SYMHC Classics: Olympe de Gouges

This 2021 episode covers Olympe de Gouges, known primarily for her 1791 pamphlet “Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Citizen.” But her writing and political activity went far beyond that one pamphlet.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
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

(00:25):
on January 18th, 2021. Enjoy! Welcome to Stuff You Missed
in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And I'm Holly Frey.

(00:46):
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

(01:08):
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, citoyen. They look very different in writing.
but they're pronounced a little similarly. Olymp de Gouges' writing

(01:33):
and political activity, though, went way, way beyond that one
pamphlet that she's famous for now. And also her execution,
which happened just before the start of the reign of terror,
was not because of the calls for equal rights for
women that she's become so associated with. It's a whole
other thing. So that's who we're going to talk about today.

(01:54):
And Olympe de Gouges, her upbringing and early life are
really hazy, and they are full of contradictions, some of
which are thanks to her own writing. We do know
that she was born Marie Gouges on May 7, 1748,
in Montauban, which is north of Toulouse in southern France.
Her mother was Anne Olympe Moise, a maidservant whose father

(02:15):
was a draper. And at least legally, Marie's father was
a butcher named Pierre Gouze. But there were rumors that
her father was actually Jean-Jacques Lefranc, who would later become
Marquis de Pompignan. And the Lefrancs and the Moisés had
been connected for generations. And although Jean-Jacques was only five
years her senior, he was Anne Olympe's godfather. The Tarn River,

(02:40):
which is prone to really dangerous and dramatic flooding... runs
through the region where the Guse family lived. And when
the young Marie Guse was only two, Pierre Guse died
as a result of one of these floods. Aside from
the fact that it was connected to the flooding, we
don't really know the details of the cause of death.

(03:00):
I mean, an obvious one would be that he drowned, but,
you know, flooding also causes disease and famines and other issues.
So we don't really know. At some point after that,
Marie's mother got married again, this time to a police officer.
And beyond that, we don't know much else about Marie
Guse's early life. She probably got at least some education

(03:23):
at an Ursuline convent. She could write well enough to
sign her own marriage documents, and the Ursuline convent would
have been the most likely place for a girl of
her station to have become literate. That marriage was to
Louis Aubray, who was a caterer who had been one
of the late Pierre Guse's associates. And this happened when
Marie was only 17. Marie and Louis had a son,

(03:46):
also named Pierre, about two years later. And then a
few months after that, Louis died. This was also as
a result of a Tarn River flood. And once again,
we don't really know much clarity on the details beyond
it being related to the flooding. Marie's marriage to Louis
had been against her will. And after his death, she

(04:06):
refused to marry again. And she also refused to conform
to what was expected of a widowed mother. Instead, she
moved to Paris in 1767. It is unclear whether she
took her son with her or whether she left him
in someone else's care while he was young. And she
also changed her name to Olympe de Gouges, drawing from

(04:27):
parts of Anne Olympe and Pierre Gouges' names, and also
adding the D.E., which made it sound a little more aristocratic.
She may have also meant her new name as sort
of a racy joke, because at the time, gouge was
a slang term for bawdy women. Yeah, I found totally
opposite accounts of whether she took her son with her

(04:50):
or left him with someone else. Regardless, though, in Paris,
Olympe de Gouges was supported by Jacques-Bietre de Rosier, who
was a wealthy man who owned a military transport company.
And she spent her first years in Paris really immersed
in self-study, attending and possibly even hosting literary salons, and

(05:10):
then pouring over the work of Enlightenment thinkers, particularly Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
During these years, she also would have expanded her knowledge
of French as a language. Her first language was actually
a regional dialect called Occitan. Because French was her second
language and her formal education was pretty minimal, she did
most of her writing in French through a secretary. In 1784,

(05:35):
Jean-Jacques Lefranc, Marquis de Pompéien, died, and de Gouges started
working on an epistolary novel that would be published in 1788.
And that was called Madame de Valmont's Memoirs on the
Ingratitude and Cruelty of the Flaucor Family Toward Her Own,
which rendered such services to the Sirs Flaucor. So this

