Olympe de Gouges - “Women, wake up! ... recognise your rights."

At the time of writing this blog, there are 220 women MPs in the House of Commons. At 34%, this is an all-time high, but women still remain underrepresented, especially in more senior positions. Only five ministers in the current Cabinet (23%) are women - the highest proportion of women in Cabinet was 36% between 2006 and 2007. But this underrepresentation may not be for the reason you think. Research from the Brookings Institution, published in 2014, refutes the common claim that fewer women run for political office because of family concerns and responsibilities. Instead, the critical factor is that women are less likely to be encouraged to run and less likely to be considered as a potential candidate when a position opens up. There is also a matter of negative self-perception and self-doubt among women. Even though there is no empirical evidence to support it, women are argued to be very likely to believe that if they run for office, they won't do as well as men.

Clearly more work needs to be done to present politics as a viable career path to girls and young women. Part of this will involve inspiring them with the stories of female trailblazers in politics and what they were able to achieve. Women like Patsy Minks, the subject of my fifth blog post and the first Asian American woman ever elected to the House of Representatives. Interestingly, in a 2014 Gallup poll, 63 percent of respondents said the U.S. would be governed better if there were more women in political office. This is in stark contrast to the situation faced by Olympe de Gouges in eighteenth-century France, when women were actively excluded from the political sphere. Fortunately, the challenge today is persuading more women to run for political office, rather than justifying their very presence in public life.

Marie Gouze was born into a middle-class family in southwestern France in 1748. She received a formal education, which was relatively rare at the time, but when she was 16, she was married against her will to Louis Aubry. She said later in her semi-autobiographical novel Memoir of Madame de Valmont, "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."

Marie’s husband died a year later, and in 1770 she moved to Paris with her son to take up residence with her sister. She changed her name to Olympe de Gouges and vowed never to marry again, calling the institution of marriage "the tomb of trust and love". In Paris she started a relationship with the wealthy Jacques Biétrix de Rozières, but refused his marriage proposal. With the support of Rozières she established a theatre company and began to attend the artistic and philosophical salons of Paris. Like many women who dared to enter the public sphere and engage in intellectual debate, she was accused of sexual immorality, and rumours spread that she was merely frequenting the salons as a “courtesan”. Later, as Olympe gained in prominence and renown, she was increasingly ridiculed by the predominantly male intelligentsia in France. Many even questioned whether she was the true author of the writings to which she attached her name.

Olympe first came to the public's attention with the play The Happy Shipwreck. It was written in 1784 and submitted anonymously to the selection committee of the Comédie Française. Although it was accepted the following year, performance of the play was long delayed. Powerful colonial interests feared that sympathetic portrayal of black slaves might threaten the profitability of French colonies. Olympe was threatened with a lettre de cachet (an arrest order signed by the king) and was attacked by both the slave trade lobby and those who thought that a woman's proper place was not in the theatre. Olympe was defiant, writing "I'm determined to be a success, and I'll do it in spite of my enemies." She took legal action, forcing Comédie-Française to stage the retitled Slavery of Blacks in 1789. Uproar ensued. The mayor of Paris condemned it as an incendiary piece which would cause revolt in the colonies. One critic reviewed the play in only one sentence: "We can only say that in order to write a good dramatic work, one must have hair on the chin." The production closed after three performances: the slave trade lobby had paid hecklers to sabotage the performances.

Both her play Slavery of Blacks and her 1788 pamphlet Reflections on Blacks made her one of France's earliest public opponents of slavery. She drew a parallel between colonial slavery and political oppression in France. In Slavery of Blacks, one of the slave protagonists explains that the French must gain their own freedom before they can deal with slavery. In total, Olympe wrote more than 30 plays, often with a socially critical theme: the slave trade, divorce, marriage, debtors' prisons, children's rights, and government work schemes for the unemployed.

Early in 1787, the Finance Minister Charles Alexandre de Calonne persuaded King Louis XVI to establish the Assembly of Notables to consider his measures to replenish the exhausted royal treasury. Fascinated by the constant news reports of the Assembly's proceedings, Olympe turned her attention to politics. In November 1788, she published Letter to the People, or Project for a Patriotic Bank by a Female Citizen. She called for a voluntary tax to fund a bank which "would be the envy of all the courts of Europe and shame the law courts" which had refused the king's tax edict. Then in early 1789 Olympe published Patriotic remarks setting out her proposals for social security, care for the elderly, institutions for homeless children, hostels for unemployed, and the introduction of a jury system. She also called upon women to "shake off the yoke of shameful slavery" and advocated for the creation of a broad taxation system to address economic inequalities.

