Olympe de Gouges
| Marie Gouze | |
 Olympe de Gouges
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| Born | May 7, 1748 Montauban, Tarn-et-Garonne |
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| Died | November 3, 1793 Place de la Revolution |
| Occupation | feminist, activist, playwright, abolitionist |
| Spouse(s) | Louis Aubry |
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Olympe de Gouges (May 7, 1748 – November 3, 1793), born Marie Gouze, was a playwright and political activist whose feminist and abolitionist writings reached a large audience.
A proponent of democracy, she demanded that French women be given the same rights as French men. 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 was executed by guillotine during the Reign of Terror for attacking the regime of Maximilien Robespierre and for her close relation with the Girondists.
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Biography
Marie Gouze was born into a petit bourgeois family in 1748 in Montauban, Tarn-et-Garonne, in southwestern France. Her father was a butcher, her mother, a laundress. She believed, however, that she was the illegitimate daughter of Jean-Jacques Lefranc, marquis de Pompignan and his rejection of her claims upon him may have influenced her passionate defense of the rights of illegitimate children.[1]
While quite young, she married Louis Aubry in 1765, who came from Paris with the new Intendant of the town, Mr. de Gourgues. This was not a marriage of love. Gouze said in a semi-autobiographical novel (Mémoire de Madame de Valmont contre la famille de Flaucourt), "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."[2] 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. [3]
In 1773, according to her biographer Olivier Blanc, she met a wealthy man, Jacques Biétrix de Rozières, with whom she had a long relationship that ended during the revolution. She was received in the artistic and philosophical "salons", 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 the Marquise de Montesson and the Comtesse de Beauharnais, who also were playwrights. She also was associated with Masonic Lodges among them, the "Loge des Neuf Soeurs" that was created by her friend Michel de Cubières.
Surviving paintings of de Gouges show her to be a woman of beauty. She chose to cohabit with several men who supported her financially. By 1784 (the year that her putative biological father died), however, she began to write essays, manifestoes, and socially conscious plays. Seeking upward mobility, she strove to move among the aristocracy and to abandon her provincial accent.
In 1784, she wrote the anti-slavery play Zamore and Mirza, which was received by the French academy. Because of its controversial subject, the play went unpublished until 1789, at the start of the French Revolution.[4] Subsequently, it was published in 1792 under the title L'Esclavage des Nègres (Negro Slavery). 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 argued in favor of sexual relations outside of marriage.
In 1788, she published Réflexions sur les hommes nègres (Thoughts about negro men), which allowed her to join the Société des amis des Noirs (Society of the Friends of the Blacks). In 1790, she wrote a play, Le Marché des Noirs (The Slave Market), the text of which was burned after her death. In 1808, Abbé Grégoire included her on his list of the courageous men [sic] who pleaded the cause of black men.
A passionate advocate of human rights, Olympe de Gouges greeted the outbreak of the Revolution with hope and joy, but soon became disenchanted because the fraternité of the Revolution was not extended to women, when 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 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 upon 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. This earned her the ire of many hard-line republicans, even into the next generation—such as the comment by the nineteenth 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."[5]
Execution
As her hopes were disappointed, she became more and more vehement in her writings. On June 2, 1793, the Jacobins arrested her allies, the Girondins, and sent them to the guillotine. 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) of 1793, led to her arrest. That piece demanded a plebiscite for a choice among three potential forms of government: the first, indivisible Republic, the second, a federalist government, or the third, a constitutional monarchy.
She spent three months in jail and not having an attorney, she tried to defend herself. Through her friends she managed to publish two texts: Olympe de Gouges au tribunal révolutionnaire, where she related her interrogations, and the last work, Une patriote persécutée, where she condemned the Terror. The Jacobins, who already had executed a King and Queen, were in no mood to tolerate any opposition from the intellectuals. Olympe was sentenced to death on November 2, 1793, and executed the following day, a month after Condorcet had been proscribed and several months after the Girondin leaders had been guillotined.
Legacy
After her death, says Olivier Blanc, her son General Pierre Aubry de Gouges went to Guyana with his wife and five children. He died in 1802, after which his widow attempted to return to France, but died aboard the boat during her return. In Guadeloupe, the two young daughters were married, Geneviève de Gouges to an English officer, and Charlotte de Gouges to an American politician Robert Selden Garnett, a member of the United Sstates Congress who had plantations in Virginia. Hence, many English and American families have Olympe de Gouges as their ancestor (per Olivier Blanc).
On March 6, 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 that the remains of de Gouges be moved to the Panthéon, however, her remains—as 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 the reburial of Condorcet).
Writings
Olympe de Gouges wrote her famous Declaration on the Rights of Women shortly after the French constitution of 1791 was created in the same year. She was alarmed that the constitution, which was to promote equal suffrage, did not address—nor even consider—women’s suffrage. The Constitution gave that right only to men. It also did not address key issues such as legal equality in marriage, the right for a woman to divorce her spouse, or a woman’s right to property. So she created a document that was to be, in her opinion, the missing part of the Constitution of 1791, in which women would be given the equal rights they deserve. Throughout the document, it is apparent to the reader that Gouges had been influenced by the philosophy of the Enlightenment, whose thinkers critically examined and criticized the traditional morals and institutions of the day, using “scientific reasoning.”
