Abstract
Before the inclusion of gender as a category worthy of serious consideration, historians either ignored the women who participated in the French Revolution, restricted them to marginalia or reduced them to stereotypes. Even Mary Wollstonecraft, in her An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, written in 1794 in the wake of the Terror, accepted the negative interpretation of the women’s march on Versailles of October 5/6, 1789 as an Orleanist plot, and describes the women of the people as rabble, “the lowest refuse of the streets,”1 who had been bribed, manipulated, and led by men disguised in women’s clothes. And while Michelet in his Les Femmes de la Révolution (1854), praises these same women for a generosity born of spontaneity and sensibility, he laments their credulity and lack of reflection which, in his view, later made them easy prey for priests and religion.2 More often, nineteenth century historiographers, reflecting the prevailing bourgeois ideology, made a distinction between, on the one hand, praiseworthy revolutionary women, such as Marie Antoinette, the Carmelites of Compiègne, and Mme.
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Notes
Mary Wollstonecraft, An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution and the Effect it has produced in Europe (New York: Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints, 1975), pp. 126–130.
As Chantal Thomas shows in her “Heroism in the Feminine” (an unpublished manuscript), Michelet could not reconcile female sensibility with a Revolution conceived in terms of reason.
For a summation of historical perspective on revolutionary women, and of Olympe de Gouges in particular, see Olivier Blanc’s Olympe de Gouges (Paris: Syros, 1981), Chapter 9.
Paule-Marie Duhet, in her Les femmes et la révolution (Paris: Julliard, 1971), reproduces some of these extraordinary caricatures.
Alfred Guillois, Etude médico-psychologique sur Olympe de Gouges (Lyon: A. Rey, 1905). See the last chapter for general remarks on revolutionary women.
See, for example, Paule-Marie Duhet ed., Cahiers de doléances des femmes en 1789 et autres textes (Paris: Des Femmes, 1981).
See Marie Cerati, Le club des citoyennes républicaines révolutionnaires (Paris: Editions sociales, 1976).
See, for example, Mona Ozouf’s La fite révolutionnaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1976).
Olwen Hufton, “Women in Revolution, 1789–1796,” in Douglas Johnson ed., French Society and the Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).
Darlene Gay Levy, Harriet Branson Applewhite, Mary Durham Johnson, eds., Women in Revolutionary Paris, 1789–1795 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979).
Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).
Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). See also “The Rhetoric of Revolution in France,” History Workshop Journal 15 (1983), pp. 78–94.
See, for example, Michèle Sarde, “Les féministes et la révolution,” in Regard sur les Françaises (Paris: Stock, 1983). The word “feminist” was not used in France until the 1830s and was probably coined by Fourier. In its most general sense it designates a solidarity among women based upon a consciousness of oppression.
This is the best known and most readily available of De Gouges’ writings. It can be found in Olivier Blanc’s Olympe de Gouges, in Benoite Groult ed., Olympe de Gouges, Œuvres (Paris: Mercure de Erance, 1986), and, in translation, in Women in Revolutionary Paris.
See Olivier Blanc’s Olympe de Gouges.
The Mémoir de Madame de Valmont can be found in Olympe de Gouges’ Œuvres, Volume I (Paris: Cailleau, 1788). All translations in the text are my own.
See the preface to L ’Homme Généreux in Œuvres, Volume 1.
The purest example of this genre is Cervantes’ La Gitanilla, in which an aristocratic child is stolen from her family by gypsies. Despite her bohemian life, she grows up impervious to the coarseness around her, remaining untouched even by the physical rigors of the weather Her final reconciliation affirms an essential identification between aristocratic sensibility and aristocratic rank. The failure of such reconciliations announces the end of the genre and the creation of a new kind of bourgeois realism.
Two plays by Marivaux, L’Ile des Esclaves (1725), which tests the structure of domestic slavery by reversing the roles of master and slave, and La Colonie (1750), which questions men’s domination of women, are particularly relevant to a reading of De Gouges’ play. They also use the romanesque trope of the shipwreck to create a new perspective on old institutions.