A passionate advocate of human rights, Olympe greeted the outbreak of the Revolution with hope and joy, but soon became disenchanted when equal rights were not extended to women. In 1791 she became part of the Society of the Friends of Truth, also called the ‘Social Club’, an association with the goal of equal political and legal rights for women. In 1791, in response to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, she wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen. In this pamphlet she expressed, for the first time, her famous statement:

"A woman has the right to mount the scaffold. She must possess equally the right to mount the speaker's platform."

This was followed by her Social Contract, named after a famous work by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, proposing marriage based upon gender equality.

In 1790, free people of colour and African slaves revolted in French colony of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti) in response to the ideals expressed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Olympe did not approve of violent revolution, and published Slavery of Blacks with a preface in 1792, arguing that those who responded to the horrors of slavery with "barbaric and atrocious torture" in turn justified the behaviour of the tyrants. In Paris, Olympe was accused by the mayor of Paris of having incited the insurrection with her play. When it was staged again in December 1792 a riot erupted in Paris.

Olympe opposed the execution of Louis XVI of France (which took place on 21 January 1793), partly out of opposition to capital punishment and partly because she favoured constitutional monarchy. This earned her the contempt of many hard-line republicans. In December 1792, when Louis XVI was about to be put on trial, she wrote to the National Assembly offering to defend him, causing outrage among many deputies. In her letter she argued that he had been duped–that he was guilty as a king, but innocent as a man, and that he should be exiled rather than executed.

Olympe was associated with the Gironde faction, who were targeted by the more radical Montagnard faction. After the execution of Louis XVI, she became wary of the Montagnard faction and in open letters criticized their violence and summary killings. As the Revolution progressed, she became more and more vehement in her writings. On 2 June 1793, the Montagnard faction imprisoned prominent Girondins and sent them to the guillotine in October. Finally, her poster The Three Urns, or the Salvation of the Fatherland, by an Aerial Traveller of 1793, led to her arrest. It demanded a plebiscite for a choice among three potential forms of government: the first, a unitary republic, the second, a federalist government, or the third, a constitutional monarchy. The problem was that it was a capital offense for anyone to publish a book or pamphlet that encouraged re-establishing the monarchy.

After her arrest, the commissioners searched her house for evidence. When they could not find any in her home, she voluntarily led them to the storehouse where she kept her papers. It was there that the commissioners found an unfinished play titled France Preserved, or The Tyrant Dethroned. In the first act, Marie-Antoinette is confronted by revolutionary forces, including Olympe herself, who reproves the queen for having seditious intentions and lectures her about how she should lead her people. Both Olympe and her prosecutor used this play as evidence in her trial. The prosecutor claimed that her depictions of the queen threatened to stir up sympathy and support for the Royalists, whereas Olympe stated that the play showed that she had always been a supporter of the Revolution.

She spent three months in jail trying to defend herself. The presiding judge denied Olympe her legal right to a lawyer on the grounds that she was more than capable of representing herself. Through her friends, she managed to publish two texts: Olympe de Gouges at the Revolutionary tribunal, in which she related her interrogations; and her last work, A patriot persecuted, in which she condemned the Terror. On 3 November 1793 the Revolutionary Tribunal sentenced her to death and she was executed for seditious behaviour and attempting to reinstate the monarchy.

Olympe’s 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". 1793 has been described as a watershed for the construction of women's place in revolutionary France. That year a number of women with a public role in politics were executed, including Madame Roland and Marie-Antoinette. While politically active women were executed the Convention banned all women's political associations.

Although Olympe’s life was cut tragically short, her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen was widely reproduced and influenced the writings of other women's advocates. One year after its publication, in 1792, the keen observer of the French Revolution Mary Wollstonecraft published Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Olympe is now considered by many to be one of the world's first feminist campaigners, and whilst she wasn’t always recognised as a key revolutionary figure in France, that has been changing in recent years. In 2004, a new square dedicated to her memory was inaugurated in Paris: the Place Olympe de Gouges, in the 3rd arrondissement.

Bibliography

Fang, Marina. “Women Are Underrepresented In Politics, But It's Not For The Reason You Think.” HuffPost UK. 2014. https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/women-in-politics_n_5607061?ri18n [Accessed 7 April 2021]

Kuiper, Kathleen. “Olympe de Gouges.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. 2020. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Olympe-de-Gouges [Accessed 7 April 2021]

The Editors of Encyclopaedia.com. “Gouges, Olympe De (D. 1793).” 2021. https://www.encyclopedia.com/international/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/gouges-olympe-de-d-1793 [Accessed 7 April 2021]

Traub, Courtney. “Remembering Olympe de Gouges, France’s First Revolutionary Feminist.” Paris unlocked. 2021. https://www.parisunlocked.com/history-of-paris/famous-parisians/biography-olympe-de-gougues-frances-revolutionary-feminist [Accessed 7 April 2021]

Uberoi, Elise et. al. “Women in Politics and Public Life.” House of Commons Library. 2021. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn01250 [Accessed 7 April 2021]