Olympe de Gouges

But in Paris, royalists do continue to be sent to the guillotine, but increasing- the more that they get sent to the guillotine, the less even the kind of, you know, the most anti-royalists among the sans-culottes feel that, you know, they've, they're no real threat at all.

So just to give the names of some of those royalists who are, who are sent to the guillotine, Olympe de Gouges, the famous feminist, author of the Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Female Citizen.

We did an episode on her.

Her Declaration of the Rights of Women was a kind of celebrated plea for equal rights, and she had the famous and ironic slogan, "Woman has the right to climb onto the scaffold.

She must equally have the right to climb onto the tribunal." And this Declaration of the Rights of Women had been dedicated to Marie Antoinette.

Olympe de Gouges had also publicly opposed the execution of Louis XVI and the turn of the Revolution to Terror, so that was enough to condemn her.

So she never climbed the tribunal, but on the 3rd of November, she did climb the scaffold, and that was the end of her.

Then three days later, on the 6th of November, Dominic, surely for you, the greatest moment in the entire French Revolution, Philippe Égalité goes to the guillotine.

We would see it, I guess, with Lord Byron, maybe Oscar Wilde, and I'm trying to think of female figures now [laughs] in the 20th century, that just shaped the, the zeitgeist.

Someone like Olympe de Gouges, perhaps something like that.

Yeah.

Exactly, and I think, I think it's-

And I would say that we still have in most parts of the world and probably 98% of the world, if not more, a culture that is a culture of patriarchy that predominates.

So the struggles that feminists have waged for, And I don't think, you know, you might think the modern feminist movement begins with Olympe de Gouges and the French Revolution when she says, well, why is it just the rights of men? What about the rights of women? And they promptly cut off her head, the same comrades with whom she had fought for the, you know, for the rights of peasants and workers.

So it's far, far older than that.

There have been women struggling to raise the question of equality and justice for much longer than that.

And it reminded me of other things as well.

See, feminism was not a Rockefeller product per se, but because, you know, first wave of f- r- of feminism, uh, run from, uh, oh, 1791, the Olympe de Gouges and [laughs] these other ...

And Mary, uh, uh, Wollstonecraft in 1792.

Remember suffrage.

Happy Saturday.

This month is the 235th anniversary of Olympe de Gouges' Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, published in September of 1791.

That is the work she is most known for outside of France today, but she had a whole career beyond that as an activist and as a playwright.

This episode originally came out on January 18th, 2021.

I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

And I'm Holly Frey.

We have gotten a lot of requests over the years for an episode on Olympe de Gouges, who's known, at least outside of France, primarily for a 1791 pamphlet titled Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Citizen.

And this was published as a direct response to the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, with the Declaration of the Rights of Man using the French word citoyen and de Gouges' response using the more feminine form of that word, citoyenne.