The Declaration of the Rights of Women and Citizens Olympe de Gouges versus Marie-Antoinette

Olympe de Gouges, femme de lettres partisane de la Révolution, et Marie-Antoinette, reine de France figure de l’Anti-Révolution, auront eu au moins un point commun : celui d’être condamnées à mort par le tribunal révolutionnaire – la reine le 16 octobre 1793, Olympe de Gouges le 2 novembre. Deux ans plus tôt, cette dernière écrit, signe et diffuse une Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne qu’elle dédicace, en rhétoricienne (im)pertinente, à Marie-Antoinette.

Par Cécile Berly, historienne

In this autumn of 1793 when the Terror reigns even if it was never voted for, women are the scapegoats of a policy that is no longer content to denounce the enemy through words alone. On October 30, the Convention banned women from meeting and closed women's clubs. There is a desire to deny them any place in public space. Those who risked it were considered unnatural, as dangerous, vicious women, ready to do anything to make the Revolution collapse. If the latter grants civil rights to women, the Assembly never debates their political rights.

A feminist manifesto before the letter

On September 14, 1791, King Louis XVI finally took an oath to the Constitution, the preamble of which was the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, voted by the National Assembly on August 26, 1789. The same day, the woman of letters Olympe de Gouges makes public her Declaration of the Rights of Women and Citizens. This text, distributed in the form of a brochure, is very structured. After a long dedication to Marie-Antoinette, because she is now the queen of the French, the author apostrophizes the man about women's rights. What follows is the Declaration itself which, logically, begins with a preamble followed by seventeen articles and a postamble. The brochure ends with a Social Contract for Man and Woman, which Olympe de Gouges proposes in place of marriage (religious and/or civil). Widowed since she was eighteen, she is fundamentally opposed to marriage, which she considers being the “true tomb of trust and love”. She experienced her widowhood as a liberation: that of no longer being alienated from an older husband, who was probably violent and did not share any of her tastes. In addition, only his widowhood guarantees him the ability to fulfill himself in letters. Ancien Régime society only authorized widows to sign and print their literature, whereas married women could not do so without written authorization from their husbands. Olympe de Gouges will be one of the first female voices to advocate free union.

In her Declaration of the Rights of Women and Citizens, Olympe de Gouges demands equal civil and political rights between men and women. In more than one way, this text is the founder of what we would call, approximately a century later, feminism. Until September 1791, the Revolution did little in favor of women and their rights. However, they have already acquired some civil rights: religious vows have been abolished, which makes forced veiling obsolete, and in inheritances, the sharing of property is now equal between the heirs. To these rights fiercely defended by Olympe de Gouges in some of her dramatic or political texts, she adds that of divorce which she considers fundamental. Before her Declaration, she dealt with it for the first time in a play, The Necessity of Divorce, written at the very beginning of 1790. In February 1792, in the streets of Paris, she put up a poster, Le Bon Sens du French, in which she defended divorce, in particular for women victims of domestic violence. The law on divorce by mutual consent will be passed on September 20. To protect divorced women and their children, she was the first to suggest the establishment of alimony.

To the Queen

In her Declaration of the Rights of Women and Citizens, Olympe de Gouges confronts the Revolution, as well as society as a whole, with all its contradictions. His Declaration, a pastiche of that voted in August 1789, undermines the idea that these rights are in no way universal. How can we talk about universality without real equality between men and women? How can we consider these rights as inalienable to the extent that they are denied to women? If Olympe de Gouges dedicates this brochure to Marie-Antoinette, whom she nevertheless hates, it is to better emphasize the universality of this fight. To the one who is now the queen of the French, still considered, although hated, as a maternal figure for the people of France, to the one who would be the only woman capable of acting in the public debate in favor of her own. Because she is the king's wife, it would be possible for her to defend the cause of women at the highest summit of the State, to finally exert a benevolent influence in favor of a just, virtuous, and even glorious fight. In short, Olympe de Gouges offers Marie-Antoinette to atone for her behavior as a scoundrel queen, reviled by public opinion for years. Defend women's rights to rehabilitate one's conduct, one's reputation spoiled by lavish spending, by plots to reign in the king's place or to plunge the kingdom into war.

