Olympe de Gouges

Marie Gouze , known as Marie-Olympe de Gouges , born with Montauban the May 7th 1748 and dead guillotinée with Paris the November 3rd 1793, is a French Woman of letters, become political Femme and Polémiste. Auteure of the Declaration of the women's rights and of the citizen , it left many writings in favor of the civil laws and policies of the women and the abolition of the Esclavage of the Noir S.

It became emblematic movements for the Women's Liberation, for the Humanisme in general, and the importance of the part which it played in the history of the ideas was revalued with the rise in the academic world of the whole world.

Biography

Montauban

Born the May 7th 1748 with Montauban, Marie Gouze is declared girl of Pierre Gouze, who does not sign with the baptism, and of Mouisset AsOlympees, married in 1737, but she learns well quickly, by her mother, who she is the natural girl of the poet Jean-Jacques Lefranc de Pompignan, the famous antagonist of Voltaire. His/her mother it even was the goddaughter of Jean-Jacques the Franc, marquis de Pompignan and of Olympe Colomb of Pomarède and any Montauban, writes the deputy Poncet-Delpech and others, knew that this pretty woman had been loved by the marquis her five year old godfather older than it.

In 1765, it marries a Parisian delicatessen, Louis-Yves Aubry, and very quickly finds mother of a little boy and almost at once widowed. Disappointed by its marital experiment, she always refuses remarier thereafter regarding the marriage as the tomb of confidence and the love . She usually carries the first names of “Marie-Olympe” (she signs several texts thus) or of “Olympe”, and she adds a particle to her patronym “Gouze” or rather “Gouges”, C-W communication adopted by certain members of her family of which his/her sister Jeanne Gouges. She wants to join this sister marries of doctor with Paris and, towards 1770, leaves Montauban with her son Pierre, future general of the armies of the République to which she makes give a very neat education.

Paris and the theater

In Paris, it éprend of a senior official of the navy, director of a powerful transport company soldiers in contract with the State. It proposal, which she refuses, but their connection lasted until the Révolution. It is thus false to affirm with those which ignore the context that Marie-Olympe de Gouges was a “courtesan”. She had perhaps some passing fancies, of the very favorites, but without common measurement with libertinage practiced in Versailles and in the mediums of the Parisian upper middle classes. Thanks to Jacques Biétrix de Rozières, who regarded it a little as his wife, it had a great financial independence, which gave him a certain way of life (it appears as of 1774 in the Almanach of Paris or directory of the people of condition) and enables him as of 1778 to be tried to write plays which is the passion of all its life. Independently of its political theater which was played under the Revolution, the part which made it famous in its time is the Slavery of the Blacks published under this title in 1792, registered with the repertory of the Comédie-Française the June 30th 1785 under the title of Zamore and Mirza, or the happy shipwreck . This part and another entitled the Market of the Blacks (1790), as its Réflexions on the negro men (1788) enabled him to join the Société of the friends of the Blacks - the Lobby of the abolitionists - created in 1788 by Brissot which speaks besides about it in its new letters, then to be quoted by the Abbé Gregoire, in the “list of the courageous Men who pled the cause of unhappy Noirs” (1808).

Gouges and the French revolution

In 1788, it is pointed out by publishing two political booklets which were very noticed and discussed in their time, in particular in the " General newspaper of France" like in other newspapers. It then develops a patriotic project of tax in its famous Lettre with the People and proposed a vast program of social reforms and sociétales in its patriotic Remarques . These writings are followed new booklets which she addresses without stopping with the representatives of the first three legislatures of the Revolution, with the patriotic Clubs and various personalities of which Mirabeau, Fayette and Necker that she admired particularly. Its positions always have very close to those of the hosts of Mrs. Helvétius, who held living room in Auteuil, and where one defended the principle of a constitutional Monarchie. In relation to the marquis de Condorcet and his wife born Sophie de Grouchy, it joined the Girondins in 1792. She attends the Talma, the Marquis de Villette and his wife, also Louis-Sebastien Mercier and Michel de Cubières, general secretary of the Commune after August 10th, which lived together as husband and wife with the countess of Beauharnais, dramatic author and woman of spirit. With them, it becomes republican as besides many members of the company of Auteuil who all practically opposed dead Louis XVI. The December 16th 1792, Mrs. de Gouges is offered to assist Malesherbes in the defense of the king in front of Convention, but its request is rejected with contempt. She considered that the women were able to assume spots traditionally entrusted to the men and regularly, practically in all her writings, she asked that the women be associated with the political debates and the societal debates. Thus, she writes: “The woman has the right to go up to the scaffold; she should also have the right to go up to the platform. ” The first, it obtains that the women are allowed in a ceremony in national matter, “the festival of the law” of the June 3rd 1792 then with the commemoration of the storming of the Bastille the July 14th 1792.

