Olympe de Gouges

Olympe de Gouges (1748–1793), born Marie Gouze, was a playwright, political activist, and pamphleteer who challenged the Revolution to live up to its own universalist principles. Her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen (1791) is one of the earliest expressions of feminist political thought — and it cost her her life.

Early Life

Born on May 7, 1748, in Montauban in southwestern France, Marie Gouze was the daughter of a butcher (officially) and, she claimed, the illegitimate child of the Marquis Jean-Jacques Lefranc de Pompignan, a nobleman and poet. This disputed parentage shaped her lifelong preoccupation with legitimacy, rights, and social status.

She was married at sixteen to Louis-Yves Aubry, a much older man who died within a year or two. Left a young widow with a son, she rejected the idea of remarrying — calling marriage “the tomb of trust and love” — and moved to Paris, where she reinvented herself as Olympe de Gouges.

In Paris, she became a self-educated woman of letters. Despite limited formal schooling and an imperfect command of written French (she often dictated her works), she produced a remarkable body of plays, pamphlets, and political writings. Her 1785 play Zamore and Mirza (later retitled L’Esclavage des Noirs) was one of the first French dramatic works to attack slavery — a position that earned her the hostility of the colonial lobby.

Revolutionary Activism

De Gouges embraced the Revolution enthusiastically but critically. She supported the constitutional monarchy, advocated for divorce rights (legalized in 1792), called for the abolition of slavery, proposed maternity hospitals and a national theater for women playwrights, and argued for a system of public welfare.

She was a prolific pamphleteer, producing dozens of political writings between 1789 and 1793. Her output ranged from practical policy proposals to open letters to the king and queen. She addressed Marie Antoinette directly, urging her to champion women’s rights as a path to political relevance — advice the queen did not take.

De Gouges’s politics did not fit neatly into revolutionary factions. She supported the Girondins and opposed the Montagnards, but she was too independent and too focused on issues that cut across factional lines — gender, race, poverty — to belong fully to any camp.

The Declaration of the Rights of Woman (September 1791)

De Gouges’s masterwork was the Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne, published in September 1791 as a direct response to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789.

The document is a systematic rewriting of the 1789 Declaration, replacing “man” with “woman” — or more precisely, insisting that “woman” must be included alongside “man” in every article. Its most famous passage is Article 1:

“Woman is born free and lives equal to man in her rights. Social distinctions can be based only on the common utility.”

Article 10 made an argument that resonated with de Gouges’s own fate:

“Woman has the right to mount the scaffold; she must equally have the right to mount the rostrum.”

The Declaration also included a proposed social contract between men and women — a kind of egalitarian marriage agreement that guaranteed property rights, inheritance rights for illegitimate children, and protections for women who were abandoned or divorced.

The document was dedicated to Marie Antoinette, with a preface urging the queen to lead the cause of women’s emancipation. It was largely ignored by the revolutionary mainstream. The National Assembly never debated it. Most male revolutionaries — even radicals who championed the rights of the poor — saw no contradiction between universal rights and the exclusion of women from political life.

Opposition to the Terror

As the Revolution radicalized, de Gouges became increasingly vocal in her opposition. She attacked Marat’s calls for violence, criticized the September Massacres, and defended Louis XVI’s right to a fair trial. After the king’s execution in January 1793, she challenged Robespierre directly in a pamphlet, warning that the Revolution was devouring its own principles.

In the summer of 1793, she put up posters around Paris calling for a national plebiscite on the form of government — monarchy, republic, or federation. This was her most dangerous act: it could be construed as both royalism and federalism, two capital offenses under the Terror.

Arrest, Trial, and Execution

De Gouges was arrested on July 20, 1793. Her trial before the Revolutionary Tribunal on November 2 was perfunctory. She was charged with sedition for her poster campaign and with attempting to restore the monarchy.

She asked to be examined by a midwife, claiming she was pregnant — a standard delaying tactic, since pregnant women could not be executed. The examination found she was not pregnant.

On November 3, 1793, Olympe de Gouges was guillotined. She was forty-five years old. According to some accounts, she faced the blade with composure, declaring: “Children of the fatherland, you will avenge my death.”

The revolutionary press celebrated her execution. The Moniteur published a commentary warning that de Gouges had “wanted to be a statesman” and had “forgotten the virtues appropriate to her sex.” The message was explicit: women who entered politics risked the scaffold.

Legacy

De Gouges was largely forgotten for nearly two centuries. The French feminist movement of the late 19th century occasionally invoked her, but she did not enter the mainstream of historical consciousness until the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s and 1980s rediscovered her writings.

Today, she is recognized as a pioneering figure in the history of human rights. Her Declaration is taught alongside the 1789 Declaration as essential to understanding both the Revolution’s achievements and its limitations. In 2016, a bust of de Gouges was installed in the French National Assembly — a belated fulfillment of her demand that women have the right to mount the rostrum.

Her central argument — that a revolution proclaiming universal rights while excluding half the population is neither universal nor truly revolutionary — remains as relevant as ever. She exposed the blind spot at the heart of the Enlightenment: that “the rights of man” did not, in practice, mean the rights of all humans. Two centuries later, that critique still resonates.