Olympe de Gouges - Biography

Biography

Marie Gouze was born into a petit bourgeois family in 1748 in Montauban, Guyenne-and-Gascony (now in the département of Tarn-et-Garonne), in southwestern France. Her father was a butcher and her mother was the daughter of a cloth merchant. She believed, however, that she was the illegitimate daughter of Jean-Jacques Lefranc, Marquis de Pompignan and his rejection of her claims upon him may have influenced her passionate defence of the rights of illegitimate children.

In 1765 she married Louis Aubry, a caterer, who came from Paris with the new Intendant of the town. This was not a marriage of love. Gouze said in a semi-autobiographical novel (Mémoire de Madame de Valmont contre la famille de Flaucourt), "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." Her husband died a year later, and in 1770 she moved to Paris with her son, Pierre, and took the name of Olympe de Gouges.

In 1773, according to her biographer Olivier Blanc, she met a wealthy man, Jacques Biétrix de Rozières, with whom she had a long relationship that ended during the revolution. She was received in the artistic and philosophical salons, where she met many writers, including La Harpe, Mercier, and Chamfort as well as future politicians such as Brissot and Condorcet. She usually was invited to the salons of Madame de Montesson and the Comtesse de Beauharnais, who also were playwrights. She also was associated with Masonic Lodges among them, the Loge des Neuf Sœurs that was created by her friend Michel de Cubières.

Surviving paintings of de Gouges show her to be a woman of beauty. She chose to cohabit with several men who supported her financially. By 1784 (the year that her putative biological father died), however, she began to write essays, manifestoes, and socially-conscious plays. Seeking upward mobility, she strove to move among the aristocracy and to abandon her provincial accent.

In 1784, she wrote the anti-slavery play Zamore and Mirza. For several reasons, the play was not performed until 1789. De Gouges published it, however, as Zamore et Mirza, ou l'heureux naufrage ("Zamore and Mirza, or the happy shipwreck") in 1788. It was performed as L'Esclavage des nègres ("Slavery of the negroes") in December of 1789, but shut down after three performances. Subsequently, it was published in 1792 under the title L'Esclavage des noirs.

She also wrote on such gender-related topics as the right of divorce and argued in favour of sexual relations outside of marriage.

As an epilogue to the 1788 version of her play Zamore et Mirza, she published Réflexions sur les hommes nègres ("Reflections on the negroes"). In 1790 she wrote a play, Le Marché des Noirs ("The Black Market") which was rejected by the Comédie Française; the text was burned after her death. In 1808 the Abbé Grégoire included her on his list of the courageous men who pleaded the cause of "les nègres."

A passionate advocate of human rights, Olympe de Gouges greeted the outbreak of the Revolution with hope and joy, but soon became disenchanted when égalité (equal rights) was not extended to women.

In 1791, she became part of the Society of the Friends of Truth, an association with the goal of equal political and legal rights for women. Also called the "Social Club", members sometimes gathered at the home of the well-known women's rights advocate, Sophie de Condorcet. Here, De Gouges 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."

That same year, in response to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, she wrote the Déclaration des droits de la Femme et de la Citoyenne ("Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen"). This was followed by her Contrat Social ("Social Contract", named after a famous work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau), proposing marriage based upon gender equality.

She became involved in almost any matter she believed to involve injustice. She opposed the execution of Louis XVI of France, partly out of opposition to capital punishment and partly because she preferred a relatively tame and living king to the possibility of a rebel regency in exile. This earned her the ire of many hard-line republicans, even into the next generation—such as the comment by the 19th-century historian Jules Michelet, a fierce apologist for the Revolution, who wrote, "She allowed herself to act and write about more than one affair that her weak head did not understand." Michelet opposed any political participation by women and thus disliked de Gouges.