Overview of Stuff You Missed in History Class: Olympe de Gouges
This episode explores Olympe de Gouges as far more than the author of the famous Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen (1791). Tracy and Holly trace her uncertain early life, her rise in Paris as a playwright and political writer, her abolitionist and feminist ideas, and the real reasons she was executed in 1793. The episode also emphasizes how long it took for her to be recognized as a serious historical figure and a precursor to modern feminist thought.
Who Olympe de Gouges Was
Early life and reinvention
- Born Marie Gouze in 1748 in Montauban, France.
- Her background is murky and partly shaped by her own later writing.
- Her mother was a maidservant; her legal father was a butcher, though rumors linked her to Jean-Jacques Lefranc, Marquis de Pompignan.
- Married young to Louis Aubry, had one son, then became a widow.
- Moved to Paris in 1767, refused to remarry, and renamed herself Olympe de Gouges to sound more aristocratic and literary.
Education and self-fashioning
- Likely educated at an Ursuline convent and became literate enough to sign legal documents.
- Spoke Occitan as her first language and later wrote in French through a secretary.
- In Paris, she immersed herself in salons and Enlightenment philosophy, especially Rousseau.
Writing Career and Social Critique
Novels, identity, and biography
- Wrote a semi-autobiographical epistolary novel, Memoirs of Madame de Valmont.
- The book helped fuel ongoing uncertainty about her parentage and early life.
- Her possible connection to the Marquis de Pompignan may have helped her access literary circles.
Playwriting and activism
- More prolific as a playwright than as a novelist.
- Her plays addressed:
- Divorce
- Women’s rights
- Sexual double standards
- Debtors’ prisons
- Children born out of wedlock
- Forced marriage and convent life
- She wrote women as having agency and solidarity, not just as passive victims.
Theater politics
- The Comédie-Française had a monopoly on professional theater, making it hard for playwrights to get work staged.
- Her play Zemore and Mirza, or The Happy Shipwreck was accepted, then delayed and contested.
- When she pushed for a performance, the company retaliated unusually harshly for a woman, even seeking her arrest.
- She eventually got her privileges restored through intervention from the Duc de Richelieu.
Abolitionism and the French Revolution
The Slavery of Negroes
- Revised Zemore and Mirza into The Slavery of Negroes, or The Happy Shipwreck.
- Considered the first explicitly abolitionist French play and one of the earliest to center enslaved people’s perspective.
- The play sparked controversy:
- Abolitionists supported it.
- Colonial interests and slaveholders organized heckling and disruption.
- She joined the Society of the Friends of Blacks in 1788.
Broader political writing
- During the Revolution, she wrote more than 60 pamphlets.
- Advocated for:
- Women’s education
- Divorce rights
- Children born outside marriage
- Support for widows, mothers, and poor children
- Ending the dowry system
- Opening professions to people regardless of sex, race, or class
- Tax reforms to reduce inequality
- Ending the death penalty
- A national theater for women playwrights
Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen (1791)
Why it mattered
- Her best-known work was a direct response to the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.
- Published on September 14, 1791, after the new constitution excluded women from full citizenship.
Core ideas
- Rewrote the declaration point by point to include women.
- Famous opening line:
- “Woman is born free and remains equal to man in rights.”
- Argued that women should have:
- Political rights
- Freedom of expression
- Recognition as mothers of children born outside marriage
- Equality in public life and law
- Compared marriage to slavery, writing that “marriage is the tomb of trust and love.”
- Proposed a social contract between man and woman based on equality and consent.
Political stance
- Despite her radical writing on women’s rights, she was not a republican in the modern sense.
- She favored a constitutional monarchy and believed France needed a symbolic king who served the people.
- Her dedication to Marie Antoinette reinforced suspicions that she was a monarchist.
Arrest, Trial, and Execution
Why she was arrested
- She aligned mostly with the Girondins, a faction later targeted by revolutionaries.
- In 1793, she proposed that France’s departments should govern themselves, which was interpreted as federalism and disloyalty.
- Authorities also seized:
- An unfinished play, France Saved, or the Tyrant Dethroned
- Her pamphlet Three Governments in Combat
- Other writings critical of Robespierre and revolutionary violence
Trial and death
- Arrested on July 20, 1793.
- Denied legal counsel and forced to represent herself.
- Convicted under a law punishing writings seen as supporting monarchy or threatening the republic.
- Tried to avoid execution by claiming to be pregnant, but the claim was rejected.
- Executed by guillotine on November 3, 1793.
- Reportedly said: “Children of the homeland, you will avenge my death.”
Legacy and Historical Reputation
Posthumous treatment
- After her death, she was widely condemned as unfeminine, political, and improper.
- Nineteenth- and twentieth-century views often dismissed her as a scandalous woman rather than a serious thinker.
Modern reassessment
- Serious scholarly attention to her life and work only became more common in the late 20th century, especially the 1990s onward.
- She is now more widely recognized as:
- A feminist pioneer
- An early advocate of abolition
- A major voice in the political culture of the French Revolution
Memorialization
- Calls to honor her at the Panthéon came in 1993 and 2013, but she was not interred there.
- A bust of de Gouges was installed at the French National Assembly in 2016.
Key Takeaways
- Olympe de Gouges was a playwright, abolitionist, and political thinker, not just the author of one famous pamphlet.
- She argued that the French Revolution’s ideals were incomplete without women’s rights.
- Her work connected gender equality, social justice, anti-slavery politics, and legal reform.
- Her execution was tied more to revolutionary factional politics and suspicions of monarchism than to feminism alone.
- Her historical reputation has improved only recently, and the episode stresses that her contribution is still understudied.