Gouges, Olympe de

Abstract

Marie Gouze was born in Montauban on the 7th of May 1748 to petit bourgeois parents, Pierre Gouze and Anne-Olympe Mouisset, perhaps the biological daughter of Jean-Jacques Le Franc de Pompignac, nobleman and provincial intellectual. At 16 she was made to marry Louis-Yves Aubry from whom she had a son, Pierre. She was soon widowed, refused to take her husband’s last name and never wanted to marry again; moving to Paris, she changed her name to Olympe de Gouges (combining her mother’s name and her legal father’s last name slightly modified). In the capital at first she mixed in the social circles of the salons; later she entered the circles of the philosophes, becoming a friend of some of the most noteworthy members of the movement (among those, it is worth recalling Mercier de la Rivière, Condorcet and his wife Sophie), and she was affected in particular by the influence of Helvétius and Rousseau.

Originally published in Mortimer Sellers and Stephan Kirste, Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy, © Springer Nature B.V. 2019, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6730-0_579-1.