Olympe de Gouges

Olympe de Gouges was a French playwright and pamphleteer of the late 18th century, best remembered as the author of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen of 1791. An early public critic of colonial slavery and an advocate of social reform, she welcomed the French Revolution but attacked its failure to include women and, later, its violence. She was guillotined in Paris during the Reign of Terror in November 1793.

She was born Marie Gouze on 7 May 1748 in Montauban, in the Quercy region of south-western France. Her mother came from a middle-class family; her legal father was Pierre Gouze, though she later encouraged the story that she was the natural daughter of the local nobleman and writer Jean-Jacques Lefranc, Marquis de Pompignan. Historians regard this as plausible but unprovable.

In 1765, aged seventeen, she was married against her wishes to Louis Yves Aubry, a caterer. A son, Pierre, was born the following year, and her husband died soon after when the river Tarn flooded. She never remarried, and took a new name built from her surname and her mother's middle name, Olympe. With the backing of a wealthy businessman from Lyon, she moved to Paris in 1768, where she mixed in literary salons.

De Gouges published a semi-autobiographical novel in 1784 and turned to the theatre, eventually writing about 40 plays. Unlike many women dramatists of the day, she published under her own name. Her best-known play, first titled Zamore et Mirza and later L'Esclavage des Noirs, was among the first French dramas to present slavery from an enslaved person's point of view. The slave-trading lobby campaigned against it, and when the Comédie-Française finally staged it after a legal fight, it closed after three performances amid organised heckling. In 1788 she also published Reflections on Black People, linking royal despotism in France to slavery in its colonies.

Over her career she published some 68 pamphlets and open letters, addressed to the king, the queen and leading ministers. They proposed a patriotic fund, care for the elderly and abandoned children, hostels for the unemployed, a jury system and the right to divorce.

The Constitution of 1791 gave political rights only to tax-paying men. Answering the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, that year de Gouges wrote her own declaration for women, dedicating it to Marie Antoinette. In it she argued: "A woman has the right to mount the scaffold. She must equally have the right to mount the speaker's platform." When the slave revolt broke out in Saint-Domingue, she condemned violence on both sides and was accused of having inspired the rising.

Close to the moderate Girondins and in favour of a constitutional monarchy, she opposed the trial of Louis XVI and in December 1792 offered to help defend him. After his execution she publicly attacked Maximilien Robespierre and the Montagnards. In 1793 a poster in which she called for a vote on whether France should be a unitary republic, a federal one or a constitutional monarchy led to her arrest on 20 July, since advocating a return of the monarchy had been made a capital crime. Refused a lawyer, she spent over three months in prison, still smuggling out writings against the Terror. The Revolutionary Tribunal condemned her on 3 November 1793 and she was executed the same day, three days after the Girondin leaders.

Revolutionary officials soon cited her fate as a warning to politically active women, and the Convention closed women's political clubs that autumn. Her declaration nonetheless circulated widely; Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman appeared the following year. Largely forgotten for almost two centuries, de Gouges was rediscovered through a biography by the historian Olivier Blanc in the 1980s, and a Paris square was named after her in 2004.

Our 1783 map shows the kingdom in which she made her name as a writer, and the 1800 map shows the French First Republic that emerged from the Revolution she both supported and criticised.