Olympe de Gouges Dies: Feminist's Voice Silenced by Guillotine

Olympe de Gouges climbed the scaffold on November 3, 1793, convicted by the Revolutionary Tribunal of seditious writings against the French Republic. Her real crime, understood by everyone present, was having demanded that the revolution's promises of liberty and equality apply to women. Two years earlier, she had published the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, a point-by-point rewriting of the revolution's founding document that asked a simple question: if all men are born free and equal, why not all people? Born Marie Gouze in Montauban in 1748, she was likely the illegitimate daughter of the Marquis Jean-Jacques Lefranc de Pompignan. She reinvented herself in Paris as a playwright, pamphleteer, and political activist, producing over 30 plays and numerous political tracts. Her 1786 play on slavery, Zamore and Mirza, was one of the first French dramatic works to argue for abolition. De Gouges initially supported the revolution but grew alarmed by its violence. She opposed the execution of Louis XVI, not from royalist sympathy but because she believed the revolution would discredit itself through bloodshed. She publicly challenged Robespierre and Marat, an act of courage bordering on recklessness during the Terror. Her poster campaign urging a national plebiscite on the form of government gave the Tribunal its legal pretext. Her execution served as an explicit warning to other politically active women. The Moniteur, the government's newspaper, commented that she had abandoned the virtues appropriate to her sex. Within days, women's political clubs were banned throughout France. Her Declaration of the Rights of Woman, ignored or mocked during her lifetime, was rediscovered by feminist scholars in the twentieth century and is now recognized as one of the earliest and most radical articulations of gender equality in Western political thought.