Revolution for ... whom?
In 1791, Olympe de Gouges protested against patriarchy: “Woman, wake up!” Louder for those in the back.
This essay is part of a series called “Shut Out, Not Shut Up” on women through the ages who’ve written despite being dismissed because of their sex. They persisted.
I must have been in elementary school when I was introduced to the Declaration of Independence. Its proclamations—“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal….Governments are created among Men”—extended the promise of equality. But for whom?
The nun teaching my class explained that the terms ‘man’ and ‘men’ referred to ‘all people.’ From this, I understood that ‘man’ was a generic term that applied to me, a girl, even though ‘man’ means ‘male’ in every other context. That is, its rhetorical use broadly applied to everyone, despite its specific meaning.
The class also covered in broad terms the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, summarized by our history textbook. It sounded great to me. Inspirational, in fact. I remember feeling proud to live in a country founded by genius philosophers.
I later read the Constitution and all its Amendments, which put the lie to the inclusiveness implied in a rhetorical use of ‘men’ cited in the Declaration. If Thomas Jefferson and his mates intended to create a government of and for everyone in the colonies, why didn’t the authors of the Constitution and Bill of Rights preserve rights for everyone from the start? Why did it take a war to extend the rights secured in the late 18th century for some men to all men? Why did the Constitution give women the right to vote as late as the 20th Century, and why has it not yet recognized equal rights for women?
I don’t know if you were taught that the word ‘men’ used rhetorically includes all people. Maybe your teachers accurately described the Declaration: that Jefferson and his co-signers, beneficiaries of patriarchy, intended to preserve it. While these White property owners challenged the monarchy and championed self-governance, they fully intended to perpetuate their dominion over non-White people and all women because doing so afforded them wealth and power. Little wonder that my teacher, who had willingly made her life subservient to a religious patriarchy, presented the lesson as she did.
When people promote revolution, they declaim in exquisite specifics what they are revolting against, using the soaring language of the virtuous who are turning the tables on those who affront them. They’re not so transparent about what they secure from the table before upending it. You must understand whether the newly arranged table affords you a seat. Chances are, the side you think you’re on isn’t really on your side.
Declaration of the Rights of Man
In 1789, France’s National Constituent Assembly produced a document they called “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” (Déclaration des droits de l'Homme et du citoyen de 1789). The document was crafted using Enlightenment concepts: that rights are universal and individual rights are protected by limiting the rights of governments. The Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson contributed to early drafts of the French Déclaration, reinforcing the Enlightenment’s presumption that its proponents had stumbled upon self-evident truths that applied universally. This document was influential not only in France, where it is still considered valid as constitutional law. Its ideas of democracy and individual freedoms influenced countries around the world.
The Assembly gave no ground in its Déclaration against women’s demands: to vote; hold positions of political power; own property; and equality in marriage, divorce, and inheritance.
Olympe de Gouges shot off a rapid response to the Déclaration with her “Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen (Déclaration des droits de la Femme et de la Citoyenne).
Were de Gouges posting online today, she’d upload her document with the wry comment: “Here, I fixed it for you!”
“Femme, reveille-toi!” (Woman, wake up!)
De Gouges comes out swinging: “Men, are you capable of being just?” She questions the source of men’s authority over women. In true Enlightenment fashion, she dares them to study nature, where they will find harmony between the sexes in every other species. “Man alone has raised his exceptional circumstances to a principle.”
Bizarre, blind, bloated with science and degenerated, in a century of enlightenment and wisdom, into the crassest ignorance, he wants to command as a despot a sex which is in full possession of its intellectual faculties; he pretends to enjoy the Revolution and to claim his rights to equality in order to say nothing more about it.
Her preamble demands the national assembly include women, citing the ‘natural, inalienable, and sacred rights of women.’ Two of those facts of nature apparently are that women are the sex ‘as superior in beauty as […] in courage,’ using women’s suffering during maternity as evidence. On this rocky foundation she bases a reformulation of the Articles to encompass and prioritize the rights of women.
De Gouges lists the 17 Articles that were decreed by the Assembly, re-interpreted to give rights to women. Some of the Articles require only a slight rewording—for instance, inserting ‘woman and’ before the word ‘man.’ Other articles are rather more explicit.
Article 4, stated by the Assembly:
Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. These limits can only be determined by law.
Article 4, by de Gouges:
Liberty and justice consist of restoring all that belongs to others; thus, the only limits on the exercise of the natural rights of woman are perpetual male tyranny; these limits are to be reformed by the laws of nature and reason.
