Olympe De Gouges

Political activist and writer Olympe de Gouges was from France. Her Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Female Citizen, together with other publications on women's rights and abolitionism, is what made her most famous.

De Gouges, a famous writer who was born in southwest France, started her career in Paris in the 1780s. One of the first people in France to openly oppose slavery, she was an ardent supporter of human rights. She covered a wide range of topics in her plays and booklets, such as social security, children's rights, unemployment, and divorce and marriage. While De Gouges first applauded the start of the French Revolution, she quickly lost hope when women were denied equal rights. Against the practice of male dominance and in favor of equal rights for women, de Gouges issued her Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Female Citizen in 1791 as a reaction to the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

Louis XVI's execution was opposed by de Gouges, who belonged to the moderate Girondins. She was eventually arrested and executed by guillotine in 1793 as a result of her increasingly violent writings during the Reign of Terror, which assailed the Revolutionary government and Robespierre's extremist Montagnards.

Her Origin and Bloodline

In the southwest region of France, on May 7, 1748, Olympe de Gouges (originally named Marie Gouze) was born in Montauban, Quercy (now part of the Tarn-et-Garonne department). The daughter of a bourgeois family, Anne Olympe Mouisset Gouze was her mother. Her father's identity remains unclear as of now. She could have been the illegitimate daughter of Jean-Jacques Lefranc, Marquis de Pompignan, or her father might have been Pierre Gouze, her mother's spouse. Marie Gouze allegedly promoted Pompignan's paternity, and while their relationship is seen as credible, it is "historically unverifiable". However, this identification is not regarded as probable; other rumors from the eighteenth century also claimed that her father may be Louis XV.

The mother of Marie Gouze, Anne Mouisset, had long maintained strong relations with the Pompignan family. Jean-Jacques Lefranc de Pompignan, who was five years old at the time of Anne's birth in 1727, was the oldest Pompignan son and her godfather. Anne's father schooled him as he matured. Pompignan and Anne were close in their early years until he was sent to Paris in 1734, and they parted ways. Before Marie, Anne had two daughters and a boy from her marriage to butcher Pierre Gouze in 1737. In 1747, the year before Marie was born, Pompignan went back to Montauban. As Marie's father, Pierre had official recognition. On May 8, Marie was baptized, but Pierre was not present. Jean Portié was a laborer, and Marie Grimal was a woman who served as her godmother. In 1750, Pierre passed away.

Marie Gouze's semi-autobiographical book Mémoires de Madame de Valmont, which was released following Pompignan's passing, provides the main evidence in favor of Pompignan's paternity. Gouze's father was Pompignan, as "all of Montauban" knew, according to modern politician Jean-Babtiste Poncet-Delpech and others. Nonetheless, a number of historians believe that Gouze most likely made up the narrative for her memoirs in order to improve her social status and reputation after moving to Paris.

Early Years

Marie Gouze was literately educated in a bourgeois environment thanks to the financial support and social standing of her mother's family. Occitan, the local tongue, was her first language.

On October 24, 1765, Gouze was forced into marriage against her will to the caterer Louis Yves Aubry. In her semi-autobiographical novel Mémoires, the protagonist was fourteen years old when she got married; the new Marie Aubry was seventeen. "I was married to a man I did not love and who was neither rich nor well-born," the novel's protagonist bitterly condemned the union. I was sacrificed for no purpose that could ever make up for how disgusting I thought this man was." Louis, Marie's new spouse, was able to quit his job and launch his own company thanks to Marie's significantly higher money. Their son Pierre Aubry was born on August 29, 1766. Louis was killed by a devastating flood on the Tarn River that November. "The tomb of trust and love" is how she described the institution of marriage, and she never got married again.

Marie Aubry became Olympe de Gouges upon the death of her husband. She started dating Jacques Biétrix de Rozières, a prosperous Lyonnean businessman.

