In Our Time - Olympe de Gouges

Episode Date: May 19, 2022

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the French playwright who, in 1791, wrote The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen. This was Olympe de Gouges (1748-93) and she was responding to The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen from 1789, the start of the French Revolution which, by excluding women from these rights, had fallen far short of its apparent goals. Where the latter declared ‘men are born equal’, she asserted ‘women are born equal to men,’ adding, ‘since women are allowed to mount the scaffold, they should also be allowed to stand in parliament and defend their rights’. Two years later this playwright, novelist, activist and woman of letters did herself mount the scaffold, two weeks after Marie Antoinette, for the crime of being open to the idea of a constitutional monarchy and, for two hundred years, her reputation died with her, only to be revived with great vigour in the last 40 years.With Catriona Seth Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature at the University of OxfordKatherine Astbury Professor of French Studies at the University of WarwickAndSanja Perovic Reader in 18th century French studies at King’s College LondonProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programs. Hello, in 1791 in the French Revolution, Alam de Guz wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, a repost to the Declaration of the Rights of Man.

Where the latter stated, men are born equal, she asserted women are born equal to men, adding, since women are allowed to mount the scaffold, they should also be allowed to stand in Parliament and defend their rights. And two years later, this self-made playwright, novelist, activist, and woman of letters did herself mount the scaffold two weeks after Marie Antoinette

for the crime of being open to the idea of a constitutional monarchy. After 200 years, her reputation died with her, only recently strongly revived. With me to discuss Alam de Guj are Catherine Astabry, of French Studies at the University of Warwick, Sanya Perravich, reader in 18th century of French studies at King's College London,

and Caterona Seth, Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature at the University of Oxford. Cachona, can you set the scene with her childhood, where she was born, how she was raised? Well, if we look for Olymp de Gouge in the baptismal certificates

of Montau-Ban, where she was born, we won't find her, or at least we won't find anyone called Olymp de Gouge. because what we will find is the baptism of a child called Marie Guise, whom we know as Olymp de Guz. Marie Guz is registered as being born on the 7th of May 1748 to a father called Pierre, who is a butcher, and a mother called Olymp.

So that's the official information we have. Olymp de Guzre herself, and that was the name she chose, believed herself to be the illegitimate daughter of a Marquis, the Marquis Lefron-Pompignan, someone who was a fairly conservative individual, someone who had apparently been a friend of her mother during his youth, and someone who was known as a writer. And this is already beginning to give us some elements

which will crop up later on in Olam de Gouge's life. She's interested, for instance, in the fate of illegitimate children. She is against all forms of tyranny, including the tyranny which a husband can exercise over a wife or which an aristocrat can exercise over his servants. And she is somebody who is trying in many ways to see society in a fair way. Montaubon is in a region in the south of France

in which the usually spoken language is not standard French. They speak occiton, the language of Langdoc. She's born into the merchant class. She marries at the age of 17. And she marries somebody who is in the same general area as her father was as a purveyor of food. Her father was a butcher. They had a son and then he, this man, died, leaving her as a widow, which became very advantageous to her. And then she embarked in a new life in Paris.

Why did she do that? And why was it being a widow advantage? It's advantageous to be a widow because you can do a lot of things without being controlled by anyone. Before you're married, your father has supremacy over what you do if you're a woman. When you marry, you have to obey your husband. For instance, if you're married, you can't publish without your husband's authorization. By not marrying again, Olam de Guz, widowed, is free to publish as she wants. And that's something she will do extensively, including when she spends the last,

a part of her life in Paris with somebody who is a fairly wealthy individual and who allows her to live in relatively comfortable style, but also gives her the freedom to act as she wishes. Why did she go to Paris? And what inspired her to take up the life of a freelance writer, let's call it that to be going on with, that she did? Olambe de Guz moves to Paris presumably because she follows this man with whom she's living, Beatrix. And also because the life of Paris, of course, is far more exciting than that of the provincial town in which she was brought up. And in Paris, she is going to get entangled in an environment of people who are very interested in

performance, in theatre and in the written word. And she's going to use the written word and the theatre as means of action, as ways of gaining some form of agency in the public sphere. Sonia Paravitch, she began her writing career in earnest, in her mid-30s, in the 1780s. What was happening around Paris at that time that was exciting to her? One thing to say is by the time the 1780s came around, the great philosoph of the 18th century had all died. But they had become a kind of cult around them, especially Russo. The other thing to say when Olymp de Gu...

