Olympe de Gouges

Olympe de Gouges (born Marie Gouze; May 7, 1748 – 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 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.

Life

Born in 1748 in Montauban, Tarn-et-Garonne, in the South-West of France, Marie Gouze was born into a petit bourgeois family. Her father was a butcher; her mother, a washerwoman. She married quite young in 1765 to one Louis Aubry, but when her husband died, she moved to Paris with her son, Pierre, and took the name of Olympe de Gouges.

She promptly 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.

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 Because she was a woman and because of her controversial subject, the play went unpublished until 1789 at the start of the French Revolution. 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 the sororité (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. French historian Jules Michelet commented misogynistically: "She allowed herself to act and write about more than one affair that her weak head did not understand."

As her hopes were disappointed, she became more and more vehement in her writings. Finally, her 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) written in 1793 led to her arrest and execution on the guillotine.

On 6 March, 2004, 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.

Quotes

• "Male and female citizens, being equal in the eyes of the law, must be equally admitted to all honours, positions, and public employment according to their capacity and without other distinctions besides those of their virtues and talents."

References

• Template:Fr icon Olivier Blanc, Olympe de Gouges, Syros:Paris, 1981.
• Template:De icon Salomé Kestenholz, Die Gleichheit vor dem Schafott: Poträts französischer Revolutionärinnen, Luchterhand: Darmstadt, 1988.

See also

• The March on Versailles
• Women's Petition to the National Assembly

External links

• An extensive article about Olympe de Gouges
• An excerpt from the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen