Curiosity by Alberto Manguel

Author:Alberto Manguel
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2015-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

Olympe de Gouges, 1784 (Musée Carnavalet, Paris). (INTERFOTO/Alamy)

Almost everyone tried to discourage her from pursuing a writing career. Her father, the old marquis, while refusing to acknowledge her as his daughter, also tried to dissuade her from becoming a playwright. In a letter addressed to her shortly before his death, Pompignan had this to say: “If persons of your sex become logical and profound in your writings, what will we become, we men, who are today so shallow and insubstantial? Farewell the superiority of which we were so proud! Women will dictate to us. . . . Women may be allowed to write, but they are forbidden, for the sake of a happy world, to undertake the task with any pretensions.” Nonetheless, she persisted, and wrote over thirty plays, many now lost, but several of which were performed by the Comédie française. So convinced was she of her dramatic talents, boasting that she could write a full-length play in five days, that she challenged the most successful playwright of the day, Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, author of The Marriage of Figaro, to a writing duel, because he had said that the Comédie française should not perform plays written by women. If Gouges won, she promised to use the money as a dowry to enable six young women to marry. Beaumarchais did not bother to reply.23

In her plays, but also in her political tracts, Olympe de Gouges fought for that elusive universal equality vaunted by the revolutionaries. She pleaded for the rights of women as well as men, and also against slavery, arguing that the prejudices that allowed blacks to be bought and sold were only the justifications of greedy white merchants. Slavery was finally abolished by a decree of the Revolutionary Assembly on 4 February 1794; almost fifteen years later, an honor roll was compiled of the “Courageous Men Who Argued or Labored for the Abolition of the Slave Trade.” Olympe de Gouges was the only woman listed.24

Unlike other revolutionary women such as the ardent Girondin Madame Roland, Gouges maintained that women should have a political voice and be given a place in the Assembly. Whereas Madame Roland had meekly declared, “We don’t want another empire than that governed by our hearts, and another throne than that within your hearts,” Gouges had argued, “Women have the right to mount the scaffold; they should also have the right to mount the tribune.” The nineteenth-century historian Jules Michelet, who recorded these words, at the same time dismissed Gouges as a “hysterical” woman who changed her political position according to her mood: “She was a revolutionary in July 1789, she became a royalist on 6 October after seeing the king made prisoner in Paris. Having then turned republican in June ’91, under the impression that Louis XVI had fled and was guilty of treason, she bestowed him again to her favor when he was taken to court.”25

The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen counters Michelet’s misogynistic judgment. It

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