Shift to Paris

Later, de Gouges moved to Paris in 1768 with Biétrix's support and he also helped her earn an income. Her brother and sister also resided with her. As she moved through the social circles of the fashionable world, she made friends with Madame de Montesson and Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, and was once referred to as "one of Paris' prettiest women". Paris's artistic and philosophical salons were frequented by de Gouges, who made numerous literary and political acquaintances, including future statesmen like Brissot and Condorcet, as well as authors La Harpe, Mercier, and Chamfort. Her regular guests in the salons were the playwrights Madame de Montesson and the Comtesse de Beauharnais.

De Gouges started her writing career in Paris, where she first published a novel in 1784 before starting a successful playwriting career. Despite coming from a humble background and living in the region, she managed to blend in with the Parisian elite. The feminine form of Citizen, citoyenne, is with whom de Gouges signed her official correspondence. There were no citizens in pre-revolutionary France, and writers were the monarch's subjects; in contrast, there were only citizens in revolutionary France. The Convention ruled in October 1792 that citoyenne would be used in place of Madame and Mademoiselle.

She urged sympathy for the suffering of slaves in the French colonies in her 1788 publication Réflexions sur les hommes nègres. De Gouges saw a clear connection between the system of slavery and France's despotic monarchy. She maintained that "Men everywhere are equal... Kings who do not want slaves know that they have submissive subjects."

Her performance of the comedy L'Esclavage des Noirs at the renowned Comédie-Française in 1785 brought her to the notice of the general public. Threats were directed at her because of her opposition to slavery in the French colonies. Those who believed that a woman's appropriate place should not be in the theater also opposed de Gouges. The well-known Abraham-Joseph Bénard said, "Mme de Gouges is one of those women to whom one feels like delivering razor blades as a present, who through their pretenses lose the lovely attributes of their sex... Regardless of her skill, every female writer is in the wrong position". Writer De Gouges was adamant, saying, "I'll do it in spite of my enemies because I'm determined to be a success." She was forced to present L'Esclavage des Noirs by Comédie-Française after the slave trade lobby launched a publicity campaign against her play, and she finally filed a lawsuit." The lobby, however, had bribed hecklers to disrupt the play's three performances, which is why it had to close.

Radical Political Theory

Eager to see égalité (equal rights) for women, de Gouges, a fervent supporter of human rights, was first delighted and hopeful when the Revolution began. In order to promote equal political and legal rights for women, de Gouges joined the Society of the Friends of Truth, often referred to as the "Social Club", in 1791. The well-known women's rights activist Sophie de Condorcet's house occasionally hosted meetings of the group. Déclaration des droits de la Femme et de la Citoyenne ("Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen"), which she penned in 1791, was her answer to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.

She originally made her now-famous statement in that pamphlet:

"It is a woman's right to climb up on the scaffold. She must have the equivalent authority to erect the speaker's podium."

This was followed by her proposal for a marriage based on gender equality in her Contrat Social, or "Social Contract", which was named after a well-known book by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Black slaves and free people of color revolted in 1790 and 1791 in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti) in reaction to the principles outlined in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. In his preface to L'Esclavage des Noirs, published in 1792, De Gouges expressed his disapproval of violent Revolution, claiming that the actions of tyrants were justified by the slaves and free people's "barbaric and atrocious torture" in response to the horrors of slavery. The mayor of Paris charged de Gouges with using the play to foment the uprising in Saint-Domingue. A riot broke out in Paris when it was presented again in December 1792.

De Gouges was against Louis XVI's execution (which happened on January 21, 1793) for two reasons: first, she was against the death penalty, and second, she supported constitutional monarchy. A number of staunch republicans, like Jules Michelet, a fervent supporter of the Revolution in the 19th century, wrote of her, "She allowed herself to act and write about more than one affair that her weak head did not understand." This angered de Gouges and continued into the following generation. Michelet detested De Gouges because he was against women participating in politics in any capacity. A letter she submitted to the National Assembly in December 1792, volunteering to defend Louis XVI, was received with anger by many delegates as the man was ready to go on trial. She claimed in her letter that he had been tricked, that he was innocent as a man but guilty as a monarch, and that imprisonment would be an acceptable punishment than death.