For an account of women playwrights in the eighteenth century, see Barbara G. Mittman, “Women and the Theater Arts” in Samia I. Spenser ed., French Women and the Age of Enlightenment (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). Playwriting was not uncommon among aristocratic women who wrote for their private theaters and friends. Mme. de Staël, for example, belongs in this category. It was very difficult for women to write for the public theaters.
In the preface to Le Philosophe Corrigé, she defends herself against Beaumarchais and invites him to test her skill by locking her in a room with only pen and paper while she writes a play. To accuse a woman of incest was not uncommon among eighteenth century misogynists, and, as in the case of Marie Antoinette, accused of incest with her son, such an accusation could lead to a death sentence.
Œuvres, Œuvres 1, p. 5.
Œuvres, Volume 11, p. 158.
Œuvres, Volume 111, pp. 92–97.
Œuvres, Volume 111, p. 93.
See, for example, the letter, signed “un colon,” in the Supplément to the Journal de Paris, 13 January, 1790. No. 4, which refers to Olympe de Gouges. While De Gouges was the target of insults, Condorcet, the president of the Société des amis des noirs, was attacked with serious arguments supporting slavery as an economic necessity for France. See, for example, the letter of M. Mosneron de l’Aulnay, Deputy of Commerce for Nantes, which he addressed to Condorcet. It was published in the Supplément to the Journal de Paris, No. 362, 28 December, 1789.
See, for example, the review in Journal de Paris, No. 364, 30 December, 1789, p. 1710: “This play was not successful. The style was too simple and the plot not simple enough. The public seemed dissatisfied right from the first scenes, which doubtless hardly predisposed it to find anything interesting in the rest of the play.”
This material is reproduced in Benoite Groult ed., Olympe de Gouges, Œuvres (Paris: Mercure de France, 1988), pp. 78–82.
See Margarete Wolters and Clara Suter eds., Marie de Gouges 1784–1793, Politische Schriften in Auswahl (Hamburg: Helmut Breslie Verlag, 1979), pp. 81–86.
See, for example, the article “Women’s Travails,” in The Economist, December 24, 1988, which expresses this common notion that De Gouges was interested only in the culture of middle class women and was terrified of the mass of poor women. This emphasis on divisions between women goes against the general thrust of De Gouges’ work which aims at solidarity based on gender.
See, for example, De Gouges’ letter of September 1789 to the National Representatives in which, defending herself against accusations of disloyalty, of being an aristocrat, she rejects facile political labels, in Marie Olympe de Gouges 1784–1793, Politische Schriften in Auswahl, pp. 81–86.
The better known Vindication of the Rights of Women, by Mary Wollstonecraft, was published a year later in 1792.
I translate from the “Déclaration des droits de la femme,” in Benoite Groult ed., Olympe de Gouges, Œuvres, pp. 99–113.
Benoite Groult ed., Olympe de Gouges, Œuvres, p. 118.
See Marie Olympe de Gouges 1784–1793, Politische Schriften in Auswahl, pp. 163–169.
Ibid., pp. 178–180.
Ibid., pp. 181–184.
For a general discussion of The Three Urns, see Olivier Blanc’s Olympe de Gouges, chapter 11.
All the documents relevant to Olympe de Gouges’ trial can be found in Alexandre Tuetey’s Répertoire général des sources manuscrites de l’histoire de Paris pendant la Révolution Française (Paris: 1890–1914), Volume X, 1912, pp. 157–163.
Chaumette’s speech was published in the Courrier Républicain, November 19, 1793.
See Olwen Hufton’s “French Society and the Revolution,” pp. 163–166.
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Diamond, M.J. (1998). Olympe De Gouges and the French Revolution: The Construction of Gender as Critique. In: Diamond, M.J. (eds) Women and Revolution: Global Expressions. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9072-3_1
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