Why was Russo important to her? To her. Russo was someone who had been... rejected some of the literary establishment of the Anson regime. He's someone who believed deeply in the authenticity of the heart. Rousseau spoke heart to heart with his readers, and Olimb de Guz presented herself as an authentic individual who also spoke heart to heart with her readers.

What was she diving into? Well, the 1780s were just extraordinary in Paris and specific, but all over France at the time, because this is the moment where book production, the public sphere, what's called the public sphere, just exploded. And I think the thing to realize is that people did not consume books in private. They didn't necessarily read in private. There was lots of sociable spaces. What such as?

There's the literary salon, obviously. They were often considered the first place of publication where you've got, we're allowed to publish. But in the 1780s, there was many other spaces as well. There was lots of, um, uh, society. There was cafe culture. There was clubs. A lot of museum, uh, a lot of public lectures. A woman were invited as guests, for example, to belong to some of these academies and societies, even if they couldn't be full-fledged members. But the money she had from and her lover, of course, she didn't marry.

She was totally against marriage. She's spoken of as having had a salon, for instance. So that shows us a bit of money around, doesn't it? Yes, and it's interesting that one of her first plays is actually she has a privilege. The censor has approved it, and that suggests that she knew the censor, who was Suar actually at the time. So one thing to realize about France at the time is that it wasn't quite the literary marketplace

that perhaps had already developed in written, books still had to have a privilege to be published. But at the same time, my sense... There's not mean a privilege, it means permission. Permission, exactly. But my sense with Alam de Guzsche is she also has, for me anyway, when I read her a strong oral voice. And I think she kind of straddles two worlds, the more polite world, perhaps, of the salon, but also a world of the street, if you will, or of forms of communication that were as much oral as written. I mean, this was a moment in which there was lots of Pasquenaed, lots of songs, lots of poetry that was circulating as much oral as written.

She took on the abolitionist view very strongly, very early, and she had a successful play, most of her plays weren't, on slavery. Can you talk a bit about that? Well, this is an extraordinary play because there's several plays. And it's when one would read this play, I would suggest that you read all the versions. There's two that are published. And one was published in 1788, although she claimed to have written a draft much earlier. actually in 1783 or 84. And they're different.

And they're different in the title. So the first play was called Zamour or Miserra or the Happy Shipwreck. And it was a tale about two runaway slaves in the East Indies, probably on Ilde France, somewhere around there, which is not very specific, who rescue a shipwrecked French family. That was 1788. And one thing that's extraordinary about Olam de Guja is she writes extraordinary preface.

Every single publication has one preface after another, and she even writes like prefaces saying not another preface. So this play was published in 1788 after she had waited for about four years for the comedy Francaise to perform it, and they didn't. And she appended... Because they didn't like the subject, or they didn't think it was good enough.

It's not clear that they even read it, actually. That's one way to reject something. Yeah. She wasn't... I mean, she was maybe an insider in the sense that she had the privilege of the censor, but she didn't have an in into the Comédie Francaise. And she appends, in the 1788 version, she writes a reflections.

There she claims that she has always supported abolitionism. And she has this extraordinary demand where she says, you know, I've waited for so long, I want the Comedie de Frances to act this play dressed as slaves, looking like slaves, which is something that wasn't done in France at the time. People didn't wear historical costume on stage. But the one that was performed in 1789 actually had a different title. So she went from having a sentimental tale that's based in the East Indies

to a title that was very, very provocative. It was called the Happy Shipwreck or Black Slavery. And when that was performed in 1789, it was only performed for three nights because it caused such a ruckus, because people with colonial interests, they were absolutely incensed that this would be staged. They all had their own cabals in the theatre,

and basically it was just a big hue and cry and she never managed to even really perform it. It was closed after three nights. That she chose to do a play like this is quite extraordinary because my sense is that it was only around 1787, 1788, that first in London actually people had started to put on abolitionist plays. So this wasn't a common fare, let's put it. Some of her other theatre plays were much more successful.

Okay. We'll go one with Catherine Asbury. She doesn't have a very impressive record when it comes to performance figures. And I think that to understand that, we perhaps need to have a clearer idea of the way in which the system of theatre worked in the 1780s, in that to have a literary reputation, you had to go to the Comedy Francaise. There were only the three privileged theatres. So spoken theatre was the Comedy Francaise.

You had to go and present your text. You had to read your text to the actors. They were the gatekeepers. If they didn't like the text, it didn't get added to the repertoire. But even once they'd added it to the repertoire, you still then had to go through a whole series of who, to persuade them to actually bump it up the order or bribe them or encourage them. And Olai d'Augge felt that the system was not fair.

