Olympe de Gouges is perhaps most famous for the way she died: by guillotine, at the hands of the Jacobin regime during the Reign of Terror. And truthfully, her death is not a bad starting point for understanding who she was, both as a person and as a philosopher. She was executed for sedition because she dared to challenge the political structures that kept the Jacobins in power, uninhibited by fear of their retaliation. And this was no isolated instance of brazenness, but a testament to the way she moved through life: audaciously, unafraid to speak her mind and unconcerned with the norms she shattered in the process. If she saw an injustice, whether in a political structure or a social one, she was going to publicly oppose it, whatever the risk to her reputation or even her life.
In her political philosophy as well as her feminist and abolitionist writings, de Gouges abhorred domination and violence, advancing a social ideal of free, equal, harmonious cooperation. Her opposition to the French Revolution at its outset, as seen in early political pamphlets like her Lettre au Peuple and Remarques Patriotiques, may seem odd, given her alignment with its core principles–liberté, egalité, fraternité. However, she had reason to be skeptical that these principles–liberty, equality, and fraternity–would be realized in practice. Fearing that the people lacked the necessary virtue to govern themselves justly, she saw, as Sandrine Bergès puts it, “that the reversal of power, instead of bringing democracy, could turn unprepared members of the lower classes, especially men, into petty tyrants who simply replicated the harmful behaviour of those they had toppled” (31). She saw the need for a leader to model virtue and initially hoped that the King could, with certain reforms in place, serve this function, ruling the people with benevolence, genuine compassion, and nonviolence.
Eventually, she became disillusioned enough with monarchy that she aligned herself with republicanism—but she would not stand for the “republicanism” of the Jacobins, which was exactly the sort of tyranny-under-a-different-name she feared at the Revolution’s outbreak. And her deepest commitment was not to any particular political structure, but to humanity. In Le Bonheur Primitif, she argues that the earliest humans, living according to natural law, formed egalitarian communities based on mutual care, trust, and collective work; through that work, they imitated and competed with one another in a way that led to progress, which she referred to as emulation. This state of primitive flourishing was lost as the force of ambition took hold. People developed a taste for luxury and power, so they began seeking to dominate one another through various means–including organized religion, which she conceives of as founded upon manipulation. Over time, society took on the corrupt form she observed in the eighteenth century–the rich dominating the poor, men dominating women, European colonists enslaving Africans.
In the interests of reversing this corruption, de Gouges decried the excesses of the rich, criticizing everything that contributed to their continued exploitation of the suffering poor–including the arts, insofar as they were poisoned by luxury. However, she believed that the arts, in a purified form, could encourage emulation and thus be a powerful tool for the moral restoration of society. In the theatre especially, she saw great potential for the teaching of virtue, provided that plays were written with that purpose in mind rather than simply for the entertainment of the rich. This was undoubtedly why she devoted so much of her literary career to playwriting; her goal was not merely to please an audience, but to reform their moral values and advance an agenda of social or political change. Perhaps the best example is her abolitionist play, L’Esclavage des Noirs, ou l’Heureux Naufrage, in which she illustrated the evils of slavery and challenged the white supremacist ideology used to justify it. The play was received with much controversy and quickly shut down after just three performances–a testament to the corruption of the arts by the interests of the wealthy, who benefited from the injustices of colonization.
L’Esclavage des Noirs was hardly the only one of de Gouges’s works that was received with harsh criticism or dismissal. Eighteenth-century French society was simply not ready for many of the ideas she was advancing–which brings me to the writing she is perhaps best known for, Les Droits de la Femme. In addition to worrying that the French Revolution was not a viable path to a just government, she criticized its hypocrisy and failure to create true social justice. She found it unacceptable that women were excluded from the Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen, which formally recognized and protected only the natural rights of man. Refusing to recognize women as citizens, the men who drafted this document denied them the same rights under the law. De Gouges sought to remedy this injustice by drafting a new version of the document, the Déclaration des Droits de la Femme et de la Citoyenne, and arguing that society had a moral obligation to recognize women’s natural equality to men. This recognition sadly did not take place in her time, which she was far ahead of. But no matter how often the powers that be failed to accept her prescriptions, and no matter how often her arguments were met with vitriol and personal attacks, de Gouges was undeterred. She continued advocating for the changes she believed in until the end, determined to bring her voice into public discourse; she responded to criticism with reasoned self-defense, and when she felt she had made a mistake, she readily admitted it. In other words, she was a true philosopher, dedicated to the truth above all else.
