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Olympe de Gouges

(1748 – 1793)

Much like the American Declaration of Independence which states "All men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and happiness" would be used by the underclasses in post-Revolutionary American to demand an equal share in government, the French Revolution's Declaration of the Rights of Man would be used by French men and women who were excluded from government to demand an equal share in that government. In both cases, the documents which formed the very basis of the country's Revolution contained the very seeds which would one day be used to undermine the power of that narrow segment of post-Revolutionary society and government that had been empowered by the revolution. The cognitive dissidence which arose from the difference between theory and practice stimulated generations of members of the underclasses to struggle for their rights.

Condorcet asserted "the rights of men result from the fact that they are sentient beings, capable of acquiring moral ideas and of reasoning concerning these ideas. Women, having these same qualities, must necessarily possess equal rights." This assertion was not obvious to eighteenth-century men. For much of the century, leading philosophers had described men as active citizens, the doers of actions, the possessors of the ability to think and reason, and women as passive citizens, persons who enabled the doers of action to perform those acts, imitators rather than thinkers, blank slates which reflected men's ideas. Because men were initiators of ideas and action and women were merely imitators, it was considered natural that men, but not women, should be actors upon the political stage.

At the same time, women were in fact political creatures, as political as the men in an age of absolute monarchies. Through their salons, women brought together the men of influence. By controlling who was and who was not invited to attend their salons, women controlled much of the political discourse of the day. The Revolution required that the two images of women, as theoretically passive and as de facto active, somehow be reconciled one to the other.

One of the challenges for feminist Republican Revolutionaries, then, was to create a new image of woman as an active citizen, a human being that, like men, is a rational, thinking being, but, at the same time, is sufficiently unlike men to require political power for women as women to further the interests of women as women. In short, to succeed, feminist Republican Revolutionaries would have to create the concept of equality in difference, a feminism that was neither difference feminism nor equality feminism, but a combination of both schools of thought.

This dual definition of citizenship, of active and of passive citizens, applied to men as well as to women. Despite the rhetoric of the Revolution -- Liberty, Equality, and Brotherhood -- the rich and powerful who largely controlled elected bodies feared "universal" suffrage, the right of all men who had reached their majority to vote. They feared the demands of the uneducated, propertyless masses. [As a note, throughout the nineteenth-century, feminist would denounce male usage of the term 'universal' to mean 'all men' as if women were not part of this universe.] This fear of the masses also known as 'the tyranny of the majority' recurred throughout the nineteenth-century. Active citizenship for men was at first extended to "independent men," men who had a minimum property qualification (and demonstrated so by paying at least three days of wages in taxes). After the fall of the monarchy, the active/passive citizenship dichotomy for men disappeared for the time being .

De Gouges addressed the issue by playing the part of an active citizen by writing political broadsides, by giving speeches, by attending the legislature, and by "petitioning" government officials on a variety of topics, including the abolition of slavery, the rights of illegitimate children, the royal veto, maternity hospitals, and even regicide. For de Gouges the most political act was to write: spoken words would soon be lost, but the written word endured; spoken words required an immediate audience, but the written word could be disseminated far and wide. By being, in fact, an active citizen, de Gouges asserted that she, and by extension all women, deserved to be treated like active citizens.

After the French National Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789, to claim the rights of citizenship for women, de Gouges rewrote the document to include women. Often, she merely included the phrase 'and woman' where the word 'man' appeared or substituted 'woman' for 'man'. In so doing, she made explicit women's claim to citizenship, removing the invisibility which women so often endured. By explicitly claiming the rights of the citizeness, de Gouges acknowledged that women's difference from men was sufficient enough that women needed to have their rights as women while at the same time acknowledging that men and women are similar enough that they have equal rights. To see how differently the Rights of Man reads with just the substitution of the word "men" with "men and women", here is Article 6 from the Declaration of the Rights of Man:

"Law is the expression of the general will. Every citizen has a right to participate personally, or through his representative, in its formation. It must be the same for all, whether it protects or punishes. All citizens, being equal in the eyes of the law, are equally eligible to all dignities and to all public positions and occupations, according to their abilities, and without distinction except that of their virtues and talents."

With the insertion of just two words 'and woman', this article becomes a radical feminist polemic. Here is the same article as written by de Gouges in her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Citizeness (the translations differ slightly)

The laws must be the expression of the general will; all female and male citizens must contribute either personally or through their representatives to its formation; it must be the same for all: male and female citizens, being equal in the eyes of the law, must be equally admitted to all honors, positions, and public employment according to their capacity and without other distinctions besides those of their virtues and talents.