So she's pushing the boundaries the whole time at even trying to make her literary career by going to the comedy Francaise. And then she does get annoyed and goes and publishes it and runs the risk of having it removed from the repertoire completely and losing her place in the queue. So she's not afraid to take people on. She's not afraid to take big names.

on, whether that's the actors of the comedy Francares or later Orbus Pierre. How would you describe her politics? So at the point we start this story really, the 1780s when she begins to develop this literary reputation in France,

I think it's probably fair to describe her as, broadly speaking, a liberal in favour of enlightenment. She is particularly concerned by what she considers to be unfairness. So whether that's the unfairness of young girls having to marry someone their parents choose,

whether that's the unfairness that she sees in slavery, whether that's the unfairness that men of non-noble birth can have a hugely successful career based on talent, whereas a woman can only succeed if she loses her virtue. So at every turn, she finds an area of unfairness. And it's that sense of injustice really inside her that drives her to write incredible prefacees to her material, to deal with difficult issues. And so she fit broadly into a group that will be the early liberal moderates

wanting to change France without completely overthrowing the entire system. Is she well known in that group? Is that the group at the forefront of what's going on in the revolution? In 1789, I think most people were seeing the revolution as an opportunity to introduce a constitutional monarchy inspired by the British system. And she's very firmly and squarely in that moderate, progressive line. Obviously, the revolution overtakes the progressive moderates who are in favour of constitutional monarchy. So by the time we get to the middle of the revolution, she's out of step. But at the beginning of the revolution, the principles of 1789, liberty, equality, fraternity,

she's very much part of a group of political moderates who are wanting to change France for the better. Thank you. Katjana, we're talking about this enormous and very, very influential in the short and the long term upheaval in 1789. Is there any way you can tell us what changed in Paris in practical terms after that 14th of July? All sorts of things changed in practical terms after the 14th of July. One of the things which touches Olam de Gujouge most clearly, of course, is everything relating to putting on shows, because you can put on plays much more freely during the revolution than you could before when the theatres were controlled,

and publishing. Publishing is freed up. So you can circulate. information much more freely. And I think that's going to be one of the elements which Olam de Guzre will use, whether she does it, for instance, by speaking to people directly, or by publishing texts or getting plays put on. We've come later, or come now to posters. She did hundreds of posters which she pasted all all over Paris, highly coloured because only official documents could be in white.

The placards are like large sheets of paper. As you said, Melvin, they're printed on a coloured background because they're not official texts. And so if you're walking through the streets of Paris, you come across a coloured poster, what do you stop? And you look and see what it says. And these coloured posters are covered in words in Olem de Guzges' case. They've not just got a few words with a slogan or something. These are like the texts of mini brochures in which she defends her ideas.

So it's a way of getting her thoughts across to the greater public and getting her thoughts across into the arena and to people whom she might not know. And what we have to consider is that the way people would have read these texts would be quite different to what we do now, whilst literacy rates had increased in France during the 18th century,

there was still a lot of illiterate people around. And you can just imagine scenes in the street where somebody looking at a coloured poster wouldn't be able to make out what it said, but somebody else would stop and read it out, there'd be a group of people, listening and that was one of the ways in which she strove to find an audience. Do we have evidence that number of people saw it and acted on it or the ideas fed into this or that

movement? The most obvious case, of course, is called Les Troisiernes, the three ballot boxes or three urns. And these three ballot boxes are the three ballot boxes which Olam de Guz proposes should be given to the French people so that they can choose where to cast their vote. One would be constitutional monarchy. The second would be a federal government, and the third would be a republic. And that was why she was arrested.

So I think there we have a very obvious example of a placard which had an immediate effect. There are other texts by her which didn't circulate very much. And quite tellingly, the one for which she's now the most famous, the Declaration of the Rights of Women, is one which didn't circulate particularly. As far as we know, there were only five copies of it printed. We'll come back to that in the moment,

her two. Sonia, let's turn to her plays now. She's working on, let's say, broadly speaking, a couple of fronts. Well, most of her plays, she claims to have written 40. Some of them remained un-published. Some of them were published, and then only four of them were actually performed. And I think what's always difficult when you read The Theatre of the French Revolution is to realize that the published version might not at all be what was performed on stage. and she has a play that was performed after the death of Mirabeau, Mirabot in the Elysium Fields, and this was a play where it's a dialogue of the dead essentially. It wasn't the only one. There was other people wrote them as well, and it was heavily altered by the actors. She complains about it in another preface.

