International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest

Extract

Olympe de Gouges, playwright, pamphleteer, opponent of black slavery, and advocate of women's rights, is best known for her Declaration of the Rights of Woman (1791). Born Marie Gouze in May 1745, officially to Anne-Olympe Mouisset and her husband in Montauban, she nevertheless claimed descent from a local noble. Indeed, scholars have since established, as Marie claimed and physical resemblance confirmed, that her mother's lover, Jean-Jacques LeFranc, Marquis de Pompignan, was very likely her real father. In 1767, already widowed with a small son (Pierre Aubry, who subsequently became a French general), the young Marie Gouze moved to Paris where she reinvented herself as Olympe de Gouges and led a lively social existence. Well known in progressive literary and political circles in Paris, she published plays, a fictionalized autobiography, and during the French Revolution , many exuberant and patriotic pamphlets and broadsides. During the early years of the revolution (1789–91) de Gouges identified herself with the cause of constitutional monarchy. She supported the efforts of the Girondins and was on good terms with Condorcet , Mirabeau , and Brissot . In September 1791 de Gouges published her best-remembered tract, “The Rights of Woman” ( Droits de la femme ). She deliberately followed the style and format of the celebrated Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789), and invoked ... log in or subscribe to read full text