someone will remember us I say even in another time —Sappho
I was thinking about the above line from Sappho--so eerie in its quiet, fragmented conviction--as I read about Olympe de Gouges (1748-1793)--a writer and activist who was all but forgotten until a biography in the 1980s began to recover her public memory. Yet despite her apparent disappearance from history, her actions and convictions did much to shape arguments for abolition and woman’s suffrage in the years and decades after her execution at the guillotine during the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution. Her work later helped shape the Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as The Declaration of Sentiments, signed at what is thought to be the first women’s rights convention to be organized by women in the United States--the Seneca Falls Convention--attended by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Martha Coffin Wright, and Frederick Douglas, whose paper the North Star, described the document as the “grand movement for attaining the civil, social, political, and religious rights of women.”
De Gouges wrote works that were overtly political, insisting on her right to speak in the public sphere--and became a strong voice in the politics of the French Revolution. Simone de Beauvoir recognizes her, in Le Deuxième sexe [The Second Sex], as one of the few women in history who “protested against their harsh destiny.” Yet in fact, there were many, many women who have published over the centuries to advocate on behalf of women’s rights (e.g., Mary Robinson, Mary Astell, Rachel Speght, Laura Cereta in Italy, among many others).
I thought of de Gouges when I saw, yet again, the media furor over Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ fantastic choice of saying her words out loud on her dress to the Met Gala this week--one of the glitziest, wealthy spectacles of largesse in the fashion and museum world. I continually marvel at how a woman’s beauty and body, combined with political will and activism, always becomes the subject of vitriol and controversy. With the cost of the $35k entrance fee for the gala donated to her, Ocasio-Cortez brought dress designer Aurora James, founder of Brother Vellies and the 15 Percent Pledge, with her in attendance--two women inserting their voice into the public sphere, using the medium available to them to challenge the public to make good on ideals of equality that this country has never yet lived up to.
Olympe de Gouges similarly insisted on inserting her voice in the public sphere as a writer and a woman, writing and demanding answers from the public and politicians. She overtly questioned how the French Revolution could purposely deny women’s and other civil rights, while they speak of egalité--of freedom for all. De Gouges wrote plays, pamphlets, and novels to overtly demand a discussion of abolition, civil rights, the right to divorce, the rights of illegitimate children, abolition of the death penalty, among many other causes--in the case of abolition of slavery in the French colonies, she was one of the first voices to make an audience confront the issue of enslavement and the inherent humanity shared by all.
Despite, or because of these efforts, she was one of three women who were executed during the Reign of Terror--the only woman to be executed for political sedition. Because she spoke out, demanded answers, and used the platforms available to demand the ideals of the French constitution be upheld for all.
De Gouges was forced to marry at seventeen, to a man much older, whom she did not love. She would later write, in her semi-autobiographical novel Mémoires, "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." They later had a son, but soon after her son’s birth, her husband died. She refused to ever marry again, later writing that the institution of marriage is "the tomb of trust and love."
After her husband's death, she changed her name to Olympe de Gouges and moved to Paris with her lover, who provided her with an income. While of low birth and from the provinces, she succesfully inserted herself into intellectual circles, attending artistic and philosophical salons where she was introduced to popular writers of the day, including the salons of Madame de Montesson and the Comtesse de Beauharnais, who were also playwrights.
De Gouges began her career writing a semi-autobiographical novel and then focused on writing plays, of which 12 survive but there are references to at least 40 in her papers upon her death. While some women were able to successfully publish works for the Comédie Française, those who published under their own name kept to themes considered suitable for their gender. De Gouges did not follow that precedent, choosing to publish works that were overtly political under her own name--and as a result, she was the object of patronizing reviews and ridicule. One critic wrote in response to her work: “[t]o write a good play, one needs a beard.”
De Gouges’ first staged production was originally titled Zamore et Mirza; ou L’Heureux Naufrage [Zamore and Mirza; or, The Happy Shipwreck]. Written in 1784 and later revised, it was finally brought to the stage in 1789 under the title L’Esclavage de Nègres, ou l’Heureux naufrage [Black Slavery; or the Happy Shipwreck]. It was the first French play to focus on the inhumanity of slavery, with an enslaved hero at the center. It had three performances before it was shut down by sabotaging actors and enraged French colonists, who organized and hired hecklers to harass the stage. De Gouges retaliated by writing public denouncements of the harassers. She tied this experience squarely to the discrimination of her gender, and as a result, called for a second national theatre that would be dedicated solely to women’s productions.
It’s impossible to list the details and plots of each play, but it was through her plays that de Gouges forced her voice into the public sphere on many social issues, referring to herself as citoyenne--citizen. She was deeply courageous and politically invested in the cause of the French Revolution, but was a pacifist and didn’t believe in the execution of the king, believing that as a king he is guilty but as a man innocent, and that he should only be exiled. In addition to abolition and the rights of women, she wrote about divorce, the marriageability of priests and nuns, of girls forced into convents against their will by family members and a complicit clergy, the injustice of debtors prison, and the double standards that face women.