It is unknown whether the text of the Declaration of the Rights of Women and Female Citizens reached the Queen. If so, did she read it carefully or skim condescendingly? If Marie Antoinette was always very attached to her freedom as a woman, the question of women's rights was completely foreign to her. Its political culture is that of absolutism. Implicitly, it recognizes a hierarchy of divine order between social orders, between the dominant and the dominant, and between men and women. She loathes this Revolution which is underway. She cannot and does not want to understand its values such as freedom of opinion or expression; equality, universality, and fraternity are subversive ideas, defended by the factious. In his eyes, there are no citizens, but subjects. Only the king is the guarantor of political and social order. Covertly, it works towards the destruction of the Revolution. Destroy so as not to be, in turn, destroyed.

From the spring of 1789, Olympe de Gouges moved to Versailles to follow the opening of the Estates General and then the debates of the Constituent Assembly, until the departure of the royal family from the castle, after the bloody days of the 5th and October 6. In her writings, she forcefully condemns popular violence and, in particular, that of women. She considers unacceptable what the queen was subjected to, whether verbal or physical. If Olympe de Gouges embraces the Revolution, she constantly denounces the use of violence for political ends. She is a revolutionary who remained faithful to the monarchy, a moderate who, over the months, grew closer to the Girondins. In May 1791, Olympe de Gouges wrote and distributed an Address to the Queen, preceded by an address to King Louis XVI and followed by another to the Prince de Condé, one of the leaders of the Armed Counter-Revolution in Europe. In this address, written as a warning, Olympe de Gouges tries to convince her not to betray the Revolution under any circumstances because the very survival of the monarchy is at stake. In vain. The flight stopped in Varennes, during the third week of June, largely thought out and organized by the queen, is experienced as an unforgivable betrayal by the one who presents herself as "the most ardent royalist Patriot, to life and to dead ".

Patriot and royalist

Patriot and royalist, she certainly remained so until the fall of the monarchy in August 1792. Following the assassination of the mayor of Étampes, André Simonneau, by a crowd demonstrating against the high cost of food and the scarcity of grain, the Legislative Assembly decides to pay him funeral honors transformed into a celebration of the Law, which will take place on June 3, 1792. Olympe de Gouges, accompanied by three citizens, appears at the bar of the Assembly to read a petition demanding that women can finally participate in festivals celebrating the Nation. This initiative is almost unanimously applauded. Responsible for organizing the women's procession, she opened a subscription to finance the white outfits and braided oak hairstyles worn by female citizens. She solicited the generosity of the queen by sending her a letter through her superintendent, the Princess de Lamballe. Marie-Antoinette takes 1,200 pounds from the royal coffers to give them to the organizers of the Festival of the Law. She would have taken advantage of this to try to secretly secure the services of this Olympe de Gouges about whom she hears a lot, if not reading it.

The monarchy overthrown, the royal family imprisoned, Olympe de Gouges published a letter dated December 16, 1792, which she then had posted in the streets of Paris, in which she offered to assist Malesherbes in defending Louis Capet, the man and not the traitor-king. Through this courageous and generous proposal – Olympe de Gouges is resolutely opposed to the death penalty – she attracts the wrath of those who affirm that the king must die so that the Revolution can live, as well as of all those, countless, who consider it hysterical, virago, distorted because it wants to “politicize”.

