Olympe de Gouges deserves a place on the syllabus next year, and in the philosophical canon, because she had the audacity to carve out a place for herself in the philosophical discourse of her time, despite being a woman and having no formal education. No societal expectation or censure could stop her from devoting her life to thinking and writing, nor could the fact that she had never learned to write; she was so determined to get her ideas out into the world that she authored countless works by dictation. But the very prejudice she flouted–that only men of letters can produce philosophical work of great value–is the one responsible for her exclusion from the canon. Because she bore so little resemblance to the conventional philosophe of her time (and in some ways, of our time), she has been mostly overlooked in discussions of Enlightenment thought, except for a couple lines in the history books. These lines are usually limited to her Déclaration des Droits de la Femme and to her execution during the Reign of Terror; she is treated as a French Revolutionary figure and early feminist, which of course she was, but the bigger picture of her life and work is lost. She is not given her due recognition as a philosopher, and her valuable contributions are largely ignored.
Most of these contributions, it’s true, did not take the form of traditional philosophical writing (Le Bonheur Primitif being the main exception). But her theoretical commitments run through nearly everything she wrote, from plays to political pamphlets. While her works are, in some ways, specific to the French Revolution, her general beliefs in equality, nonviolence, mutual care, and collective contribution to the common good are always in the background. From her proposal of a caisse patriotique—a fund that citizens (especially the wealthy) would voluntarily contribute to for the good of the nation (see Lettre au Peuple)—to her reasoned defense of Louis XVI when the Convention was planning to execute him (see Olympe de Gouges, Défenseur Officieux de Louis Capet), she applied her philosophy to current events, advocating for concrete, context-specific prescriptions. But her overarching vision of human society can just as easily be applied to contemporary contexts.
The relations of domination she observed in eighteenth-century France, both at the political and social level, are just as prevalent today in cultures across the globe, though in different forms. Women in modern America, for instance, are now legally recognized as citizens with the right to vote and own property, as de Gouges advocated in Les Droits de la Femme ; however, we are far from being socially equal to men, and patriarchal oppression continues at both the systemic and individual level. De Gouges’s feminist arguments thus remain highly relevant, meriting attention not only for their historical importance but for the practical support they may provide to modern social justice efforts. The same goes for her abolitionist arguments; slavery may now be abolished, but racial equality remains far from realization. De Gouges recognized the injustice of racial inequality at a time when it was largely unquestioned, calling out the fallacies of white supremacist arguments that retain an insidious, lingering influence to this day. She definitely had her blind spots, sometimes taking her commitment to nonviolence too far when considering appropriate forms of resistance to racial oppression (for instance, in her harsh criticism of Haitian revolutionaries in her préface to L’Esclavage des Noirs). Nevertheless, there is much that her reflections can continue to teach us about the moral irrelevance of skin color and the injustice of racial domination. Similarly, we have much to gain from her reflections on the injustice of class-based hierarchy and the corruptive role of luxury. I have no doubt that she would look upon today’s tech billionaires with the utmost moral disapproval, decrying the ways in which our capitalist, individualist culture perpetuates socially destructive selfishness.
And if de Gouges were a citizen in an ostensibly democratic country, watching an aspiring authoritarian leader consolidate power through blatant intimidation and lies, she would not hesitate to condemn his tyranny. Her resistance to Robespierre and the Jacobin regime makes her a model of patriotism in its most courageous form—that is, the refusal to passively stand by when one’s country descends into terror. She lived her philosophy to the point where she died for it, mounting the scaffold as a martyr for her humanistic values. By studying those values and the implications they hold, we help to make her sacrifice worthwhile. And to the extent that we can put her philosophical commitments into practice as we carve out modern paths to social reform, we just might bring ourselves closer to that elusive state of human flourishing.