When the French Revolution took shape, de Gouges’s beliefs on abolition and support for marginalized members of society--the orphan, the illegitimate child, the poor, the commoner--galvanized in her fight for women’s rights. The events of the French Revolution--including the day that a group of angry, frustrated women marched to Versailles to protest the cost of bread--led to many discussions of what a new state should look like and address; many women advocated for women’s education and equality. When the rights of citizens, despite the advocacy of both the Girondin and women, were not applied to women--de Gouges aimed her writing directly towards the political realm.
Her first political brochure was a manifesto entitled Letter to the people, or project for a patriotic fund. Soon after, she published Patriotic remarks, which outlined proposals for social security, institutions for the homeless and unemployed, and a jury system for criminal trials. She later wrote a series of political pamphlets on a range of social concerns that would help frame the arguments of later early feminist advocates, including a voluntary tax system (which was published anonymously and saw implementation the following year); social services for widows, the elderly and orphans; civil rights for illegitimate children and unmarried mothers; suppression of the dowry system; regulation of prostitution; sanitation; the rights of divorce; and the abolition of the death penalty. In 1792, the French National Assembly did pass laws that gave illegitimate children some civil rights and granted women the right to divorce--whether in response to de Gouges’ advocacy remains unclear.
De Gouges’ most direct work--which influenced the writing of Mary Wollstonecraft a year later, and much later, the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments in the United States--is her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, written in 1791. De Gouges’ Declaration was in direct response to the Marquis de Lafayette’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which asserts that all men "are born and remain free and equal in rights" and that these rights were universal.
Modern scholarship has described de Gouges’ Declaration as “forceful and sarcastic in tone and militant in spirit, its third section takes up each of the seventeen Articles of the Preamble to the French Constitution in turn and highlights the glaring omission of the female citizen within each article. Meant to be a document ensuring universal rights, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen is exposed thereby as anything but.” Woolfrey continues to say that “despite the lack of attention Gouges’s pamphlet received at the time, her [de Gouges’] greatest contribution to modern political discourse is the highlighting of the inadequacy of attempts at universality during the Enlightenment.”
In her Declaration, addressed to Marie Antoinette for maximum publicity, de Gouges writes:
“Woman, wake up; the tocsin of reason is being heard throughout the whole universe; discover your rights. The powerful empire of nature is no longer surrounded by prejudice, fanaticism, superstition, and lies. The flame of truth has dispersed all the clouds of folly and usurpation. Enslaved man has multiplied his strength and needs recourse to yours to break his chains. Having become free, he has become unjust to his companion. Oh, women, women! When will you cease to be blind? What advantage have you received from the Revolution? A more pronounced scorn, a more marked disdain…
A woman has the right to mount the scaffold. She must possess equally the right to mount the speaker's platform."
As the Revolution continued on, the Jacobins began to imprison prominent Girondins, finally sending them to the guillotine in October 1793. De Gouges’ 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"), demanding a plebsicite or vote on the three different proposed forms of government--a unitary republic, a federalist government, or a constitutional monarchy--led to her arrest. The advocacy of any type of monarchy was deemed sedition.
De Gouges spent three months in jail, with rights to an attorney denied to her by the judge, who deemed her capable of representing herself. She continued to write from prison, publishing two final texts through her friends--Olympe de Gouges au tribunal révolutionnaire ("Olympe de Gouges at the Revolutionary tribunal"), which described her interrogations; and a final work, Une patriote persécutée ("A [female] patriot persecuted"), where she roundly condemned The Reign of Terror.
On 3 November 1793, the Revolutionary Tribunal sentenced de Gouges to death. She was executed by guillotine for seditious behavior and attempts to reinstate the monarchy.
De Gouges’ execution was a resounding warning to the many women who were politically active during the Revolution--there would be no interest in honoring their voices in the public sphere.
Women in France would continue to not be considered full citizens with the right to vote until 1944.
Robert Pogue Harrison, in his book The Dominion of the Dead, writes:
Works of literature…are more than enduring tablets where an author’s words survive his or her demise. They are the fights of human worlds, cosmic in nature, that hold their place in time so that the living and the unborn may inhabit them at will, make themselves at home in their articulate humanity…
Reading de Gouges and other early women writers, I want to make a home in their articulate humanity. Their works are so much a part of what Pogue Harrison’s quote speaks to--that we have, through written texts, the fights for human worlds, that hold their place in time so that we, the living and as yet unborn at the time they were written, can inhabit them at will.
We need to inhabit them at will--be reminded that while the endless scroll and the fires that are surging around us are not all that our world is made up of--we also have the ancestors we choose, who can speak to us, even when their voices were prematurely silenced.
We can ensure that these forgotten voices who have shaped us--still in ways we don’t yet realize--can find their rightful place in the public they fought--and fight--for still.
Links:
Olympe de Gouges: here and here
Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, 1791
More of de Gouges’ writings: here
AOC coverage from the last week: here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here
Freya your corner is rich in substance and deep in knowledge, HOld on my dear friend..
very interesting work, useful wind to spread history and the path run by women