Olympe De Gouges
Olympe de Gouges was born in 1748 Montauban, Quercy. She was born Marie Gouze, the daughter of a butcher. She believed however that she was actually the illegitimate offspring of Marquis de Pompignan. The Marquis however would never accept that he had any involvement in her siring. She married in 1765 however her husband died leaving her to move to Paris with her son. It was in Paris that she began to write a series of plays, essays and pamphlets. These included a range of works protesting against the perpetuation of slavery.
Alexander Kucharsky’s painting of Olympes de Gouges
By the outbreak of the French Revolution she had changed her name to Olympe De Gouges and had a substantial body of work. 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. 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.”
When the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was published she wrote a response in the form of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen. This and her work Contract Social emphasised her view that the French Revolution had failed to bring equality to women. This went against the view of many male Revolutionaries particularly the Jacobins who saw women’s role as mothers not politicians.
She further swam against the Jacobin tide when she opposed the execution of Louis XVI due mainly to her stance against the death penalty. She was placed in a yet more perilous position when her allies the Girondins were expelled from the Convention and arrested on mass. This did not stop her from publishing a placard calling for a national plebiscite on the future political path of France. She wanted the people to decide whether the country should be a Republic, a federalist government or a constitutional monarchy. It was this publication that led to her arrest in 1793.
She spent three months in jail and was able to write various texts. However on the 2nd of November 1793 she was sentenced to death and the following day she was executed.