Olympe de Gouges defends with heat the Women's right . Being addressed to Marie-Antoinette to protect “her sex” that she said unhappy, she writes the Déclaration of the women's rights and of the citizen , copied on the Déclaration of the human rights and the citizen of 1789, in which she affirms the equality of the civil laws and policies of the two sexes, insist that one returns to the woman natural rights that the force of the prejudice had withdrawn to him. At that time, the vote is censitaire because it is necessary to pay three day's works to vote. Only the privileged people can vote: majority of the French people, whose men, thus does not vote. She asks the suppression of the Mariage and the introduction of the Divorce which is adopted a few months later. She puts forward in the place the idea of a Contrat signed between boyfriends and militates for the free research of the Paternité and the recognition of the newborns except marriage.

She is also one of the first to theorize, in her broad outlines, the protective system nursery school and infantile which we know today by the creation of maternities. Moreover, it recommends the creation of national workshops for the unemployed and hearths for beggars who approach the hearths of lodgings current.

End

In 1793, it is caught some highly with those which it held for persons in charge of the atrocities of the September 2nd and 3rd 1792 (“blood, even with the culprits, soils the Revolutions eternally”, said it), indicating particularly Marat. Suspecting Robespierre of aspiring to the Dictature, it challenges it in several writings what is worth a denunciation of to him Bourdon of Oise to the club of the Jacobin S. After the committal for trial of the party of Gironde entire with the convention, on June 2nd, 1793, it addresses a letter full with energy and courage, being indignant at this attentatoire measurement to the democratic principles (June 9th, 1793). This mail is censured in the course of reading. Being put in infringment with the law of March 1793 on the repression of the writings calling into question the republican principle (it had written a poster in matter federalistic or of Gironde under the title " Three ballot boxes or the Safety of the fatherland, by a traveller aérien"), it is stopped and submitted with the revolutionary Tribunal on August 6th, 1793 which accuses it.

Patient with the prison of the abbey of Saint-Germain-of-Near, claiming care, it is sent to the infirmary of the small Force, street Pavée in the Marsh, dividing the cell of one condemned to death, Mrs. de Kolly, who claimed herself pregnant. Next in October, it obtains its transfer in the pension of Mrs. Mahay, kind of prison for rich person where the mode was more liberal and where it had seems he a connection with one of the prisoners. It would then have been easy to him to escape but, wishing to be justified charges weighing against her, she publicly claims her judgment in two very courageous posters which she succeeds in making leave prison clandestinely and print so that they are widely diffused (“Olympe de Gouges with the revolutionary Tribunal” and “a persecuted patriot”, its last text, very moving). Translated with the Court in the morning of November 2nd, that is to say forty-eight hours after the execution of his/her Girondins friends, she is condemned to the capital punishment to have tried to restore a government other than one and indivisible. According to a police inspector as a civilian, the Prévost citizen present at the execution, and according to the Newspaper of Perlet as well as other testimonys, it is assembled on the scaffold with infinitely of courage and of dignity as opposed to what at the 19th century the author of the memories apocryphal books of Sanson and some historians tells of which Jules Michelet.

Its last letter is for his/her son, the general adjudant Aubry de Gouges, who disavowed it in a “civic profession of faith”, by fear to be worried. In its Declaration of the Women's rights, she had written in to a premonitory way “the woman has the right to go up on the scaffold; she must have also that to go up to the Platform”. but the prosecutor of the Common of Paris, Pierre-Gaspard Chaumette, in a speech with republican, fustigated his memory and applauds his execution, deserved according to him, would be this only because it had, said he, “forgotten the virtues which are appropriate for its sex”.

Posterity

Of alive sound, Olympe de Gouges underwent prejudices much (one said, for example, that it could not truly write and that others did that for it) and even, a certain hostility of the women who, as it says it in the postambule of its Déclaration of the women's rights (September 1791) had drawn up to now favors of their social position.

After its execution, the name of Olympe de Gouges will be dirtied, it was in particular described as prostitute, which much believed still recently.

It will be necessary to await the end of the Second world war so that Marie-Olympe de Gouges left the caricature and the anecdote. Studied, discussed, particularly with the the United States, the Japan and in Germany, its originality, its independence of mind, its courageous writings and its generosity without terminal, just as its intellectual honesty do of them one of the most beautiful humanistic figures of the end of the 18th century.

