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Olympe de Gouges
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Olympe de Gouges (born Marie Gouze; December 31, 1745 – November 3, 1793) was a playwright and journalist whose feminist writings reached a large audience. A proponent of democracy, she demanded the same rights for French women that French men were demanding for themselves. 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 lost her life to the guillotine due to her revolutionary ideas.
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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 of Jean Jacques Lefranc; his rejection of her claims upon him may have influenced her passionate defense of the rights of illegitimate children.[1] She married quite young in 1765 one Louis Aubry, the son of an inn-keeper, but when her husband died a year later, she moved in 1770 to Paris with her son, Pierre, and took the name of Olympe de Gouges. [2]
Surviving paintings of her show a woman of remarkable beauty; not surprisingly, she chose to live with several men who supported her financially. However, by 1784 (the year that her putative biological father died), she began to write essays, manifestoes, and socially conscious plays. A social climber, she strove to move among the elite and to lose her provincial accent.[citation needed]
In 1774, she wrote the anti-slavery play L'Esclavage des Nègres (Negro Slavery). Because she was a woman and because of her controversial subject, the play went unpublished until 1789 at the start of the French Revolution.[3]. Even then, Olympe showed her combativeness when she fought unsuccessfully to get her play staged. She also wrote on such gender-related topics as the right of divorce and the right to sexual relations outside of marriage.
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 women (that is, that equal rights were not extended to women).
In 1791, she became part of the Cercle Social—an association 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 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"), the first declaration of truly universal human rights. This was followed by her Contrat Social ("Social Contract", named after a famous work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau), proposing marriage based on gender equality.
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 capital 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 about more than one affair that her weak head did not understand."[4].
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) and sent them to the guillotine. Finally, her last piece Les trois urnes, ou le salut de la Patrie, par un voyageur aérien (The Three Urns, or the Health of the Country, By An Aerial Voyager) (1793) led to her arrest. That piece demanded a plebiscite on a choice of three potential forms of government: the first, indivisible Republic, the second, a federalist government or the third, a constitutional monarchy. The Jacobins, who had already executed a queen, were in no mood to tolerate an advocate of women's rights. Olympe was executed on the guillotine on 3 November 1793, a month after Condorcet had been proscribed and several months after the Girondin leaders had been guillotined.
On 6 March, 2006, the junction of the Rues Béranger, Charlot, Turenne and Franche-Comté in Paris was proclaimed the Place Olympe de Gouges. The square was inaugurated by the mayor of the Third Arrondissement, Pierre Aidenbaum, along with the first deputy mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo. The actress Véronique Genest read an extract from the Declaration of the Rights of Woman.
2007 French presidential contender Ségolène Royal has expressed the wish of her remains being moved to the Panthéon. However, her remains like those of the other victims of the Reign of Terror have been lost through burial in communal graves, so any reburial would be ceremonial (as was done for Condorcet himself.)
- ^ Pauline Paul. tr by Kai Artur Diers. "I Foresaw it All: The Amazing Life and Oeuvre of Olympe de Gouges". DIE ZEIT, No. 23, June 2, 1989. [1]. Also see this article.[2]
- ^ Pauline Paul. Op.cit.
- ^ Pauline Paul. Op.cit.
- ^ Cited in Luise F. Pusch, 300 Porträts berühmter Frauen, Insel Verlag, 1999, p.111
- (French) Olivier Blanc, Olympe de Gouges, Syros:Paris, 1981.
- (German) Salomé Kestenholz, Die Gleichheit vor dem Schafott: Poträts französischer Revolutionärinnen, Luchterhand: Darmstadt, 1988.
- An extensive article about Olympe de Gouges
- An excerpt from the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen
Categories: All articles with unsourced statements | Articles with unsourced statements since July 2007 | French dramatists and playwrights | French journalists | French suffragists | French women writers | People executed by guillotine during the French Revolution | Feminist writers | Executed writers | 1748 births | 1793 deaths | People of the French Revolution