Olympe de Gouges executed - November 3, 1793

On this day in 1793, writer and activist Olympe de Gouges was executed for sedition.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class. It's a production of I
Heart Radio. Greetings, I'm Eves and welcome to This Day
in History Class, a show that believes no day in
history is a slow day. Today is November three, nineteen.

(00:24):
The day was November three, se Alampe de Gouche was
sentenced to death and executed by guillotine. Googe was a
playwright and an activist who advocated for women's rights and
the abolition of slavery. Googe was born Marie Goose in
southern France in seventeen. She married Louis Aubrey, a man

(00:46):
much older than her, in seventeen sixty five, and they
had a son together, but Aubrey died not long into
the marriage, and Googe vowed to never marry again. She
became close to a businessman named Jacques Beatrix de Rosier,
who set her up in Paris. He supported her for
several years until his resources ran dry. Not a lot

(01:09):
is known about her early education, but it is evident
that she was mostly self educated. She preferred to use
secretaries to transcribe her literary work. Though she was often
accused of being illiterate, she was knowledgeable about the ideas
of the Enlightenment and familiar with the works of many
philosophers in Paris, she rubbed shoulders with famous writers and philosophers.

(01:33):
Googe herself wrote plays, novels, and socio political pamphlets. By
the late seventeen eighties, she was believed to be the
author of novellas in several plays in the style of
drama bourgeois, which was popular in France in the late
eighteenth century. Dramatist Luis Vastien Mercier helped her navigate the
Comedie Francaise, the national theater in France, and published in

(01:56):
stage some of her plays. Unlike other women play rites
at the time, Goog chose to publish her plays under
her own name and defy the standards of what content
was appropriate for women to produce. Her early plays had
mixed reviews, but her later plays, which were more political,
produced stronger reactions. They often explore themes of injustice. Her

(02:19):
play The Generous Man explored the political powerlessness of women.
Her first stage production, originally called Zamore and Mirza or
The Happy Shipwreck, was accepted by the Comedy Francaise when
it was submitted anonymously, but once they found out she
was the author, the play was shelved. In it too,

(02:39):
enslaved people were liberated. After revisions, the play was performed
under the title Black Slavery or the Happy Shipwreck in
Sight nine. Abolitionist praised the production, but some actors and
French colonists tied to the slave trade protested since the
play highlighted the inhumanity of slavery. Some thought it would
incite bolt in the colonies, and the play shut down

(03:02):
after only a few performances. By this point, France was
on the verge of the French Revolution. Goose tried light comedy,
but most of her playwriting was political and responded to
contemporary issues. In her plays, she discussed girls who were
forcibly sent to convents, imprisonment for debt, and the powerlessness

(03:22):
of women in marriage. Through her plays, she often expressed
the ideas that all women have agency and the injustices
that women face are tied to larger social ones. Still
in her work, she negatively depicted revolutionaries and monarchists in
the Revolution. She was critical of the queen and king,
but maintained the view that a constitutional monarchy was the

(03:44):
best way to go for France. Gouge remained a monarchist
almost until the end, when she became disillusioned by the
monarchies in action. She was also a political activists. Outside
of her socially charged literary work, she advocated for governmental
and social reform in the press and in her pamphlets.
She called for elimination of the sexual double standard, and

(04:06):
she championed women's independence and access to political rights. She
wrote The Rights of Women as a response to the
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen,
criticizing the document for its omission of women's rights. As
the revolution ramped up, her writings became more charged. She
published a poster called the Three Urns, calling for a
plebiscite for a choice between a unitary republic, a federalist government,

(04:30):
or a constitutional monarchy. She was arrested and the Jacobins
sentenced her to death first edition and calls to reinstate
the monarchy. Guge was the only woman executed first edition
during the Reign of Terror, a period during the French
Revolution marked by massacres in public executions. According to an obituary,
she was also executed for quote having forgotten the virtues

(04:53):
of her sex, I mean Jeff Coote and hopefully you
know a little more about history today than you did yesterday.
If you're hungry for more history, you can find us
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(05:15):
heart media dot com. Thanks for going on this trip
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