The more radical Montagnard group was after De Gouges because he belonged to the Gironde party. After Louis XVI was put to death, she started to be cautious about Robespierre's Montagnard faction and denounced their brutality and senseless deaths in open letters.

Penning

Inspired by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782), Gouges' first published work was an epistolary romance that was published in 1784. Her book purportedly included real letters-with names changed-that she had sent to her father, the Marquis de Pompignan. Accordingly, "Monsieur de Flaucourt" stood in for Pompignan and "Madame Valmont" for de Gouges herself. De Gouges started writing plays after finishing this book, with her debut piece Zamore et Mirza ou l'Heureux Naufrage being presented at the Théâtre-Français in 1784.

Playwriting and Activism Before the Revolution

More than 40 plays have been credited to De Gouges. Socially conscious topics were prevalent in them. She wrote and published several plays; some of which are still in production. About forty plays are listed in a record of her documents that were taken during her 1793 execution. She authored plays about a variety of subjects, including the slave trade, marriage, divorce, debtors' prisons, children's rights, and government employment programs for the unemployed. She aggressively entered the current political debates as a dramatist and was frequently at the forefront.

Along with the Marquis de Condorcet, she was among the first people in France to publicly oppose slavery with her 1788 booklet Réflexions sur les Hommes Nègres and play L'Esclavage des Noirs. She highlighted the terrible state of slavery in the French colonies in her 1788 "Réflexions sur les Hommes Nègres". She denounced the institution's injustice, saying, "I clearly realized that it was force and prejudice that had condemned them to that horrible slavery, in which Nature plays no role, and for which the unjust and powerful interests of Whites are alone responsible." She also stated, "Men everywhere are equal... Kings who do not want slaves know that they have submissive subjects." "Let our mutual rejoicings be a joyous presage of liberation" is the prayer for freedom uttered by the French colonial owner (not the slave) in the last act of L'Esclavage des Noirs de Gouges.

She analogized French political tyranny to slavery during the colonial era. Before the French could cope with slavery, one of the slave protagonists stated that: they first needed to set themselves free. The idea that human rights existed in revolutionary France was another openly criticized idea by De Gouges. The protagonist, a slave, made a remark on the state of affairs in France: "A thousand Tyrants wielding control over one Master alone crush the People beneath their feet. At some point in the future, the People will break free from their bonds and assert their legal entitlements. The Tyrants will learn from it what can be accomplished by a people brought together by years of tyranny and educated by good thinking. While comparing political tyranny to slavery was prevalent in France, this was not an abolitionist feeling; rather, it was a comparison.

Political Letters and Pamphlets

During her professional life, de Gouges released 68 booklets. November 1788 saw the publication of her first political pamphlet, a manifesto titled Letter to the People, or Scheme for a patriotic fund. She outlined her plans for social security, elder care, children's homes, jobless shelters, and the jury system in her publication Remarques Patriotiques, which was released in early 1789. With the words, "France is sunk in grief, the people are suffering, and the Monarch cries out", she brought attention to and propagated the problems affecting the country as it teetered on the verge of revolt.

According to her views, the estates were what Parliament was demanding. The Nation was unable to reach a consensus with the General. On choosing who would lead these assemblies, there had yet to be an agreement. With good reason, the Third Estate told the Emperor, "Your people are unhappy. Unhappy!". It claimed that due to the current crises, its voice was equal to that of the elite and the clergy.

Moreover, she encouraged women to "shake off the yoke of shameful slavery". Her booklets on many social issues, including illegitimate children, were written in the same year. Through these booklets, she promoted public discussion on topics that feminists like Flora Tristan would later take up. From 1788 until 1791, she kept up her publication of political articles. One such example is the "Cry of the Wise Man", by a woman who cried out in reaction to Louis XVI convening the Estates-General.

Olympe de Gouges was executed by guillotine on 3 November 1793 in Place de la Révolution, Paris, French First Republic, at the age of just 45.