(05:56):
book is one of the reasons why some of the
biographical accounts of Olympe de Gouges' early life are really contradictory.
She framed this book as a real correspondence with only
the names changed to protect the reputations of the people involved. Today, though,
most sources describe this book as semi-autobiographical. But sometimes they

(06:18):
also use the letters contained in it to try to
kind of glean some details about de Gouges' early life.
On the other hand, the first de Gouges biography, available
in English, is Women's Rights in the French Revolution, a
Biography of Olympe de Gouges. That's by Sophie Mosé, and
it was translated from French. This biography was first published

(06:41):
in 2007, and the author cites these memoirs, which, again,
is an epistolary novel. She cites them repeatedly as fact. Like,
the footnotes are literally this book. Ha ha ha ha ha.
And this novel was inspired in part by Les Liaisons Dangereuses,
which had been published in 1782 and was also written

(07:02):
in the form of letters exchanged among its characters. In
the memoir of Madame de Valmont, the main characters are
Madame de Valmont and her half-brother, son of the Marquis
de Flaucourt. In addition to their correspondence, the book also
includes Madame de Valmont's correspondence with other family members. Part
of this book's framework is an unnamed narrator or editor

(07:26):
who's brought these letters together to publish and also takes
a part in some of the correspondence. And this unnamed
editor maintains that all the facts she's putting forth in
the letters are, quote, authentic truths. And then what starts
out as a comic story told through letters gradually shifts
to document Madame de Valmont's attempts to prove that she

(07:49):
is really the Marquis' daughter. and to get his recognition
and support. The letters come together to paint the Flauquer
family as having been cruel and indifferent to Madame de
Valmont's mother, with the Marquis trying to distance himself from
her while never flat-out denying that he is the father
of her child. The unnamed editor and Madame de Valmont

(08:11):
are both generally interpreted as stand-ins for de Gouges herself,
with the Marquis de Flauquer representing the Marquis de Pompignan.
Biographer Sophie Mousset contends that the Marquis de Pompignan was
unquestionably Olympe de Gouges' biological father and that everybody in
the community knew this. Even that the Lefranc family had

(08:33):
taken pains to send Jean-Jacques away from the area to
separate him from Anne Olympe when they were young. This
just isn't something that it's possible to conclusively know at
this point, though. For Olympe de Gouges' own part, she
didn't overtly claim that the Marquis de Pompignan was her father,
but she did sort of seem to stoke the idea

(08:56):
that he could be. Since he had been dead for
four years by the time The Memoirs of Madame Belmont
was published, we really do not have his thoughts on
this matter at all, unless the letters really are his
real letters, as the book contends. Which seems like a
very long walk, but... I mean, it... It could be, like,

(09:16):
we just don't really know. And this purported connection to
the Marquis de Pompignan may have given Olympe de Gouges
access to theatrical and literary circles that she might not
have had otherwise. Apart from his status, the Marquis was
a poet, playwright, and literary critic, whose biggest claim to
fame at this point is having become the archenemy of

(09:38):
the way more famous French writer Voltaire. So the idea
that she was his unacknowledged daughter may have opened some
doors for her. And it definitely seems to have led
to some of her later advocacy on social issues related
to children born out of wedlock and their mothers. Olympe
de Gouges wrote one other novel during her lifetime, but

(09:59):
she was... a lot more prolific when it came to
writing plays, and we will get to more of that
after a sponsor break. So We know that Olympe de
Gouges had at least one wealthy benefactor who supported her

(10:20):
life in Paris. That was Jacques-Biètre de Rosier, who we
mentioned earlier. It's likely that she had other benefactors as well.
She may have had romantic relationships with some of them,
but like so many other details about her life, it's
all pretty vague. De Gouges was also friends with Madame
de Montesson, wife of Louis-Philippe I d'Orléans. That's the Duke