The Assembly codified in Article 9 the legal presumption of innocence until proven guilty. De Gouges loses this important distinction in her revision of Article 9, jumping right to the guilty outcome: “Once any woman is declared guilty, complete rigor is [to be] exercised by the law.”
De Gouges enhances Article 10’s protection of free speech (with a clause effectively reserving this right except when shouting ‘FIRE!’ in a crowded theatre) with her memorable comparison (emphases mine):
Article 10. No one is to be disquieted for his very basic opinions; woman has the right to mount the scaffold; she must equally have the right to mount the rostrum, provided that her demonstrations do not disturb the legally established public order.
De Gouges insists on the same responsibilities as well as the same rights of men in constituting a government. She envisions women sharing the total burden of society, from working in the government to being taxed to property ownership, calling it ‘an inviolable and sacred right.’
Her postscript challenges women to ‘wake up!’ Noting that male revolutionaries are using women to break the chains of the prior social order, she pleads with women to stop being blind to their ill-usage by men. She charges that women have enabled the patriarchy by thinking that they benefit from it. She reminds women that when they’re old, have lost their beauty and are no longer bearing children, they will have no protection from losing everything they treasure. Those women complacent about being kept out of the revolution are only the privileged, and, de Gouges says, that privilege can be taken away in a moment’s notice.
She finishes her manifesto with a template for a social contract between man and woman, something like a pre-nup that would give women equal rights during marriage and upon divorce or death. She lists a number of laws she’d like to see drafted, from adoption to prostitution to the marriage of priests to slavery. De Gouges had opinions on a lot of things, and the means to publish and disseminate them.
So who is Olympe de Gouges?
Born to a wealthy family named Gouze, she was given the name Marie at birth. Her mother, Anne, had been privately tutored but Marie wasn’t formally educated. She was married at age 171 against her will to a man named Louis Aubry. She didn’t love her husband, complaining that he lacked wealth and social standing.
After the marriage, Louis Aubry quit his job and started his own business using money from his wife’s family. Within a year of the wedding, Marie gave birth to a son, Pierre Aubry, and within months her husband died in a flood. She never re-married, disapproving of marriage as an institution. She changed her name (she had been known as Marie Aubry) to Olympe de Gouges. She entered a relationship with a wealthy businessman and she moved to Paris with her son, where her businessman paramour kept her in style.
De Gouges found her place in the salon society of Paris in the 18th century. She began writing, published a novel and became a playwright. Flirting with the revolutionary spirit, she started signing her letters Citoyenne.
In 1788 she published a pamphlet that championed compassion for African people enslaved by French colonists, linking the institution of slavery to the French monarchy’s need to dominate its subjects. When the Comédie-Française performed her play, “L’Esclavage des Noirs” she stepped fully into the spotlight of public criticism. She received threats for taking a stand against colonial oppression of Africans. She was reviled for not knowing her place (in the home) and daring to work in the theatre. After three performances, during which paid protestors swarmed the theatre lobby, the production shut down.
Although impassioned by the Revolution, Olympe was soon disgruntled by its exclusion of women from its declaration of rights. She joined a political advocacy group focused on extending rights to everyone, including women.
An insurrection on the French colony Saint-Domingue (today known as Haiti) protested the Assembly’s “Declaration” that excluded free people of color and Africans who were enslaved. The backlash was fierce. De Gouges tried to distance herself from it, insisting that she didn’t advocate violence. The mayor of Paris accused her of inciting the insurrection.
De Gouges also tried to separate herself from the revolutionaries when they executed Louis XVI (21 January 1793). She asked to speak for the king at his trial, arguing that although as a king he was guilty, as a man he had been misled so was innocent. Her request was denied.
Wanting to replace the authoritarian and brutal Montagnard rule with Federalism, de Gouges published letters arguing against Robespierre and his Montagnards, criticizing their violence and summary killings. Drawn to the Gironde faction, she became an increasingly louder voice challenging the Montagnards, including its Jacobin faction.
After the Jacobins imprisoned and then executed prominent Girondins, de Gouges created a poster titled “The Three Urns, or the Salvation of the Fatherland, by an Aerial Traveller.”
In this piece, she called for an end to anarchy and violence, and urged a plebiscite for the people to vote on the kind of government they wanted: a unitary republic, a federalist government, or a constitutional monarchy. Because the revolutionary assembly had made it a capital crime to advocate for the return of a monarchy, de Gouges was charged and imprisoned for her poster. Her son lost his job; he later renounced her. The judge refused her the right of legal representation, claiming that she had represented herself in her writing. The court found her guilty and she was executed by guillotine.
An anonymous Parisian published thoughts on her death:
Yesterday, at seven o'clock in the evening, a most extraordinary person called Olympe de Gouges who held the imposing title of woman of letters, was taken to the scaffold, while all of Paris, while admiring her beauty, knew that she didn't even know her alphabet... She approached the scaffold with a calm and serene expression on her face, and forced the guillotine's furies, which had driven her to this place of torture, to admit that such courage and beauty had never been seen before... That woman... had thrown herself in the Revolution, body and soul. But having quickly perceived how atrocious the system adopted by the Jacobins was, she chose to retrace her steps. She attempted to unmask the villains through the literary productions which she had printed and put up. They never forgave her, and she paid for her carelessness with her head.
The execution of Olympe de Gouges stifled other women’s interests in publicly advocating for equal rights. Women wearing red Phrygian caps2 were cautioned not to be like Olympe de Gouges and suffer her consequences—so apparently, they were warned not to be like Marianne as well. The Jacobins’ backlash against women was fierce. Having embraced a symbol of the revolution in feminine form, they demonized de Gouges although she’d played only incidental roles in the political groups that advocated against the Revolutionaries. So began the Reign of Terror.
While French women were feeling the Jacobin boot heel on their necks, de Gouges’ writing inspired women in England and America. Mary Wollstonecraft amplified de Gouges’ thoughts in her own “Vindication of the Rights of Women.” De Gouges’ ideas traveled to America, where some women took to calling themselves “citizeness.” In 1848, the Women’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls used de Gouges’ rhetorical style to fashion a call for women’s suffrage.
Her influence faded, along with hopes of revolutionary inclusion. Olympe de Gouges remained largely unknown until Olivier Blanc published a political biography in the 1980s. Lauren Gunderson’s 2018 play “The Revolutionists” dramatizes de Gouges as a writer and political activist during the Reign of Terror.
Not right all the time, but also not wrong
Her writing manifests de Gouges’ passionate response to living in a time when social norms were being re-made. The idea of creating a new social order de novo exhilarated her. Secure in her wealth and social connections, she felt empowered to think freely and speak without inhibition.
If we’re starting with a blank sheet of paper, she says, then let’s put it ALL on the table: women are equal in everything, of course. But also, enslavement is bad: let’s get rid of it because it’s so obviously wrong. Why shouldn’t men be held accountable for their actions, including making promises to women in the pursuit of romance, then abandoning them. That’s wrong too!
I can’t criticize the enthusiasm that renders her writing with more emotional than intellectual force. She’s all over the place, but it’s endearing in its earnest pursuit of a world in which all people are equal. Ultimately, its impact is dulled because it’s a manifesto. She has no strategy beyond calling out something as wrong.
Colonialists wouldn’t abandon their practices of gaining free, involuntary labor just because a woman says it’s wrong. She was only able to influence the victims of slavery, and in Saint-Domingue they turned words into action. Theirs were violent actions, necessarily so. But she condemned them. She wanted a bloodless revolution, in which everyone accepted the truth of natural wisdom. She was hopelessly naive.
Her importance lies in her challenge to the assumption of patriarchy in a newly modeled social order. Her political contemporaries in the US were supporting the male revolutionaries who signed the US Declaration of Independence. If there had been a fiery, well-placed visionary like Olympe de Gouges challenging Jefferson and his co-signers to include women and Africans in their own manifesto, and if that argument had convinced them to upend White patriarchy as well, the country’s history would have run a completely different course. Today, the country would be several centuries beyond the ancient misogyny and racism brought to its shores by the British monarchy. It could have become that beacon for the world that it aspired to be.
Olympe de Gouges mis-stepped at times, once tragically, but she wasn’t wrong.
Thanks for reading,
In her autobiography she claims to have been 14.
Also called Liberty Caps or bonnets rouges, these were a symbol of women during the French Revolution. Marianne, representing France to this day, wears a Phrygian cap as you can see in the Delacroix painting at the top of this essay. Women (called les tricoteuses) knitted these red caps as they witnessed the executions of the monarchists—yes, like Madame Defarge in ‘A Tale of Two Cities.”
“Here, I fixed it for you.” Still laughing at this one. Spot on!