And she has another play that was extraordinary in 1973. It was called the entry of Jumurier in Brussels, when Jumurier, the General liberated Brussels. and it was a flop. It only was performed five times, but it's extraordinary. She had this, I think she has a real cinematic imagination. She tried to kind of portray a total theatre, have all of society on stage

and kind of present war from the perspective of the commoners. And this, again, I think one of her problems was she wrote far too much. So the actors did what they wanted with that play as well. At this stage, is she, in the milieu that is influencing the ideas that are around, spread around in the French, Revolution? It's hard to say. I think

when you read the contemporary eyewitnesses of the time, they all knew about her, so people did know about her and they do talk about her after her death. But I think what happened in the French Revolution also is that she was executed at the same time as other prominent woman, notably Marri Antoinette, as you mentioned,

Madame Colon, Charlotte Corday. So in a way, she became part of a set of women that were very prominent at the time. Let's come sideways, really, Kate. Hesbury into what could be thought of a major work. Let's start with the Declaration of the Rights of Man. What was the impact of that?

The Declaration of the Rights of Man was agreed as a text at the end of August 1789. We're talking about Lafayette and Jefferson. Lafayette and Jefferson produced a draft. The published version was then largely the work of the Abysseillaise. This document really was a stopgap. The National Assembly had said they would continue to meet until they had a constitution for France and then realised it was going to take them

quite a while to write a constitution for France. But very quickly it took on a life of its own and became a foundational document. The National Guard would swear oaths of allegiance on it. So it became something that was very quickly set in stone. It portrays an enlightened idea that education can improve society. It places the nation at the heart of everything.

so the king is not mentioned in the document. But it has a concept of man with a capital M that is abstract and universal. It also ensured that property was seen as an inalienable right. Now, that is because it was written by those with property and that included the enslaved. Women were also not included in this abstract universal idea of mankind because of notions of differences between men and women.

Partly Rousseau's fault, we keep coming back to Rousseau. Men had a monopoly of reason. Women could get in by being better at sentiment, sentimentality. Absolutely right. So there are notions that men belong in the public sphere, women belong in a private sphere. And so there's no question that women can be politically active. And so they're not included in this abstract universal concept.

Here we come to, can I turn to you now, Katriona, to the work for which is most noted, really, which is the Declaration of the Rights of Woman. Can you tell us about that, what it said and what effect it had? The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Citoyen, of the Female Citizen, is a text which Olam de Guj wrote as a reaction, as a response to the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. And Olam de Guz feels that women and men must be equal. And so what she does essentially is take the different articles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. And she then in parallel says, well, this is what happens for men and women.

So she's pleading for gender equality. And she does so, I think, very, very cleverly because she says, you know, if men are born and remain free and equal in rights, then she responds, woman is born free and remains equal to man in rights. And she stresses that any social distinctions have to be based on common utility. There are other elements in the Declaration of the Rights of Woman, which go in the sense of everything she has been fighting for during all of her active intellectual life. We mentioned the rights of illegitimate children, for instance. She also says that a woman should be able to say who is the father of her child

and that the father has to be responsible for any illegitimate children. She says, and you reminded us of that in the opening, Melvin, that woman is allowed to mount the scaffold and therefore should be allowed to voice her opinions in the assembly. So she's asking for equality in terms of natural rights, rights in terms of social rights, in terms of political rights. It's an extremely engaged document, which I think is the basis for her fame nowadays, even if it wasn't as renowned as we might have hoped it, would have been when she actually wrote it. One of the other interesting things

I think about it is that it's dedicated to Marie Antoinette, because at the stage when Olem de Guz writes the Declaration of the Rights of Women in 1791. She still believes that Marie Antoinette can be a unifying figure and that Marie Antoinette is in many ways the most important woman in France and so that if Marie Antoinette were to lead a sort of women's lobby, they might have some chance of succeeding. Sanya, thank you very much. Sanya, how alive with the ideas of sexual politics at that time?

Very much alive, actually. And it's interesting that many of her most cherished beliefs actually were actualized by the Jacobin government. In 1792, they legalized divorce for reasons of mutual incompatibility. And in November of that year, they also legalized the rights of illegitimate children to inheritance. And they also allowed for adoption. And these were three very important things that went beyond actually, Allempt de Guz, because Republicans were very much interested in undermining the patriarchal order, which was the basis for the Ansin regime, and in particular, how inheritance and property

rights passed down the generations. So I think the sexual politics were absolutely central to the revolution. I mean, that's what made... At that stage. Even in 1789, but in 1791 and 72, they were able to do what I think a number of people wanted to accomplish, which is reform marriage. How much support did that get at the time? There was, for example, lots of theatre plays that weren't written by Alim de Guzge, but were all about, I mean, the titles are just extraordinary, like the Republican wet nurse or the pleasures of adoption or, you know, divorce. And so if you were a Republican, it seemed obvious

that you would try to undermine the power of the king, obviously in the country, the priest and the religious, and the role of the family was like a mini-state. They thought this is where the revolution within the revolution would take place. Kate, can we talk more about who was supporting her? What's going on? So if we're talking about 1792, we're at the... When Paris is in Fermanent and France is in Fermanent and the thing is shifting...

We're heading towards the terror. So she can broadly be seen to belong to the political grouping that we would know as the Gérondin, called the Gérondin because they were a fairly loosely grouped set of political figures who came from the south-west of France, so from her part of the world. So they were in 1792 in favour of war because they thought that that would be the way of safeguarding the revolution.

But they also increasingly fall out of line with the Jacobin, who will be the ones who will gain political ascendancy. The Jacobin under Robespierre very much want to centralise power and the Girondin have a more diffuse concept of the revolution and see it as a federal system as the way forward. So she's broadly aligned with a political grouping that will come in opposition to the Jacobat and to Robespierre. She goes to a number of women's clubs. So she is a figure that's seen in some of the revolutionary clubs for women.

She organises part of a little revolutionary festival on law. So she's someone who is there or thereabouts. She's forever turning up at the assembly, trying to talk to them, trying to make her point, get her point across. So she's not a completely lone figure because there are political allies. But there comes a tipping point where she starts laying into Jean-Paul Marat, he of the bath and the execution

or the stabbing by Charlotte Corday. She lays into Mara, she lays into Robespierre as poisoning the revolution, as destroying the revolution. Once the revolution turns violent, she then really starts to put down a mind, mark her and say, no, this is not where the revolution should be going. And from that point on, her card is marked.

Catherine, what was her method of work? Did she continue to be dictating to her secretary, or did she write, or what was going on? Olamdouges very often dictated to secretaries, and that was something which was used against her, because you'll read lots of accounts which say, oh, she was an illiterate woman, and other accounts which will say, oh, you know, she had a debauched lifestyle. and these are generally criticisms which are used to attack any woman in the public sphere in France at the time and indeed elsewhere. We know that Gouge quite often dictates. She says she's sometimes dictating to three secretaries at the time.

This is something which male writers would have been doing too. We know who Voltaire's secretaries were, for instance, because he generally dictates letters to a secretary to take just one example. So that has nothing to do with literacy or lack of literacy. We do know that she wrote even when she was in prison, so she's writing any way she can. She feels an urgent need to communicate, I think, and the orality of it probably means that she's more at ease as someone who's come up through amateur theatre first and then writing for the stage to publishing all sorts of different texts. She likes talking, she likes addressing herself to people, and many of her texts, and I think that can. came out in some of the things which Sanya and Kate have already said, some of her texts are addressed to different people,

to Robespierre or to Marie-Antoinette, for instance. She's in constant attempts to dialogue with people, to convince them. And it's striking that even when she's in prison, she manages to have a couple of placards printed, thanks to texts which she smuggles out to friends and which they then have printed for her. So she's forever trying to convince others of her opinions. And I think one of the other really important things to remember is that her opinions evolve over time.

And she's entirely happy with that. She's entirely happy to say, yes, at one stage, I thought that Marie Antoinette was a good person to talk to or to talk about. Whereas now I don't think so. I think she's betrayed the revolution. Tanya, Kate mentioned the despotism that moved in and personified by, perhaps instigated by, caused by Robespierrearre, this iron world. Robespierre, who... Is it his presence that suddenly made put her in danger? One thing to remember is that Robespierre came to power at a moment of extreme weakness, actually, and that most of the policies that were imposed were of a weak government that didn't really have a

constitution. One of the things that's interesting about Robespierre and Marat actually is that both were very much beloved by women, and a lot of their power actually came from their female supporters. And when we talk about women's politics in relationship to revolution, It's interesting to think, I mean, people have made the argument that one of the reasons why they shut down, people were interested in shutting down the women's clubs and women's participation is because Robespierre had too much of it on his side. But as I understand it, Roebfair was opposed to her personally because of her believing constitutional monarchy, which he detested. And secondly, because she was a nuisance, a woman who was a nuisance of these two things. She also accused him of instigating the September massacres.

