Between the Queen and the Cabby : Olympe de Gouges's Rights of Woman [1 ed.] 9780773585591, 9780773538863

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between the queen and the cabby

McGill-Queen’s Studies in the History of Ideas Series Editor: Philip J. Cercone   1 Problems of Cartesianism Edited by Thomas M. Lennon, John M. Nicholas, and John W. Davis

10 Consent, Coercion, and Limit: The Medieval Origins of Parliamentary Democracy Arthur P. Monahan

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11 Scottish Common Sense in Germany, 1768–1800: A Contribution to the History of Critical Philosophy Manfred Kuehn

  3 Claude Buffier and Thomas Reid: Two Common-Sense Philosophers Louise Marcil-Lacoste   4 Schiller, Hegel, and Marx: State, Society, and the Aesthetic Ideal of Ancient Greece Philip J. Kain   5 John Case and Aristotelianism in Renaissance England Charles B. Schmitt   6 Beyond Liberty and Property: The Process of SelfRecognition in EighteenthCentury Political Thought J.A.W. Gunn   7 John Toland: His Methods, Manners, and Mind Stephen H. Daniel   8 Coleridge and the Inspired Word Anthony John Harding   9 The Jena System, 1804–5: Logic and Metaphysics G.W. F. Hegel Translation edited by John W. Burbidge and George di Giovanni Introduction and notes by H.S. Harris

12 Paine and Cobbett: The Transatlantic Connection David A. Wilson 13 Descartes and the Enlightenment Peter A. Schouls 14 Greek Scepticism: Anti-Realist Trends in Ancient Thought Leo Groarke 15 The Irony of Theology and the Nature of Religious Thought Donald Wiebe 16 Form and Transformation: A Study in the Philosophy of Plotinus Frederic M. Schroeder 17 From Personal Duties towards Personal Rights: Late Medieval and Early Modern Political Thought, c. 1300–c.1650 Arthur P. Monahan 18 The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill: Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi Translated and edited by George di Giovanni

19 Kierkegaard as Humanist: Discovering My Self Arnold B. Come

29 Jacob Burckhardt and the Crisis of Modernity John R. Hinde

20 Durkheim, Morals, and Modernity W. Watts Miller

30 The Distant Relation: Time and Identity in SpanishAmerican Fiction Eoin S. Thomson

21 The Career of Toleration: John Locke, Jonas Proast, and After Richard Vernon 22 Dialectic of Love: Platonism in Schiller’s Aesthetics David Pugh 23 History and Memory in Ancient Greece Gordon Shrimpton 24 Kierkegaard as Theologian: Recovering My Self Arnold B. Come 25 An Enlightenment Tory in Victorian Scotland: The Career of Sir Archibald Alison Michael Michie

31 Mr Simson’s Knotty Case: Divinity, Politics, and Due Process in Early Eighteenth-Century Scotland Anne Skoczylas 32 Orthodoxy and Enlightenment: George Campbell in the Eighteenth Century Jeffrey M. Suderman 33 Contemplation and Incarnation: The Theology of MarieDominique Chenu Christophe F. Potworowski 34 Democratic Legitimacy: Plural Values and Political Power F.M. Barnard 35 Herder on Nationality, Humanity, and History F.M. Barnard

26 The Road to Egdon Heath: The Aesthetics of the Great in Nature Richard Bevis

36 Labeling People: French Scholars on Society, Race, and Empire, 1815–1848 Martin S. Staum

27 Jena Romanticism and Its Appropriation of Jakob Böhme: Theosophy – Hagiography – Literature Paolo Mayer

37 The Subaltern Appeal to Experience: Self-Identity, Late Modernity, and the Politics of Immediacy Craig Ireland

28 Enlightenment and Community: Lessing, Abbt, Herder, and the Quest for a German Public Benjamin W. Redekop

38 The Invention of Journalism Ethics: The Path to Objectivity and Beyond Stephen J.A. Ward

39 The Recovery of Wonder: The New Freedom and the Asceticism of Power Kenneth L. Schmitz 40 Reason and Self-Enactment in History and Politics: Themes and Voices of Modernity F.M. Barnard 41 The More Moderate Side of Joseph de Maistre: Views on Political Liberty and Political Economy Cara Camcastle 42 Democratic Society and Human Needs Jeff Noonan 43 The Circle of Rights Expands: Modern Political Thought after the Reformation, 1521 (Luther) to 1762 (Rousseau) Arthur P. Monahan 44 The Canadian Founding: John Locke and Parliament Janet Ajzenstat 45 Finding Freedom: Hegel’s Philosophy and the Emancipation of Women Sara MacDonald 46 When the French Tried to Be British: Party, Opposition, and the Quest for Civil Disagreement, 1814–1848 J.A.W. Gunn

47 Under Conrad’s Eyes: The Novel as Criticism Michael John DiSanto 48 Media, Memory, and the First World War David Williams 49 An Aristotelian Account of Induction: Creating Something from Nothing Louis Groarke 50 Social and Political Bonds: A Mosaic of Contrast and Convergence F.M. Barnard 51 Archives and the Event of God: The Impact of Michel Foucault on Philosophical Theology David Galston 52 Between the Queen and the Cabby: Olympe de Gouges’s Rights of Woman John R. Cole

Between the Queen and the Cabby Olympe de Gouges’s Rights of Woman john r. cole

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2011 isbn 978-0-7735-3886-3 Legal deposit third quarter 2011 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from Bates College. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Cole, John R. (John Richard), 1941–   Between the queen and the cabby : Olympe de Gouges’s Rights of Woman / John R. Cole.

(McGill-Queen’s studies in the history of ideas ; 52) Text includes a translation of: Droits de la femme. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-7735-3886-3

  1. Gouges, Olympe de, 1748?–1793. 2. Gouges, Olympe de, 1748?–1793. Droits de la femme. 3. France. Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen. 4. Women’s rights – France – History – 18th century. 5. France – History – Revolution, 1789–1799 – Women. I. Gouges, Olympe de, 1748?–1793. Droits de la femme. II. Title. III. Series: McGill-Queen’s studies in the history of ideas ; 52 hq1615.g68c64  2011  305.42092  c2011-901778-4 Typeset by Jay Tee Graphics Ltd. in 10.5/13 Sabon

To my wife, Joanne, and our daughters, Rebecca, Elizabeth, and Katherine

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Contents

Illustrations xi Acknowledgments xiii Introduction 3 A Translation of The Rights of Woman 27 part one  the dedication  43 1 Gouges’s Devotion to the King and Defence of the Queen  45 2 Marie-Antoinette’s Reputation and the Counter-Revolution  66 part two  the declaration  91 3 Gouges’s Patriotism and Aristocratic Sentiments Prior to 1791  93 4 Gouges’s Declaration and That of the National Assembly  113 part three  the postamble  139 5 The Social Contract between the Man and the Woman  141 6 The Rights of Persons of Colour and of Blacks  163 part four  the addenda and a conclusion  185 7 The Addenda  187 A Conclusion: Gouges’s Feminism in the Context of 1791  202 Appendix: Facsimile of Les Droits de la femme 233 Notes 247 Bibliography 285 Index 307

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Illustrations

All illustrations are from the Bibliothèque nationale de France Frontispiece for Remarques patriotiques: Louis xvi à son peuple 48 Frontispiece for Lettre au Peuple: Projet de l’impôt patriotique 49 La Famille des cochons ramenée dans l’étable 67 Les Deux ne font qu’un  68 Les Deux font la paire  69 Leçon donnée par Ro ... : C’est semer des perles devant les pourceaus 69 Il a tout perdu au 21 ... juin 1791  70 Troc pour troc. Cœffure pour couronne. Paris pour Montmédy. Départ pour l’Autriche 71 Hé hu! da da!  73 Le Promenoir royal ou la fuitte en empire  73 L’Aveugle mal conduit à Mons Midie  74 Enjambée de la Sainte Famille des Thuilleries à Montmidy  75 L’Égout royal 76 Frontispiece for Les Crimes des reines de France  84 Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen  213 La Démocrate: Ah l’bon décret!  221

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dean Jill Reich of Bates College for long years of generous support for my teaching and scholarship and Mark Abley of McGill-Queen’s University Press for his interest in this pro­ ject. Elizabeth Hulse’s meticulous copy-editing has saved me from many errors and omissions. Although I can’t thank them by name, I am also grateful to anonymous readers for the many corrections and helpful suggestions on how to improve prior drafts of this book.

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between the queen and the cabby

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Introduction

The French Revolution remains a watershed in European history, an abrupt transition from one conception of the relationship between the individual and the state to another: beforehand, there were subjects of the king, many privileged but all obliged to obey; afterward, there were citizens of the sovereign nation with constitutionally guaranteed rights to liberty and equality. Patriots were determined to end a regime premised on royal will as the source of law and aristocratic dominance as the natural order of social and political institutions. The National Assembly drew the line on 20 August 1789 when it decreed the first three articles of the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen (Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen): “i. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights ... ii. The aim of every political association is the preservation of the natural and inalienable rights of Man ... iii. The principle of all Sovereignty resides essentially in the Nation.” Any such proclamation of universal equality reflects a reaction against particular sorts of inequality. Those challenged in August 1789 were primarily privileges that had favoured nobles over commoners. Most deputies were also ready to end privileges that had favoured the clergy over laymen, and a few were particularly concerned with those that had favoured Catholics over Protestants. But Christians over Jews? Whites over blacks? The propertied over the poor? Men over women? “Race, class, and gender” may be a mantra for us, but it was not one for deputies who proclaimed equal rights for all men without apparent awareness of effective exclusions. Nevertheless, their own subsequent decrees and those of their successors in the Legislative Assembly and the National Convention demonstrated a willingness to extend citizenship and its rights

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in unprecedented ways. The structure of the Estates General had presupposed a Catholic France, and its deputies included a disproportionate number of priests and bishops, but before the year 1789 had ended, these same men, now a National Assembly, granted full rights to Protestants, while reserving judgment on Jews. All the deputies were white, of course, but in 1791 a liberal majority won a significant, if temporary, victory when they voted to extend political rights in the colonies to some free men of colour and blacks; it mattered less but lasted longer when they then granted citizenship to the few men of colour and blacks on French soil. That same year they formally extended rights to all Jews. In 1792 a new set of deputies in the Legislative Assembly decreed full rights, civil as well as political, for all free men of colour and blacks, even in the colonies. In 1793 yet another set of deputies in the predominantly bourgeois Convention dropped property requirements for the franchise and eligibility for office, eliminating the category of passive citizenship and extending active citizenship to the poor. Finally, in 1794, at the height of the Terror, these same men legally emancipated all slaves in French colonies. This series of decisions left women as an excluded category, denied active citizenship even as they gained passive rights. After a generation in which the profession itself has been democratized by gender, historians of the Revolution have learned to regard this exclusion as a fundamental limitation of what fifty years ago, without worrying much about women, Robert R. Palmer could call “the Age of the Democratic Revolution.” The broader perspective made possible by an outpouring of subsequent scholarship by and about women is also evident in the current literature on the history of rights, such as Michelene Ishay’s History of Human Rights and Lynn Hunt’s Inventing Human Rights: A History.1 Historians of the Revolution, of rights-consciousness, and of women and gender now routinely honour a few exceptional French men and women who did see such issues more or less as we now do, pre-eminently Marie-JeanAntoine-Nicolas Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, and the subject of this book, Olympe de Gouges. Elisabeth and Robert Badinter have praised Condorcet as “the greatest feminist of his century” and the sole advocate for political rights for women in “the first year of liberty.” David Williams has echoed this praise and gone further, claiming that the philosopherturned-politician also made “detailed proposals for legislation.”2



Introduction 5

Contrarily, despite the lucidity of the case for women’s rights that he did make in 1788 and again in 1790, I regard him as something of a disappointment, for reasons that I shall attempt to explain in my Conclusion, when extended consideration of Gouges’s manifesto will have provided a basis for a comparison with the related publications not only of this last great representative of the French Enlightenment but also with those of less-well-known politicians who spoke or wrote on behalf of women’s rights after Condorcet had fallen silent, Gilbert Romme and Pierre Guyomar. I shall also consider a number of foreigners who were inspired by the principles of the Revolution: a certain Mademoiselle Jodin, who qualified herself on her title page as “the daughter of a citizen of Geneva,” thus making an anti-Rousseauist point about the status of women, while also likening herself to the great Genevan prophet of democracy; Etta Palm d’Aelders, a Dutchwoman who claimed to be a baroness; Mary Wollstonecraft, an Englishwoman; and Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel, a Prussian. Gouges was neither philosopher nor politician. She did not produce orderly arguments for women’s rights or against those who would deny them, and perhaps she could not have. But no one else matched the boldness with which she demanded that the twin ­ideals of 1789, liberty and equality, be extended to women both in the public sphere and in private relationships. Her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Citizen has become part of a modern canon, familiar in a general way to historians of the Revolution, of rights, and of women. Ishay’s sweeping History of Human Rights, for instance, includes parts of the Declaration, and Hunt’s French Revolution and Human Rights includes the whole. But there are wholes and wholes, and this Declaration was only part, if the defining part, of what Gouges published in September 1791 as Les Droits de la femme (The Rights of Woman), filling less than a quarter of its pages.3 It is perhaps surprising that the entire pamphlet has never been translated into English. I say perhaps, because Gouges frames her Declaration with greater and lesser embarrassments. Her first pages are devoted to an awkward dedicatory letter to the queen, at the time the most hated enemy of the Revolution, and her last pages include an extended rant against a cab driver who, she claimed, had overcharged her and the magistrate who refused to see things her way when she tried to make a case for a lower fare. The most ­generally

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accessible English translations have been those in useful collections of documents on women’s history: Women in Revolutionary Paris, edited by Darline Gay Levy, Harriet Branson Applewhite, and Mary Durham Johnson, and Women, the Family, and Freedom, edited by Susan Groag Bell and Karen M. Offen. However, even in the first and more specialized collection, the angry outburst against the cabby and the magistrate has disappeared from the text, along with the Postscript and its telling deference to grander figures: the king, the émigré princes, and two eminent liberals, Charles-Maurice, formerly the comte de Talleyrand-Périgord, and Marie-Joseph-PaulYves-Roch-Gilbert du Motier, better known then and now as the marquis de Lafayette. In the second collection, there is no sign of the queen, the cabby, or these bluebloods and, for that matter, no trace of Gouges’s stirring advocacy for men of colour and blacks.4 Of course, no modern editor could print everything or would want to, just as no reader can read everything, but if we do not consider what she presented to her first readers, we cannot do full justice to it or understand its reception. It is certainly surprising that, despite its acknowledged significance as a first great feminist manifesto, there is no thorough commentary even on Gouges’s Declaration, let alone the whole pamphlet. Most scholars who have written on the subject cite this Declaration in italics, as if it were the title of a published work. It is not, and fussiness about the title is not pedantic quibbling. Too sharp a focus on the part of her pamphlet that has most appeal in our time – but failed to appeal to others in hers – can draw attention away not only from what I have called the greater and lesser embarrassments but also from a just appreciation and critical assessment of her vindication of the rights of married women, illegitimate children, free persons of colour, and even enslaved blacks, for all of whom the French Revolution was to be the Democratic Revolution. A case for the exceptional significance of Gouges and her Rights of Woman is easy enough to make: First, for the five years from the publication of her first political pamphlet in September 1788 to her trial and execution in November 1793, she published on current affairs and public policy more often and more boldly than any other woman. Second, in this one celebrated pamphlet, she demanded the extension of full civil and political rights to women more formally and more uncompromisingly than any prior person, male or female, French or foreign. Third, she appreciated the linkage between



Introduction 7

g­ overnment and the law, on the one hand, and home and the ­family, on the other – a public sphere and a private sphere – and in the same pamphlet she tried to rally other women behind a radical extension of liberty and equality into domestic relationships. And fourth, as if all this were not enough, within the same twenty-four pages she incorporated a defence of the highly controversial decree of 15 May 1791 that had extended rights to those persons of colour and blacks in the colonies who were born of two free parents and, going beyond that restricted grant, professed her belief in liberty as the birthright of all men. Yet a comprehensive study of Gouges’s pamphlet in its historical context remains to be made. Of course, she wrote for contemporaries, not for us. I want to understand why what seems so attractive now did not attract support then, even from compatriots who were otherwise committed to equal rights. It has been tempting to dismiss the men as hypocrites and to suggest that the women must have agreed with her. But at least Maximilien Robespierre, the incarnation of the radical revolution, was no hypocrite; rather, having been vocal in his early opposition to the very notion of “passive citizenship,” he became the true type of Jacobin zealotry and the high priest of republican equality.5 Nor was he a chauvinist with a mind closed to claims made on behalf of women; rather, as Alyssa Sepinwall has shown, he was exceptional for his receptivity to female intellectuals even before the Revolution. In his first days as a member of its Committee of Public Safety, he was also to present a case for public coeducation that envisioned more schooling for girls than Talleyrand had proposed in 1791 or, more remarkably, Wollstonecraft would in 1792.6 Why could Gouges not have moved him or his kind? More importantly, why could she not have moved her own kind, supposing that to have been radical women? The most prominent in our retrospect are Marie-Jeanne Phlipon, Madame Roland, and the leaders of the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women. Shortly after guillotining Gouges, Jacobins executed Roland; shortly before, they had closed down the society. These actions look like a pattern of male repression of female radicals, even if Roland and the Women were political enemies, and there is no credible evidence of Gouges’s influence on them, theirs on her, or her association with either. It is no wonder that scholars, including Joan Landes, Dorinda Outram, Madelyn Gutwirth, and Lynn Hunt, have argued that the Revolution as a whole was hostile to women.

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Why was Gouges not more persuasive? Much of the explanation must be a matter of gender-driven resistance to the changes that she demanded. But if it is a blame game, I shall argue that much of the blame was also her own. She recklessly offended all imaginable readers, women as well as men, and her susceptibility to royals and nobles compromised her credibility as an advocate for the extension of revolutionary principles. Furthermore, she did not support her Declaration with persuasive argument, had not clarified her own thinking on fundamental matters, and would not try to make good these deficiencies in subsequent publications.

a life in five acts I will not attempt to retell the story of Gouges’s life (1748–93) in any detail or to review her publications as a woman of letters with anything like completeness, but a brief sketch could help to orient students of her Rights of Woman. With a bow to Gouges herself as a self-dramatizing playwright, I adopt the conceit of a historical tragedy in five acts. Act I would be a girlhood played out in Montauban after her birth on 7 May 1748. A baptismal register identifies her as “Marie Gouze, the legitimate daughter of Pierre Gouze, butcher, and Anne-Olympe Mouisset.”7 This Pierre died in 1750, and Anne-Olympe then remarried. Of course, Marie’s way to adulthood began with family relationships and childhood experiences, but we know little or nothing about them. Her mature identity as Olympe de Gouges is what matters to us, and it seems telling that the distinctive “given” name that she adopted was actually taken from her mother and that the surname that she used was simply a variant spelling of her father’s. That hardly suggests a determination to reject her past and reinvent herself, even if she did see fit to add the flourish of a particle. However, in 1788 Gouges was to publish a Mémoire de Madame de Valmont (Memoir of Madame de Valmont), in which she suggests to the suggestible that she had grander ancestry. She too, like her Madame de Valmont, would have been the illegitimate child of an illustrious nobleman who refused to acknowledge paternity. For her to have shamed him and his family by naming them in print would have been to risk repercussions for libel, even after his death, but she could base a fictional character on Jean-Jacques Le Franc de Pompignan, a wealthy magistrate and prolific poet from M ­ ontauban



Introduction 9

who had been elevated to a marquisate and elected to the Academy. Tragically, her story goes, the great man, when approached late in his life, had rejected his adult daughter, although a curious variant within the same story holds that he had adored her in her early years and would have raised her himself, had her mother not refused to surrender her – and had he not married another woman.8 Gouges persisted in her claims and identified this putative father in conversation, but the relationship is historically unverifiable.9 Act ii would begin in 1765 with her marriage at the age of seventeen to Louis-Yves Aubry, a son of bourgeois Parisians who was then on the domestic staff of the royal intendant of Montauban. His higher-status parents were to be so slow in granting their permission, let alone pledging any material support, that the wedding was celebrated without it and without them. Notarial records suggest that the bride’s mother had to provide the groom with the working capital necessary to establish a household and to set himself up as a shopkeeper on a modest scale, but some transactions may have been fictions intended to give the young wife a potential legal claim on assets that would otherwise have been controlled by her husband. We do not really know much about him or their relationship.10 Gouges’s few relevant comments in works published long after the fact are consistent only in suggesting a short and unhappy marriage. In the Memoir the heroine retells her story in a letter to her father, the marquis, reminding him that she had been barely fourteen years old when married against her will to a man who was “neither wealthy nor well-born,” despite the fact that she had also been pursued by “a man of quality who wanted to marry me.” Enough of this account is historically false (the bride’s age) or dubious (the parental rejection of a noble suitor) that we might too quickly discount what follows: Gouges writes, “From that point on, I felt superior to my condition”; her character also says that she had been “forced to flee a husband who was hateful to me.”11 The flesh-and-blood woman did feel superior to her modest provincial origins, and it is quite possible that she had fled from Aubry before his death. Several years later, in June 1789, she responded to critics who questioned her virtue in an effort to discredit her, vindicating her personal independence by saying that she had been widowed at the tender age of sixteen.12 In June 1791 she effectively claimed in a more circumstantial anecdote that she had endured an unhappy marriage to a hated husband, who had died by the time she was eighteen.13 Perhaps so.

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For Act iii the scene shifts to Paris, but even here we know little about the plot lines or supporting characters. Gouges never remarried, and without the local supervision of a parent or a husband, she would have been free to make her own way. Youth, beauty, spiritedness, and intelligence must have helped: when later accused of having taken sexual liberties with men, she implicitly acknowledged that she had enjoyed lovers, and two close male friends provide what seems to be confirming testimony.14 However, nobody ever suggested for the author of the Memoir of Madame de Valmont a life of amoral sexual gamesmanship of the sort associated with the original Valmont, the fictional anti-hero of Pierre-AmbroiseFrançois Choderlos de Laclos’s Liaisons dangeureuses (Dangerous Liaisons), and it seems unwarranted now to call her a courtesan, even if she did profit from her sexual attractiveness.15 Notarial contracts drawn up between 1774 and 1785 guaranteed Gouges a generous income as the return on substantial capital sums that she had nominally advanced to a wealthy military contractor, Jacques Biétrix de Villars de Rozières. What must have been the legal fiction that he was indebted to her served to give her the financial security of an assured income without committing either of them to marriage.16 She was later to boast of having amassed a fortune of 80,000 livres – this at a time when an unskilled man might have been paid a single livre for a long day’s labour.17 So far as we know, this money could not have come from her father, mother, or husband, and nothing suggests that she herself had ever pursued gainful employment. Yet she aged inexorably, and her protector’s financial situation suffered badly from institutional reforms in military support services necessitated by the aggravated crisis in royal finances after 1787. That decline, in turn, led to Biétrix’s economies with her and her legal action against him. This may not be quite the stuff of tragedy, but it must have been painful. Act iv itself is comparatively well-documented, even if, at first glance, somewhat surprising in a woman’s life that was to leave no trace of earlier literary engagement or ambition. In 1786 Gouges suddenly appeared in print as a woman of letters, eager to make a mark for herself as a playwright but frustrated in efforts to get her works staged and so forced to publish them herself. Inspired by the spectacular success of Le Mariage de Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro), which she had seen performed in 1784, she had dashed off a sequel, Le Mariage inattendu du Chérubin (The Unexpected



Introduction 11

Marriage of Cherubino), imprudently boasting that it had taken her less than twenty-four hours to compose and that she was too quick-witted for any ten scribes.18 Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais was neither impressed nor amused, and her play was never to be performed in public. Undaunted, she tried again and again and again, only to be denied the gratifications of acceptance, applause, and acclaim. Beaumarchais’s own meteoric rise from artisanal origins would have shown what was possible for the most talented and best-­ connected man of letters at the end of the Old Regime, and ­Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis, the mistress of a prince, governess to his daughters, governor to his sons, and published author of improving theatricals for children and an epistolary novel in which a noble mother educates a daughter and a son, what was possible for the most talented and best-connected woman.19 Gouges’s social ambitions do help to explain her early writing. When she put together the first two volumes of her self-published Oeuvres (Works) in 1788, she began with an effusive dedication “To His Most Serene Highness, Monseigneur Louis-Philippe-Joseph, duc d’Orléans,” who was the first prince of the blood, the richest man in France, the lover of Genlis, a hero for liberals, and, not incidentally, as Gouges pointedly reminded him, a generous patron.20 Then came a “Preface for the Ladies” in which she pleaded with the sisterhood for their critical indulgence; the Memoir, in which she implicitly claimed noble blood and lamented the genteel poverty caused by the “ingratitude” of her father and his family; a self-referential “Dialogue”; an apologetic “Postface”; and a play in which her princely dedicatee could have seen his better self represented in the title role, L’Homme généreux (The Generous Man). In a third volume of the Works, published later in the same year, Gouges cast her net a little more widely, appealing to Louis-Joseph de Bourbon, prince de Condé.21 In addition to the controversial Zamore et Mirza, ou L’heureux naufrage (Zamore and Mirza, or the Fortunate Shipwreck), this volume featured Molière chez Ninon, ou Le siècle des grands hommes (Molière at Ninon’s, or The Century of Great Men), an effort to please the theatrical establishment by putting Molière himself on stage as a revered master. She also particularly honoured other figures from the Splendid Century: Ninon de Lenclos, the celebrated courtesan and salonnière, ­Christina of Sweden, the philosopher-queen, and the great Condé, the war hero

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and patron. Boldly, the playwright introduced into the imagined company of these exalted figures an emphatically young, beautiful, noble, and “most unfortunate” girl named Olympe.22 The same ­volume included a set of anecdotes entitled Bienfaisance, ou La bonne mère (Beneficence, or The Good Mother) and a little dramatic piece, La Bienfaisance récompensée, ou La vertu couronnée (Beneficence Rewarded, or Virtue Crowned), in which the flattery of Orléans as a princely doer of good deeds is undisguised and the implicit appeal to Genlis, too, unmistakable.23 It is unclear whether either they or Condé ever rewarded Gouges with the support that she so evidently sought. Ironically, her one great success with the Comédie-Française led to her greatest frustration. Zamore and Mirza, a three-act melodrama concerned with slaves who have fled from their good master after the hero has been forced to kill an abusive overseer in selfdefence, was accepted in 1785 for production, but colonial interests, who were particularly offended by a happy ending for a fugitive slave who had killed an overseer, managed to block it. The company temporized and Gouges sputtered, making matters worse for herself by airing her grievances in print. Year after year passed without a performance of her plays, and she became convinced that it was not her subject matter or the quality of her scripts that had aroused opposition but her gender.24 When she published her novel of paternal irresponsibility and masculine “ingratitude,” she was not yet a feminist in a later sense, but she was already beginning to discover herself as a writer and already learning that women writers were treated inequitably. Act v of this hypothetical drama concerns Gouges’s political pamphleteering, which began in September 1788 with her Lettre au Peuple, ou Projet d’une caisse patriotique (Letter to the People, or Proposal for a Patriotic Fund). While we are apt to think of the portion of the metaphorical last act that would culminate three years later with her Rights of Woman as a triumph, and that pamphlet does end with her postscripted celebration of an apparent reconciliation between Louis xvi and the National Assembly, the theatrical metaphor of tragedy is suggestive, even without considering her eventual arrest, imprisonment, trial, conviction, and execution. In the end, her capital crime was to be strictly political: her apparent effort to arouse monarchists and federalists even after the execution of the king and the expulsion of the Girondins from the C ­ onvention.



Introduction 13

But it could have been grim enough for her to look back from ­September 1791. Gouges’s first and most cherished policy proposal had been appropriated by others, as she saw the world, without having achieved its ends: in September 1788 her happy idea had been for the king to open up a patriotic fund for a “voluntary imposition”; loving subjects would then rush to make the donations that would end the crisis in royal finances. In a dramatic gesture a year later, other women had actually brought their jewellery to the Assembly as a gift to the nation, and a desperate Jacques Necker had proposed an exceptionally heavy surtax, notably lightened by provisions making compliance voluntary. Neither the women nor the minister credited Gouges, and neither initiative restored solvency.25 Condé had emigrated, Orléans had been driven into exile, and Louis xvi had been forced to make humiliating capitulations.26 When the Comédie-Française finally staged Gouges’s revised Zamore and Mirza on 28 December 1789, the first performance was a disaster and the run was cancelled after only two more poorly attended performances. Appeals to the mayor of Paris and the National Assembly to right this great wrong fell on deaf ears. By mid-1790 Gouges felt defeated, so much so that she had contemplated emigration to England.27 The Flight to Varennes in June the following year had called into question the viability of a constitutional monarchy and so driven a potentially lethal wedge into her politics as a declared patriot and royalist.28 Finally, in September 1791 the Constitution was completed without rights of women to complement those of the men.

scholarship on the subject Of course, I am not the first to focus attention on Gouges and her Rights of Woman. Let me briefly review the two books that informed readers would regard as the best. Olivier Blanc has contributed the most erudite account of her life: Marie-Olympe de Gouges: Une humaniste à la fin du xviii e siècle (Marie-Olympe de Gouges: A Humanist at the End of the Eighteenth Century). Joan Wallach Scott has offered the most sophisticated and most influential interpretation of her work: Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man.29 Blanc’s first book was the earliest modern biography of Gouges (1981); he updated it in 1989 and has now replaced it with Marie-

14

Between the Queen and the Cabby

Olympe de Gouges (2003). He has also edited and introduced two volumes of her political works for the bicentennial of her execution (1993), allowing less-learned students to consider the whole of her Rights of Woman and to set it into a larger context of fifty-six other pamphlets, posters, and miscellaneous printed materials with a political bearing from 1788 to 1793.30 No researcher has done more to retrieve materials on Gouges’s life and work; no one else nearly as much. I am deeply indebted to Blanc, but I am also perplexed that he refers to her best-known pamphlet by a compounded title of his own invention, Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne dédiée à la reine (Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Citizen Dedicated to the Queen), not only while chastising contemporary feminists for ignoring the rest of her work but also while failing to give even the Declaration due attention.31 Gouges’s Declaration is indeed what matters most to most of us, but she herself was determined to fill all twenty-four pages of her self-financed pamphlet. Her first page does double-duty, not only laying out her proper title, les droits de la femme , typeset in large capitals under the printer’s bold horizontal lines at the top of the page, but also beginning the four-page text of what is only conventionally classifiable as a dedicatory letter, given the mix of selfpraise, indelicate threats, and moral exhortation that she addresses to Marie-Antoinette and the utter lack of the outspoken flattery and mumbled pleading that fill most pre-revolutionary dedications, including her own. If there is any basis for confusion over her title, it is that a larger, bolder, and more ornamental font prioritizes the dedication: “à la reine.” After summarily brushing aside others’ scholarship, especially that of feminists, Blanc explains that he will present “a better perspective on the subject replaced in her context. Thus, Mme de Gouges was no more a ‘feminist’ than many men and women of her time. On 22 May 1791, the authors of the Journal de la cour [et de la ville] [Journal of the Court (and the City)], for instance, attributed to Mme de Staël a Déclaration des droits de la femme [Declaration of the Rights of Woman] a few months earlier than that of Olympe de Gouges, and in England, a year earlier [sic], Mary Woolstonecraft [sic] had published [A] Vindication of the Rights of Women [sic]: The topic was really in the air at the time.”32 Wollstonecraft’s great Vindication of the Rights of Woman was in fact to follow Gouges’s Rights of Woman into print at the beginning



Introduction 15

of 1792. According to William Godwin’s testimony in the Memoirs of the Author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” (1798), his late wife had written the book, start to finish, in just six weeks; if true, this would mean that she began work in London in midNovember 1791, about two months after Gouges’s pamphlet had appeared in Paris.33 It would be simplistic to honour either woman as “the first feminist,” but historians of women and of feminism – or plural feminisms – recognize the Revolution as a watershed, and the question of priority between this Frenchwoman and this Englishwoman does matter, even if, as seems to be the case, neither influenced the other.34 Reviewers of other historical works by Blanc have complained that he tends to be uncritical in the use of problematical sources.35 Even his apparently cautious reference to the Journal of the Court in the above quotation suggests something of the sort, and his claim that Gouges was only one of many like-minded feminists and neither the first nor the foremost risks diminishing the significance of her Rights of Woman unduly. In fact, although Madame de Staël, née Germaine Necker, was not yet a major literary figure, even in May 1791 she was not just anyone: for the unforgiving royalists, aristocrats, and Catholics who put together the Journal, she was the daughter of the hated Jacques Necker, the Genevan architect of revolutionary ruin, and a plebian woman who had published a eulogy of the hated Jean-Jacques Rousseau, republican, democrat, and Protestant or worse. In the spring of 1791, responding to Necker’s recently published defence of his administration, the Journal returned time and again to demean him and the liberal policies associated with him.36 The attribution of a Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Citizen to his daughter was meant to reflect badly on the father too and to reduce to absurdity the principles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, no more but no less. There is no good reason to suppose that such a publication ever existed. A more consequential example of Blanc’s readiness to believe what he reads in problematical sources comes in his first substantive chapter on Gouges’s life. He takes her Memoir of Madame de Valmont at face value or more, reading it as a thinly veiled autobiography.37 In the Preface to The Generous Man, a comic drama with a partially overlapping cast of characters that she published as a pendant to the Memoir, she did state: “I can assure [you] that

16

Between the Queen and the Cabby

most of the ­characters that I have sketched do exist ... , including Madame de Valmont ... The Memoir ... gave me the idea for the play. [It] proves the injustice and the cruelty of a rich and distinguished family to which she is related by blood, [a family] that has never done anything for her. That is the way of making her [character] interesting in my play.”38 The evident recipe, a good one in an age of sensibility, was to afflict a noblewoman with pitiable hardship. However, in securing a privilege to print, Gouges called the Memoir a “novel,” and within the published text “the author” also calls Valmont’s story of her origins and mistreatment a “novel.”39 Her claim of authenticity for the letters that make up most of the book is a paper-thin literary convention. The amatory gamesmanship of Gouges’s plot, the name of her heroine, and the epistolary structure all suggest conscious imitation of the earlier anti-romance by Choderlos de Laclos.40 Such materials would never have been accepted as a proof of noble origins in Old Regime society or law, and they should not be accepted in modern historical scholarship. For the student of women’s rights-consciousness, the most startling limitation of Blanc’s life-and-works is the lack of any analysis, however perfunctory, of even the Declaration, let alone the rest of The Rights of Woman. He does honour Gouges as having been “the first” to publish “an important feminist manifesto,” but he also says that “nobody was ready to listen to her,” offering intelligent but undeveloped explanations as to why that should have been the case. Much of the problem, he suggests, was that she was simply “too far ahead of her time for an old country, settled in its habits and its ways of life”: it would be only in the early twentieth century that her Declaration could be generally “recognized as one of the principal documents of modern feminist thought.” In the early twenty-first he calls it a “veritable manifesto of parity.”41 Yet Blanc does not really engage with Gouges’s ideas or attempt to set her most celebrated text into the historical context of September 1791. To find that sort of analysis, we have to look elsewhere. No American interpreter of Gouges commands greater respect than Joan Wallach Scott, who followed her prize-winning ­Gender and the Politics of History (1987) with a succession of papers on Gouges’s feminism and then Only Paradoxes to Offer (1996). Scott applies a theoretical grid of equality feminism and difference feminism to Gouges and a number of other Frenchwomen from the Revolution of 1789 to the final achievement of women’s suffrage in



Introduction 17

1944. Her governing conception is that there is a theoretical   contradiction or “paradox” within feminism, insofar as the pursuit of an ideal equality for each individual, woman as well as man, has required a contrary affirmation of the real gender difference setting women apart from men.42 Now she has carried her inquiry into the present with Parity! Sexual Equality and the Crisis of French ­Universalism (2005). Blanc has complained that Scott’s work is essentially anachronistic, the misappropriation of a historical figure to serve as “a sort of boxing ring where American feminists and anti-feminists can fight it out.”43 This is at once to suggest potentially valid lines of historical criticism and to betray a fundamental misunderstanding of Scott’s paradox: she wants to point up conceptual tensions within the thought of feminists and is unconcerned to batter opponents. Gouges’s Declaration, particularly in the two articles that Scott singles out for commentary, does exemplify a theoretical fault line between the demand for a gender-neutral equality and the assertion of women’s difference. More generally, its very conception does expose the gender bias of the men’s nominally universal principles, even while echoing them and appropriating them for women as a differentiated gender. This is a perfect illustration of the paradox. That said, there is something to Blanc’s complaints that Scott’s work is inappropriately theoretical and insufficiently historical. She takes her title from Gouges’s Bonheur primitif de l’homme, ou Les rêveries patriotiques (Primitive Happiness of Man, or The Patriotic Dreams), attributing to the author something like her own self­consciousness as a feminist caught on the horns of contrary theories. Gouges wrote: “If I go any further in this matter, I will go too far and attract the enmity of the newly rich, who, without reflecting on my good ideas or appreciating my good intentions, will condemn me pitilessly as a woman who has only paradoxes to offer and not problems easy to resolve” (emphasis added).44 However, in early 1789, the correct publication date, she was not yet a feminist, and she did not regard her own ideas as paradoxical. Rather, she anticipated that imagined critics would dismiss them as “paradoxes,” thus echoing the real critics of Rousseau’s works, beginning with the ­Discours sur les sciences et les arts (Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts) – critics who regarded it as paradoxical that a thinker and writer should have seemed quite so determined to assail thinking and writing.45

18

Between the Queen and the Cabby

The phrase as Gouges uses it has nothing to do with modern feminist theory. It immediately follows an emphatic protest against a supposed “frenzy” of popular self-instruction or pseudo-intellectual pretension that she condemns as “a national malady.” To hear her tell it, every little “lackey, tailor, and fruit peddler” in France seems to want to be a great “philosopher,” an overreach evident in the publication of countless “ideas and projects” that unduly jeopardize social subordination and political obedience: “An artisan ought not to speak or to think like a D.P. [de Pompignan], nor a hairdresser, like a C.D.B. [Caron de Beaumarchais], because these men would become too dangerous for [the welfare of] society and the fatherland. Since [political] authority has been introduced among men, that same authority ought skilfully to keep each class in its place.”46 Then follows the sentence quoted by Scott. A spate of pamphleteering in the winter of 1789 on behalf of an egalitarian structure and parliamentary procedures for the forthcoming Estates General occasioned Gouges’s protest. She seems to be a good Rousseauist when she warns against the proliferation of printed attacks on the fundamental principles of the social order and even when she rejects the illusion that there could be a “return to nature.” Paradoxically or not, she is also very much the antiRousseauist in her evident concern to reinforce institutions premised on the predominance of the aristocracy, her demand for a new women’s theatre that would at long last stage her own plays, and in her indignant protest that a journal to which she subscribes is not providing notices of her newly published work or printing her letters.47 In this season of others’ hope, she comes no closer to a rights-conscious feminism. Scott embraces Gouges as having been a self-aware creature of her own imagination as well as a feminist before the Revolution and a prophet of the paradoxes of later feminist theory. Her chapter title “The Uses of the Imagination” signals this interpretation, which she develops in a substantial excursus on major philosophes (Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and Condillac) and completes with concluding pages on Gouges’s death as a victim of the Jacobin Terror and afterlife in nineteenth- and twentieth-century thought and writing.48 However, Gouges always considered herself to be an untutored “natural,” and any abstract epistemology or theory of creativity would have been wholly alien to her. Furthermore, her political



Introduction 19

commitments as both a patriot and a royalist restricted any creative sense of mutable identities. That is not to say that Gouges lacked a rich imagination or the willingness to express it in published works, even political ones. The Postface to her Memoir and the Preface to The Generous Man do show that she regarded such fiction and drama as products of her imagination,49 and any reader of her later pamphlets can see that she experimented with literary devices in political works that are themselves formally imaginative. In the first three chapters of Primitive Happiness, she offers a storybook version of human prehistory, conceived to support cautionary counsels against publications threatening the established order. In other works she adopted different rhetorical tactics suggested by a rich imagination, including, in just the first twelve months of her pamphleteering, the dream narrative in her Remarques patriotiques (Patriotic Remarks), the dramatized core of her Dialogue allégorique entre la France et la Vérité (Allegorical Dialogue between France and Truth), the dream speeches given Louis xvi and Orléans in her Séance royale (Royal Session), and Mentor’s exhortation to the king’s émigré brother, Charles-Philippe, comte d’Artois, in her Ordre national (National Order).50 Her seldom-cited “Dialogue entre mon esprit, le bon sens et la raison, ou Critique de mes oeuvres” (Dialogue among My Mind, Good Sense, and Reason, or Review of my works), published early in 1788 with her Memoir, comes as close as anything else to an extended self-critical reflection on the nature of her creative work before her intense involvement with the realities of the Revolution. It is less theory than a personified play of disclaimer (confessing a lack of sense) and apologetics (claiming a lot of reason), but if there is anything of broader import to be gleaned from it, it is this: her mind claims that her works exhibit both qualities, but while a personification of the former, M. Good Sense, does not recognize himself in these works and thinks that they favour women unduly, the personified Mme Reason does see herself writ large throughout and speaks up for the author’s intelligence. In seventeen more or less imaginative pages, Gouges makes no reference to the imagination.51 In a subsequent paper, “The Imagination of Olympe de Gouges,” Scott calls for “the study of feminisms in context,” a history “that focuses on feminists in their own epochs” and “asks how what comes to be seen as ‘feminism’ ... is formulated in the context of its

20

Between the Queen and the Cabby

times.”52 However, in my reading of her important monograph, a logical complement to her emphasis on the creative imagination is a relative indifference to the real-world contexts for Gouges’s political works, including The Rights of Woman. Even after the distinguished historian had presented her project to several audiences and revised it in a series of published papers, what she published on Gouges in book form remains spotted with factual errors.53 More importantly, it is based on a defective text of The Rights of Woman and betrays a relative lack of interest in aspects of the historical context that were crucial for Gouges and an audience of contemporaries. It is incorrect, for instance, to state, “As the constitution was being debated in 1791, Olympe de Gouges published her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen.”54 In fact, those debates had closed on 3 September, when, to great acclaim, the deputies decreed: “The National Assembly, having heard the reading of the constitutional act and having again approved it, declares that the Constitution is finished.”55 The Postscript to The Rights of Woman, the proper title, trumpets the happier news of 13–14 September: that Louis xvi had formally accepted the Constitution and the grateful Assembly had then immediately passed the Amnesty Decree that he had requested.56 Of course, two centuries later a difference of ten or twelve days in 1791 might not seem to matter much. But context is all: if Gouges were to have published The Rights of Woman during parliamentary debates on the Declaration, she could have had somewhat more realistic expectations of influencing them. And if the deputies and the rest of the politicized nation – including women – were then simply to have ignored her feminist appeal, a likely enough scenario, our retrospective judgment on their failings might be more severe and our understanding of the difficulties confronting her would be more complete. Scott’s primary concern to emphasize unchanging contradictions of feminist theory imposes a perspective from which the fast-changing political, legislative, and diplomatic history of the Revolution is at best a secondary concern. There is a remarkable selectivity even in her explication of Gouges’s Declaration. She devotes one long paragraph to its Articles x and xi, ending with a citation of Article iii, but that is about it.57 She does not devote even this much attention to the men’s Declaration, Gouges’s model, which makes good sense, given her primary purpose, but she also divorces the adaptation from its historical context. From my perspective, working with



Introduction 21

a different purpose, the rest of The Rights of Woman gets such short shrift that the text itself seems neglected: even Gouges’s dedicatory letter to Marie-Antoinette, where I will begin, receives only a single sentence at the end of a paragraph on the author’s imagination.58 It does not help that Scott’s text of reference is the mistitled, reordered, and truncated version of the pamphlet edited by ­Benoîte Groult. In a particularly well-documented paper on Gouges’s plays, Gabrielle Verdier has criticized this edition of the Oeuvres as “unscholarly.” That assessment is not too harsh.59 Even in the case of The Rights of Woman, Groult provides her own title, reorders sections, and simply excises paragraphs concerned with the Austrian-born queen and the foreign threat. They must have seemed beside the point to her in 1986, and so Scott did not consider them in 1996. But they were enormously important for Gouges and her contemporaries in 1791. Few of my readers could yet be ready to worry much about the cabby, who is also missing from Groult’s version of the text and so from Scott’s study, and perhaps they are right. But the postscripted Louis xvi? The émigré princes? Talleyrand? Lafayette?60 If we do not attempt to come to terms with their place in Gouges’s world, men though they were, we will never understand her or others’ reception of her work. In important monographs, other respected students of the history of women, the Revolution, and feminism have recognized Gouges’s particular significance, but none analyzes The Rights of Woman as a whole or situates it in its immediate political context. ­Dominique Godineau’s wonderful Citoyennes tricoteuses: Les femmes du peuple à Paris pendant la Révolution française (translated as The Women of Paris and Their French Revolution), for instance, at once briefly acknowledges the “profound theoretical significance [portée théorique fondamentale]” of Gouges’s Declaration, both likening The Rights of Woman to Condorcet’s work in this respect and making her one of “the trinity of the [notable] female personalities of the Revolution,” along with Etta Palm and Théroigne de Méricourt. Yet Godineau clearly distinguishes Gouges from the women of the people and their revolutionary movement, her proper subject, and leaves to others the histories of French feminism and women of letters.61 Christine Fauré and Mona Ozouf are among the French scholars whose work on such issues has reached a wide American readership. Fauré, a ranking expert on the canonical men’s Declaration of

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Between the Queen and the Cabby

1789 and the scores of proposals that culminated in it, knows that the variants introduced by Gouges in 1791 are significant enough to “require a careful examination of each article in turn,” but her own interest in the sweep of feminist history going back to the beginning of the fifteenth century allows her very little of that in La Démocratie sans les femmes (Democracy without Women).62 Ozouf’s stature as a leading historian of the Revolution has made her exploration of the history and meaning of “French singularity” with respect to feminism and femininity particularly important. Her controversial Mots des femmes (Women’s Words) portrays ten French writers, Gouges not included, and in an appended essay she contests the historiography of American feminists, including Scott, effectively relegating Gouges to the uncertain status of an individual exception within the national exception. Like Condorcet or Guyomar, Gouges had made only “isolated demands …, quickly forgotten, quickly stifled.”63 Gouges was an extraordinary woman at an extraordinary time, but her feminist demands were not “isolated,” if that term is mistaken to mean that either her own feminist breakthrough or its apparent lack of resonance with her countrymen in September 1791 can be understood apart from a political history that was particular to France. There can be disagreement over the relationship between what Gerda Lerner has called “the creation of feminist consciousness” and the Revolution. In a history by this title in which she establishes 1870 as a terminal date and looks back to a millennial past, Lerner herself defines that consciousness as women’s awareness of five truths: “that they belong to a subordinate group; that they have suffered wrongs as a group; that their condition of subordination is not natural, but is societally determined; that they must join with other women to remedy these wrongs; and finally, that they must and can provide an alternate vision of social organization in which women as well as men will enjoy autonomy and self-determination.”64 By these standards, political movements dominated by men can have little or nothing to do with the origins of feminism, and unsurprisingly, Lerner has virtually nothing to say about the French Revolution. She does not mention Gouges or, for that matter, Condorcet or Hippel. What little she does say about the Revolution is dismissive: “[W]omen’s participation in general revolutionary movements did not bring them closer to advancing their own rights and interests.” Yet she does acknowledge Wollstonecraft’s great Vindication of the Rights of Woman as “the first feminist theory to



Introduction 23

put the claims for women’s rights and equality in the context of a broader liberationist theory for all of society and to separate such claims from ... religious arguments.”65 There are other ways of conceiving the relationship between the French Revolution and the origins of modern feminism. In her comprehensive European Feminisms 1700–1950: A Political History, Karen Offen begins with a working definition of feminism that is historically more supple: “To be a feminist is necessarily, specifically, and primarily to challenge male domination in culture and society.”66 Paradoxically or not, a revolution in which an all-male National Assembly made the principles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen foundational thereby inspired feminists or proto-feminists, Gouges in September 1791 as well as ­Wollstonecraft in the months that followed. Offen deliberately adopts volcanic imagery to make a more general point: “[T]he Revolution unleashed a spectacular eruption of well-formulated feminist claims ... [that] spread relentlessly and irresistibly throughout Europe ... Because of this outpouring, the first five years of the French Revolution provide an unparalleled historical laboratory for studying European gender politics.”67 It is easy to see that the fundamental principles of the Revolution and the form of the men’s Declaration of 1789 inspired the most celebrated part of Gouges’s Rights of Woman, if not to discern any impact for her feminism at the time or soon afterward either in France or beyond its borders. Yet just over two centuries after her once-ignored pamphlet, her time was to come; in Au Pouvoir, citoyennes! Liberté, Egalité, Parité (To Power, Female Citizens! Liberty, Equality, Parity), Françoise Gaspard, Claude Servan-Schreiber, and Anne Le Gall look backward historically to the Revolution, not beyond, and to Gouges’s Declaration quite particularly.68 Other scholars, prominent among them Elisabeth Sledziewski, in the multi-volume History of Women in the West, co-edited by Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot, and Suzanne Desan, in her ­Family on Trial, have argued that the Revolution was “the turning point” for women as well as men, even that it “transformed the most intimate relationships and challenged the patriarchal structure of Old Regime families.”69 I shall argue a narrower point: that the Revolution was the turning point for Gouges and that it enabled her to give a political form to what had been merely personal discontents and inspired her to extend concepts of liberty and equal rights

24

Between the Queen and the Cabby

not only to women in political life and in domestic relationships alike, with an unprecedented boldness, but also to colonial social structures, more cautiously. To adopt Offen’s imagery of volcanism, Gouges, not the more cerebral Condorcet, is the archetypal feminist of the French Revolution, the perfect Vesuvian. Her work does allow us an extraordinary opportunity to study not only the eruption itself but also the setting for it, if only we are willing to look with the requisite care. My chosen task is to restore this now-celebrated Declaration more deliberately to the literary context of the full Rights of Woman and to set both that pamphlet and its author into the historical context of 1791. The place to begin is with a full translation of The Rights of Woman; I also append a facsimile of Les Droits de la femme. Gouges’s structure determines my own. Part One concerns her problematical Dedication to Marie-Antoinette in a political context in which the king and queen had to be considered together. Part Two considers her susceptibility to the charms of aristocracy and focuses sharply on her Declaration, comparing it systematically to the men’s Declaration. Part Three discusses her Postamble, which includes her Social Contract, a non-marital partnership agreement for man and woman, and her vigorous defence of a contested law favouring political rights for certain persons of colour and blacks. And Part Four comments more briefly on the two seldom-noted addenda: her account of the fare dispute with the cabby and her joyous Postscript on the late-breaking news of 13–14 September 1791, principally the king’s formal acceptance of the Constitution and Lafayette’s Amnesty Decree. Concluding assessments cannot be simple: On the one hand, there was something in her Rights of Woman to offend almost everyone, and Gouges failed to persuade any part of her contemporary audience. The queen continued to conspire with the Austrians and failed to commit herself any more to the rights of woman than to the rights of man. The deputies in the Constituent Assembly and those who followed them in the Legislative Assembly failed to consider her Declaration, let alone to adopt anything like its principles. The former neglected to uphold even their own May decree on the rights of free men of colour, and the latter extended such rights only when doing so seemed to serve the restoration of social order in a slave society. On the other hand, Gouges succeeded in envisioning a fuller civic role for women than any embraced by the most ­prominent



Introduction 25

political activists – the marchers of the October Days, Madame Roland, or the leaders of the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women. Her feminist proposals bear favourable comparison with those of more sophisticated Frenchmen – Condorcet, Romme, and Guyomar – and foreigners Jodin, Palm, Wollstonecraft, and Hippel. There is no evidence that she influenced them or they her, but one and all were creatures of the French Revolution, even in criticisms of its limits.

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A Translation of The Rights of Woman

I have tried to present Gouges sympathetically to a highly literate modern readership, keeping my English close to her French, while occasionally correcting a sometimes awkward text that was probably composed orally in several stages. I have broken up many long sentences and restructured some in the interest of comprehensibility. I have also made some changes in word choices even where cognates exist, and my punctuation is more modern than that of the original. On the other hand, I have been careful to reflect Gouges’s somewhat chaotic capitalization, and the paragraphing is hers, her scribe’s, or her compositor’s. I have also tried to preserve other aspects of the layout and typography, which she took care to supervise (lines 437–8). Among the most striking are the visual prominence of “To the Queen” on the first page and, contrarily, the printer’s recourse to successively smaller fonts to append the anecdote of her dispute with the cab driver (lines 425–67) and the celebratory Postscript at the end (lines 481–93), filling or over-filling her twenty-four pages. In a spirit of patriotic generosity or even financial “sacrifice,” Gouges bore the expenses of publication herself and distributed copies of her pamphlets without charge, but she did want her money’s worth and did not want to incur the cost of a fresh sheet. The Postscript permits precise dating of the publication: The Talley­rand Rapport sur l’instruction publique (Report on P ­ ublic Education) to which she refers was read out to the National Assembly on 10–11 September 1791; she tells us that The Rights of Woman was then in press (lines 481–4). The king’s acceptance of the Constitution and Lafayette’s Amnesty Decree came together on 13–14 September, and she refers to them joyously as late-breaking news (lines 486–90).1

the rights of woman.

to t h e qu e e n .

m adame,

Being little used to the language with which one addresses Kings, I will not employ the adulation of Courtiers in offering you the homage of this singular production. My purpose, Madame, is to speak frankly to you. I did not await the era of Liberty to express myself in this way: I showed the same energy at a time when the blindness of Despots punished so 10 noble an audacity. When the entire Empire accused you and made you responsible for its calamities, I alone, at a time of trouble and storm, I had the strength to take up your defence. I have never been able to persuade myself that a Princess raised in the midst of 15 grandeur could have all the vices of baseness. Yes, Madame, when I saw the sword raised against you, I threw my observations between that sword and the victim. But now that I see that the crowd of hireling rebels is under close scrutiny and that it is restrained by fear of the laws, I will tell 20 you, Madame, what I would not have told you then.2 If the foreigner enters France in arms, I will no longer regard you as this falsely accused Queen, this attractive Queen, but as an implacable enemy of the French. Ah! Madame, remember that you are a mother and a wife; employ all your influence 25 for the return of the Princes. That influence, wisely exercised, [can] secure the father’s crown, save it for the son, and reconcile you to the love of the French. This worthy negotiation is the true duty of a Queen. Intrigues, cabals, and sanguinary schemes would precipitate your fall, if one could suspect you 30 of being capable of such plots.3 Madame, let a nobler employ characterize you, excite your ambition, and fix your attention. It falls only to her whom 5



A Translation of The Rights of Woman 29

chance has raised to an eminent position, to give impetus to the launch of the Rights of Woman and to speed its success. If 35 you were less well-informed, Madame, I might fear that your particular interests could prevail over those of your sex. You love glory: Reflect, Madame, that one is immortalized by the greatest crimes, as by the greatest virtues. But in the annals of history, how different, the [two forms of] celebrity! One 40 is forever held up as an example, while the other is eternally execrated by humankind. They will never make it a crime for you to work for the restoration of morals [and] give your sex all the firmness of which it is capable. This task is not a day’s work, unfortu45 nately for the new regime. The Revolution will be achieved only when all women are convinced of their deplorable lot and of the rights that they have lost in society. Madame, support so fine a cause, defend this unfortunate sex, and you will soon win over half the kingdom and at least a third of the other 50 half. Those, Madame, those are the feats by which you ought to distinguish yourself and to employ your influence. Believe me, Madame, a life, especially a Queen’s, amounts to very little, when that life is not ornamented by the peoples’ love and by 55 the eternal charm of doing good. If it is true that Frenchmen are arming all the [foreign] powers against their fatherland, why [are they doing so]? To defend petty prerogatives, [mere] chimeras. Believe [me], Madame, my feelings tell me that all [patriotic] hearts will 60 rally around the fatherland to defend it [and] the monar­ chical party will self-destruct unless it abandons all the [foreign] tyrants. These, Madame, these are my principles. Speaking to you about my fatherland, I lose sight of the purpose of this dedica65 tion. This is the way that every good Citizen [masc.] sacrifices his glory and his interests, when he has as his sole objective [to serve] those of his country.    I am, with the most profound respect, Madame, 70    Your very humble and very obedient servant, De Gouges

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Between the Queen and the Cabby

the rights of woman.

man, are you capable of being just? It is a woman who poses the question; you won’t deprive her of at least that right. Tell 75 me: Who gave you the sovereign empire to oppress my sex? Your strength? Your talents? Observe the creator in his wisdom; survey nature in all its grandeur, which you seem to want to emulate, and offer me, if you dare, an example of this tyrannical empire.* Go back to the animals, consult the elements, 80 study the plants, and finally cast a glance on all the modifications of organic matter. Then yield to the plain truth when I show you the way. Search, investigate, and distinguish, if you can, between the sexes in the workings of nature. Everywhere you will find them intermixed; everywhere they cooperate in 85 this immortal masterpiece with a harmonious togetherness. Man alone has made a foolish principle of his exceptionalism. Bizarre, blind, bloated with learning, and degenerated into the crassest ignorance in this century of enlightenment and wisdom, he wants to rule as a despot over a sex that has also 90 been given every intellectual faculty. He claims to enjoy the revolution [for himself alone] and reasserts his rights to equality, so as to say no more about it.

declaration of the rights of woman and of citizen, 95

To be decreed by the National Assembly in its last sessions or in those of the next legislature.5

preamble. The mothers, the daughters, the sisters, representatives [fem.] of the nation, demand to be constituted in [a] national * [Gouges’s note] From Paris to Peru, from Japan to Rome, The stupidest animal, in my opinion, is man. [De Paris au Pérou, du Japon jusqu’à Rome, Le plus sot animal, à mon avis, c’est l’homme.]4



A Translation of The Rights of Woman 31

100 assembly [sic; no capitalization]. Considering that ignorance,

forgetfulness, or scorn for the rights of woman are the sole causes of public misfortunes and of the corruption of governments, [they] have resolved to set forth in a solemn declaration the natural, inalienable, and sacred rights of woman, so 105 that this declaration, constantly present to all the members of the social body, may ever remind them of their rights and their duties, so that the acts of the power of women and those of the power of men may be compared at any moment with the purpose of every political institution [and] be the more 110 respected, [and] so that the demands of the female citizens, founded henceforth on simple and incontestable principles, may always serve the maintenance of the constitution, good morals, and the happiness of all. Therefore, the sex that is [as] superior in beauty as in cour115 age in the pains of childbirth recognizes and declares, in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being, the following Rights of Woman and of the Citizen. first article. Woman is born free and remains equal to man in rights. 120 Social distinctions may be based only on the common welfare [l’utilité commun]. ii. The goal of every political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of Woman and of Man. 125 These rights are liberty, property, security, and especially resistance to oppression. iii. The principle of all sovereignty rests essentially in the Nation, which is nothing but the union of Woman and Man. 130 No body [and] no individual may exercise authority that does not emanate from it expressly. iv. Liberty and justice consist in restoring to others all that is theirs; thus, the exercise of the natural rights of woman has

32

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135 no limits other than the perpetual tyranny with which man

opposes it. These limits must be reformed by the laws of nature and of reason. v. The laws of nature and of reason forbid all actions [that are] 140 harmful to society. Anything that is not forbidden by these laws, wise and divine, may not be prevented, and no one may be compelled to do what they do not command. vi. The Law must be the expression of the general will; all 145 female Citizens and male Citizens must concur in its formation, in person or by their representatives. It must be the same for all: All female citizens and all male citizens, being equal before it, must be equally admissible to all public honours, positions, and employments, according to their abilities and 150 without other distinctions than those of their virtues and their talents. vii. No woman is an exception. She is [to be] accused, arrested, and detained in cases specified by the Law. Like men, women 155 [must] obey this rigorous Law. viii. The law may establish only penalties that are strictly and obviously necessary, and no one [masc.] may be punished other than by virtue of a Law enacted and promulgated before 160 the offence and legally applied to women. ix. If found guilty, every woman [must be punished with] all severity prescribed by the Law. x. 165 No one [masc.] may be disquieted for opinions, even fundamental. Woman has the right to mount the scaffold; she must also have that of mounting the Rostrum [la Tribune], provided that her pronouncements [ses manifestations] do not disturb the public order established by the Law.



A Translation of The Rights of Woman 33

170 xi. The free communication of thoughts and opinions is one of the most precious rights of woman, because that liberty ensures the legitimacy of children with respect to their fathers. Therefore, without a barbarous prejudice forcing her to 175 disguise the truth, every female Citizen may freely say, “I am the mother of a child who belongs to you,” although she must answer for abuses of this liberty in cases determined by the Law.

xii. 180 The guarantee of the rights of woman and of citizen must

serve a general interest [une utilité majeure]. This guarantee must be established for the advantage of all and not for the particular interest [l’utilité particulière] of those [fem.] to whom it is entrusted. 185 xiii. For the maintenance of the public force and for the expenses of government, the taxes [les contributions] on woman and man are equal. She shares responsibility for all corvées6 [and] for all [other] burdensome obligations; therefore, she must 190 have the same share in the distribution of positions, employments, offices, honours, and jobs.

xiv. Female Citizens and male Citizens have the right to verify by themselves or by their representatives the need for public 195 taxation [la contribution]. Female Citizens can comply with this [the obligation to pay taxes] only if admitted to equal shares of [private] wealth and of public administration and [given the authority] to determine the amount, assessment, ­collection, and duration of the tax imposed [l’impôt]. 200 xv. The mass of women, associated for taxation [la contribution] with that of men, has the right to demand an accounting of his administration from every public agent.

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Between the Queen and the Cabby

xvi. 205 No society has a constitution unless rights are guaranteed

and the separation of powers is definite. The constitution is null, if a majority of the individuals who make up the Nation has not cooperated in drafting it. xvii. 210 Properties belong to [persons of] both sexes, [whether they

are] united or separated. Each [individual] has an inviolable and sacred right [to them, and] no one may be deprived of them, the true patrimony of nature, unless a public necessity, legally verified, obviously requires it, and [then only] on condi215 tion of a just and prior indemnity.

postamble. Woman, wake up! The tocsin of reason is heard throughout the universe: Know your rights. The powerful empire of nature is no longer surrounded by prejudice, fanaticism, superstition, 220 and lies. The torch of truth has scattered all the clouds of folly and usurpation. Enslaved man has multiplied his [own] strength but needed recourse to yours to break his fetters. Having become free, he has become unjust to his companion. Oh, women! women, when will you open your eyes? What 225 have you gained from the revolution? A more marked contempt, a more public disdain. In the era of corruption, you ruled only over the weakness of men. Your empire is destroyed. What, then, remains for you? To convince [yourselves] of man’s injustices [and] to reclaim your patrimony, 230 based on the wise decrees of nature. What would you have to fear in so fair a cause? The bon mot of the Legislator of the wedding of Cana?7 Are you afraid that our French Legislators, the reformers of that morality, having tried everything possible, fair or foul, in ways that are no longer acceptable, may 235 repeat: “Women, what is there in common between you and us?” You could answer: “Everything.” If, in their weakness, they insist on this inconsistency, contradicting their [own] principles, courageously use the strength of [your] reason to oppose their vain pretensions to superiority. Unite under the 240 banners of philosophy, show all the energy of your character,



A Translation of The Rights of Woman 35



and you will soon see these haughty men, not grovelling at your feet in slavish adoration, but proud to share with you the treasures of the Supreme Being. Whatever may be the barriers that they raise against you, it is within your power to over245 come them: You have only to will it. Now let us turn to the appalling spectacle of what you have been in society, and since at the moment there is question of a national education, let us see whether our wise legislators will think reasonably about women’s education. 250 Women have done more harm than good. Constraint and dissimulation have been their lot. What force has stolen from them, cunning has restored: They have resorted to all the resources of their charms, and the most upright man did not resist them. Poison, the dagger, all was at their disposal; they 255 commanded in crime as in virtue. French government, especially, depended for centuries on the nocturnal administration of women; the cabinet had no secret[s] beyond their indiscretion. Ambassadorships, commands, ministries, presidencies, the pontificate, the cardinalate,* in short, everything that 260 characterizes the foolishness of men, everything sacred and profane was subject to the greed and ambition of this sex, once despicable and respected and, since the revolution, respectable and despised. On this sort of antithesis, how many remarks could I make! 265 I have only a moment to make them, but this moment will fix the attention of the remotest posterity. Under the old regime, everything was vicious, everything was guilty, but can’t we see an improvement of things in the very nature of the vices? A woman needed only to be beautiful or charming; if she had 270 both of these advantages, she saw a hundred fortunes at her feet. If she didn’t profit from them, she had a bizarre character or an uncommon philosophy that led her to a contempt for riches; in this case, she was considered dull-witted, [while] the most indecent woman made herself respectable with her gold. 275 The trade in women was a sort of commerce that was accepted in the highest class, [but,] from this time onward, it will no longer be legitimate. If it were, the revolution would be lost,

* [Gouges’s note:] M. de Bernis, by the favour of Madame de Pompadour.8

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Between the Queen and the Cabby

and within the new order we would still be corrupt. However, is it reasonable to deny that every other way to fortune is 280 closed to the woman whom a man buys like a slave on the coasts of Africa? Admittedly, there are great differences: This “slave” commands the master. But if the master gives her liberty without compensation at an age when the “slave” has lost all her charms, what is the fate of this unfortunate woman? 285 [She becomes] an object of scorn, even the doors of charity closed to her; she is poor and old, [and] people ask: “Why wasn’t she able to make a fortune for herself?” Other examples, still more touching, come to mind: A young, inexperienced person, seduced by a man whom she loves, will abandon 290 her parents to follow him; the ingrate will leave her after a few years, and the more she has aged with him, the crueller will be his infidelity. If she has children, he will abandon her just the same. If he is rich, he will consider himself excused from sharing his fortune with his noble victims. If he has made some 295 promise to respect his duty, he will violate it, trusting completely in the laws. If he is married, he will ignore the rights of every other commitment. What laws, then, remain to be made in order to extirpate vice to its roots? That of sharing wealth between men and women, along with public administration. 300 One can easily understand that the woman born into a rich family gains a lot from an equal division [of a deceased parent’s estate]. But she who has been born into a poor family, [whatever] her merit and virtue, what is her fate? Poverty and shame. If she doesn’t exactly excel in music or in painting, 305 she can’t be accepted for any public function, even if she is perfectly capable. I want to give just a sketch of these things, [which] I will develop in the new edition of all my political works, with notes, that I propose to give to the public in a few days. 310 I return to my discussion of morals. Marriage is the tomb of trust and of love. The married woman can give bastard children to her husband with impunity and [so give them claims to] a fortune that isn’t rightly theirs. The unmarried woman has only a feeble right: Old and inhumane laws deny her 315 children the right to their [own] father’s name and property, and they haven’t made new laws on the matter. If it is considered paradoxical for me at the moment to try to give my sex



A Translation of The Rights of Woman 37

credit for being honourable and just, as if this were an impossible task, I yield the glory of treating this issue to the men 320 of the future, but, while waiting, we can prepare for it by the national education, by the restoration of morals, and by [the reform of] conjugal conventions. Form of the Social Contract between the Man and the Woman. 325 We, name and name, unite with one another of our own free will, for the length of our lives and for the duration of our mutual inclinations, on the following conditions: We understand that we willingly put our fortunes into communal ownership, reserving for ourselves, however, the right to 330 separate them in favour of our children and those persons for whom we may have a particular inclination, mutually recognizing that our assets belong directly to our children, from whatever bed they come, and that all without exception have the right to bear the name of the fathers and 335 mothers [sic] who have acknowledged them. We commit ourselves to respect the law that punishes the denial of one’s own blood. In case [our union ends in] a separation, we also obligate ourselves to divide our wealth and to set aside for our children the portion that is specified by the law. In the 340 case of a lasting union, the one who dies first will divest himself of half his property in favour of his children; if he dies childless, the survivor will inherit by right, unless the decedent has disposed of half the common property in favour of whomever he thinks proper. 345 That’s approximately the formula of the conjugal act that I

propose for adoption. I suppose that, upon reading this bizarre writing, the tartuffes,9 the prudes, the priests, and the whole damned lot of them will rise up against me. But what moral means it offers to the wise for reaching the perfection of a 350 happy government! I am going to give the physical proof in a few words: The wealthy Epicurean who lacks children finds it just fine to go to the home of his poor neighbour to add to his family. When there is a law authorizing the wife of a poor man to have her children adopted by the rich, social bonds will be 355 strengthened and morals, purified. This law will perhaps con-

38

Between the Queen and the Cabby



serve the prosperity of the [marital] community and restrain the disorder that sends so many victims to the hospices of shame, baseness, and the degradation of humane principles, [institutions] at which nature has long shuddered. Let the 360 detractors of a sound philosophy then cease their outcries against primitive morals – or let them get lost in the search for their citations.* I would like another law that would favour the widows and young ladies who have been deceived by the false promises of 365 a man to whom they were attached. I would like, I say, this law to force an unfaithful man to keep his promises or [to pay] an indemnity proportional to his wealth. Furthermore, I would like this law to be severe with respect to women, at least those who have the brazenness to have recourse to a law that they 370 themselves have violated by their misconduct, if that can be proven. At the same time, as I explained in the primitive happiness of man in 1788 [sic],11 I would like prostitutes to be placed in designated districts. [But] it isn’t the prostitutes who contribute most to the depravity of morals; it’s the [married] 375 women of [polite] society. By rehabilitating the latter, we reform the former. Initially, such ties of fraternal unity may lead to disorder, but they will eventually produce a perfect togetherness in the end. I offer an infallible way to elevate the souls of women: It is 380 to join them in all the activities of men. If men persist in finding this impractical, let them share their wealth with women, not capriciously, but by the wisdom of the laws. Prejudice falls, morals are purified, and nature resumes all its rights. Add the marriage of priests, strengthen the king on his throne, and the 385 French government can no longer fail. It was absolutely necessary for me to say a few words about the troubles that the decree [of 15 May 1791] in favour of the men of colour supposedly causes on our islands.12 That’s where nature shudders in horror, where reason and humanity 390 have still not touched hardened hearts, and, above all, where division and discord agitate the inhabitants. It’s not hard to find the incendiary instigators of these fermentations: Some * [Gouges’s note:] Abraham had perfectly legitimate children by Hagar, his wife’s servant.10



A Translation of The Rights of Woman 39

are in the very bosom of the National Assembly; they light the fire in Europe that must engulf America. Colons rule presump395 tuously as despots over men who are their sons and brothers; they misconstrue the rights of nature, [justifying denial of] them by the tiniest tint of blood [in coloured children]. The inhumane Colons say: “Our blood circulates in their veins, but we will spill it all, if necessary, to satisfy our greed or our 400 blind ambition.” These are the places, the closest to nature, where the [white] father fails to acknowledge the [coloured] son; deaf to the cries of blood, he stifles all their appeal. What hope can there be in opposing the resistance [of a son]? To restrain him by violence is to make him terrible; to leave him 405 in irons is to put America on the path to every calamity. A divine hand seems to extend everywhere the birthright of man, liberty [author’s emphasis, here alone in the body of her text]; the law can rightfully repress this liberty only if it degenerates into licence, but it must be equal for all. It is this [liberty], 410 above all, that the National Assembly, guided by prudence and by justice, must reaffirm by its decree. May it act likewise for the state of France, paying as much attention to new abuses, which become more frightful each day, as it has paid to the old! My opinion would still be to reconcile the power of the 415 executive with that of the legislative, because it seems that the one is everything, the other, nothing, from which will come, perhaps unfortunately, the fall of the French Empire. I consider these two powers [to be] like a man and wife,* who make a good household when united as equals in strength and in 420 virtue.

So, it’s true that no one can escape her fate. I found out that today. I had decided and resolved not to allow myself in this production the least word in jest, but fate has decided otherwise. Here’s what happened:

* [Gouges’s note:] In The Magic Supper by M. de Murville, Ninon asks, “Who is the mistress of Louis xvi?” She is answered: “It’s the Nation; that mistress will corrupt the government, if it takes too much power.”13

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Between the Queen and the Cabby

425 There’s no law against economizing, especially in these hard times.

430

435

440

445

450

455

460

465

I live in the country. At eight o’clock this morning, I left Auteuil and walked to the road from Paris to Versailles, along which one finds those popular little taverns that bring in traffic by low prices. For sure, an evil star followed me all morning. I reached the [gatehouse of the customs] barrier, where there wasn’t even the sorriest aristocratic cab. I rested on the steps of the imposing edifice that used to harbour the agents [of the Farmers General]. It rang nine o’clock, and I continued on my way [until] a coach came into sight; I took a seat and reached the Pont Royal at a quarter after nine on two different watches. There, I took a cab and flew to the shop of my Printer on the rue Christine, because that’s the only place I can go so early. When correcting proofs, there’s always something left for me to do if the pages aren’t well composed and filled. I stayed about twenty minutes, and, tired from the walking, the composing, and the printing, I decided to bathe in the district of the Temple, where I was going to dine. I got there at a quarter to eleven by the clock at the bathhouse, so I owed the cab driver for an hour and a half, but, so as not to quarrel with him, I offered him 48 sous. He demanded more, as they usually do, and made a lot of noise. I refused to pay him more than his due, because the fair-minded person would prefer to be generous than to be cheated. I threatened him with the law, [but] he laughed this off and said that I would [have to] pay him for two hours. We went to a justice of the peace, whom I have the decency not to name, although the high-handed action that he permitted himself with me does deserve a formal complaint. He must not have known that the woman who was seeking justice from him was the woman who had written with beneficence and equity. Without paying attention to my arguments, he pitilessly condemned me to pay the cabby what he demanded. Knowing the law better than he did, I told him, “Monsieur, I refuse to do it, and I beg you to take care lest you fail to uphold the principles of your office.” Then this man or, more exactly, this crook got mad [and] threatened me with La Force [prison] if I didn’t pay right away; [I thought I might have to] spend the whole day in his office. I asked him to have me taken to the tribunal of the Department or the office of the mayor, where I could lodge a complaint against his abuse of authority. The grave magistrate, in a coat [that was] covered with powder [and] as disgusting as his conversation, responded sarcastically: “[You’ll take] this case [all the way to] the National Assembly, won’t you?” I said, “Maybe so,” and hurried off, half-furious and half-laughing at the judgment of this latter-day Bride’oison,14 remarking, “So, that’s the sort of man who is fit to judge an enlightened people!” We see nothing else. Such



A Translation of The Rights of Woman 41

adventures happen [to everyone] alike, the good patriots as well as the bad. There’s only one cry from the disorders of the sections and 470 the courts: Justice isn’t done, the law isn’t known, and God knows how any order is kept. One can’t find the cab drivers to whom parcels have been entrusted any longer; they change their numbers at a whim, and, like me, many others have suffered considerable losses in their vehicles. Under the Old Regime, whatever was the thievery, one 475 could trace lost items by calling the names of the drivers and inspecting the numbers [of their cabs], and in the end one was safe. But what are these justices of the peace doing? What about these commissioners and these inspectors in the new regime? [It’s] nothing but foolishness and special interests. The National Assembly must pay 480 full attention to this matter, which inflames the social order. P. S. This work was composed a few days ago, but there were further delays in the printing; this production was already in press at the moment when M. Talleyrand, whose name will always be dear to posterity, had just given his work on the principles of national education. [I’ll be] a happy 485 woman, if I find that I agree with the recommendations of this orator! Nevertheless, I can’t restrain myself from stopping the press and bursting out in the pure joy that my heart has felt at the news that the king has just accepted the Constitution and that the national assembly – which I now adore, the abbé Maury not excepted,15 and la Fayette is a god – has unanimously proclaimed 490 a general amnesty. Divine Providence, may this public joy not be a false illusion! May all our fugitives return to us in a body, and may I, together with a loving people, fly [to greet] their passage.16 On this solemn day, we will all render homage to your power.

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part one The Dedication Among Gouges’s most attractive traits is the boldness with which she addressed powerful men, including Louis xvi and princes of the blood in other works and the deputies who had made themselves representatives of the sovereign nation in The Rights of Woman. She is hardly less bold in admonishing Marie-Antoinette, even while dedicating the pamphlet to her. Yet the prominence of the words “To the Queen” on her preliminary page would have repelled many potential readers in 1791, and modern readers of her Declaration may not give sufficient thought to what the Dedication meant in the historical context. Part One puts that unconventional address into the context of Gouges’s other works and the politics of that period. Chapter 1 documents her fervent devotion to the king and supports her claim to have defended the much-maligned queen. Chapter 2 concerns the remarkable combination of threat and blandishment in the Dedication, published when Marie-Antoinette was already suspected of conspiring with her brother, Emperor Leopold ii, and the émigré princes, especially the king’s brothers, Provence and Artois, and most militant cousin, Condé. The first impression for contemporary readers would have been to associate Gouges’s cause with the hated queen, even if the feminism of its demands and recommendations was wholly foreign to Marie-Antoinette. A last impression could have been to associate it with the king, who had publicly denounced the constitutional project of the National Assembly in June when he had felt momentarily free to speak his mind and publicly accepted it in September only when he knew that his situation left him no real choice.

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1 Gouges’s Devotion to the King and Defence of the Queen

The principal concern of this chapter is with Gouges’s political identity as a royalist and monarchist, which she had established in pamphleteering from earlier years and maintained in The Rights of Woman. Beginnings are all-important for any author seeking to engage an audience, and the equivocal Dedication with which she prefaced her Declaration obviously requires a hard look at “To the Queen.” But endings matter too, and it is one of Gouges’s distinctive traits as an author who composed orally that she often had trouble stopping. After her Declaration comes the Postface; within the latter comes one concern, then another, and then another. After her Postface comes the untitled narrative of her unfortunate dispute with cabby, and after that comes the Postscript. It has escaped scholarly notice that at each of what seem to have been three successive conclusions to the pamphlet we read for its feminism, Gouges saw fit to declare a monarchism that went beyond an abstract constitutional preference to a personal devotion to the king and other members of the extended royal family (The Rights of Woman, lines 384–5, 414–20 with Gouges’s note, 486–92). Historians since Herodotus and dramatists since Sophocles have counselled the wise to “look to the end in all things,” and that lesson can pertain here too. As is generally understood, but perhaps only generally, Gouges went to her own tragic end as something of a martyr to her monarchism. The best gauge of the strength of these sentiments may be her spontaneous actions in the most desperate circumstances after the assault on the Tuileries on 10 August 1792 and the fall of the monarchy. In these radically altered conditions, Gouges remained a royalist at heart, even if she would make protestations of good republican principles. Four days after Robert

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The Dedication

­ indet’s indictment of the deposed king before the National ConL vention on the following 11 December, she would grandly offer to serve as co-counsel for the defence of the doomed “Louis Capet.”1 The day after a roll-call vote ended on 17 January 1793 with a death sentence, she would rush into print with a wild scheme intended to save his life.2 On the very day of Charlotte Corday’s execution for having assassinated the ferocious Jean-Paul Marat on the following 13 July, she would attempt to placard Paris with Les Trois Urnes (The Three Urns), a poster in which she urged a referendum on the Republic that would effectively have invited Frenchmen to vote for a federalist or monarchical alternative. This reckless gesture, by which she defied the draconian decree of 29 March, was to cost her own life.3 However, modern students of her Rights of Woman have tended to pay little attention to the implications of her royalism, past and future, for the reception of this pamphlet by her contemporaries. In it, she may seem to pay scant attention to the king, and historians of women and of feminism have other priorities. However, Louis xvi had come first in the institutional structure of the Old Regime, and he did so again in the political history of September 1791. He comes first here also, although it is the queen who takes precedence in Gouges’s pamphlet and so merits particularly careful attention.

royalist and monarchist Gouges’s earliest political pamphlet, the Letter to the People, goes back to September 1788. Her identity as a patriotic woman was perfectly compatible with an explicitly patriarchal conception of the state. For her, Louis xvi is “an all-powerful king,” a “master” whose every “order” must be revered as “sacred.” Above all, he is a good father who commands love and so need not command obedience: “Oh, paternal goodness, which ought to inflame the heart of every good Frenchman! ... The king is like a father whose affairs have become distressed; for his children, it is a simple matter of honour and love as well as respect to fly willingly to the aid of this unfortunate father.”4 Ten optimistic pages follow on the predicted willingness of good subjects to bring offerings to their father-king in his time of financial need. Only then, as something of an afterthought, does Gouges introduce the queen, following a paragraph on fashionable women and



Gouges’s Defence of the Queen

47

their excessive expenditure on clothing and accessories, especially hats. Ever so delicately, she alludes to Marie-Antoinette’s reputation for extravagance in her dress, while predicting that the queen will deny herself for the public welfare: “Who can doubt that she will make the greatest economies in her finances in order to increase the amount of this patriotic fund?”5 That is, she will forsake further purchases of the hats and yet more hats, with all their plumes, criticized in this immediate context, so as to make exemplary donations in the form of the “patriotic” or “voluntary tax” that Gouges proposes in the pamphlet as a whole.6 She informally dedicated her second political tract, the Patriotic Remarks, to the same idealized queen, whose “goodness and intelligence” and “beneficent humanity” promise relief for widows, orphans, the aged, and the unemployed.7 This pamphlet features an engraved frontispiece entitled Louis xvi à son peuple (Louis xvi to His People), in which a figure representing Marie-Antoinette stands at the peak of a central triad. On one side below, Gouges offers up this new publication, with its happy idea of additional luxury taxes on the rich to supplement the “patriotic” or “voluntary tax.” On the other side is the king, reclining in a chariot drawn by a docile ewe and a regal cock. Louis holds the sceptre in the crook of his left arm and gestures with his right at a tree laden with fruit. Marie-Antoinette receives Gouges’s pamphlet with one graceful hand, while resting the other lightly on the tree, a wonder-working queen’s touch,8 and fruit comes raining down on kneeling subjects. The author explains all this in an extended dream-narrative.9 In republican retrospect, a more descriptive title for her Patriotic Remarks might appear to be be “Royalist Fantasies.” Gouges subscribed to royalist ideology and extended its patriarchal mythology. Whatever her own secularism, her politics make sense in terms of traditional ideals of mutual love that are fundamentally Christian. As the good father-king loves and protects his people, so those subjects must love and submit to their ruler. Pride and greed are bad; deference and sacrifice are good. At the same time, there are already quasi-democratic and proto-feminist aspects of even her earliest political pamphlets. The central figure in the frontispiece for the Letter to the People, itself entitled Projet de l’impôt patriotique (Proposal for a Patriotic Tax), is a laundress who contributes her mite to the patriotic fund while carrying on her strong back a large hamper filled with a mound of others’ linens.

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Frontispiece for Remarques patriotiques: Louis xvi à son peuple (Patriotic Remarks: Louis xvi to his people)

In the frontispiece for the Patriotic Remarks, as just described, it is Gouges herself as a female subject, not an aristocratic minister of state, whose proposals promise to restore royal finances and feed the hungry, while it is the queen, not the king, who acts to distribute abundance. There is no sense that Marie-Antoinette needs defenders, no evidence of Gouges’s rights-consciousness, nor any sign of other constitutional thought.



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Frontispiece for Lettre au Peuple: Projet de l’impôt patriotique (Letter to the People: Proposal for a patriotic tax)

Gouges published her Primitive Happiness of Man in the winter of 1789, when the pre-Revolutionary crisis had called forth not only her own first political tracts but also an unprecedented flood of “ideas and projects” that were potentially destructive of the

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e­ stablished order. In these last months before what would quickly become a parliamentary usurpation of royal authority by deputies of the Third Estate acting in the name of the nation, it was not yet clear to Gouges that a challenge to the privileged position of the Clergy and Nobility would also entail a challenge to the king, and she was so concerned to combat the illusions and pretensions of levellers that she seems not to have given much thought to the mythology of the monarchy, which rested on patriarchal assumptions. Nevertheless, however reflexively, she shared them. In the very first sentence of the first chapter of her Primitive Happiness, “the first man” of her imagination already “give[s] laws to his children and great-grandsons.” At the end of his life, these descendants cast themselves at his feet, begging the naturally wise man to tell them how to preserve order. The goal of his law is explicitly conservative: “[T]he law that I establish among you [is] that he who would encroach on the rights of his brother, his neighbour, [or] his friend be driven from the family and the society as a rebel.” All this is masculine.10 When Gouges turns from this imaginative reconstruction of a happier patriarchal past to address the present crisis in her own voice, it is to endorse unqualified monarchy as the best of all possible governments, best because “the happiest for peoples” and “the most peaceful for men.”11 For her, justice is a matter of the traditional three estates getting along together, respecting ranks, and acknowledging duties, all under the aegis of a patriarchal ruler: “[T]he shrewdest and wisest policy for the sovereign is to remain deaf to all this meaningless clamour. Let the king as the first head of the kingdom pronounce and give [his] orders to the nation to assemble as he thinks proper for the welfare of his state and the good of his subjects.”12 The year 1789 was to be a watershed in all sorts of ways, of course, most dramatically for the monarchy. In this same period, Gouges, the daughter of a provincial butcher, came of age as a pamphleteer, freely distributing her political opinions and policy recommendations in an irregular series of further publications. Blanc has collected them in his edition of her Écrits politiques (Political Writings), but they have never been systematically studied by other scholars, probably for the simple reasons that most of her immediate concerns turn out to have had little lasting significance and that in this annus mirabilis of the Democratic Revolution she herself hardly anticipated her later feminism. The most striking fact is that she did not waver in her support for the king’s cause. It is not enough simply to call her a royalist for her allegiance to Louis xvi or a monar-



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chist for her conviction that France required a powerful ruler. She was reluctant to accept the sovereignty of the National Assembly or to concede the need for a new constitution, and her traditionalism smacks of what would become in other hands a more coherent conservative ideology in which the claims of the established Church, the regular army, and private property would all become more important than they were for her. In June 1789, the month when the deputies of the Thirds first claimed sovereign authority for themselves in the name of the nation and took a solemn oath “to give France a constitution,” Gouges committed herself in print to the king and the traditional order: “I foresaw that the king’s authority as first legislator of the law [sic] would compel him to interpose his superior power. What a cruel extremity for the wisest of monarchs! What a harsh necessity for the best of fathers! ... The French monarchy has foundations that cannot be changed without disturbing the state, the throne, and the happiness of the citizens. Fourteen centuries ... have only improved its good constitution. Nevertheless, they talk of changing it, assuring us ... that our nephews will celebrate this revolution. What times! What morals! What a spirit!”13 She urged Louis xvi to “[h]eed only the voice of your own heart” and challenged the “right” of the Third Estate to reconstitute itself as a National Assembly.14 In July a substantial troop buildup in and around Paris, the dismissal of the liberal Necker and other like-minded ministers, and the appointment of Louis-Auguste le Tonnelier, baron de Breteuil, to head a newly authoritarian ministry seemed to signal an imminent royalist coup against the rebellious assembly. However, in the Memorable Week of 11–17 July, the unreliability of these troops, the armament of the Parisians, and the fall of the Bastille combined to force the king to yield. On 15 July he had to take the humiliating walk from the palace to the Menus Plaisirs, where he announced to the National Assembly that he was dispersing the troops, as the deputies had demanded in vain before the crisis. On 16 July his council had to agree to dismiss the new ministers and recall Necker. On 17 July he drove to Paris, where he announced these decisions, adopted a patriotic cockade, and accepted the formation of a new municipal government and a new bourgeois militia. It is quietly telling that Gouges, who had so much to say about other things, failed to celebrate any of these epochal events. In August, while the deputies were dismantling a regime of graduated privileges and untrammelled monarchical authority and l­aying

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the foundations of a new order in the August Decrees and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, Gouges was denouncing “brigands” and appealing to the king’s more reactionary brother, Artois, who had already emigrated and whom she urged to return as the head of a new chivalric order to which even she could aspire. This was not a matter of her commitment to newly egalitarian conceptions of citizens’ rights – far from it. Given her future as the author of a feminist declaration of rights, it is particularly striking that at the time she had nothing to say in print about the men’s Declaration. Instead, she publicly professed her beliefs that “Frenchmen are born to live subject to the laws of a good king” and that “the authority of the king” must be strengthened for the very salvation of the fatherland.15 In September, apparently, when she rashly suggested that Louis xvi step aside at least temporarily to make way for a regency government under Orléans, a hero for patriots, she did so in the name of professedly illiberal principles. She wanted a strong monarch with an absolute veto, and she resisted changes that threatened the state and the fatherland: “There must be only one master in a government like that of France. He holds his power from the nation, but for its own survival the nation ought to grant it to him without limits.” By relinquishing the government to someone more willing to use force in defence of an imperilled regime, she thought that Louis could restore his own royal authority. Reaffirmation was the goal: “[S]oon, Sire, you will see that the nation will return to your hands the absolute power [sic] that alone can re-establish order.” In words scripted for a dream Orléans, she concluded that the National Assembly should abandon the principles of the Declaration and its attempts to frame a constitutional monarchy: “I will finish by observing that it is important for the French constitution to return absolute power [sic] to the hands of the head of state; ... the nation can be strengthened only insofar as its force and vigour are in the hands of a single man.” This language of royal “force and vigour” was not merely metaphorical: in the same pamphlet, Gouges advocated significantly increasing troop levels in the Household of the King, both by replacing those French guards who had defected to join the Paris National Guard and by restoring elite units that had been sacrificed in the name of economy (the Musketeers, the Gendarmes, and the Light Horse).16 The October Days were to be decisive for the king, insofar as the march of Parisian women to Versailles, followed hard by the



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National Guard under Lafayette, induced him even on 5 October, before the rioting of the next morning, to give his “pure and simple acceptance” to both the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and the Constitutional Articles. This agreement broke what had been a political impasse between the old sovereign and the new, the king and the National Assembly, and formalized for the first time his concession of law-making authority to his former subjects. Judging from Gouges’s references to the delayed march of Lafayette, to “the moment of tumult,” and to the present darkness, night watch, and promised dawning of a brighter day, she seems to have composed her Contre poison: Avis aux citoyens de Versailles (The Antidote: Advice for the Citizens of Versailles) sometime late on that very day. Perhaps the most striking thing about this broadside is yet another silence, even in these dramatic circumstances; there is not a word about either the impasse or its resolution. Gouges’s expressed concern is with the restoration of order.17 In the event, the drama would intensify on the morning of 6 October with the murder of two of the elite body guards, the intrusion of rioters into the palace apartment of the queen, and the king’s agreement to abandon Versailles for residence in the heart of Paris. Patriots regarded that too as a triumph, but Gouges was not to celebrate it. Thus her politics in 1789 were devotedly, perhaps even stubbornly, monarchical. The year 1790 was to be quieter for both the king and a disheartened Gouges, but in bidding a somewhat defiant farewell to what readership she could still attract, she contrasted herself with the liberal Necker and reaffirmed her own conservatism as a good royalist: I have wanted to conserve ... and to consolidate the monarchy ... I have counselled [Frenchmen] not to touch the ancient and sacred tree of the monarchy, but simply to trim its branches ... How dangerous it is, Monsieur [Necker], to turn men away from their accustomed ways, once they have gotten used to them! ... I would like the king of France [an old-style title; the approved new style was “king of the French”] to reclaim his throne and the nation to acknowledge that it has been a misfortune for France for him to have stepped down ... An infatuation with liberty still turns the Frenchmen’s heads, but once this craze has passed, I hope that they will recognize that it is more beneficial for men to have a single master than for everyone to be masters at the same time ... Why abandon the best of kings? Why leave the state in the sorry condition to which it has been reduced?18

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This is not Wollstonecraft avant la lettre but Burke! In 1791 Gouges’s royalist sympathies survived even the great shock of the Flight to Varennes, in which the king failed in his attempt to escape the Revolution and succeeded only in publicly declaring his considered rejection of the constitution in the making. In the immediate aftermath of his arrest on 21 June, when the most advanced patriots were already publicly advocating a republic and the National Assembly had yet to determine the fate of a fugitive who was arguably a traitor, Gouges unabashedly reiterated that she was a royalist, if a patriotic royalist, and that Louis xvi should be granted “the indispensable power that is suitable for the king of the French,” thus effectively rewarding his defection by meeting his demands.19 More consequentially, in the immediate aftermath of the deputies’ formal submission of their completed constitution to the king for his approval on 3 September, Gouges publicly advised him not to sanction it and impetuously distributed her Avis pressant au roi (Urgent Counsel to the King) to the very deputies who had finally decreed it. This response, in turn, prompted many of them to dismiss her as “crazy” and discount her politics as “aristocratic.” Turn and turn about, on 5 September she had then to publish a disavowal in the form of the Repentir de Madame de Gouges (Repentance of Madame de Gouges).20 All this came within ten or twelve days of the publication of The Rights of Woman, which matters so much more to us. With our eyes properly fixed on the feminist content of its Declaration, we may miss the fact that she reaffirms her support for the king and a strong monarchy twice in the Postamble and once in the Postscript (lines 384–5, 414–20 with Gouges’s note, 486–92). This position would have mattered to her contemporaries. The dedication “To the Queen” with which she begins would have mattered even more.

defender of the queen Gouges presents herself as a heroic champion of the queen: “When the entire Empire accused you and made you responsible for its calamities, I alone ... had the strength to take up your defence ... when I saw the sword raised against you, I threw my observations between that sword and the victim” (Rights of Woman, lines 11–17). She had known that Marie-Antoinette was already unpopular even before 1789 but seems to have felt no particular need to mount



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a defence. Along with much else, that was soon to change. I shall focus on periods of escalating tensions: first, Gouges’s vigorous, if incidental, response in mid-June 1789 to the memoir of a brazen con artist who libelled the queen as having been the criminal mastermind in the Diamond Necklace affair; second, her desperate appeal for calm in the hours before bloody-minded rioters burst into the queen’s apartment in the palace of Versailles on the early morning of 6 October 1789; and third, her attempt to come to terms with the consequences of the Flight to Varennes on 20–21 June 1791, when the queen was blamed for the king’s defection. Within 1789 Marie-Antoinette came under sharp attack. Most recent scholarly attention has been paid to the many scurrilous pamphlets, brief, vulgar, and anonymous, that perversely profited from newly claimed freedoms of expression and from a popular readiness to believe the worst about the queen as a sexually voracious monster.21 Gouges did not attempt to answer them. However, in a substantial digression within a mid-June pamphlet of her own, she did blast away at a longer, more polished, more nearly plausible, more widely distributed, and far more damaging new publication, the Mémoire justificatif de la comtesse de Valois de La Motte (Justificatory Memoir of the Countess de Valois de La Motte). The self-styled countess was the remarkable woman who had escaped to England after having been convicted and imprisoned in France for the theft of the spectacular Diamond Necklace.22 The Justificatory Memoir has the nominal purpose of appealing La Motte’s conviction, representing her as an innocent victim. Here it is the queen who is the true thief, an arch-villain driven primarily by the twin demons of “the most insatiable greed” and “the most devious ambition.”23 This story also presumes her uninhibited sexuality, including a prolonged lesbian dalliance with the beautiful countess herself and “probably” the final gratification of the illicit desires that the Cardinal de Rohan had already begun to express in Vienna when Marie-Antoinette, then an archduchess, was hardly out of girlhood. That said, the supposed affairs of the grown woman with both men and women are given as evidence more of her talents for deception and manipulation than of her pursuit of sexual pleasure for its own sake, let alone her capacity for mutual affection.24 For the memoirist, politics is “the key to everything.”25 The tale of the “greed” of even an indulged queen must have seemed the more credible from the facts that she was a notorious