(10:43):
of Orléans. And at one point, she was rumored to
be having an affair with the Duke's son, who was
later known as Philippe Egalité. And this may have been
a rumor spread to try to tarnish de Gouges' reputation.
But her son Pierre did wind up getting an appointment
as an engineer, thanks to the Orléans family. As Olympe
de Gouges was making connections to some of the really

(11:04):
wealthy and powerful families of France, she was also writing
plays that focused in one way or another on injustice
and social issues. They tackled themes like divorce and women's
rights during and after a divorce, as well as sexual
double standards and the existence of debtors' prisons, the rights
of children born out of wedlock, and girls being forced

(11:27):
to marry or sent to convents against their will. Overall,
her female characters in these plays had and used their agency,
and they supported and protected one another rather than being
rivals or adversaries. And when women in de Gouges' plays
were victimized, it was not something that was played for
its own sake or for shock value. It was connected

(11:48):
back to a greater theme of social injustice. At the
same time, though, de Gouges' plays didn't necessarily dispel negative
stereotypes of women, such as the idea that women were
weak or deceitful. Instead, she framed those traits as the
inevitable consequences of women's place in French society— While there

(12:08):
were individual women who held high positions within the monarchy
or the aristocracy, women as a group had very little
overt political power. Educational opportunities for girls were really limited,
and for most women, their only options for their adult
lives were to get married or to enter a convent.

(12:29):
And either way, they had virtually no property rights or
control over their own lives and bodies. So, for example,
de Gouges saw women as deceitful because they had to
be to survive in this environment, and as weak because
they were given no opportunities to build their own strength.
Olympe de Gouges established a private amateur theater in Paris.

(12:52):
But when it came to public theater, there was really
just one option. the French National Theatre, known as the Comédie-Française,
which essentially had a monopoly on professional theatre. The Comédie-Française
accepted new plays and then performed them in the order
that they were received. So if there was a backlog,
which there usually was, there could be a really long

(13:14):
delay between a play's acceptance and its actual performance. Accepted
plays were not published until they had been performed, or...
until three years after they had been accepted, whichever might
come first. That gives you an indication of how big
the backlog was. Playwrights whose plays were accepted were given
entry privileges at the theater, but when it came to

(13:35):
the performance of the play itself, that was completely out
of their control. So especially for new playwrights who were
first trying to make a name for themselves, their careers
really rested on the whims and political shifts of the Comédie-Française.
This was true for Olympe de Gouges. In 1784, she
wrote Zamora and Mirza, or The Happy Shipwreck. Sometimes that's

(13:58):
translated as The Fortunate Shipwreck. This was a melodrama that
takes place in the East Indies, involving the shipwrecked, aristocratic
San Fremont family, as well as an enslaved Asian couple.
The shipwreck is described as happy because it leads to
the enslaved couple being freed. Degouge submitted this play to

(14:19):
the Comédie-Française anonymously when it was accepted in 1785. As
time passed after her play was accepted, Degouge started writing
to the theater and its actors about when it would
be performed. She became so insistent that in September of 1785,
the troop leader wrote back to her and told her
that they were pulling that play from the repertoire and

(14:40):
striking her name from the list of people who had
entry privileges at the theater. The theater also petitioned to
have her arrested. That might sound a little extreme. This
was not really a unique situation at all. It was
common for playwrights to become really frustrated with the Comédie-Française
to the point of being combative with their correspondents. It

(15:02):
was also pretty common for the company to then reverse
their acceptance of the play. But what was really unusual
was for a playwright who was treated this way to
be a woman. Between 1761 and 1789, the Comédie-Française accepted
only nine plays written by women. To put that in context,

(15:23):
the royal regulations required the company to produce between 25
and 40 new plays a year. It was not doing that.
It was really performing more like 10 or 12, which
honestly still sounds like a large number of plays. It
was accepting more work than it was performing, though, so...
Plays by women just made up a really tiny portion