So you can say that that's close to life. because I don't think he actually was so instrumental in the September massacres. I wonder if there's still some ambiguity about exactly what happened when she was executed. But I think it's quite clear that she was executed not because she was a woman, but because of what she wrote and because of her support for a form of government that meant the revolution would be undone. And I think that was the position anyway that the Jacobin government took at that time. She also had numerous opportunities to not be in that situation,

from what I can tell from her biography. numerous people warned her. In fact, one of her a fiche, the person who was supposed to put it up, didn't want to put it up. He was like, just go home. I don't want to put up the affiash. Yeah, so I think she was quite headstrong,

extraordinarily headstrong in a situation where other people, you know, had some enlightened self-interest. She was prepared to put her, in a sense, her money where her mouth is. She was not prepared to keep quiet on her opinions. She knew really she was heading for the guillotine because of what she was saying.

Also that Uren was published. or she published it just after Charlotte Corday had assassinated Mara. So there was a lot of paranoia at the time about counter-revolutionary women as well. And I think that it's a time at which the revolution is also trying to stop women from expressing themselves. So she's at once an individual on whom Robespierre can sort of fix his sights as a sort of enemy of what he's trying to do. and someone who can serve as an example to say to other women, watch out. This is what will happen if you're too vocal.

The other important role of women at this time, of course, is after the death of Mara, there was a lot of women participating in the cult of Mara that was established all over France. You better tell people who Mara was. Mara was the journalist who was the friend of the people. That was the name of his newspaper. And he was the one who was killed, as Kate mentioned in his bathtub, the famous painting by David,

by this beautiful young woman called Charlotte Corday. and after his death there was a number of cults set up in his honour and a lot of them were led by women because women had the role of funereal with funerals and things like that they were quite close to that side

and I think there was a desire to control that aspect too because this was a very popular expression of adhesion for example to views that the government couldn't control Katjana can I come back to you let's move towards her arrest imprisonment and death in that order.

So as I mentioned earlier, Olim de Guz is arrested after having had this placard printed and put up, the placard which suggests that one of the options for France would be potentially to return to a constitutional monarchy.

And this is considered to be a betrayal of what is it could be envisaged politically for France the time. So she's arrested. We're in 1793. she's arrested and she's cast into prison. When she's in prison, she asks to have a lawyer to defend her,

and she's told that no, no, she's been good enough, speaking up for herself all the way through, and therefore she might as well defend herself if her lawyer hasn't turned up. She is condemned and she's about to be executed. One of the things she does, as many other people did, and many other women did at the time, is to claim that she's pregnant,

because one of the rules which the French apply at the time is that women who are pregnant can obtain a stay of execution until their baby has been born. And she says, no, I'm only pregnant. I haven't been pregnant for very long at all. They call in a couple of doctors who say, no, no, she's not pregnant. She's just made this up.

It's all a ploy. Therefore, she's executed. We don't know if she was indeed pregnant or not, but she mounts the scaffold and she's executed publicly in Paris and then thrown into a pit near the Madeleine, the cimte de la Madeline, and that's where she lies,

as far as we know, you know, mixed up with other bodies. And then there's been an idea mooted recently that maybe she should actually lie in the Pontillon in Paris, so the national monument, in which traditionally great men, but a few great women also, are buried. Did she have famous, as I understand it from my reading,

a few, three, she had a famous last sentence of declaration before she was executed, before she was decapitated. We don't know, it may be apocryphal, but she said to have said that she was about, I owe children of the homeland, of the Batri, you will avenge my death. But, as I say, it may be apocryphal.

Did, Sonia, did her death, it was two except to marry Antoinette and others were being, did her death have an effect on people? Did there was the reaction to it that you can mark on it? Yes, and the reaction came from both what we might call the right and the left actually. So for people sympathetic to, for example, Charlotte Corday,

they said, oh, she's as beautiful, she went to her death as beautifully as Charlotte Corday did. For people on the left, like Schomet, they used her death as an example to say, look, we need to shut down the women's clubs, we need to shut down women's participation. and she became an example for them. So I think she was used on both sides of the spectrum.

And then a few years after that, she was acknowledged by there was a young woman called Fortuné Brique, who wrote a dictionary of historical women, famous French female writers, and she's in there as a laudable figure, as a praiseworthy figure. And Abbe Gregorre, who was involved in abolitionism, he names her as the only French woman that fought on behalf of the abolition. of slavery and the slave trade in his book written in 1808 about the cultural accomplishments of black people. But you'll be safe to say that for the next 200 years,

or almost 200 years, her reputation subsided and baited and it was taken up largely by American scores, as I understand it, and is now raging ahead with her studies about her interest in her work, proper acknowledgement. Can you develop that, Kate? I can. That's a fair assessment that really largely straight after her death, almost complete oblivion for the best part of 200 years, has mention of her in an American work on French Theatre of the Revolutionary Decade.

