page_title: Olympe de Gouges
section_title: Political legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Olympe de Gouges / Political legacy
caption_attribution_description: Romantic history painting. Commemorates the French Revolution of 1830 (July Revolution) on 28 July 1830.
context_page_description: Olympe de Gouges, born Marie Gouze, was a French playwright and political activist whose writings on women's rights and abolitionism reached a large audience in various countries.
  She began her career as a playwright in the early 1780s. As political tension rose in France, Olympe de Gouges became increasingly politically engaged. She became an outspoken advocate against the slave trade in the French colonies in 1788. At the same time, she began writing political pamphlets. Today she is perhaps best known as an early women's rights advocate who demanded that French women be given the same rights as French men. In her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, she challenged the practice of male authority and the notion of male-female inequality. She was executed by guillotine during the Reign of Terror for attacking the regime of the Revolutionary government and for her association with the Girondists.
context_section_description: Her execution was used as a warning to other politically active women. At the 15 November 1793 meeting of the Commune, Pierre Gaspard Chaumette cautioned a group of women wearing Phrygian bonnets, reminding them of "the impudent Olympe de Gouges, who was the first woman to start up women's political clubs, who abandoned the cares of her home, to meddle in the affairs of the Republic, and whose head fell under avenging blade of the law". This posthumous characterisation of Gouges by the political establishment was misleading, as Gouges had no role in founding the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women. In her political writings Gouges had not called for women to abandon their homes, but she was cast by the politicians as an enemy of the natural order, and thus enemy of the ruling Jacobin party. Paradoxically, the two women who had started the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women, Claire Lacombe and Pauline Léon were not executed. Lacombe, Léon and Theroigne de Mericourt had spoken at women's and mixed clubs, and the Assemblée, while Gouges had shown a reluctance to engage in public speaking, but prolifically published pamphlets. However, Chaumette was a staunch opponent of the Girondins, and had characterised Gouges as unnatural and unrepublican prior to her execution.
  1793 has been described as a watershed for the construction of women's place in revolutionary France, and the deconstruction of the Girondins' Marianne. That year a number of women with a public role in politics were executed, including Madame Roland and Marie-Antoinette. The new Républicaine was the republican mother that nurtured the new citizen. While politically active women were executed the Convention banned all women's political associations. 1793 marked the start of the Reign of Terror in post-revolutionary France, where thousands of people were executed. Across the Atlantic world observers of the French Revolution were shocked, but the ideals of liberté, égalité, fraternité had taken a life of their own.
  Gouges' Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen had been widely reproduced and influenced the writings of women's advocates in the Atlantic world. One year after its publication, in 1792, the keen observer of the French Revolution Mary Wollstonecraft published Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Writings on women and their lack of rights became widely available. The experience of French women during the revolution entered the collective consciousness. The anti-imperial Irish Rebellion of 1798 was whipped up by Anglo-Irish women such as Maria Edgeworth, but the quest of Catholics for political rights was brutally suppressed by the British military.
  American women began to refer to themselves as citess or citizeness and took to the streets to achieve equality and freedom. The same year Gouges was executed the pamphlet On the Marriage of Two Celebrated Widows was published anonymously, proclaiming that "two celebrated widows, ladies of America and France, after having repudiated their husbands on account of their ill treatment, conceived of the design of living together in the strictest union and friendship." Revolutionary novels were published that put women at the centre of violent struggle, such as the narratives written by Helen Maria Williams and Leonora Sansay. At the 1848 Women's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, the rhetorical style of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen was employed to paraphrase the Declaration of Independence into the Declaration of Sentiments, which demanded women’s' right to vote.
  After her execution her son Pierre Aubry signed a letter, denying his endorsement for her political legacy. He tried to change her name in the records, to Marie Aubry, but the name she had given herself has endured. Although she was a celebrity in her lifetime and a prolific author, Gouges became largely forgotten, but then rediscovered through a political biography by Olivier Blanc in the mid 1980s.
  On 6 March 2004, the junction of the Rues Béranger, Charlot, de Turenne, and de Franche-Comté 
caption: Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix (1833)
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