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spendthrift with a particular fondness for diamonds and that the court jewellers had priced the fabulous necklace, with its hundreds of matched stones, at 1,600,000 livres. Would not such a greedy and powerful woman have wanted it but balked at paying for it? Thus we come to the “ambition” alleged for an archduchess who had become the dauphiness at fourteen and queen at eighteen. The claim is that, even in France, she was still l’Autrichienne, that is, “the Austrian woman” or “the Austrian bitch,” serving the interests of Emperor Joseph ii, her brother and the son and heir of a displaced Duke of Lorraine, himself ever desirous of reclaiming the province and ever needy of financial support.26 She supposedly duped Rohan to get the diamonds for herself, her favourites, and her brother, intending to reward the cardinal with a ministry that would be friendly to Austrian interests. Gouges blasts away at the so-called countess and the credibility of her so-called memoir in a couple of short paragraphs that are as effective as any name-calling could be. She can hardly contain herself about La Motte, whom she calls a “mastermind of heinous crimes, guilty woman, monster vomited up from hell.” As for the Memoir, it is pure fiction, absurd, unbelievable, pitiful.27 That assessment is not too harsh. Even scholars who acknowledge lingering uncertainties about the affair cannot accept the notion, for instance, that the queen herself could have been the evil genius behind the tragi-comic nighttime rendezvous with Rohan, in which her own part had been played by a prostitute hired from the Palais Royal, or that she herself could have suggested, however indirectly, that the cardinal be given a counterfeit authorization to purchase the jewels bearing a crude forgery of her own signature. Absurd. Unbelievable. Pitiful.28 In what Gouges seems to have intended as a last pamphlet, she went on for another three paragraphs to sympathize personally with the queen’s situation as the victim of such calumny. In the circumstances, her repeated references to Marie-Antoinette as “a tender mother” and “cherished spouse” are particularly affecting and not just generic flattery, if we assume the pamphlet to have been composed sometime in the week following the fateful decision of the Thirds on 10 June to begin the verification of credentials for deputies from all three orders.29 The royal family was then in seclusion, mourning the death on 4 June of the dauphin, an eight-year-old who had suffered a long and excruciating decline. The womanly sympathy is real, but, as La Motte had said to a contrary effect, politics is



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“the key to everything”: Gouges supposes that because the queen is the “wife and mother of Frenchmen,” she must “cherish this nation,” preferring “the welfare of her fatherland [France] to that which has become foreign for her [Austria].”30 Gouges also poses without quite answering what is still a significant question: How had Marie-Antoinette, who had been much admired in France as a young princess, fallen so far from the grace of popular favour as a mature queen? The pamphleteer offers the ­frivolity and vivacity natural to a child-bride as at least partial excuses for early pleasure-seeking. But neither age nor gender provides her strongest arguments in favour of the queen. She firmly rejects the idea that a woman raised as an archduchess and enthroned as queen could possibly have sunk to the level required by La Motte’s version of the Diamond Necklace affair. Marie­Antoinette would no more have behaved in this way than the sun should arise at night to steal the very treasures that it gives by day.31 Thus Gouges was indeed an early defender of the queen against the libel of her most vicious enemy. Marie-Antoinette was not credibly threatened with bodily harm before the October Days, but after the march of armed women from Paris to Versailles on 5 October 1789, the threat was immediate. Early the next morning, rioters burst into the palace and penetrated her apartment, not only killing the two body guards and wounding others but also, according to much later testimony, threatening the queen herself.32 In sworn affidavits that were given to the judges of the Châtelet over the course of the following winter and spring, generally credible male witnesses reported having heard nameless rioters, often but not always identified as women, vow “to eat her heart,” or, more simply, “to carry her head back to Paris,” leaving the rest of the corpse at Versailles, or, more colourfully, “to cut off her head, [cut out] her heart, and fricassee her liver,” or “to bring her to Paris, massacre her [there], and quarter her,” or “to bring the king to Paris, slaughter the queen, and make cockades of her intestines.”33 In most such testimony, rioters do not attempt to justify their animus against the queen, but one municipal official did claim to have heard returning women accuse her of having been “the cause of all the ills that afflict us.” Switching gender roles, a female witness swore that she had heard a man defend the political violence as a “necessary evil,” alleging that “the queen is the cause of our shared woes.”34 Appalled contemporaries rushed to the conclusion

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that the rioters had been hirelings, paid to serve the political interests of Orléans, who was already suspected for wanting to ride the Revolution to power as regent or even king.35 All this seems to fit Gouges’s vague dedicatory description of the circumstances for her heroic defence of the queen. However, the fit is imperfect in other crucial ways. In October 1789 Gouges was indeed at Versailles, but as an interested observer, not a marcher or rioter, and then and there she produced The Antidote, which seems to have been composed after the arrival of the angry crowd in the mid-afternoon of 5 October and before the criminal violence of 6 October. She responds to the immediate crisis and the threat of chaos represented by the arrival of the armed women, whom she calls “the enemy,” appealing for calm, silence, patience, and reliance on the National Guardsmen of the municipality of Versailles itself, under the command of Jean-Baptiste, comte d’Estaing, and those of Paris, a much more imposing force under Lafayette that followed the demonstrators at some distance, reaching Versailles toward midnight: “A God stands watch for you and over you. This God, it’s Lafayette.” By six o’clock the next morning, after the godlike hero had finally fallen asleep and the defences of the palace had catastrophically failed, such calming words and fulsome praise would have seemed bitterly sarcastic. Gouges makes no reference here to the queen as the particular object of popular wrath, none to the gender of the “enemy” that made her “tremble,” none to the fact that the leaders of the National Assembly effectively exploited the crisis to secure nominal royal “acceptance” of their Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and preliminary Constitutional Articles.36 Long afterward, in a letter to an editor occasioned by the news of a assassination of a defender of law and order by militant revolutionaries, Gouges was to represent herself as having stood heroically between “the court” and would-be killers in October 1789: “When I saw at the outbreak of the Revolution that ... insurrection was going to lead to crime, I threw myself between the assassins and their [intended] victims ... [T]he court was utterly abandoned; I alone dared to take up its defence. I was to die [i.e., to be killed] on 5 October. The attempt failed, [and,] directed against the court, [it] spared a troublesome woman who played only a very minor part.”37 Her sympathies are evident, even if she does not say just how she



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had been threatened or just how her Antidote had served to save the day for the queen. The great fact about the October Days has always seemed to be the enforced relocation of the king and the royal family to Paris.38 Eighteen months later it was a further humiliation when their carriage was stopped by hostile crowds on 18 April 1791 as they attempted to make the short journey from the Tuileries to SaintCloud, where they hoped to attend an Easter mass celebrated by a non-juring priest. Patriots supposed an escape plot and implicated Marie-Antoinette as the arch-conspirator. In a preface for her dramatic tribute to the recently deceased Mirabeau, Gouges rose to Marie-Antoinette’s defence, recalling happier times in the 1770s when the young queen had delighted to come to Paris to join audiences at the Comédie-Française. How the world had turned, now that she was so unhappily forced to try to escape from Paris! “I pity the queen all the more, in that she may have nothing for which to reproach herself, despite all the accusations ... against her. And she has no true friends! Scribblers have all written against her, and no one has taken up a pen to defend her, no one ... If there’s a conspiracy of aristocrats, of refractory priests, of false patriots, it’s the queen who is blamed, always the queen. What! Crude lies always [seem to] lead men astray, give vice the victory, and mask the truth!”39 Then Gouges turns to fault ill-advised courtiers and urges the queen to get rid of counter-revolutionary spirits among them. This aristocratic entourage may attempt to “poison” such patriotic “observations,” but, expecting no favour, Gouges will tell her the truth: “All the efforts of the Nobility and the Clergy are powerless; the Revolution has been decided,” and the queen should “embrace the new government, for all its defects, if any, [and] embrace the cause of the people.” So doing, she will regain their love.40 Of course, Marie-Antoinette did nothing of the sort. Eventually, in a desperate effort to regain their freedom, the king and queen successfully escaped from the Tuileries on the night of 20 June 1791 and fled toward Montmédy and presumably loyal frontier garrisons, not to mention Austrian troops across the border. Unfortunately, they were stopped short at Varennes, arrested, and forcibly returned to Paris. Their subsequent difficulties were compounded by the fact that the king had left behind a declaration in which he repudiated the constitutional project on which the National ­ Assembly had

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been working for two years, a period within which he had repeatedly, publicly, and formally pledged his support.41 The Flight was arguably royal treason and its end certainly a fiasco. The king was promptly suspended and the monarchy itself called into question. As for the queen, she was more hated than ever.42 The Mémoires (Memoirs) of Pierre-Victor Malouet, a prominent defender of the monarchy in the National Assembly and a survivor who lived long enough to have put the controversies of the summer of 1791 into perspective, provides a fair summary of the queen’s standing after the Flight: “When the king was brought back to Paris, we had once again a fair test of public opinion. Discontent was general ... People were more prone to believe that the queen was plotting vengeance [as an unreconstructed reactionary] than that the king was seeking reconciliation as a moderate, of which I was certain. Disapproval of the step that he had just taken was universal among those who held to the Revolution, however firmly.”43 At the time, patriots had wondered: had the Flight been his misstep, properly, or hers? If hers, was it not evidence of her plotting with her Austrian family against the revolutionary nation? With characteristic impetuosity, Gouges had responded by drafting a “Project Addressed to the National Assembly on the Day of the King’s Arrest,” which she had immediately distributed to some deputies in manuscript form and then hastily incorporated into a pamphlet entitled Sera-t-il roi, ne le sera-t-il pas? (Will There Be a King, or Won’t There?). Answering her own question, she had examined the alternatives to a constitutional monarchy with Louis xvi as the king: dethronement and a republican government, abdication and a regency government for the king’s young son, or reinstatement of Louis himself with powers undiminished or even enhanced.44 To the deputies, she had acknowledged that the Flight had been “frightful,” exposing the fugitive king as a “hypocrite” or a “liar” in previous professions of support for the nation and the constitution. That said, “The constitution is at stake: No king, no constitution.”45 To the king, she had urged a wholesale reform of the royal households and “regeneration” of the court, excluding unreconstructed aristocrats and replacing them with good patriots, including born commoners.46 She had clearly supposed that a good but weak ruler could be redeemed, a judgment shared by other moderates, but also one that suggested to her, unlike most others, a particular



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regard for patriotic women as uniquely qualified for a new form of public service. Gouges herself looms large in a pamphlet provoked by the constitutional crisis; in what she, her secretary, or her compositor punctuates as just one overlong sentence, she uses first-person singular pronouns eleven times: “I saw ..., I would like ..., I was born ...,” and so on.47 More interestingly, she digresses to incorporate three substantial anecdotes of mistreated women and girls, in which informed readers have seen autobiographical substance. And before resuming the thread of her argument or reaching the published version of the “Project” that advances her most definite proposal, she simply declares: “Women want to be something, and whatever effeminate men have to say about that, when the occasion demands courage and energy, these men would fall far short.” She wants the National Assembly somehow to relieve “this unhappy sex,” to acknowledge women’s past contributions to the Revolution, and to organize “a legion of women” or “modern Amazons,” a new sort of National Guard, not so much to fight the good fight as to protect what has to be protected.48 In the same pamphlet from late June 1791, she announces a writing project then called “L’Ami des femmes” (The friend of women), a working title that may have owed something to L’Ami du Peuple (Friend of the People) put out by her journalistic bête noire, Marat; in September this undertaking would come to fruition as The Rights of Woman. Curiously, despite her promise to submit to the deputies “a crowd of ideas ... on the ability, the strength, and the courage of the entire sex that I represent,” even at this late date she explicitly disavows any intent to advocate political roles for women. Indeed, in a passage that merits particular emphasis, she regrets their present engagement in public life and recalls them to domestic roles: “We will not allow ourselves, Messieurs, to enter into competition with you on politics and affairs; our sole purpose is to make ourselves useful. Today, women mix in public gatherings [and] in the clubs. They are deserting their households, [and] we must bring them back by a noble emulation.”49 Gouges seems to mean that right-thinking women should set a good example of “noble” devotion to domesticity. Now, the queen: Marie-Antoinette did not enjoy whatever security there was in the “inviolability” of the king that had been decreed

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without debate on 17 September 1789.50 Twenty-one months later, as the royal family was being returned to a yet more uncertain future in Paris after their arrest at Varennes, Gouges had to confront contrary fears: the queen’s domestic enemies might take the occasion to strike her down, or she herself might conspire again with foreigners against the Revolution. The queen’s dynastic allies could only be restrained, Gouges argued, if she were to be reinstated with the king. At the same time, she herself could no longer be trusted and would have to be watched. Gouges proposed a new “national guard of women for the surveillance of the queen, madame royale [her daughter], madame [one sister-in-law], and Madame E ­ lisabeth [another].”51 Serving as guards, patriotic women could follow these royals everywhere without necessitating a flagrantly offensive intrusion of males into their most intimate lives.52 Such surveillance could even be regarded as protecting the queen’s own most vital interests. Thus Gouges could well claim to have come forward in defence of Marie-Antoinette in advance of the greatest threats, in late June 1791 as in mid-June and early October 1789. A second post-Varennes pamphlet in the form of a set of open letters followed in July, after the delayed return to Paris of a special emissary whom Louis xvi had sent to Condé, the most militant of the émigrés: Adresse au roi. Adresse à la reine. Adresse au prince de Condé. Observations à M. Duveyrier sur la fameuse ambassade (Address to the King. Address to the Queen. Address to the Prince de Condé. Observations to M. Duveyrier on His Famous Embassy). Duveyrier had been commissioned to convey a decree in which the National Assembly demanded that the prince remove hostile encampments from frontier regions. However, the fact that the king fled toward that same border almost immediately afterward strongly suggested the agent’s complicity in broader counterrevolutionary plots. Gouges lectured all parties – king, queen, and prince – warning them of the disastrous consequences of fomenting or leading armed opposition to the Revolution, especially in league with foreign powers. The king should issue “a solemn manifesto,” declaring his love for the people and his fidelity to the fatherland.53 The Address to the Queen provides an instructive precedent for the Dedication that was to head The Rights of Woman some six or seven weeks later. It was probably this mid-summer Address that Gouges had particularly in mind in that piece. She begins by speaking truth to power, reminding the queen of her unpopularity: “You



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can’t deceive yourself: In the eyes of the French people, you aren’t what you once were; the people, long overburdened and surely too embittered, blames you for all its woes.”54 Then she poses a rhetorical question, professes her own political faith, and passes judgment on the queen’s reduced entourage: “Queen and mother, could you be the sworn enemy of your own subjects? No, I can’t believe it.­ [M]en have recognized their rights, and the Revolution has been accomplished. Madame, ... you have to acknowledge the work of the perfidious persons who surround you, ... traitors, ... tyrants.55 The queen, too, must publish a “manifesto,” supporting the constitution and doing everything possible to spike the guns of counterrevolution: “Above all, rebuff the pretensions of your brother ... If the foreigner makes a rash step, and perhaps your brother, his Empire, and perhaps ... [author’s ellipsis]. No, I have to stop.” The greatest fear was that Leopold ii might attempt to exploit the crisis in France to reclaim the province of Lorraine for his family. Of course, the king, too, had brothers, and Gouges hoped that the queen could use her influence to secure their return to France along with all other émigrés. She wanted to correct a queen who had strayed and might be tempted to stray again, and so to save her as well as the monarchy itself. She signs off as “the most ardently patriotic royalist.”56 For students of Gouges’s feminism, the most interesting passage in the pamphlet may be that in which, addressing the queen, she tries to enrol her in a revolutionary party of liberty. Nature itself, she says, “has favoured you with its most beautiful gifts,” namely, intelligence and public-spiritedness. She makes no reference in this context to the physical attractions that Marie-Antoinette had brought to Versailles or the finery in which she then dressed herself. Instead, she suggests that, even as a teenaged dauphiness, she had been “precociously philosophical,” an enlightened opponent of the petty tyrannies of court etiquette: “Recall, Madame, the time when, surrounded by old duchesses, you encountered a tyrannical etiquette on every side. You quickly got rid of it; you were the first to produce a revolution in the old ways ... Madame, we owe to you the penchant for liberty, and today, they say, your efforts tend only to take it from us!”57 The attached Address to Condé includes contrarily startling passages. Gouges’s primary purpose is to recall the proud heir of great warrior heroes to his troubled homeland: “Come back to France, come back to your home! Following your example, every fugitive

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will fly to the fatherland. You aren’t indifferent to glory ...; the cause is so fair! Ah, how much [lustre] you will add to the name that you bear!” This sort of thing is hardly surprising. That Gouges reassures the prince he will be received “with transport and enthusiasm” is also unsurprising, as is her assurance that all will be well for France under the Legislative Assembly then being chosen to replace the Constituent.58 But consider these comments: “The constitution is loved. It would be impossible to destroy it; to try would be to turn all France into a cemetery ... An internal or external war, that’s not the remedy, whatever extremists say, ... [but] we must purge France of the factions. Even I agree that a bleeding may be necessary, and if it’s only to be the hotheads, the brigands, [and] the radicals, I’d say: ‘All right, bleed the poor kingdom.’” It does matter that Gouges then recoils, but it is startling indeed that, addressing the warrior-prince, the daughter of Pierre Gouze should have put it this way, her voice dripping with sarcasm: “[I]f your ambition is still pleased by the noble employment of a butcher, unfurl your standard.”59 It is also startling that, having volunteered in whatever spirit to replace Duveyrier as an emissary, a forwardness that any modern feminist could applaud, she then suggests in a coquettish spirit that “having employed all the resources of your sex, I would employ those of mine.”60 Finally, in her last pages, Gouges calls readers’ attention to satirical verses about her career as an author; she publishes them, joins in the laughter, and protests that she, who had proclaimed her ignorance countless times, has no intellectual pretensions. The verses begin and end this way: Folle du tout, et surtout de l’Amour; A raisonner opéra, politique, Danse, tableau, sculpture, vers, musique, La sotte Eglé consume chaque jour ...; Aimez les Arts, qu’ils soient de votre vie, L’amusement et les plus doux plaisirs; D’être savante, abhorrez la manie, Le ciel vous fit pour n’être que jolie.

