Marie Gouze , said Marie-Olympe de Gouges (1748 – 1793), is a feminist, French woman of letters, who became a politician and a polemicist. In particular, she wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Women and Citizens and many texts in favor of the abolition of slavery. His independence and his ideas will bring him a tragic end.
Unconvinced by marriage
Born May 7, 1748 to Anne Mouisset, Marie Gouze was declared the daughter of Pierre Gouze, butcher, although rumor has it that she is the adulterine daughter of the Marquis Jean-Jacques Lefranc de Pompignan.
At the age of 18, Olympe is married to a Louis-Yves Aubry, a Parisian caterer, no doubt an important client of the family butcher's shop, from whom she soon has a son, Pierre. Louis-Yves dies shortly after and Olympe, unconvinced by this matrimonial experience, will never remarry.
With her son, she left to join a sister in Paris; she gave Pierre a careful education there and adopted the name “Olympe de Gouges”. She meets a senior naval official, Jacques Biétrix de Rozières, with whom she has an affair that lasts until the Revolution.
The Declaration of the Rights of Women and Citizens
Educated and cultured, Olympe de Gouges frequented salons, met men of letters and started writing, creating a theater troupe with political overtones. Thus, in 1785, she presented her play Black Slavery to draw attention to the plight of slaves and criticize the Code Noir, then in force. But the performance is forbidden and the play fails to send Olympe to the Bastille; the first performance will not take place until 1789. Olympe will subsequently write other texts on the situation of slaves and will become a member of the Société des amis des Noirs.
Olympe also wrote many political texts, including her “Patriotic Notes” in which she develops a series of societal reforms. In 1792, she joined the Girondins and became a Republican. A feminist, she considers women capable of the tasks reserved for men and fights for women to be involved in political and social debates. On the model of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, she wrote a Declaration of the Rights of Women and of the Citizen where it affirms the equality of the sexes, in their civil and political rights. She writes in particular:“The woman has the right to mount the scaffold; she must also have the right to go up to the Tribune”. She campaigns in particular for the establishment of divorce, the abolition of religious marriage, the recognition of children born out of wedlock, the creation of maternity hospitals and the creation of homes for beggars. Humanist, she positions herself against the execution of the king and more particularly defends Marie-Antoinette.
Article one.Woman is born free and remains equal to man in rights. Social distinctions can only be based on common utility.
II.
The object of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of Woman and Man:these rights are freedom, property, security, and above all resistance to oppression.
III.
The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the Nation, which is only the reunion of Woman and Man:no body, no individual, can exercise authority that does not expressly emanates from it.
IV.
Liberty and justice consist in giving back all that belongs to another; thus the exercise of the natural rights of woman has no limits except the perpetual tyranny that man opposes to her; these bounds must be reformed by the laws of nature and reason.
"Children of the Fatherland you will avenge my death. »
Like Charlotte Corday, Olympe de Gouges was revolted by the massacres of the king's supporters and servants in September 1792. She attacked those responsible and in particular Jean-Pierre Marat, signatory of a circular proposing to extend the massacres of prisoners in all of France. In the spring of 1793, she denounced in her writings the excesses of the Revolution and the risks of dictatorship. On August 6, 1793, she was arrested for writings accused of questioning the republican principle. Transferred to the Revolutionary Tribunal, she was charged and sentenced to death in November.
On November 3, 1793, after writing a last letter to her son – which was intercepted – Olympe de Gouges ascended the scaffold. his last words are:“Children of the Fatherland you will avenge my death. »
She remains a great humanist figure of the late 18th century.