Olympe de Gouges
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Olympe de Gouges (born Marie Gouze; May 7, 1748 – November 3, 1793) was a playwright and journalist whose feminist writings reached a large audience. A proponent of democracy, she demanded the same rights for French women that French men were demanding for themselves. 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 her revolutionary ideas.
Life
Marie Gouze was born into a petit bourgeois family in 1748 in Montauban, Tarn-et-Garonne, in the South-West of France. Her father was a butcher, her mother, a washerwoman. However, she believed that she was the illegitimate daughter of Jean-Jacques Lefranc, marquis de Pompignan; his rejection of her claims upon him may have influenced her passionate defense of the rights of illegitimate children.[1] She married quite young in 1765 one Louis Aubry, coming from Paris with the new Intendant of the town, Mr. de Gourgues. This was not a marriage of love. As de Gouges 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] She had a perfect education fot a woman at that time and she was able to read, but wrote quite bad as the majority of the European people at that time. In 1773, according to her biographer ||Olivier Blanc]], she met a rich man, Jacques Biétrix de Rozières, with who she had a long story which finished under the revolution. She was received in the artistic and philosophical "salons" where she met many writers, like La Harpe, Mercier or Chamfort, and future politicians like Brissot or Condorcet. She was usually invited in the salons of marquise de Montesson and countess de Beauharnais who were playwritters like her. She was also in connection with masonry lodges among them the "Loge des Neuf soeurs" created by her friend Michel de Cubières.
Surviving paintings of her show a woman of remarkable beauty; not surprisingly, she chose to live with several men who supported her financially. However, by 1784 (the year that her putative biological father died), she began to write essays, manifestoes, and socially conscious plays. A social climber, she strove to move among the elite and to lose her provincial accent.[citation needed]
In 1784, she wrote the anti-slavery play Zamore and Mirza which was received by the french comedy, performed in 1789 and published in 1792 under the title L'Esclavage des Nègres (Negro Slavery). Because she was a woman and because of her controversial subject, the play went unpublished until 1789 at the start of the French Revolution.[4]. Even then, 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 the right to sexual relations outside of marriage.
A passionate advocate of human rights, Olympe de Gouges greeted the outbreak of the Revolution with hope and joy, but soon became disenchanted, in that the fraternité of the Revolution was not extended to women (that is, that 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 Female 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 on 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. The late 19th century French historian Jules Michelet commented "She allowed herself to act and write about more than one affair that her weak head did not understand."[5].
As her hopes were disappointed, she became more and more vehement in her writings. On 2 June 1793, the Jacobins arrested the Girondins (her allies) and sent them to the guillotine. Finally, her last 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) (1793) led to her arrest. That piece demanded a plebiscite on a choice of 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 having not a lawyer, she triedd to defend by herself. She managed to published (owing to her friends) two texts: olympe de Gouges au tribunal révolutionnaire , where she relates her interrogations, and the last ""Une patriote persécutée where she condemned the Terror. The Jacobins, who had already executed a queen, were in no mood to tolerate an advocate of women's rights. Olympe was sentenced to death on november the 2nd and executed on the guillotine on 3 November 1793, a month after Condorcet had been proscribed and several months after the Girondin leaders had been guillotined.
After her dath, says Olivier Blanc, her son General Pierre Aubry de Gouges went in Guyana with his wife and five children. But he died in 1802 and his widow tried to come back in France but she died on the boat. In Guadeloupe the two young daughters were married, Geneviève de Gouges to an english officer, and Charlotte de Gouges to an American politican, member of congrès, who had plantations in Virginia. Now, many english and american families have Olympe de Gouges as their ancestor (Olivier Blanc).
Legacy in France
On 6 March, 2006, 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 of her remains being moved to the Panthéon. However, her remains like 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 done for Condorcet himself.)
Notes
- ^ Pauline Paul. tr by Kai Artur Diers. "I Foresaw it All: The Amazing Life and Oeuvre of Olympe de Gouges". DIE ZEIT, No. 23, June 2, 1989. [1]. Also see this article.[2]
- ^ Paul Noack, Olympe de Gouges. p. 31
- ^ Pauline Paul. Op.cit.
- ^ Pauline Paul. Op.cit.
- ^ Cited in Luise F. Pusch, 300 Porträts berühmter Frauen, Insel Verlag, 1999, p.111
References
- Template:Fr icon Olivier Blanc , Marie-Olympe de Gouges, une humaniste à la fin du XVIIIè siècle, Editions René Viénet: Cahors, 2003 (annexes; bibliography; index; illustrations (257-270).
- Template:De icon Salomé Kestenholz, Die Gleichheit vor dem Schafott: Poträts französischer Revolutionärinnen, Luchterhand: Darmstadt, 1988.
See also
External links
- An extensive article about Olympe de Gouges
- An excerpt from the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen
