OLYMPE DE GOUGES - A FEMINIST IN FRENCH REVOLUTION

The History of humanity is full of unknown people that had a direct impact on our actual lives. Let me tell you the story of one of these persons, Olympe de Gouges, who was one of the pioneer of feminism and humanism during the french revolution.

Born Marie Gouze in the town Montauban in 1748, Olympe de Gouges was not destined to be one of the major public figures in the history of France. But, thanks to her avant-garde spirit and her courage, she has positioned herself as the pioneer of female emancipation, and as a great defender of the abandoned.

Olympe de Gouges is an illegitimate daughter. Her father, who never recognized her, would be the Marquis Jean-Jacques Lefranc de Pompignan, magistrate and writer. Her mother, Anne-Olympe Mouisset, is the daughter of a lawyer in the region.

In montauban, Olympe de Gouges, spent a normall childhood alongside her mother and her official father, a butcher from Montauban.

Everything changed, few months after she turned 17, in October 1765, she was married, by force, to the seller Louis-Yves Aubry, a rustic man with little culture. For Olympe de Gouges this marriage looks more like imprisonment than anything else.

Widowed and single mother at not even 20 years old, Marie Gouze made the first big decision of her life by leaving Montauban to Paris and decided to take the name of Olympe de Gouges.

In the same period, she decided to start a literary career, helped by her friend, Jacques Biétix de Rosières, who introduces her to the Parisian high society. Olympe de Gouges begins, very slowly, to be known in the Parisian literary world.

She quickly started to take strong positions in humanism and feminism...she is one of the first to denounce the slavery in "Zamore and Mirza ou l'Esclavage des Noirs" (1784), she also put the finger one the female condition in "Le Mariage inattendu de Chérubin" (1786) and even calls for radical political and social reforms in "Lettre au Peuple ou projet d’une caisse patriotique, par une citoyenne" (1788).

Blacks, women, children, the destitute, the sick ... Olympe de Gouges takes the side of all those left behind and does not hesitate to challenge the established order.

The French Revolution roaring in the streets, she denounces and condemns ever louder writing political and engaged textx, accusatory plays, political brochures... Her daring and courage seem to have no limits.

It was in September 1791 that Olympe de Gouges wrote her best known text, a "Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne", copied from the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789. Denouncing the absence of women in the project carried by the revolutionaries, it affirms, in its Preamble, that "the ignorance, the forgetting or the contempt of the rights of the woman are the only causes of the public misfortunes and the corruption of the governments". This Declaration, addressed to Queen Marie-Antoinette, denounces in 17 articles the "perpetual tyranny that man" opposes to women and affirms that "woman is born free and remains equal to man in rights".

2 years later, in 1793, she published the "manifeste des 3 urnes... In this text displayed throughout Paris, she denounces the “criminal extravagances” of the "Terreur period" and violently attacks Marat and Robespierre, 2 of the biggest revolutionary figures. She was Arrested on July 20, 1793 while she was sticking some poster herself, she was condemned to death and executed on November 3, 1793.

Some personality are inspirational thanks to their courage and opinions and open the door and build the basis to human evolution.... Thank you Olympe

Olympe de Gouge's execution :