A tragic ending

In the fall of 1791, reception of the Declaration of the Rights of Women and Female Citizens was almost zero. Few voices defend women's rights. The previous year, Condorcet published the Essay on the Admission of Women to the Right of Citizenship. In Germany, Theodore von Hippel disseminated such ideas, while Mary Wollstonecraft, from England, wrote one of the founding texts of feminism, Vindication of the Rights of Women, translated into French in 1792. In the logic of Olympe de Gouges, Marie-Antoinette becomes, in a way, a figure serving his rhetoric. The queen is the counter-example of what women must and can no longer be in times of revolution: women of influence thanks to their power of seduction, for the sole benefit of their interests and their coterie. When Olympe de Gouges wrote her Declaration, it had been almost ten years since Marie-Antoinette had been nothing but the bad queen, the bad woman, the bad mother. The first embodies a progressive, humanist, and moderate Revolution, while the second can only defend an ultra-conservative position. Both are mocked, degraded, vilified: one because she claims to have ideas, to write them, to sign them, and to have them read; the other, because she is the queen of a world about to be over.

However, in the fall of 1793, they both met a tragic end. The prison experience, an unfair and hasty trial, a public execution. Olympe de Gouges and Marie-Antoinette give, despite themselves, all its meaning to this most well-known passage from the Declaration of the Rights of Women and Female Citizens, taken from an article on the scaffold; she must also have the right to go to the podium. » By cutting off their heads, the Revolution cut off their speech.

And for the revolutionaries to rejoice, as we can read in the newspaper Le Moniteur Universel, in November 1793: “In a short time the revolutionary tribunal has given women a great example which will undoubtedly not be lost for them: because justice, always impartial, constantly places lesson alongside severity. Marie Antoinette, raised in a perfidious and ambitious Court, brought the vices of her family to France. She sacrificed her husband, her children, and the country which had adopted her to the ambitious views of the House of Austria... She was a bad mother, and a debauched wife... and her name will forever be a horror to posterity. Olympe de Gouges, born with an exalted imagination, took her delirium for inspiration from nature. She wanted to be a statesman and it seems that the law punished this conspirator for having forgotten the virtues appropriate to her sex. »

Excerpts from the dedication to the Queen of the Declaration of the Rights of Women and Citizens

" Madam,

Little accustomed to the language used by Kings, I will not use the adulation of Courtiers to pay you homage to this singular production. My aim, Madam, is to speak frankly to you; I did not wait, to express myself thus, for the era of freedom: I showed myself with the same energy in a time when the blindness of despots punished such noble audacity.

When the whole Empire accused you and held you responsible for its calamities, I alone, in a time of trouble and storm, had the strength to take your defense. […] May a nobler employment, Madam, characterize you, excite your ambition, and fix your gaze. It is only up to the one whom chance has elevated to an eminent place, to give weight to the development of Women's Rights, and to accelerate its success. […] Support, Madam, such a beautiful cause; defend this unfortunate sex, and you will soon have half of the Kingdom for yourself, and at least a third of the other. »

Excerpts from the postamble of the Declaration of the Rights of Women and Citizens

“Woman, wake up; the tocsin of reason is heard throughout the universe; recognize your rights. The mighty empire of nature is no longer surrounded by prejudice, fanaticism, superstition, and lies. The torch of truth has dissipated all the clouds of stupidity and usurpation. The slave man multiplied his strength and needed to resort to yours to break his chains. Having become free, he became unfair to his companion. […] Courageously oppose the force of reason to vain pretensions of superiority; […] Whatever barriers are placed against you, it is in your power to overcome them; you just have to want it. […]

Women have done more harm than good. Constraint and dissimulation were their share. What force had taken from them, cunning has restored to them; they resorted to all the resources of their charms, and the most irreproachable could not resist them. Poison, iron, everything was subject to them: they ruled over crime as well as virtue. The French government, above all, depended, for centuries, on the nocturnal administration of women; the cabinet had no secret for their indiscretion; embassy, pontificate (M. de Bernis, in the manner of Madame de Pompadour), cardinalate: finally everything that characterizes the stupidity of men, profane and sacred, everything was subjected to the greed and ambition of this sex in the past contemptible and respected and since the Revolution, respectable and despised. […] »