On this day in 1793, Olympe de Gouges was executed by guillotine. She is best known for her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen and other writings on women’s rights and abolitionism.
A passionate advocate of human rights, she was one of France’s earliest public opponents of slavery. Her plays and pamphlets spanned a wide variety of issues including divorce and marriage, children’s rights, unemployment and social security. in response to the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, de Gouges published her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, in which she challenged the practice of male authority and advocated for equal rights for women.
A passionate advocate of human rights, de Gouges greeted the outbreak of the Revolution with hope and joy, but soon became disenchanted when égalité (equal rights) was not extended to women. In 1791, influenced and inspired by John Locke’s treatises on natural rights, de Gouges became part of the Society of the Friends of Truth, also known as the “Social Club,” which was an association whose goals included establishing equal political and legal rights for women. In her pamphlet on the Rights of Women she expressed, for the first time, her famous statement: A woman has the right to mount the scaffold. She must possess equally the right to mount the speaker’s platform.
She became more and more disillusioned with the Revolution and more and more vehement in her writing. her poster Les Trois urnes, led to her arrest. Olympe decreed in this publication that “Now is the time to establish a decent government whose energy comes from the strength of its laws; now is the time to put a stop to assassinations and the suffering they cause, for merely holding opposing views. Let everyone examine their consciences; let them see the incalculable harm caused by such a long-lasting division…and then everyone can pronounce freely on the government of their choice.”
Marie-Olympe de Gouges was arrested on 20 July 1793. She spent three months in jail without an attorney as the presiding judge had denied de Gouges her legal right to a lawyer on the grounds that she was more than capable of representing herself. On 3 November 1793, the Revolutionary Tribunal sentenced her to death, and she was executed for seditious behavior and attempting to reinstate the monarchy.
De Gouges’s Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen had been widely reproduced and influenced the writings of women’s advocates in the Atlantic world. One year after its publication, in 1792, the keen observer of the French Revolution Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Writings on women and their lack of rights became widely available. The experience of French women during the revolution entered the collective consciousness. Revolutionary novels were published that put women at the center of violent struggle, such as the narratives written by Helen Maria Williams and Leonora Sansay. At the 1848 Women’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, the rhetorical style of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen was employed to paraphrase the United States Declaration of Independence into the Declaration of Sentiments, which demanded women’s right to vote.
The execution of Olympe de Gouges
Pets like Halloween (sort of)
Street name…
On this day in 1990, 25 years after their version was recorded, The Righteous Brothers went to No.1 on the UK singles chart with Unchained Melody. The track had been featured in the Patrick Swayze film Ghost. Written by Alex North and Hy Zaret, ‘Unchained Melody is one of the most recorded songs of the 20th century, with over 500 versions in hundreds of different languages. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOnYY9Mw2Fg
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