Nothing about the quality of the plays, just that she was ugly and irascible, and therefore that was the end of the analytical assessment of her work. But in the 1970s, 1980s, as we head towards the bicentenary of the revolution in 1989, French feminists are inspired by a biography written by a scholar called Olivier Blanc to see her as an inspirational figure because of all the work she does saying that men and women should be treated equally

and that men and women should have equal rights to jobs and futures. So she becomes very much an emblem of the feminist movement to the point now that there is extensive, work on her, not just on her declaration of the rights of women, but on other parts of her work. And last year she was included in the French literature baccalaurea, so the equivalent of the A level. Her declaration of the rights of woman was included as a literary text. So that's almost the sort of the canonisation of her is complete now that she's made it into the French back, though without the dedication to the Queen, which is really interesting. Olivia Ritz has

written about this. Somehow the French Republic can't quite cope with a republican cornerstone that's dedicated to the Queen, that complicates things. But actually that complication and that ambiguity about her is what makes her an interesting figure. One of the reasons Olimbe de Gouge wasn't talked about as much as she possibly should have been, is because the revolution has traditionally been read as the product of the Jacobins. And the Girondins, Kate mentioned earlier on, have been slightly wiped out of the picture because they were too modern. So Elam de Guzhe is on the moderate side.

She's not on the right side. She bothers the people who were really conservative. She bothers the Jacobins and their heirs. And yes, the Republic finds it difficult to condone the celebration of anybody who might have been in any way at all, a monarchist. At the same time, I find it quite curious that I think one of the reasons why Alam de Guz and women's rights in general have taken such center stage is because they allow us to have the revolution while critiquing the revolution.

And I think it's quite interesting. Someone said, we realized after so many years that all the great men of the revolution were women. But I find it quite curious because, of course, the revolution also made someone like Olamte d'Agh. It allowed her a kind of freedom of expression and a range of possibilities that also are a positive heritage. Last thought?

The name Olamdouges has to be remembered, too. It's a name she chose for herself. It's one she created, which she forged from her mother's first name, Olimp, which sounds as though it's noble, and then this Gouge name, something which sounds like the name she was born to. But it's just her own name.

She uses it in her texts. She signs it. She doesn't want to be Miss So-and-So or Mrs. So-and-so. She is Olymp de Gouge. So she's very much her own woman, speaking in her own name. Kate John to say something.

I think what's striking about Olam de Guge is that we haven't yet finished understanding her written work. We've spoken briefly about the way in which some of her plays weren't performed very often. Is that a marker that they weren't very good? Is that that she came up against the comedy Francaise and their objections to her just roughing it up a bit and not being happy with being meek and mild

and following the rules? Now she goes and publishes one of her texts and she's supposed to have waited her turn for it to be performed. So there's all sorts of broader issues going on around the way in which the theatre world at the time works and is very much stacked against women and anyone who would like to think of themselves as respectable as a woman. It's very difficult and she's not prepared to play the game.

She tries the bribery, it doesn't work, she gets impatient because she's bribed them and it's still not working. So I think we need to sit down and actually reassess all the elements of her written work in order to get a more balanced understanding of her place in late 18th century culture. Yes, and there's been a lot of work recently done on a woman's history of the French Revolution.

So I think placing her beside other notable woman because there's a number of people active on all sides of the political spectrum, I think there's still a lot of work to be done because women are hard to find in the historical record sometimes. I mean, in a way, Alam de Guz is, you can find her and she talks a lot about herself in all her paratextual apparatus

that she includes with her writing. But other women might not have published under their own name. They might have used their husband's name. So there's a kind of a lot of effort nowadays to find all the different ways that women found to express themselves. And it's not always so easy, actually. I think Olau de Guz definitely should be read.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Katrienne Arseth, Kate Astridorri, Sanya Perovich, and to our studio engineer, hand. Next week, it's the early Christian stories of martyrdom in the Roman Empire, why they were told and the difference they made. Thank you very much for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What did we miss out that you thought we should have had in? Let's start with you, Kay. So I think one of the things that we might want to address is this question of

Why was she so unsuccessful as a playwright if we're going to measure success by the number of performances, which is often the way as shorthand for successful? And I think we then, in order to say, but she was only performed twice, three times, four times, 40 times here for the convent, she will stick with what she believes in, even if it's not to her own advantage.

I think he's right, because people had lobbies, you know, saying, please help me to get my play performed, even when it had been accepted. So the fact that her play was sitting around in the Comedie Francaise for several years doesn't mean to say that it wasn't good, that it wasn't interesting. It is a misogynist system. She talks about being humiliated when she has to go and read her play to the actors.

