SYMHC Classics: Olympe de Gouges
Stuff You Missed in History Class
This episode of Stuff You Missed in History Class explores the life and legacy of Olympe de Gouges, a pioneering feminist writer and revolutionary activist best known for
Key takeaways
- Olympe de Gouges' 'Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Citizen' was a direct feminist response to the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man, using the feminine form 'citoyenne' to emphasize gender inclusion.
Main topics
- Olympe de Gouges' early life and contested parentage
- The creation and significance of 'Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Citizen'
Notable quotes
'She changed her name to Olympe de Gouges, drawing from parts of Anne Olympe and Pierre Gouges' names, and also adding the D-E, which made it sound a little more aristocratic.'
Conclusion
Olympe de Gouges remains a crucial but often overlooked figure in feminist history, whose bold advocacy for gender equality
Transcript preview
Speaker 8 (0:00) This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Speaker 1 (0:05) Hey, it's Bobby Bones. Join me and former NFL quarterback Matt Castle every Wednesday on our podcast, Lots to Say, with me, Bobby Bones, and Matt Castle. You're in training camp, and the rookie quarterback has one good throwing session in front of the media. Suddenly, everybody online says he should start over you week one. How do you handle this? You just go back out to practice the next day and wait for him to mess up. Listen to Lots to Say with Bobby Bones and Matt Castle on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 7 (0:35) 30 years ago, an island off Manhattan almost brought down New York City. Who will you trust? Your friends and neighbors? Or will you trust the people five miles overseas? This is a story about neighbors turning on each other and what happens when a forgotten place decides it's had enough. Speaker 1 (0:52) But we're not stopping, are we? 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Listen to Good Moms, Bad Choices from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 2 (2:53) Happy Saturday. This month is the 235th anniversary of Olympe de Gouges' Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, published in September of 1791. That is the work she is most known for outside of France today, but she had a whole career beyond that as an activist and as a playwright. This Speaker 4 (3:15) episode originally came out on January 18th, 2021. Enjoy! Speaker 4 (3:22) Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Speaker 2 (3:32) Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And I'm Holly Frey. We have gotten a lot of requests over the years for an episode on Olympe de Gouges, who's known, at least outside of France, primarily for a 1791 pamphlet titled Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Citizen. And this was published as a direct response to the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, with the Declaration of the Rights of Man using the French word citoyen, and de Gouges' response using the more feminine form of that word, citoyenne. They look very different in writing, but they're pronounced a little similarly. Olymp de Gouges' writing and political activity, though, went way, way beyond that one pamphlet that she's famous for now. And also her execution, which happened just before the start of the reign of terror, was not because of the calls for equal rights for women that she's become so associated with. It's a whole other thing. So that's who we're going to talk about today. Speaker 4 (4:45) And Olympe de Gouges, her upbringing and early life are really hazy, and they are full of contradictions, some of which are thanks to her own writing. We do know that she was born Marie Gouges on May 7th, 1748, in Montauban, which is north of Toulouse in southern France. Her mother was Anne Olympe Moise, a maidservant whose father was a draper. And at least legally, Marie's father was a butcher named Pierre Gouges. But there were rumors that her father was actually Jean-Jacques Lefranc, who would later become Marquis de Pompignan. And the Lefrancs and the Moisés had been connected for generations. And although Jean-Jacques was only five years her senior, he was Anne Olympe's godfather. Speaker 2 (5:29) The Tarn River, which is prone to really dangerous and dramatic flooding, runs through the region where the Gouze family lived. And when the young Marie Gouze was only two, Pierre Gouze died as a result of one of these floods. Aside from the fact that it was connected to the flooding, we don't really know the details of the cause of death. I mean, an obvious one would be that he drowned, but... You know, flooding also causes disease and famines and other issues, so we don't really know. At some point after that, Marie's mother got married again, this time to a police officer. And Speaker 4 (6:07) beyond that, we don't know much else about Marie Guse's early life. She probably got at least some education at an Ursuline convent. She could write well enough to sign her own marriage documents, and the Ursuline convent would have been the most likely place for a girl of her station to have become literate. Speaker 2 (6:25) That marriage was to Louis Aubray, who was a caterer who had been one of the late Pierre Guse's associates. And this happened when Marie was only 17. Marie and Louis had a son, also named Pierre, about two years later. And then a few months after that, Louis died. This was also as a result of a Tarn River flood, and once again, we don't really know much clarity on the details beyond it being related to the flooding. Speaker 4 (6:52) Marie's marriage to Louis had been against her will, and after his death, she refused to marry again. And she also refused to conform to what was expected