Olympe de Gouges

Olympe de Gouges 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. In addition to her being a playwright and political activist, she was also a small time actress prior to the Revolution. 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 Maximilien 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

Birth and parentage

Marie Gouze was born on 7 May 1748 in Montauban, Quercy, in southwestern France. Her mother, Anne Olympe Mouisset Gouze, was the daughter of a bourgeois family. The identity of her father is ambiguous. Her father may have been her mother's husband, Pierre Gouze, or she may have been the illegitimate daughter of Jean-Jacques Lefranc, Marquis de Pompignan. Marie Gouze encouraged rumours that Pompignan was her father, and their relationship is considered plausible but "historically unverifiable." Other rumours in the eighteenth century also suggested that her father might be Louis XV, but this identification is not considered credible.
The Pompignan family had long-standing close ties to the Mouisset family of Marie Gouze's mother, Anne. When Anne was born in 1714, the eldest Pompignan son, Jean-Jacques Lefranc de Pompignan, was her godfather. Anne's father tutored him as he grew. During their childhoods, Pompignan became close to Anne, but was separated from her in 1734 when he was sent to Paris. Anne married Pierre Gouze, a butcher, in 1737 and had three children before Marie, a son and two girls. Pompignan returned to Montauban in 1747, the year before Marie's birth. Pierre was legally recognized as Marie's father. Pierre did not attend Marie's baptism on 8 May. Her godfather was a workman named Jean Portié, and her godmother a woman named Marie Grimal. Pierre died in 1750.
The primary support for the identification of Pompignan as Marie Gouze's father is found in her semi-autobiographical novel, Mémoires de Madame de Valmont, published after Pompignan's death. According to the contemporary politician and others, "all of Montauban" knew that Pompignan was Gouze's father. However, some historians consider it likely that Gouze fabricated the story for her memoirs in order to raise her prestige and social standing when she moved to Paris.

Early life

Marie-Olympe de Gouges was born into a wealthy family, and although her mother was privately tutored, she had no actual formal education herself. Reportedly illiterate, she was said to dictate to a secretary.
Gouze was married on 24 October 1765 to Louis Yves Aubry, a caterer, against her will. The heroine of her semi-autobiographical novel Mémoires is fourteen at her wedding; the new Marie Aubry herself was seventeen. Her novel 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." Marie's substantially larger fortune allowed her new husband Louis to leave his employer and start his own business. On 29 August 1766, she gave birth to their son, Pierre Aubry. That November, a destructive flood of the river Tarn caused Louis' death. She never married again, calling the institution of marriage "the tomb of trust and love".
Known under the name Marie Aubry, after her husband's death she changed her name to Olympe de Gouges, from her surname and adding her mother's middle name, Olympe. Soon after, she began a relationship with the wealthy Jacques Biétrix de Rozières, a businessman from Lyon.

Move to Paris

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, at one point being called "one of Paris' prettiest women," and formed friendships with Madame de Montesson and Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans. De Gouges attended the artistic and philosophical salon of Paris, where she met many writers, including La Harpe, Mercier, and Chamfort, as well as future politicians such as Brissot and Condorcet. She usually was invited to the salons of Madame de Montesson and the Comtesse de Beauharnais, who also were playwrights.
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 pre-revolutionary France there were no citizens, and authors were the subjects of the king, but in revolutionary France there were only citoyens. It was in October 1792 that the Convention decreed the use of citoyenne to replace Madame and Mademoiselle.
File:Code noir.jpg|thumb|upright|The Code Noir, a decree passed by King Louis XIV in 1685. The Code Noir defined the conditions of slavery in the French colonial empire and restricted the activities of free Negroes
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 influential Abraham-Joseph Bénard remarked "Mme de Gouges is one of those women to whom one feels like giving razor blades as a present, who through their pretensions lose the charming qualities of their sex... Every woman author is in a false position, regardless of her talent." De Gouges was defiant: she wrote "I'm determined to be a success, and I'll do it in spite of my enemies." 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 was not extended to women. In 1791, influenced and inspired by John Locke's treatises on natural rights, de Gouges became part of the Society of the Friends of Truth, also known as the "Social Club," which was an association whose goals included 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. 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, proposing marriage based upon gender equality.
In 1790 and 1791, in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, free people of colour and African slaves revolted in response to the ideals expressed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. De Gouges did not approve of violent revolution, and published L'Esclavage des Noirs with a preface in 1792, arguing that the slaves and the free people who responded to the horrors of slavery with "barbaric and atrocious torture" in turn justified the behavior of the tyrants. In Paris, de Gouges was accused by the mayor of Paris of having incited the insurrection in Saint-Domingue with the play. When it was staged again in December 1792 a riot erupted in Paris.
De Gouges opposed the execution of Louis XVI, 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—such as the 19th-century historian Jules Michelet, a fierce apologist for the Revolution, who wrote, "She allowed herself to act and write about more than one affair that her weak head did not understand." Michelet opposed any political participation by women and thus disliked de Gouges. In December 1792, when Louis XVI was about to be put on trial, she wrote to the National Assembly offering to defend him, causing outrage among many deputies. In her letter 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.
Olympe de Gouges was associated with the Gironde faction, which ultimately led to her being executed. After the execution of Louis XVI she became wary of Robespierre's Montagnard faction and in open letters criticized their violence and summary killings. She did not go to the guillotine for her feminism, as many might think. Instead her crime was spreading Federalism as a replacement for Montagnard revolutionary central rule. Revolutionary rule during the Terror was accompanied by emphasis on masculine public political authority that resulted, for example, in the expulsion of women from Jacobin clubs.