They're not kind to her. There is a natural suspicion of women playwrights. It's not an easy situation. space. Actors are still not allowed burial and consecrated ground in the late 1780s. So this is not a space in which women are made to feel particularly comfortable. That's right. I think sometimes historians or us coming to past after 200 years, we have a tendency to hindsight is 2020 and to see people as being self-interested or to apply a sociological explanation. I think if we do read her, it's important to read her as, but she has an extraordinary voice. So for her voice, I would say,

which is a voice that is sincere. That's not a very fashionable thing to read for, but there's a sense in which sometimes people try to explain away the figures of the past through our sociological categories. And literary reading would be very useful. But she suffers the fate of many people at the end of the 18th century because what happened after the revolution is many of these Engage writers were dismissed for being mad, crazy, in bad taste.

They were called Enragette. and it was kind of like a insult that was used for a number of people, actually, not just her. Katriona? Yes, there's something I wanted to talk about, which we didn't talk about very much, and that's her attitude to marriage. Oramdouges got married at the age of 17 to a man who was older than her. She was orphaned at the time, so she may well have had to get married for financial reasons. And she marries this man and has a son.

She loves the son very much. The man she's married to, she doesn't love. very much. He fortunately dies quite soon. But we mentioned that she then doesn't want to marry the person with whom she lives apparently happily for a number of years. She's against the institution of marriage, which she thinks is stacked against women. And she proposes a social contract between man and woman. And you note the Russoian vocabulary in the term social contract, but which would replace the marriage contract. She thinks that marriage itself is, you know, is the tomb of love, that, you know, that's where you go to bury love and faithfulness and this sort of thing.

And I think she has quite a modern, almost contractual view. She almost has a prenuptial agreement sort of proposal at the end of the Declaration of the Rights of Women. Exactly. She has this proposal where if you have a written document before you marry, then you've got a better chance of the woman being protected and her financial needs being protected. And we would see that as a pre-nup. agreement now. So there are ways in which she is, she is ahead of her time. And I set my students quite regularly a discussion topic in seminars. Is she just too revolutionary for the revolution?

It's taken to the late 20th century, early 21st century for some of our ideas on equality, really to have gained traction politically. Yeah. And what's fascinating about the Declaration of the rights of women is how much turns on a simple repetition or turn a phrase. It's extraordinary. Like you have a document, you repeat most of it, and then you repeat with a difference, and you add something new to it, and it changes the document entirely. And when I teach this document,

you really have a feeling that students really feel that's the revolution, when you can have a declaration and you can actually change the world by just showing who's excluded or by moving the boundaries. It's extraordinary. And her attention to material conditions of women. I think that's just absolutely fundamental. Her idea of women's rights isn't an abstract one. It's about money,

property survival. That's right. The financial question, I think, is absolutely essential in her attitude to women's rights, children's rights, the right to work, the right to inherit and so on. And for her, it's through money that women are going to become free. Maybe there's a kind of a tendency to maybe critique Olimt Degrooge for being a humanist. Her feminism is a humanism. Nowadays, I think that's an unfashionable potentially point of view.

but I think she's extraordinarily brave and worth reading, I think. And an inspiration increasingly. There are a number of modern plays using her as a theatrical figure in her own right. So she's developing this afterlife. Talked about dialogues of the dead earlier. She's developing a really exciting creative afterlife in the French theatrical scene because it's felt that theatre in France is still stacked against women. so she's used often by feminist playwrights in the 21st century

as a symbol of the brighter, better future. And also I think because she's a woman who is defending the idea that women could express themselves in the public space. Again, something which France politically has some difficulty in dealing with. Well, thank you all very much. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Hello, this is Jane Garvey with some good news. Life-changing is back.

And I can honestly tell you that we have found some really remarkable individuals for this series. People have lived through extraordinary, life-changing moments. Now here's just a quick taster of what's in store for you. And I was calling May Day, May Day, May Day, and a ship answered. And I thought, thank goodness. We've got the starboard railings are in the water, we're rolling around, and we're sinking. So he said, what is your position? So I said, we're about halfway between the port of East London and Durban.

No, what are your coordinates? he says. So I said, well, I don't know what the coordinates are. And I could hear sort of, what rank are you? So I'm saying, well, I'm not a rank. I'm a guitarist. And he said, what are you doing on the bridge? So I said, well, there's nobody else here. You might need a strong brew and some steady nerves for that one. It's quite a story. Honestly, I've been blown away by what so-called ordinary human beings are capable of. Don't miss this series of Life Changing. These stories and these people are definitely going to improve your day.

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