Olympe de Gouges
French writer, playwright and revolutionary (1748–1793), born Marie Gouze in Montauban, married young to a man she did not love and soon widowed, she moved to Paris where she reinvented herself as a playwright and pamphleteer under the name Olympe de Gouges, writing without formal education but with extraordinary political prolificacy and courage. She embraced the ideals of the French Revolution enthusiastically from its beginnings, but soon observed, disappointed, that the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) systematically excluded women from full political citizenship. In response, she published in 1791 her most celebrated work, the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, a text that deliberately parodies, article by article, the official revolutionary declaration to expose its glaring hypocrisy: it demands for women the same civil, political and property rights as men, advocates women's suffrage and the right to hold public office, and declares in its most quoted line that 'woman is born free and remains equal to man in rights' — and, in a passage of devastating political clarity, notes that 'woman has the right to mount the scaffold; she must equally have the right to mount the rostrum', anticipating with tragic precision her own fate. Also an anti-slavery activist, she wrote abolitionist plays at a time when this entailed considerable political risk. Accused of moderate royalism and of attacking the dominant Jacobin faction, she was summarily tried and guillotined during the Terror in November 1793, becoming, alongside Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the essential founders of modern feminist thought and, for contemporary French historiography, a symbol of the revolution betrayed by its own promises of universal equality.