Gouges opens up her Declaration with a witty, and at times sarcastically bitter, introduction in which she demands of men why they have chosen to subjugate women as a lesser sex. Her opening statement put rather bluntly: “Man, are you capable of being just? It is a woman who poses the question; you will not deprive her of that right at least.” The later part of the statement shows her assertion that men have been ridiculously depriving women of what should be common rights, so she sarcastically asks if men will find it necessary to take away even her right to question. Gouges begins her long argument by stating that in Nature the sexes are forever mingled cooperating in “harmonious togetherness.” There she uses a bit of Enlightenment logic, if in nature the equality and the working together of the two sexes achieves harmony, so should France achieve a happier and more stable society if women are given equality among men.
After her opening paragraph she goes into her declaration, which she asks be reviewed and decreed by the National Assembly in their next meeting. Her preamble explains that the reason for contemporary public misfortune and corrupt government was due to the oppression of women and their rights. The happiness and well being of society would only be insured once the rights of women were equally as important as those of men, especially in political institutions. In her document Gouges establishes rights of women on the basis of their equality to men, that they are both human and capable of the same thoughts. Gouges also promotes the rights of women by emphasizing differences women have from men, however, differences that men ought to respect and take notice of. She argues that women are superior in beauty as well as in courage during childbirth. Addressing characteristics that set women apart from men, she added what she probably thought was logical proof to her argument that men are not superior to women, and therefore, women are deserving at least to have the same rights.
Her declaration bares the same outline and context as the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, but Gouges either changes the word “man” to “woman” or adds “for both women and men.” In article II, the resemblance is exact to the previous declaration except that she adds “especially” before “the right to the resistance of oppression,” emphasizing again, how important it is to her to end the oppression of women, and that the government should recognize this and take action.
A main difference between the two declarations is that the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen emphasizes the protection of the written “law” while the Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Female Citizen emphasizes protection of the “law” and “Natural Laws.” Gouges emphasizes that these rights of women always have existed, that they were created at the beginning of time by God, that they are natural and true, and they cannot be oppressed.
Article X contains the famous phrase: “Woman has the right to mount the scaffold; she must equally have the right to mount the rostrum.” If women have the right to be executed, they should have the right to speak.
She modifies article XI to say that women have the right to give their children the name of their father even if it is out of wedlock and, even if the father has left her. Gouges is very passionate about this because she believed that she was an illegitimate child.
In her postscript, Gouges tells women to wake up and discover that they have these rights. She assures them that reason is on their side. Gouges asks, what women have gained from the French Revolution? Stating that the answer is nothing, except that they’ve been marked with yet more disdain. She exclaims that women should no longer tolerate this, they should step up, take action, and demand the equal rights they deserve. Gouges declares the morality that women are lesser an “out of date” concept. In that Gouges shows strongly her Enlightenment perspective—to break from old, illogical traditions that are "out of date." She exclaims that to revoke women the right to partake in political practices also is “out of date.”
Her last paragraph is titled a "Social Contract between Men and Women." Taking a leaf from Rousseau’s book, the contract asks for communal cooperation. The wealth of a husband and wife should be distributed equally. Property should belong to both and to the children, whatever bed they come from. If divorced, land should be divided equally. She called this the “Marriage contract.” Gouges also asked to allow a poor man’s wife to have her children be adopted by a wealthy family – this would advance the community’s wealth and drive back disorder. Near the end of the contract, Gouges finally requests creation of a law to protect widows and young girls from men who give them false promises. This perhaps, is the most important issue she wants to deal with in France. In the postscript section of her document, Gouges describes the consequences of a woman who is left by an unfaithful husband, who is widowed with no fortune to her name, and of young experienced girls who are seduced by men who leave them with no money and no title for their children. Gouges therefore requests a law that that will force an inconsistent man to hold his obligation to these women, or to at least to pay a reimbursement equal to his wealth.
One of the last persuasions in her document directs itself to men who still see women as lesser beings: “the foolproof way to evaluate the soul of women is to join them to all the activities of man, if man persists against this, let him share his fortune with woman by the wisdom of the laws.” She challenges men that, if they wish, they may evaluate scientifically the consequences of joining man and woman in equal political rights.
Olympe de Gouges’ personality emerges strongly in her writings and her opinions are shameless. She wrote this declaration using powerful language and boldness that was dangerous for her to do at the time. A bold woman often is persecuted, and in fact, Gouges was executed two years later. In a long history of fighting for the rights of women, however, the Gouges declaration played a very important and positive role in the struggle.
See also
- The March on Versailles
- Women's Petition to the National Assembly
References
External links
- An extensive article about Olympe de Gouges
- An excerpt from the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen
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