Olympe de Gouges

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 the present-day department of Tarn-et-Garonne), 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 (age five), 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 Jean-Baptiste Poncet-Delpech 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 (formally Marie Gouze) 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 (Gouze) 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 salons 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.

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 (equal rights) 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 ("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 equally have 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 1790 and 1791, in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), 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 (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—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.

Arrest and execution

As the Revolution progressed, she became more and more vehement in her writings. On 2 June 1793, the Jacobins of the Montagnard faction imprisoned prominent Girondins; they were sent to the guillotine in October. Finally, her poster Les Trois urnes, ou le Salut de la Patrie, par un voyageur aérien ("The Three Urns, or the Salvation of the Fatherland, by an Aerial Traveller") of 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." She also called for an end to the bloodshed of the Revolution saying "It is time to put a stop to this cruel war that has only swallowed up your treasure and harvested the most brilliant of your young. Blood, alas, has flowed far too freely!" and warned that "The divided French... are fighting for three opposing governments; like warring brothers they rush to their downfall and, if I do not halt them, they will soon imitate the Thebans, ending up by slitting each others throats to the last man standing". That piece demanded a plebiscite for a choice among three potential forms of government: the first, a unitary republic, the second, a federalist government, or the third, a constitutional monarchy. 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.

Marie-Olympe de Gouges was arrested on 20 July 1793. Although she was arrested in July, she would not meet the end of her life until November of that year. After her arrest, the commissioners searched her house for evidence. When they could not find any in her home, she voluntarily led them to the storehouse where she kept her papers. It was there that the commissioners found an unfinished play titled La France Sauvée ou le Tyran Détroné ("France Preserved, or The Tyrant Dethroned"). In the first act (only the first act and a half remain), Marie Antoinette is planning defense strategies to retain the crumbling monarchy and is confronted by revolutionary forces, including de Gouges herself. The first act ends with de Gouges reproving the queen for having seditious intentions and lecturing her about how she should lead her people. Both de Gouges and her prosecutor used this play as evidence in her trial. The prosecutor claimed that de Gouges's depictions of the queen threatened to stir up sympathy and support for the Royalists, whereas de Gouges stated that the play showed that she had always been a supporter of the Revolution.

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. It is likely that the judge based this argument on de Gouges's tendency to represent herself in her writings. Through her friends, she managed to publish two texts: Olympe de Gouges au tribunal révolutionnaire ("Olympe de Gouges at the Revolutionary tribunal"), in which she related her interrogations; and her last work, Une patriote persécutée ("A [female] patriot persecuted"), in which she condemned the Terror.

De Gouges had acquired for her son, Pierre Aubry, a position as a vice-general and head of battalion in exchange for a payment of 1,500 livres, and he was suspended from this office after her arrest. On 2 November 1793 she wrote to him: "I die, my dear son, a victim of my idolatry for the fatherland and for the people. Under the specious mask of republicanism, her enemies have brought me remorselessly to the scaffold."

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 was executed only a month after Condorcet had been proscribed, and just three days after the Girondin leaders had been guillotined. Her body was disposed of in the Madeleine Cemetery. 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. At the 15 November 1793 meeting of the Commune, Pierre Gaspard Chaumette cautioned a group of women wearing Phrygian bonnets, reminding them of "the impudent Olympe de Gouges, who was the first woman to start up women's political clubs, who abandoned the cares of her home, to meddle in the affairs of the Republic, and whose head fell under avenging blade of the law". 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. Paradoxically, the two women who had started the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women, Claire Lacombe and Pauline Léon, were not executed. Lacombe, Léon and Theroigne de Mericourt had spoken at women's and mixed clubs, and the Assemblée, while de Gouges had shown a reluctance to engage in public speaking, but prolifically published pamphlets. However, Chaumette was a staunch opponent of the Girondins, and had characterised de Gouges as unnatural and unrepublican prior to her execution.

The year 1793 has been described as a watershed for the construction of women's place in revolutionary France, and the deconstruction of the Girondins' Marianne. That year a number of women with a public role in politics were executed, including Madame Roland and Marie Antoinette. The new Républicaine was the republican mother that nurtured the new citizen. During this time the Convention banned all women's political associations and executed many politically active women. 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 A 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.

After her execution her son Pierre Aubry signed a letter in which he denied his endorsement for her political legacy. He tried to change her name in the records, to Marie Aubry, but the name she had given herself has endured.

Descendants

Olympe de Gouges's son Pierre Aubry (de Gouges), who at the start of the Revolution was living with Marie-Hyacinthe Mabille, married Mabille after the Reign of Terror. In 1801, he was posted by Napoleon Bonaparte to a command in French Guiana, where he arrived with his family in 1802 and died on 7 February 1803. They had at least two daughters and three sons, including:

• Geneviève Hyacinthe Aubry de Gouges (1793–1853), married in 1810 in Basse-Terre on Guadeloupe to British Royal Navy Captain William Wood, a landowner in Tasmania, where he later settled and is buried with his wife.
• Louis Anacharsis Aubry de Gouges (1794–1855), married in Paris to Louise Célestine Julie Leroy.
• Charlotte Olympe Aubry de Gouges (1796–1856), married in 1812 in Philadelphia to United States Congressman Robert Selden Garnett Sr. (1789–1840) of Virginia. Their children included Confederate general Robert Selden Garnett Jr. (1819–1861).
• Jean Hélie Hippolyte Aubry de Gouges (1798–1870), married in 1839 in Batignolles (now a neighborhood of Paris) to Marie-Jeanne Hergott.