Olympe de gouges childhood

Women's Rights and the French Revolution: A Biography of Olympe de Gouges by Sophie Mousset

Women's Rights and the French Revolution is Sophie Mousset's biography of the playwright and feminist activist Olympe de Gouges.  I first learned about Olympe a long time ago, in a college class on the French Revolution, when we read her most famous work, Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, where she said that women should have the same rights as men, including the right to vote and hold political office.  The document did not have much effect on the leaders of the Revolution, who either ignored Olympe or ridiculed her, but later on it was recognized as a pioneering work of feminist theory, and had a great influence on Mary Wollstonecraft and other early feminists.

Olympe was born Marie Gouze in 1748 in the city of Montauban in southern France.  Her first language was Occitan, the regional language of the south of France, which is actually closer to Catalan than French.  She did not learn French until much later.  Her pseudony

Portrait of Olympes de Gouges by Alexander Kucharsky, Collection particulière

Olympe de Gouges, née Marie Gouze

*May 7, 1748 (Montauban, France)
†November 3, 1793 (Paris, France)

Spouses: Louis-Yves Aubry

Children: General Pierre Aubry de Gouges

Olympe de Gouges was a playwright and political activist during the French Revolution. She was born as Marie Gouze in Monauban as the daughter of Anne-Olympe Mouisset and Pierre Gouze, a butcher, but her biological father may have been Jean-Jacques Le Franc, Marquis de Pompignan. At 16, she was married against her will to Louis-Yves Aubry, who died two years later. Rejecting the institution of marriage, she gave herself the name Olympe de Gouge and moved to Paris with her young son, Pierre. The following years were spent in pursuit of her intellectual education, supported by Jacques Biétrix de Roziéres, a wealthy merchant. Soon, de Gouges established herself as a fixture in Parisian society; she held salons and began writing poetry, novellas, pamphlets and plays. A passionate advocate of human rights, de Gouges welco

Olympe de Gouges (1748 – 1793) was born Marie Gouze, in southern France. As a young woman of 16, she was forced into an arranged marriage by her family. When her husband died a year later, she chose not to remarry. Instead, she moved to Paris where she reinvented herself and adopted the name ‘Olympe de Gouges’. Here she began formulating her ideas and campaigning for a more equal society.

Olympe de Gouges believed women should have the same rights as men – a revolutionary idea at the time. She wrote prolifically about this, most famously in her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen (1791). Here she bravely drew attention to the fact that, while the French Revolution called for liberty and freedom, this did not apply to women. De Gouges also wrote plays – performed by her own theatre company – calling for an end to slavery and raising awareness of social issues.

Ultimately, her views and active campaigns were deemed a threat to the ideals of the Revolutionary government and she was arrested, during what became known as the Reign of Terror. Refusing to stay q

Copyright ©dadtori.pages.dev 2025