges herself. The first act ends with De Gouges lecturing the queen for having seditious intentions and on how to lead her people. Both De Gouges and her prosecutor used this play as evidence in her trial. The prosecutor claimed that Olympe's depictions of the queen threatened to stir up sympathy and support for the Royalists, whereas De Gouges stated that the play showed that she had always been a supporter of the revolution.

-She spent three months in jail without an attorney, trying to defend herself. The presiding judge denied De Gouges her legal right to a lawyer, on the grounds that she was more than capable of representing herself. It seems as though the judge based this argument on De Gouges's tendency to represent herself in her writings.

-Through her friends, she managed to publish two texts: Olympe de Gouges au tribunal révolutionnaire, where she related her interrogations and her last work, Une patriote persécutée, where she condemned the Terror.

-The Jacobins, who already had executed a King and Queen, were in no mood to tolerate any opposition from the intellectuals. De Gouges was sentenced to death on 2 November 1793, and executed the following day for seditious behavior and attempting to reinstate the monarchy. Olympe was executed only a month after Condorcet had been proscribed and just three days after the Girondin leaders had been guillotined. Her body was disposed of in the Madeleine Cemetery.

Olympe's last moments were depicted by an anonymous Parisian who kept a chronicle of events:

"Yesterday, at seven o'clock in the evening, a most extraordinary person called Olympe de Gouges who held the imposing title of woman of letters, was taken to the scaffold, while all of Paris, while admiring her beauty, knew that she didn't even know her alphabet.... She approached the scaffold with a calm and serene expression on her face, and forced the guillotine's furies, which had driven her to this place of torture, to admit that such courage and beauty had never been seen before....

That woman... had thrown herself in the Revolution, body and soul.

But having quickly perceived how atrocious the system adopted by the Jacobins was, she chose to retrace her steps. She attempted to unmask the villains through the literary productions which she had printed and put up. They never forgave her, and she paid for her carelessness with her head."