Olympe de Gouges

The French Revolution was the birth of the notion of citizenship, but were you aware that “citizen” was only ever meant to be a man? One woman attempted to change that and paid with her life for getting involved in the aftermath of the French revolution.

Olympe de Gouges was born as Marie Olympe Gouze in 1748 in Montauban in the southwest of France. Olympe was born into the bourgeois class, her father being a butcher, but she believed that she was the illegitimate daughter of her mother’s noble childhood friend. This suspicion accompanied her throughout her life and was one of the main motivations for advocating for rights of illegitimate children, for example while inheriting. At 17, Olympe was married off to a man she never loved. Her marriage lasted only about one year, during which Olympe gave birth to a son. Her husband died during an uncertain time in 1766.

It may sound weird, but widowhood so early in her marriage was the best thing that could have happened to Olympe. As an unmarried woman, she had belonged to her father, and as a married woman, she was her husband’s property. As a widow, she was free. Avoiding further family arranged marriages and being attracted to city life, Olympe and her son moved to Paris around 1770. In Paris, Olympe was finally free to do as she wished. She had several romantic affairs, sometimes with men who sustained her financially. At that time, literary salons were coming up and Olympe was introduced to literature and literary discussion. Autodidactically, she learned about creative writing, literature, and theatre. Eventually, she started a theater company and worked on her own pieces.

Olympe was passionate about many types of injustice. She stood for women’s and illegitimate children’s rights, and she was a dedicated abolitionist and anti-racist (as far as you can apply that word to a European person in the 18th century). In 1782 she wrote her first piece Zamore et Mirza, that details the story of two run-away enslaved men in the East Indies who meet two French men who were ship wrecked. On the grounds of being too radical, too against the Zeitgeist of its time, the piece was only performed a few times, even after substantial changes by de Gouges that made the piece more “moderate.”

She usually shared her political ideas through colorful pamphlets that she would put up around the city. In 1789, one of the main texts of the French Revolution was published, the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789”. The text, of course, did not include women in the notion of citizenship. To point out this deliberate omittance and to make up for it, Olympe published her “Declaration of the Right of the Woman and of the Female Citizen” two years later. In this extremely heated time of political debate, destruction, and construction, Olympe was already demanding women’s voting rights and the right to divorce.

Olympe was beheaded in 1792. In the time of the “Terror”, most thinkers were not safe. Olympe’s crime was that she advocated for a constitutional monarchy similar to the English model. Her son survived and had a few children on his own, and Olympe’s descendants can now be found living in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain.