in Público, February 2022

About 230 years ago, after decades of brutal and costly wars, the kingdom of France plunges into a severe economic crisis. The Assembly that brings together representatives of the three states, is convened. To the king’s left sit the third estate representatives, claiming political rights and demanding a better and fairer distribution of wealth. To the king's right sit the clergy and the nobility, fighting to keep their privileges, including the tax exemption regime. There is severe hunger among the peasants and poverty prevails. The bourgeois merchants of the cities, inspired by Enlightenment values and the example of the American revolution, head a movement that results in the establishment of the first Republic on the European continent. One of the revolution highlights was the writing of the French Constitution of 1791, which incorporates the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen – passed to the king's left.

Anyone who considers themselves left or right today inherits this topography and a significant part of its ideological apportionment. We chose sides convinced that humanity at large was involved, but women did not vote or sit on any of the wings of the Revolutionary Assembly. Hence, it is crucial to know the life arc of the woman who writes, amid the French Revolution: "The Constitution is null and void if the majority of the individuals who compose the nation have not cooperated in its elaboration."

Marie de Gouges was born in 1748, the daughter of a bourgeois family in the South of France. At 17 she is forced to marry a man she does not love. She is widowed five years later, never remarries, but falls in love with a wealthy merchant and, in 1770, follows him to Paris. Under the new name of Olympe, she becomes an active author in Parisian intellectual circles, a “femme des Lettres”. De Gouges signs her works as ‘citoyenne’, introducing a word never used before into the common lexicon. It was not until 20 years later that the word ‘citoyenne’ was used instead of ‘madame’ and ‘mademoiselle’.

In 1774, at the age of 26, De Gouges wrote a play, The Slavery of Negroes, where she recounts the escape attempts of two enslaved people. Her antislavery positions garner enmities. About her, a remarkable man, seated at the right hand of the king, writes: "Madame de Gouges is one of those women to whom one feels like giving razor blades as a present; a woman who with her pretensions loses the charming qualities of her sex. Every woman who is a playwright is in a position that does not belong to her, regardless of her talent."

De Gouges continues to write about slavery and extends her activity to other causes, such as the abolition of the death penalty, the right to vote, and the right to divorce. She attends the salons of Madame de Condorcet, where the women's association Cercle Social meets. Olympe is 41 years old when the French Revolution breaks out, and she welcomes it with great enthusiasm. But soon becomes disillusioned for the revolution did nothing to consecrate women's civic and political rights.

In response to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, De Gouges published the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Citizen, where she claims that "women are born free and remain equal to men in rights." Article X of the Declaration reproduces a phrase of her that became popular in Condorcet’s salons: "If women have the right to the scaffold, they must also have the right to the tribune." She dedicates the work to Queen Marie-Antoinette, to whom she writes: "The revolution will only come about when all women are aware of their deplorable destinies and the rights they do not have in society."

But this was not her sole disagreement with the revolutionary process. De Gouges strongly opposed the death penalty and the imminent beheading of sovereigns. Accused of conspiring against the Republic, Louis XVI was tried and beheaded. Nine months later, Queen Marie-Antoinette had the same destiny. And the following month, at the age of 44, on November 3, 1793, Olympe de Gouges had the same destiny. She was sentenced to death as the revolutionary tribunal concluded that she was on the side of those who preferred a constitutional monarchy to the Republic. Thus began a period known as La Terreur, led by Robespierre, who, in turn, had the herculean task of putting an end to more than a thousand years of absolutist monarchy, once and for all.

We will never know whether the constitutional monarchy, defended by the more moderate wing, would have had better results or cut off fewer heads. The admirable thing about the position of Olympe de Gouges is that, as a revolutionary, she does not lose sight of the horizon, where she includes the rights of sovereigns defeated by history. She seems to believe in the varied nature of everyone and tries to explain the revolution to kings and sovereignty to the revolutionaries. She does so in a pedagogical, inclusive, and fraternal becoming, far ahead of the political practices of her time – and ours.

Let's imagine that Olympe de Gouges travels through history and visits us in the present. Ah, how radiant the world of today seems to her! How happy she is about women's freedom, independence, and mobility; how interested she is in the sciences and politics – representative democracy, does it work, where does it fail? It looks normal to her that there are unglamorous men who seem to come directly from her own time on the chamber's right side. "Strange that there are so few of them," we imagine her saying, "and how lovely that their heads were not cut off," she adds.

Olympe votes in an election and feels very moved while doing so. When she hears about the welfare state, she declares it to be the political invention of the 19th century. It is easy to see what contemporary causes she would be involved in if she were to stay among us: racism, women's rights, inclusion, and citizenship. And surely, she would be highly interested in the energy transition and the climate crisis. Predictably, the animal cause would also touch her. We know enough about Olympe to guess which side of the House she would sit on and the linkages she would try to establish with the opposite wing. It is unfortunate that she is not alive today; we need people with practice in dealing with the absurd and the untenable. And that they do so keeping in mind all that has improved in the meantime – from a great deal to very little.