(15:45):
of the theater's repertoire. I feel like this is the
story of so many companies who set really big goals
at the beginning of every year. Yeah. There's no way
you're going to meet them. Aside from de Gouges, only
two of those women corresponded with the company about their work.
That was the Delorme sisters, who had written a one-act

(16:06):
comedy together. The Comédie-Française performed that comedy only once, and
the Delorme sisters felt that it had been dropped in
favor of work by better-known playwrights. They revised the play
and resubmitted it, and the company rejected that revision six
months later. So while the company had taken the step
of penalizing other playwrights who pushed too hard with their correspondence,

(16:31):
Olympe de Gouges was really the only woman to face
such a treatment. The Delorme sisters had not had their revision... but, like,
they had also not been stripped from the roles. There
was no warrant out for their arrest. Or threatened with arrest.
So she wrote to the Duc de Richelieu, who was
one of the first gentlemen of the king's bedchamber, noting

(16:52):
that while the Comédie-Française had treated other playwrights this way,
the theater's conduct was, quote, extraordinary toward a woman. The
duke got her status with the company restored... And although
the Comédie-Française still did not perform that play, her correspondence
on the subject became a little more conciliatory after this.

(17:14):
Four years passed between the time when The Happy Shipwreck
was accepted and when it was finally performed. And in
that time, de Gouges had revised it repeatedly. And in
August of 1788, she had printed an unbound version of
the play, which was technically allowed under the policies of
the Comédie-Française. but it was also considered kind of a

(17:35):
rude move on her part. Yeah, she had not quite
gotten to that three-year mark yet. She kind of did
an end run around the letter of the law. By
the time the company did perform the play in 1789,
it was shorter. The story took place in the Caribbean,
and the characters of Zamora and Mirza had become African

(17:56):
rather than Asian. The play had been retitled The Slavery
of Negroes or The Happy Shipwreck. It's often been described
as the first explicitly abolitionist play in French, and the
first French play told from the point of view of
enslaved people. Even though the Comédie-Française did finally perform this work,
the performances themselves did not go smoothly. Because of its

(18:20):
abolitionist focus, it drew heavy criticism from wealthy people who
had connections to French colonies in the Caribbean that relied
on enslaved labor. Abolitionists praised the play, while landowners hired
hecklers to disrupt the performances. Yeah, some of the people
paying people to disrupt the performances would have been just, like,
people who had investments, as well as, like, people who

(18:42):
directly owned these plantations and the enslaved workers who were there.
Degouge also claimed that there was sabotage on the part
of the actors involved. The ones who had been cast
in the roles of Africans did refuse to darken their
skin for the roles. So the idea of white actors
and blackface was still absolutely rooted in racism, but it

(19:07):
didn't have quite the same connotations in the late 1700s
as it would develop during and after the era of
menstrual shows that started to develop in the early 1800s.
France's movement for the abolition of slavery was still in
its infancy when Olympe de Gouges first wrote Zemmour and Mirza.
The Society of the Friends of Blacks was established in 1788,

(19:29):
and de Gouges became a member. Slavery was abolished in
France in 1794, although Napoleon restored it in 1802. By
her count, Olympe de Gouges wrote more than 40 plays,
although only 12 of them survive, and only four of
them were actually staged during her lifetime. And aside from

(19:49):
her novels and plays, she also wrote more than 60
political pamphlets during the French Revolution, and we will get
to that after another quick sponsor break. Olympe de Gouges
The Carrelle des Femmes, or the Woman Question, was a

(20:11):
literary and philosophical debate that had been going on in
France and other parts of Europe for hundreds of years
prior to the French Revolution, starting in the Renaissance. It
involved questions about the nature of women and about women's
rights and status within the society. And a lot of
these same questions were argued again during the French Revolution.

(20:33):
Although men were doing a lot of this arguing, women
were also politically active during the French Revolution, particularly when
it came to subjects that were considered part of women's sphere.
A big one was food and access to food. In 2017,
we did an episode on the Women's March on Versailles,
which started on March 5th, 1789. And this was a

(20:55):
march from Paris to Versailles with the goal of getting
the monarchy to address a serious food shortage and return
to Paris. Women, many of whom were anonymous, published work
on subjects like education and poverty, as well as criticizing
divorce and inheritance laws that favored men. The various factions
that arose during the revolution varied a little bit in

(21:18):
how welcoming they were of women. I say a little bit.
It was broader than that. There were some factions that
were like, nah, we only have men in our leadership
and others who did allow women at least some participation.
So women also formed their own political clubs during the
French Revolution. Many of those clubs were still focused on

(21:38):
the subjects that were considered appropriate for women, like food
and education. Olympe de Gouges had some overlap with these
other often anonymous women. She wrote on some of the
same subjects, including divorce, inheritance, and education, particularly education for girls.
She called for women to be able to publicly name

(21:59):
the fathers of their children born out of wedlock and
for those children to be legitimized. She also advocated an
end to the dowry system and the creation of services
for widows, mothers, and children living in poverty. But unlike
many other women writers who were often anonymous, she also
wrote under her own name, and she wrote more broadly

(22:20):
on other political issues and on women's political and social
rights in general. She advocated for professions to be open
to anyone, regardless of their sex, their color, or their
social status. She believed that celibacy requirements for monks and
nuns set the stage for abuse and called for them
to have marriage rights. She proposed a voluntary tax to

(22:43):
try to address wealth inequality and to save the French
Republic from bankruptcy. She also advocated a luxury tax that
would pay for services for the poor. She called for
an end to the death penalty, and she advocated the
establishment of a national theater that would focus on publishing
and staging the work of women playwrights. Some of the

(23:04):
reforms that she advocated were ultimately adopted, including protections for
children who were born out of wedlock and divorce rights
for women. These were passed into law by the National
Assembly in 1792. On August 26, 1789, the French National
Constituent Assembly issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man

(23:24):
and the Citizen, written by the Marquis de Lafayette and
the Abbé Sieyès, along with Thomas Jefferson. That includes 17
articles outlining the fundamental rights of male citizens. And in 1791,
the National Assembly adopted a new constitution, one that gave
the right to vote only to male taxpaying citizens. To

(23:48):
a lot of people, this was a little at odds
with the French Revolution's professed values, including liberty and equality.
De Gouges' response to all of this was the Declaration
of the Rights of Woman and the Citizen, sometimes translated
as the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the
Female Citizen, thanks to her use of the word citoyenne.

(24:12):
It followed the same basic format as the Declaration of
the Rights of Man, including a preamble, 17 articles, and
an epilogue. It was also dedicated to Marie Antoinette, encouraging
her to take up the cause of the revolution and
to use her position to advance the cause of women's rights.
De Gouges published this on September 14th, 1791, to coincide

(24:35):
with Louis XVI's ratification of the new constitution that excluded
women from full citizenship rights. And the prologue to this
piece began, quote,' Man, are you capable of being fair?'
A woman is asking, at least you will allow her
that right. Tell me, what gave you the sovereign right
to oppress my sex? The 17 articles follow the Declaration

(24:59):
of the Rights of Man point by point. And in
some cases, they simply use the word woman or women
in place of man or men, or they specifically include
women in addition to men where they're referenced. So Article
1 of the Declaration of the Rights of Women, for example, is, quote,
woman is born free and remains equal to man in rights.

(25:21):
Social distinctions may be founded only on the common good.
Other articles add additional nuance. For example, Article 10 in
the Declaration of the Rights of Man is, quote, no
one shall be disquieted on account of his opinions, including
his religious views, provided their manifestation does not disturb the
public order established by law. In the rights of women,

(25:44):
that is written as, quote, Article 11 is about free expression.
And in de Gouges' writing, she specifically cites the rights
of mothers to name their children's fathers. Quote, The free

(26:11):
expression of thoughts and opinions is one of the most
precious rights of woman, given that this liberty ensures the
legitimacy of fathers and their children. Any female citizen can
therefore freely declare, I am the mother of your child,
without a barbarous prejudice forcing them to hide the truth,
unless in response to the abuse of this freedom in

(26:33):
cases determined by the law. In a postscript that's longer
than the rest of the document, Degouge calls for women
to wake up and acknowledge their rights. She contends, quote,
women have done more harm than good. Constraint and dissimulation
have been their lot. What force stole from them, ruse returned.

(26:53):
They had to resort to the power of their charms
and the most irreproachable man could not resist. She then
draws parallels between marriage and slavery, ending on the idea that, quote,
marriage is the tomb of trust and love. She also
prints a template for what she describes as a social
contract between a man and a woman, a union that,

(27:14):
unlike marriage, involves a man and a woman coming together
in equality and of their own volition. In the postscript,
she also recounts an argument with a coachman who tried
to overcharge her, and this is something that she includes
as an example of the everyday injustices and indignities that
women face in But it also seems enough like a

(27:35):
digression that a lot of time it is left out
of English translations. Olympe de Gouges had always faced criticism
and derision for her writing and her political activism. There
were allegations of affairs that were meant to discredit her,
along with claims that she was illiterate or a fraud.
But when it came to the Declaration of the Rights
of Woman, what really drew suspicion was her dedication to

(27:59):
Marie Antoinette, which reinforced suspicions that that she was in
fact a monarchist. And unlike a lot of the other
suspicions that swirled around her, this one was actually pretty accurate.
In spite of her revolutionary writings and her general support
of the French Revolution, Olympe de Gouges thought a constitutional

(28:19):
monarchy was the system of government that was most suited
to the national character of France. But she also thought
that the monarch should be a symbolic emblem for France
as a nation and should work for the good of
its most vulnerable people, not a symbol of power and
a tool to carry out the wishes of the aristocracy.

(28:39):
When King Louis XVI was tried for treason in 1792,
Olympe de Gouges offered to defend him. Her argument was
that he unquestionably had done wrong, but that he had
done wrong when he was king. By her argument, since
France had abolished the monarchy and become a republic in
September of 1792, the former king was no longer guilty

(29:02):
in the eyes of the republic. The republic could not
prosecute someone who was no longer the monarch for something
the monarch had done. Her offer to defend the king,
by the way, was not accepted, and he was, of course,
executed on January 21, 1793. Yeah, we're not suggesting that
defense would have worked, but. It's kind of a weird

(29:22):
pretzel logic. It's a little, yeah. It's like, no, he
stopped being the person that you hate when he stopped
being king. Like, that's not quite right. So by the
time Louis the 16th was executed tensions had been growing
between revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries and also among different factions within

(29:46):
the revolution for years the french revolutionary wars had also
started in 1792 and that had put even more strain
on this young republic The revolution had become increasingly radical
and increasingly intolerant of suspected monarchists and counter-revolutionaries. Olymp de
Gouges had been mostly aligned with the revolutionary faction known

(30:09):
as the Girondins. 29 of them had been expelled from
the national convention and arrested and then would be executed
a few months later. In the face of all of
this tension, in July of 1793, de Gouges proposed that
each department of France be allowed to govern itself, rather
than the one unified nation of France that was required

(30:31):
by law. And this idea seems to be what finally
led to her arrest on July 20th, 1793, not long
after the mass arrest of the Girondins. She seems to
have genuinely believed that if she cooperated, that her writings
would demonstrate that she was loyal to France and the revolution,
and that she would be cleared of all suspicion. She

(30:53):
even took investigators to her office and storage space when
they couldn't find any incriminating writing in her home. The
materials that they wound up confiscating included an unfinished five-act
play called France Saved or the Tyrant Dethroned. As its
title suggests, the monarch is dethroned in this play, but

(31:15):
its sympathetic portrayal of Marie Antoinette was used as evidence
in Marie de Gouges' trial. So was a pamphlet she
had written called Three Governments Battle to the Death, which
called for the nation of France to make an ultimate
choice among monarchy, federalism, or republicanism. She had also been
highly critical of Maximilien Robespierre and of the increasing violence

