Olympe de Gouges (1748–1793)

Olympe de Gouges was the pseudonym of Marie Gouze, born in Montauban, Quercy (present-day Tarn-et-Garonne) in southwestern France. Her mother Anne Olympe Mouisset Gouze was the daughter of a bourgeois family, but the identity of her biological father is ambiguous. In 1765, at age 16 or 17, she was married against her will to Louis Yves Aubry, a caterer, with whom she had a son. Shortly afterwards, her husband died in a flood and Marie moved to Paris. There she began visiting the salons and became a playwright and human rights activist under the name Olympe de Gouges. A handful of her 30 or so plays was staged by the Comédie Française, the national theater of France. In 1788, she published Réflexions sur les hommes nègres, which opposed the practice of slavery in the French colonies. Today she is perhaps best known as an early women's rights advocate. In her Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne (Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, 1791), she challenged the patriarchy and the denial of equality to women. She also wrote the semi-autobiographical Mémoire de Madame de Valmont sur l’ingratitude et la cruauté de la famille de Flaucourt (Memoir of Mme de Valmont, 1788). As the French Revolution became more heated, her forceful expression of opinions and influence were considered dangerous by the men in power. She was executed by guillotine during the Reign of Terror. Although Olympe de Gouges was a celebrity in her lifetime and reached a large audience, she fell into obscurity -- before being rediscovered in the 1980s through a biography by historian Olivier Blanc.