According to de Gouges, women along with men "must be equally admitted to all honors, positions, and public employment according to their capacity and without other distinctions besides those of their virtues and talents." Implied in these words are women's right to vote, to run for public office, to serve if elected, to be appointed as magistrates, to serve as judges in courts of law, to be appointed to advisory positions, and to work in all levels of the Civil Service. From humble clerks to exalted ministers in both civilian and military positions, women had the right to all public employments without regard to their sex. By the same token, women had the same rights as men to the benefits which the government provided including education and job training, private sector employment in government sponsored jobs (yes, they had that kind of job back then, too), and aid to the poor. Sounds like a radical feminist manifesto from the 1960s, not the 1790s, doesn't it? And all she did was change a couple of words. Brilliant. Her Declaration is at the same time a critique of and a correction of the original Declaration of the Rights of Man.

Now let's compare the free speech articles of the two documents, Article 11. In the Rights of Man it reads:

The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man. Every citizen may, accordingly, speak, write, and print with freedom, but shall be responsible for such abuses of this freedom as shall be defined by law.

In the Rights of Woman it reads:

The free communication of thoughts and opinions is one of the most precious rights of woman, since the liberty assures the recognition of children by their fathers. Any female citizen thus may say freely, I am the mother of a child which belongs to you, without being forced by a barbarous prejudice to hide the truth; [an exception may be made] to respond to the abuse of this liberty in cases determined by the law.

To de Gouges, the freedom of speech for women includes the right of a woman to publicly declare the name of the man who fathered her children, even if that man is a nobleman who raped her, a man who seduced her, or a man whom she seduced. In one sentence, she obliquely addresses the rape of women by men, the destruction of women's reputations through their seduction by men, and the right of women to willfully engage in a sexual relationships as lovers or mistresses. At the same time, she brings to our attention an issue in which women have a strong interest in having the right to speak freely while men have a strong interest in suppressing women's speech.

Perhaps the best remembered article (Article 10) in de Gouge's Declaration reads in part ". . .woman has the right to mount the scaffold; she must equally have the right to mount the rostrum. . ."

De Gouge's feminist manifesto resonates across the ages. Denounced in her own time as a crack-pot and a nuisance, in part for her strident feminism, in part for her strong support of the Girondins, and in part for her bitter denunciation of Robespierre, de Gouges was arrested as an enemy of the Revolution after placarding the streets of Paris with broadsides denouncing the government for beheading the king. Tried and convicted, de Gouges went to the guillotine on November 3, 1793, in a very real sense acknowledging that she had accomplished what she had set out to do – she had set out to be recognized as a political individual. Not long thereafter, women were banned from all political clubs . By May 1795, all public assemblies of women in groups of more than 5 or more women were banned.

Here is what the Moniteur universel says about the deaths of Marie Antoinette, de Gouges, and Madame Roland, all of whom went to the guillotine at about the same time.

In a short span of time, the Revolutionary tribunal has just given to women a great example that will not be lost on them: for justice, always impartial, metes out its lessons severely.

Marie-Antoinette, raised in a perfidious and ambitious court, brought the vices of her family to France. She sacrificed her husband, her children, and the country that had adopted her to the ambitious views of the House of Austria. . . . She was a bad mother, a debauched wife. . . and posterity will forever look down in horror upon her name.

Olympe de Gouges, born with an exalted imagination, took her delirium for an inspiration of nature. She wanted to be a statesman and it seems that the law has punished this conspirator for forgetting the virtues that suit her sex.

[And as for Madame Roland] . . . the desire to be learned led her to forget the virtues of her sex, and this forgetfulness, always dangerous, led her to her death.

Footnotes:

References:

Condorcet, Marquise de, On Giving Women the Right of Citizenship (1790)

Gouges, Olympe de, Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Citizeness, 1793

Scott, Joan Wallach, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996] pp. 19 - 56

Vanpée, Janie, 'Le Déclaration des Droits de la Femme et de la citoyennes: Olympe de Gogue's Re-Witing of La Déclaration des Droits de l'homme', in Catherine R. Montfort (ed.), Literate Women and the French Revolution of 1789 [Birmingham, Al: Summa Publications, 1994] pp. 55 - 79

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last updated February 2003