(31:38):
associated with the revolution and the war. On July 25th, 1793,
de Gouges was charged with, quote, having composed a work
contrary to the expressed desire of the entire nation and
directed against whoever might propose a form of government other
than that of a republic, one and indivisible. She was incarcerated,

(32:00):
and she continued writing, smuggling pamphlets detailing the conditions there
out of her prison. At trial, the judge denied Degouge
legal representation, so she had to represent herself. And different
accounts interpret her behavior at court very differently. She claimed
to be 38, but she was really 45. She's also

(32:22):
described as sighing, smirking, or rolling her eyes as the
charges were read. either, depending on who you're reading, clearly
not taking the proceeding seriously, or trying to kind of
performatively embody the idea of innocence, almost like a character
from one of her plays. She was ultimately found in

(32:43):
violation of a law that banned the composition or printing
of works that advocated the reestablishment of royalty or the
dissolution of the Republic, which was punishable by death. She
tried to avoid execution by claiming to be pregnant, but
a doctor examined her and said that she was not.
As is the case with any historical examination of this

(33:04):
kind that we talk about on the show, we really
don't know what was done, what this doctor did as
a test, or whether it would have been able to
even detect a pregnancy. Yeah, I mean, eventually it becomes
relatively obvious, but in the early stages, who knows? In
the early stages in the 1790s. Yes. Anyway, Olympe de

(33:28):
Gouges was executed in Paris on November 3rd, 1793. And
her last words were, children of the homeland, you will
avenge my death. The word homeland, as she said it
in French, is la patrie. And that's also translated as
both motherland and fatherland, depending on who you're looking at.

(33:50):
because the patrie part comes from the word for father,
but la is also a feminine article, so it kind
of meshes both of that. Olympe de Gouges' son, Pierre,
denounced her during all of this, and while she did
write several letters to him during her imprisonment and her trial,
those were all confiscated. She was buried at Madeleine Cemetery

(34:11):
in Paris, which was later closed and cleared with the
skeletal remains being moved to the Paris catacombs. Although... In
Unearthed in July 2020, we talked about the discovery of
skeletal remains in the Chapelle Expatoire, which is a memorial
chapel that was built on the site of the former cemetery.

(34:32):
So it's possible that the remains of Olympe de Gouges
are in the Paris catacombs. Also possible that they could
be in these relatively newly unearthed skeletal remains in this chapel.
De Gouges continued to be criticized and vilified after her death.
in ways that questioned her politics, her character, and her womanhood.

(34:52):
In 1793, French politician Pierre-Gaspard Chaumet wrote, quote, Never forget
that Virago, the woman-man, the impudent Olympe de Gouges, who
abandoned the cares of her household to get involved in
politics and commit crimes. She died on the guillotine for
having forgotten the virtues that suit her sex. It really

(35:13):
took decades. I mean, even into like the 1990s, before
people started really viewing Olympe de Gouges as a forerunner
of the feminist movement and to really seriously study her work.
There were calls to have her commemorated at the Pantheon
in Paris in 1993 and then again in 2013. The
first woman to be interred at the Pantheon was Sophie Berthelot,

(35:36):
whose husband, chemist and politician Marcelin Berthelot, had died within
hours of her passing. The first woman to be interred
at the Pantheon based on her own accomplishments was Marie Curie,
when that didn't happen until 1995. Although Alain de Gouges
has not been Pantheonized, a bust of her was installed

(35:58):
at the National Assembly in 2016. That is Alain de Gouges.
As I said just a second ago, there was not
a lot of serious look at her work and her
life until roughly the 90s, really, and I would like
to say I still find... the available research lacking. There
was just not as much of it as I would

(36:18):
have liked and not as robust as I would have
liked it to be. Thanks so much for joining us
on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note,
our email address is historypodcast at iheartradio.com. And you can
subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

(36:40):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.