In France, some regionalistic historians, inter alia, were interested in the character, but it is after the publication (1981) of the biography of Olivier Blanc who has, the first, exhumed the impossible to circumvent handwritten sources, and during the preparation of the bicentenary of the Revolution of 1789, which the texts of Olympe de Gouges were read, played, published, finally ensuring a first and (modest) form of recognition to them.

Many university articles and in particular those of Gabrielle Verdier (the United States) and Gisela Thiele-Knobloch (Germany) finally could release the interest of the dramatic work of Olympe de Gouges which approached, not without talent contrary with an unfounded legend, new sets of themes like slavery ( Zamore and Mirza ), the divorce ( Nécessité divorce ), the forced taking the veil ( the Convent ) and other sensitive topics at its time.

Since October 1989, on the initiative of the historian Catherine Marand-Fouquet, several petitions are addressed to the presidency of the Republic asking for the pantheonisation of Olympe de Gouges. In November 1993, it initiates a demonstration in front of the Pantheon to commemorate the bicentenary of the execution of Olympe. This demonstration also fits in the claim of the parity. March 6th, 2004, a place Olympe de Gouges was inaugurated with Paris in the III {{E}} district.

In 1989, Nam June Paik created a work entitled Olympe de Gouges in the electronic fairy . This work, ordered by the municipality of Paris at the time of the bicentenary of the French revolution is today visible with the museum of Modern art of the town of Paris.

A college of Noisy-the-Dryness, a college with Champcueil (91) or a school with Montpellier (opening in 2007) bear its name, the very modern maternity of the CHU of Turns also paid homage to Olympe de Gouges, and one does not count any more the public highways the large ones or small towns like Rennes or Lieusaint (77) which baptized a boulevard of its name. The 11th promotion of the pupils territorial administrators (2003-2005), chose Olympe de Gouges for Christian name as well as promotion 2006 of Science-Po Toulouse. Lastly, the town of Montauban, birthplace of Olympe de Gouges, baptized of its name the old theater of the in October 2006 city. September 19th, 2007, the town of Bondy with inaugurated its school complex Olympe de Gouges.

On Wednesday, March 7, 2007, at the time of a meeting with Dijon within the framework of the presidential campaign, Ségolène Royal affirmed her wish, if she were elected President of the Republic, to transfer ashes from Olympe de Gouges to the the Pantheon of Paris.

Works

; Theater

the Slavery of the Blacks or the happy shipwreck (1786)
the Man generous (1786)
Democrats and aristocrats, or the curious ones about the field of Mars (1790)
Need for the divorce (1790)
the forced Convent, or wishes (1790)
Mirabeau at the Champs Elysées (1791)
saved France, or the tyrant détrôné (1792)
the Entry of Dumouriez to Brussels, or the canteen-keepers (1793)
Declaration of the women's rights and of the citizen (1791)

Extracted: Preamble :

The mothers, the girls, the sisters, representing nation, ask to be made up as an National Assembly. Considering that ignorance, the lapse of memory or the contempt of the women's rights, are the only causes of public misfortunes and of the corruption of the governments, solved to expose in a solemn declaration, inalienable and crowned natural rights of the woman, so that this declaration, constantly presents to all the members of the social body, points out their duties unceasingly to them, so that the acts of the capacity of the women, and those of the capacity of the men which can be at every moment compared with the goal of any political institution, are respected of it, so that the complaints of the citizens, based from now on on simple and undeniable principles, always turn to the maintenance of the constitution, of moralities, and with the happiness of all.

Consequently, the higher sex in beauty as in courage, in the maternal sufferings, recognizes and declares, in presence and under the auspices Être Supreme, the following Rights of the Woman and the Citizen.

Extracted: Article first :

The woman is born free and remains equal to the man in rights. The social distinctions can be founded only on the common utility.

Extracted:

Article II . The goal of any political association is the conservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of the Woman and the Man; these rights are freedom, the property, safety and especially resistance to oppression… Article X . No one should not be worried for its even fundamental opinions; the woman has the right to go up on the scaffold; she must have also that to go up to the Platform, provided that its demonstrations do not disturb the law and order established by the Law. Article XI . The free communication of the thoughts and the opinions is one of the most invaluable rights of the woman, since this freedom ensures the legitimacy of the fathers towards the children. Any citizen can thus say freely, I am mother of a child who belongs to you, without a barbarian prejudice forcing to dissimulate the truth; except answering of the abuse this freedom in the cases determined by the Law.

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