Olympe de Gouges was a force of nature, impervious to societally imposed boundaries both in her life and work. Born in Montauban, France in 1748, with Marie Gouze as her given name, she was raised as the daughter of a maidservant and a butcher (Woolfrey). However, she believed her biological father to be not a butcher but the erudite Jean-Jacques Lefranc, Marquis de Pompignan (Blanc 25). Her Memoir de Madame de Valmont, which laments the injustice of illegitimacy for a woman abandoned in childhood by an aristocratic father, is regarded as a fictionalized autobiography.
Following the death of her elderly husband, Louis Yves-Aubry, whom she was forced to marry at sixteen, Marie Gouze moved to Paris with her son, Pierre (Kaüper). It was then that Olympe de Gouges was born. Determined to take the place in society that was rightfully hers, to rise above the roles she had been given—wife, mother—and to follow in the footsteps of the man she believed to be her father, she assumed this aristocratic title and reinvented herself. Despite having received little to no formal education, she successfully pursued a vibrant intellectual life and prolific literary career. With the support of Jacques Biétrix de Rozières, a wealthy merchant who may also have been her lover, she quickly gained access to the upper echelons of Parisian society and educated herself. She met leading enlightenment thinkers at salons and formed close friendships with some—for instance, the Marquis de Condorcet, with whom she shared a broad vision of social equality that transcended lines of gender and race (Diamond 97).
That vision of equality was central to much of de Gouges’s work (Thiele-Knobloch 12). Perhaps her most famous writing, Les Droits de la Femme, is a direct challenge to the exclusion of women from French revolutionary rhetoric. Imploring men to be just and women to wake up, she insists that the natural rights outlined in the Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme be explicitly extended to members of her sex. In doing so, she exposes the hypocrisy and utter inadequacy of a strictly class-based framework for the pursuit of the revolution’s core ideals. Other forms of oppression, particularly that perpetuated by the patriarchy, must be combatted with equal force in order for those ideals—liberty, equality, fraternity—to be meaningfully fulfilled.
De Gouges was also highly critical of racial oppression, particularly in the form of slavery, and believed that the natural rights of Black people must also be equally recognized (Thiele-Knobloch 12). She wrote the first abolitionist play in France—L’Esclavage des Noirs, ou l’Heureux Naufrage—and fought tooth and nail for it to be publicly performed, undergoing a years-long battle with the powerful Comédie Française that foreshadowed many more struggles over the course of her literary career (Diamond 97). Whether writing plays or political pamphlets, she clashed not only with institutions but with the public, receiving an endless barrage of criticism for her writings. Nevertheless, she persisted in bringing her ideas into public discourse, no matter how radical.
Ironically, one of her most “radical” stances was her opposition to the increasingly radicalized revolutionary regime. She openly opposed the death penalty for King Louis XVI and even supported constitutional monarchy as potentially compatible with an egalitarian society. But although she eventually shifted to republicanism, she produced scathing attacks on the Jacobins’ version of it, denouncing Robespierre and the Reign of Terror as antithetical to revolutionary ideals. And when she dared to publish a political pamphlet, Les Trois Urnes, proposing that the people vote between three forms of government—republic, monarchy, or federation—the Jacobins seized the opportunity to arrest her for sedition (Vanpée 47-49). Facing execution, de Gouges held firm on her political philosophy until the very end, unwilling to yield ideological ground to preserve her life. Like Socrates, she spoke in her own defense at trial but to no avail; unlike Socrates, she pretended to be pregnant as a last resort, also to no avail (Diamond 103). She was guillotined on November 3, 1793, at age 45—the only woman to be executed for her political writings during the French Revolution.
Sources
Blanc, Olivier. Marie-Olympe de Gouges, une humaniste à la fin du XVIIIe siècle. Éditions René Viénet, 2003.
Diamond, Marie Josephine. “Olympe de Gouges and the French Revolution: The Construction of Gender as Critique.” Dialectical Anthropology 15, no. 2/3 (1990): 95–105. http://www.jstor.org/stable/29790339.
Gouges, Olympe de. “Les Droits de La Femme” [1791]. Project Gutenberg, 2016. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Les_droits_de_la_femme/Y6Z-EAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1.
Gouges, Olympe de. La Mémoire de Madame de Valmont. Translated by Clarissa Palmer. Paris: Côté-Femmes Éditions, 1788. https://olympedegouges.eu/docs/memoir-de-madame-valmont.pdf.
Käuper, Kristin. “Olympe de Gouges.” History of Women Philosophers and Scientists, n.d. https://historyofwomenphilosophers.org/project/directory-of-women-philosophers/de-gouges-olympe-1748-1793/.
Thiele-Knobloch, Gisela. “Préface.” In Olympe de Gouges, Théâtre Politique (Tome 1): Le Couvent ou Les Voeux Forcés, Mirabeau Aux Champs-Elysées, L’entrée de Dumouriez à Bruxelles ou Les Vivandiers. Paris: Côté-Femmes Éditions, 2015.
Vanpée, Janie. “Performing Justice: The Trials of Olympe de Gouges.” Theatre Journal 51, no. 1 (1999): 47–65. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25068623.
Woolfrey, Joan. “Olympe de Gouges (1748-1793).” In Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, n.d. https://iep.utm.edu/gouges/#:~:text=Details%20are%20limited.,accusation%20of%20plagiarism%20by%20Voltaire).