Olympe de Gouges

Olympe de Gouges, born Marie Gouze in Montauban in 1748 and guillotined in Paris in 1793, was a French playwright, pamphleteer and political thinker. She lived through the late Enlightenment and the first years of the Revolution. She is remembered above all for her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen (1791), a text that answered the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen with pointed irony and demanded for women the same rights granted to men. Her importance lies in being one of the first voices in France to link the defence of women's equality explicitly with opposition to slavery.

Her origins are uncertain. She was born into a bourgeois family in Montauban, and the identity of her father is disputed: he may have been her mother's husband, the butcher Pierre Gouze, or an illegitimate daughter of the poet Jean-Jacques Lefranc de Pompignan, a relationship considered plausible but impossible to verify. Married at seventeen to a much older man, she was widowed with a young son and chose never to remarry, once describing marriage as the tomb of trust and love. Around 1770 she settled in Paris, took the name Olympe de Gouges and moved in literary salons, where she met writers and future politicians. From the mid-1780s she published novels and, above all, plays, some of which were staged across France.

Her best-known play, Zamore and Mirza, or the Happy Shipwreck, later published as Slavery of the Blacks, exposed the condition of enslaved people in the colonies. It was followed by Reflections on Black Men (1788) and other abolitionist writing, and she was admitted to the Society of the Friends of Blacks. During the Revolution she produced a long run of political pamphlets, around thirty by most estimates, addressed to legislators, clubs and public figures. In them she proposed social reforms such as maternal and child welfare, recognition of children born outside marriage and legal divorce, and she drew on Montesquieu's idea of separated powers. She first supported constitutional monarchy but moved towards the republican cause and opposed the execution of Louis XVI. Aligned with the Girondins, she criticised the authoritarian drift of Robespierre and Marat, and this led to her arrest in August 1793.

While imprisoned, ill and without a lawyer, she wrote her final texts in her own defence. The Revolutionary Tribunal tried her summarily and sentenced her to death for defending a federal model of the state, in line with the Girondins. She was guillotined on 3 November 1793. Her influence grew mainly from the nineteenth century onwards and, especially, in twentieth-century feminism, which has adopted her as an early reference for women's rights and for criticism of slavery.