On This Day: Playwright, journalist, feminist Olympe de Gouges guillotined - Nov. 3, 1793

(edited from Wikipedia)
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Olympe de Gouges (born Marie Gouze, 1748–1793) was a French playwright and political activist. She is best known for her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen and other writings on women's rights and abolitionism.

Born in southwestern France, de Gouges began her prolific career as a playwright in Paris in the 1780s. A passionate advocate of human rights, she was one of France's earliest public opponents of slavery. Her plays and pamphlets spanned a wide variety of issues including divorce and marriage, children's rights, unemployment and social security.

De Gouges welcomed the outbreak of the French Revolution but soon became disenchanted when equal rights were not extended to women. In 1791, in response to the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, de Gouges published her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, in which she challenged the practice of male authority and advocated for equal rights for women.

De Gouges was associated with the moderate Girondins and opposed the execution of Louis XVI. Her increasingly vehement writings, which attacked Robespierre's radical Montagnards and the Revolutionary government during the Reign of Terror, led to her eventual arrest and execution by guillotine in 1793.

Biography

Marie Gouze was born in southwestern France. Her mother, through the funds and influence of her family, afforded her a bourgeois education where she was made literate.

Gouze was married in 1765 against her will. Her novel, Memoires, strongly decried the marriage: "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." In 1766, she gave birth to their son. That November, a destructive flood caused [her husband's] death. She never married again, calling the institution of marriage "the tomb of trust and love".

After her husband's death, she changed her name to Olympe de Gouges. She began a relationship with the wealthy Jacques Biétrix de Rozières, a businessman from Lyon. In 1768, Biétrix funded de Gouges's move to Paris, where he provided her with an income. She lived with her son and her sister. She socialized in fashionable society. De Gouges attended the artistic and philosophical salons of Paris, where she met many writers, as well as future politicians.

De Gouges began her career as a writer in Paris, publishing a novel in 1784 and then beginning a prolific career as a playwright. As a woman from the province and of lowly birth she fashioned herself to fit in with the Paris establishment. De Gouges signed her public letters with citoyenne, the feminised version of citizen.

In 1788 she published Réflexions sur les hommes nègres, which demanded compassion for the plight of slaves in the French colonies. For de Gouges there was a direct link between the autocratic monarchy in France and the institution of slavery. She argued that "Men everywhere are equal... Kings who are just do not want slaves; they know that they have submissive subjects."

She came to the public's attention with the play L'Esclavage des Noirs, which was staged at the famous Comédie-Française in 1785. Her stance against slavery in the French colonies made her the target of threats. De Gouges was also attacked by those who thought that a woman's proper place was not in the theatre.

The slave trade lobby mounted a press campaign against her play and she eventually took legal action, forcing Comédie-Française to stage L'Esclavage des Noirs. But the play closed after three performances; the lobby had paid hecklers to sabotage the performances.

Revolutionary politics

A passionate advocate of human rights, 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, de Gouges became part of the Society of the Friends of Truth, also known as the "Social Club," which was an association with the goal of establishing equal political and legal rights for women. Members sometimes gathered at the home of the well-known women's rights advocate, Sophie de Condorcet. In 1791, 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 of the Female Citizen " ). In that pamphlet 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.

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

In Paris, de Gouges was accused by the mayor of Paris of having incited the insurrection in Saint-Domingue with [her anti-slavery] play. When it was staged again in December 1792 a riot erupted in Paris.

De Gouges opposed the execution of Louis XVI (which took place on 21 January 1793), partly out of opposition to capital punishment and partly because she favored constitutional monarchy. This earned her the ire of many hard-line republicans, even into the next generation. She argued that he had been duped–that he was guilty as a king, but innocent as a man, and that he should be exiled rather than executed.

De Gouges was associated with the Gironde faction, who were targeted by the more radical Montagnard faction. After the execution of Louis XVI she became wary of Robespierre's Montagnard faction and in open letters criticized their violence and summary killings.

Arrest and execution

As the Revolution progressed, she became more and more vehement in her writings. Finally, [a pamphlet she wrote in 1793] led to her arrest. Olympe decreed in this publication that "Now is the time to establish a decent government whose energy comes from the strength of its laws; now is the time to put a stop to assassinations and the suffering they cause, for merely holding opposing views. Let everyone examine their consciences; let them see the incalculable harm caused by such a long-lasting division...and then everyone can pronounce freely on the government of their choice. The majority must carry the day. It is time for death to rest and for anarchy to return to the underworld."

The problem was that the law of the revolution made it a capital offense for anyone to publish a book or pamphlet that encouraged reestablishing the monarchy. [She was arrested for a play she wrote that she said] showed she had always been a supporter of the Revolution. [The prosecution said the play showed sympathy for the Queen].

She spent three months in jail without an attorney as the presiding judge had denied de Gouges her legal right to a lawyer on the grounds that she was more than capable of representing herself.

The execution of Olympe de Gouges

On 3 November 1793 the Revolutionary Tribunal sentenced her to death and she was executed for seditious behavior and attempting to reinstate the monarchy. 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.

Posthumous political impact

Her execution was used as a warning to other politically active women. This posthumous characterisation of de Gouges by the political establishment was misleading, as de Gouges had no role in founding the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women. In her political writings de Gouges had not called for women to abandon their homes, but she was cast by the politicians as an enemy of the natural order, and thus enemy of the ruling Jacobin party.

The year 1793 has been described as a watershed for the construction of women's place in revolutionary France. That year a number of women with a public role in politics were executed. 1793 marked the start of the Reign of Terror in post-revolutionary France, where thousands of people were executed. Across the Atlantic world observers of the French Revolution were shocked, but the ideals of liberté, égalité, fraternité had taken a life of their own.

De Gouges's Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen had been widely reproduced and influenced the writings of women's advocates in the Atlantic world. One year after its publication, in 1792, the keen observer of the French Revolution Mary Wollstonecraft published Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Writings on women and their lack of rights became widely available. The experience of French women during the revolution entered the collective consciousness.

American women began to refer to themselves as citess or citizeness and took to the streets to achieve equality and freedom. The same year de Gouges was executed the pamphlet On the Marriage of Two Celebrated Widows was published anonymously, proclaiming that "two celebrated widows, ladies of America and France, after having repudiated their husbands on account of their ill treatment, conceived of the design of living together in the strictest union and friendship."

Revolutionary novels were published that put women at the centre of violent struggle, such as the narratives written by Helen Maria Williams and Leonora Sansay. At the 1848 Women's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, the rhetorical style of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen was employed to paraphrase the United States Declaration of Independence into the Declaration of Sentiments, which demanded women's right to vote.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympe_de_Gouges

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