of a widowed mother. Instead, she moved to Paris in 1767. It is unclear whether she took her son with her or whether she left him in someone else's care while he was young. And she also changed her name to Olympe de Gouges, drawing from parts of Anne Olympe and Pierre Gouges' names, and also adding the D-E, which made it sound a little more aristocratic. She may have also meant her new name as sort of a racy joke, because at the time, gouge was a slang term for bawdy women. Speaker 2 (7:35) Yeah, I found... Totally opposite accounts of whether she took her son with her or left him with someone else. Regardless, though, in Paris, Olympe de Gouges was supported by Jacques-Bietre de Rosier, who was a wealthy man who owned a military transport company. And she spent her first years in Paris really immersed in self-study. attending and possibly even hosting literary salons, and then pouring over the work of Enlightenment thinkers, particularly Jean-Jacques Rousseau. During these years, she also would have expanded her knowledge of French as a language. Her first language was actually a regional dialect called Occitan. Because French was her second language and her formal education was pretty minimal, she did most of her writing in French through a secretary. Speaker 4 (8:24) In 1784, Jean-Jacques Lefranc, Marquis de Pompéien, died, and de Gouges started working on an epistolary novel that would be published in 1788. And that was called Madame de Valmont's Memoirs on the Ingratitude and Cruelty of the Flaucor Family Toward Her Own, which rendered such services to the Sirs Flaucor. Speaker 2 (8:46) So, this book is one of the reasons why some of the biographical accounts of Olympe de Gouges' early life are really contradictory. She framed this book as a real correspondence, with only the names changed to protect the reputations of the people involved. Today, though, most sources describe this book as semi-autobiographical, but sometimes they also use the letters contained in it to try to kind of glean some details about Deguja's early life. On the other hand, the first de Gouges biography available in English is Women's Rights in the French Revolution, a Biography of Olympe de Gouges. That's by Sophie Mosse, and it was translated from French. This biography was first published in 2007, and the author cites these memoirs, which, again, is an epistolary novel. She cites them repeatedly as fact. Like, the footnotes are literally this book. Speaker 4 (9:45) And this novel was inspired in part by Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which had been published in 1782 and was also written in the form of letters exchanged among its characters. In the memoir of Madame de Valmont, the main characters are Madame de Valmont and her half-brother, son of the Marquis de Flaucourt. In addition to their correspondence, the book also includes Madame de Valmont's correspondence with other family members. Speaker 2 (10:13) Part of this book's framework is an unnamed narrator or editor who's brought these letters together to publish and also takes a part in some of the correspondence. And this unnamed editor maintains that all the facts she's putting forth in the letters are, quote, authentic truths. And then what starts out as a comic story told through letters gradually shifts to document Madame de Valmont's attempts to prove that she is really the Marquis' daughter and to get his recognition and support. Speaker 4 (10:44) The letters come together to paint the Flauquer family as having been cruel and indifferent to Madame de Valmont's mother, with the Marquis trying to distance himself from her while never flat out denying that he is the father of her child. The unnamed editor and Madame de Valmont are both generally interpreted as stand-ins for de Gouges herself, with the Marquis de Flauquer representing the Marquis de Pompignan. Speaker 2 (11:10) Biographer Sophie Mousset contends that the Marquis de Pompignan was unquestionably Olympe de Gouges' biological father and that everybody in the community knew this. Even that the Lefranc family had taken pains to send Jean-Jacques away from the area to separate him from Anne Olympe when they were young. This just isn't something that it's possible to conclusively know at this point, though. For Olympe de Gouges' own part, she didn't overtly claim that the Marquis de Pompignan was her father, but she did sort of seem to stoke the idea that he could be. Since he had been dead for four years by the time the Memoirs of Madame Valmont was published, we really do not have his thoughts on this matter at all, unless the letters really are his real letters, as the book contends. Speaker 4 (12:02) Which seems like a very long walk, Speaker 2 (12:04) but... I mean, it... It could be. Like, we just don't really Speaker 4 (12:08) know. And this purported connection to the Marquis de Pompignan may have given Olympe de Gouges access to theatrical and literary circles that she might not have had otherwise. Apart from his status, the Marquis was a poet. playwright and literary critic, whose biggest claim to fame at this point is having become the arch enemy of the way more famous French writer Voltaire. So the idea that she was his unacknowledged daughter may have opened some doors for her. And it definitely seems to have led to some of her later advocacy on social issues related to children born out of wedlock and their mothers. Speaker 2 (12:47) Olympe de Gouges wrote one other novel during her lifetime, but she was a lot more prolific when it came to writing plays, and we will get to more of that after a sponsor break. Speaker 1 (13:00) When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months. I survived, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are The Survivor Files. I just remember this Speaker 5 (13:18) low,