Olympe de Gouges

Olympe de Gouges (born May 7, 1748, Montauban, France—died November 3, 1793, Paris) was a French social reformer and writer who challenged conventional views on a number of matters, especially the role of women as citizens. Many consider her among the world’s first feminists.

Early life and marriage

Marie Gouze was born to Anne Olympe Mouisset Gouze, who was married to Pierre Gouze, a butcher. Marie’s biological father may have been Jean-Jacques Lefranc (or Le Franc), marquis de Pompignan, a magistrate who later became a poet and man of letters. (See Researcher’s Note.)

At age 17 Marie was married to Louis-Yves Aubry, a caterer employed by a provincial administrator. They had a son, but their marriage was short-lived. When her husband died, she changed her name to Olympe de Gouges, moved to Paris, and vowed never to marry again.

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Life in Paris

In Paris, Gouges frequented salons and began to write. Her first book, Mémoire de Madame de Valmont (1788), was an epistolary novel (a novel composed of letters) inspired by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782; Dangerous Liaisons), a scandalous novel about the ruthless sexual and social conquests of the libertine Valmont and his accomplice, Madame de Merteuil. Gouges claimed that her book reproduced the letters that she had exchanged with her alleged biological father, the marquis de Pompignan, late in his life (he died in 1784). She had only fictionalized the names, choosing the name of Laclos’s antihero in place of her own.

Revolutionary writings

By this time the French Revolution had begun, and Gouges threw herself into supporting the movement and its democratic ideals. She became active in political causes and took up social issues that ranged from road improvement to divorce, maternity hospitals, abolitionism, and the rights of orphaned children and unmarried mothers, and she wrote prolifically in defense of her ideas. Among her plays was the abolitionist Zamore et Mirza; ou, l’heureux naufrage (“Zamore and Mirza; or, The Fortunate Shipwreck”), which was staged at the Théâtre-Français in 1789; it later became known as L’Esclavage des noirs (“Black Slavery”).

In 1791, as the French Revolution continued, she published the pamphlet Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne (Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen) as a reply to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the [Male] Citizen (Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen), which had been adopted two years earlier by the National Assembly. Although the Declaration of the Rights of Man expressed support for such ideals as equality and liberty, in Revolutionary France those ideals remained gendered. Women did not receive equal political citizenship. In her pamphlet Gouges asserted not only that women have the same rights as men but also that children born outside of marriage should be treated as fairly as “legitimate” children in matters of inheritance.

Death

Soon Gouges became an enemy of certain factions of the Revolution. In September 1792 a new assembly, the National Convention, proclaimed the abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of the republic. The National Convention quickly became divided between the Girondins, who wanted to organize a bourgeois republic in France and to spread the Revolution over the whole of Europe, and the Montagnards, who, with Maximilien Robespierre, wanted to give the lower classes a greater share in political and economic power. Gouges sided with the moderate Girondins against the Montagnards and defended King Louis XVI. The king was executed on January 21, 1793, and that summer the Girondins were purged from the National Convention.

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After the fall of the Girondins, the Revolution devolved into the Reign of Terror, with Robespierre as one of its architects. Gouges denounced him in a pamphlet, accusing him of tyranny. She was arrested for calling for a plebiscite to allow citizens to choose between three forms of government: constitutional monarchy, federalist republic, or unified republic, the last of which was the only acceptable form according to Robespierre. Gouges was subjected to a mock trial, and on November 3, 1793, she was sent to the guillotine.