(Mad for everything, and especially love; Reasoning about the opera, politics, Dance, painting, sculpture, poetry, music, The foolish Eglé consumes each day ...; Love the arts, let them be your life, Entertainment, and sweetest pleasures; Reject the madness of being learned, Heaven made you to be pretty, that’s all.)61



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“Folle du tout”: it seems to have been a widespread opinion that Gouges was mad, wild, crazy in all her undertakings as a woman who aspired to the role of a public intellectual.62 It may not have been mere madness for an ardent royalist to have attempted to reach out to the king, the queen, and the prince in the aftermath of the Flight to Varennes, whatever her prospects of success. It was courageous. But if she was more concerned to move the hearts and minds of more conventional patriots, it was reckless to associate herself so closely with these royals in this season and then to dedicate The Rights of Woman to Marie-Antoinette.

2 Marie-Antoinette’s Reputation and the Counter-Revolution

There is also courage to the point of recklessness in the content of Gouges’s address to Marie-Antoinette, given the deference that was the very essence of conventional dedications. She threatens the queen, whom she is attempting to enlist as the patroness of her feminist cause, while urging her to be a good wife and mother for the sake of her husband and son: “If the foreigner enters France in arms, you are no longer this falsely accused queen, this attractive queen, but an implacable enemy ... Ah! Madame, remember that you are a mother and a wife; employ all your influence for the return of the princes. That ... secures the father’s crown and saves it for the son. Intrigues, cabals, and sanguinary schemes would precipitate your fall, if one could suspect you of being capable of such plots” (Rights of Woman, lines 21–30). Gouges refers to suspicions that Marie-Antoinette was at heart still a foreigner, an intriguer in league with both the Austrian enemies of the French people and the émigré princes, who were just then actively engaged in attempts to enlist the emperor and other rulers in a coalition that could invade France, sweep the rabble from power, and restore the Old Regime.1

“the austrian woman” and the foreign threat Gouges’s suspicious fellow citizens were exactly half right: On the one hand, the queen had indeed conspired with her Austrian relatives before the Flight to Varennes and was still doing so in September 1791, even as her husband prepared to swear formal allegiance to the nation and the Constitution; on the other, she had done everything in her power to obstruct the émigré princes, especially the king’s brothers, Provence and Artois, and his cousin Condé.



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La Famille des cochons ramenée dans l’étable (The pig family brought back to the sty)

The political recklessness of Gouges’s Dedication is a simpler matter. Although no patriot could have documented the queen’s treason at the time, materials now known from Austrian archives being unavailable then, suspicions of Marie-Antoinette were so widespread that to present The Rights of Woman under a bold “To the Queen” was effectively to address the people of the tricolour while advancing under a banner of Hapsburg black. Consider a sampling of hostile cartoons from the summer that followed the Flight and preceded Gouges’s feminist pamphlet. Annie Duprat has discussed them and related print journalism in terms of “the weakening of royal dignity” and “the effective destruction of the image of Louis xvi” or, more dramatically, a metaphorical decapitation of the king or even “the tomb of the monarchy.”2 Antoine de Baecque has properly emphasized the prominence of Marie-Antoinette in related caricatures.3 From my perspective, the most striking observation is the consistency with which it is a cartoon queen, at heart still an Austrian, who misleads the king of the French. Louis xvi’s corpulence and the fact that Sainte-Menehould, on the escape route, was known gastronomically for its pigs’ feet both encouraged pig imagery; the most familiar such image is the simple but memorable engraving entitled La Famille des cochons ramenée dans l’étable (The pig family brought back to the sty). If the

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Les Deux ne font qu’un (The two are only one)

image is read from left to right, the pig family includes the couple’s daughter, Madame Royale, the king’s brother, Provence, the dauphin, the king’s sister, Madame Elisabeth, and the porcine king and the plumed queen themselves, in that order. So much for kings and queens as superior creatures! A whip-holding postilion and French guards in the service of the nation enforce a new order. The image allowed for many variants in which it is the queen herself who degrades the king. The pig-king could be given the horns of a goat, symbols of his dishonour as a supposedly cuckolded husband, and monstrously joined in mid-body to a leopard-queen marked by the unchangeable spots of her Austrian birth, the serpent hair of a Medusa, and the peacock feathers of overweening pride, as in Les Deux ne font qu’un (The two are only one). Once imagination had been liberated, the queen could be turned into a sow on which the king in human form is mounted, grasping his sceptre but losing his crown, as in Les Deux font la paire (The two make a couple). Alternatively, the king could be shown dining in the open air, bottle in hand, hearing but not heeding Robespierre, who stands at his left with a speaking trumpet, while a sow-queen forages and a piglet-dauphin suckles below and right, as in Leçon donnée par Ro ...: C’est semer des perles devant les pourceaus (Lesson given by

Les Deux font la paire (The two make a couple)

Leçon donnée par Ro ... : C’est semer des perles devant les pourceaus (Lesson given by Ro[bespierre]: It’s to cast pearls before swine)

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Il a tout perdu au 21 … juin 1791 (He lost everything at/on 21 ... June 1791)

Ro ...: It’s to cast pearls before swine). Robespierre’s “lesson” was the decree of 25 June that suspended the powers of the fugitive king. Yet again, this same sow-queen could be shown mounted by a naked faun, both of them with heads lowered before twin tablets, normally a way of likening the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen to the Ten Commandments. However, on these tablets a fully dressed but myopic king in human form inscribes the dates of his most shameful actions, starting with his failed attempt to reassert authority at the Royal Session of 23 June 1789 and culminating in another such failed attempt, the Flight from Paris, which had been discovered on the morning of 21 June 1791. Il a

Troc pour troc. Cœffure pour couronne. Paris pour Montmédy. Départ pour l’Autriche (Quid pro quo. Coiffure for crown. Paris for Montmédy. Departure for Austria)

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tout perdu au 21 ... juin 1791 (He lost everything at/on 21 ... June 1791) puns on the name of the card game and the date of both the Flight and his arrest at Varennes, the gamble of his escape attempt having failed. Enough pigs? That animal imagery served admirably to degrade previously exalted personages far below the level of free men and women, but it did not lend itself as well to suggestions of the queen’s dominance over her husband or her dynastic allegiance to the Austrians. In the aftermath of the Flight, the patriotic appetite for such fare was apparently limitless, and the queen in human form consistently subordinates, pushes, pulls, or even carries the king. In Troc pour troc. Cœffure pour couronne. Paris pour Montmédy. Départ pour l’Autriche. (Quid pro quo: Coiffure for Crown. Paris for Montmédy. Departure for Austria), a clever caricaturist puns on coiffeur and coiffure, playing on the remarkable fact that, even as she hazarded her escape, the vain Marie-Antoinette had been unwilling to travel without her personal hairdresser and so had assigned Monsieur Léonard a crucial role in the attempted flight. The cartoonist represents the unhappy king himself as a common hairdresser, the perversity of his menial service pictorially emphasized by the fact that he still wears the cordon bleu sash of the Order of the Holy Spirit, since the sixteenth century a prerogative of royalty. The queen sits before a mirror, getting her hair done after having induced him to sacrifice his crown. In Hé hu! da da! (Hey, ho! hobby horse!), a determined queen with peacock feathers, an elaborate hairdo, and a plumed hat pushes a childlike king on a wheeled stag toward Montmédy. Of course, this animal recalls the king’s one true passion, hunting, while its horns are again a visual pun, suggesting that the queen has cuckolded him before pushing him toward the brink of treason. His sash is still prominent, but his crown is obviously slipping. His infantilization by her and the inversion of gender roles tell against them both. In Le Promenoir royal ou La fuitte en empire (The royal walker, or the flight to the empire), the queen and her daughter pull, while an oversized wheeled walker supports the uncertain steps of the “fleeing” toddler-king. The queen’s hairdo and plumed hat are in good order, and he still wears the cordon bleu, but instead of the crown he sports what seems to be a helmet-like device meant to protect a very young child when he falls, as fall he will. He holds a toy

Hé hu! da da! (Hey ho! hobby horse!)

Le Promenoir royal ou la fuitte en empire (The royal walker, or the flight to the empire)

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L’Aveugle mal conduit à Mons Midi (The blind man misled to Montmédy)

­ indmill instead of a sceptre and reaches out to the dauphin. She is w the grander figure, and imperial territory as the supposed destination reinforces her culpability. In L’Aveugle mal conduit à Mons Midie (The blind man misled to Montmédy), the queen again leads the way toward Montmédy and Germany, discreetly veiled but again properly coiffed, hatted, and plumed. The sightless king follows, wearing his identifying sash but not his crown and holding out an elongated sceptre as his blind man’s cane. Provence, whose own flight across the border had succeeded, points the way, but the dominant figure is again the queen, and the implicit misogyny of the caricature is underscored by having the misled king also pushed from behind by a somewhat withered she-devil. In the Enjambée de la Sainte Famille des Thuilleries à Montmidy (Stretch of the Holy Family from the Tuileries to Montmédy) the queen with her signature coiffure, hat, and plumes carries both the king (“I go where they lead me”) and the dauphin on her back, grasping the sceptre from the uncrowned king and attempting to cross in a single stride from the central tower of the palace in Paris to a rocky Montmédy. A busty Countess de La Motte and the Car-



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Enjambée de la Sainte Famille des Thuilleries à Montmidy (Stretch of the Holy Family from the Tuileries to Montmédy)

dinal de Rohan stand below, raising high under her widespread legs and open skirt jewels that suggest the Diamond Necklace and the queen’s criminal sexuality. To their left, leading royalists exclaim: “We’re f***!” The Flight of the Holy Family? This is no Joseph and Mary, inspired to save the infant Jesus from Herod by the Flight to Egypt, and she is no virginal Queen of Heaven! L’Égout royal (The royal sewer) avoids such sacrilege but plumbs new depths of filth. Above, a single seated figure, Jean-Sylvain Bailly, the patriotic mayor of Paris, defecates through a hole in the floor. Below, the queen yet again leads the way, as the royal family makes its escape from the palace by wading through a sewer tunnel, a conceit that has the great virtue of causing the women to raise their skirts indecently high and the minor vice of eliminating plumage from the queen’s high hat, if not horns from the king’s head or the shit above, below, to the front, and, of course, to the rear. Such aggressive caricatures, which blame the queen for the defection of the king, represent a calculated appeal to popular misogyny and xenophobia as much as disaffection from Louis xvi and disillusionment with the prospects for a constitutional monarchy. In the

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L’Égout royal (The royal sewer)

treatment of Marie-Antoinette, we sense some of the force of enduring stereotypes. That does not mean that she was a political innocent: first, the queen was in fact the more decisive and more active planner of the unfortunate escape attempt; second, she had relied on Austrian military support of a sort that would almost inevitably have provoked a foreign war compounded by civil war; and third, her vision of an acceptable outcome for the Revolution was simply reactionary. Let us consider these three points in order. The king’s personal role in the planning processes remains obscure, given the nature of the surviving evidence on the c­ onspiratorial enterprise. But the open Declaration that he left behind in the Tuileries on 20 June 1791, which combined a withering analysis of the draft constitution with a great deal of whining about the indignities that he and his family had been made to suffer, does make it clear that he was much more than a fellow traveller. It seems equally clear that it was the queen who played the more active role in planning before that date and that she had a right to expect the Austrians would be willing to support her.4 Although Emperor Leopold ii had not seen his sister in twenty years, after his accession in February 1790 he had been particularly effusive in expressions of his “tender attachment” and “inviolable fidelity” and had promised much more than mere words: “Test me ... I am at your disposal on every occasion.”5



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In the same winter Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, better known as the comte de Mirabeau, had secretly counselled the king and queen and encouraged them to believe that Frederick William ii of Prussia too, like the queen’s brother, could be made to see it as being in his own interest to display a show of force in the name of the sanctity of treaties and the respect due kings. But until the following June, even in confidential communications with her long-time Austrian mentor Florimond-Claude, comte de Mercy-Argentau, and Leopold himself, Marie-Antoinette had asked for nothing and spoken only of the need for gentleness and patience.6 Plans for an escape from Paris matured in the winter and spring of 1791, as the queen and her intimate friend the Count Axel de Fersen pushed them forward. Ideally, the royal family could secure themselves in a fortified place on French territory near the frontier, where the king could make a show of defending France against a nominal foreign threat. The hope was that with an imposing force behind him, he could appeal to loyal subjects, compel the capitulation of political enemies, or negotiate from a position of strength, all without either provoking a civil war or necessitating a foreign invasion.7 Louis wanted to avoid conflict at all costs, but MarieAntoinette was more realistic about the need for usable, not just visible, force. She reiterated to her brother that they needed Austrian soldiers “available at our request” or even “our demand,” imperial troops sent by the emperor and placed under Louis xvi’s command, ready “to march at the request of the king.”8 Jeanne-Louise Genêt, madame de Campan, the First Woman of the Bedchamber, much later reported preparations that imply the queen’s equally realistic presumption that the royal family would have to find refuge across the border, on Austrian territory.9 In practice, almost every aspect of this scheme was to prove problematical, even after the royal family did manage to slip undetected from the palace and escape from Paris. The Austrians refused to move before the king and queen had reached safety, so as not to arouse a nationalistic backlash, and the Prussians were not involved. There were failures in the command, discipline, and coordination of the French troops who were supposed to escort the fugitives. The king himself was incapable of acting decisively. Most importantly, as Timothy Tackett has recently argued and as Louis himself acknowledged after his return, the plotters failed to take into account the breadth and depth of patriotic sentiment in the provinces.10

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Even had the royal family reached Montmédy safely and taken refuge on French territory within a couple of miles of the frontier and even had the Austrians massed the eight or ten thousand Imperials across the border that the queen had insistently demanded from her brother, they would have confronted armed opposition. In any of the most likely scenarios, the combination of foreign and civil war would have been a catastrophe in 1791, as it was to be two years later. Only if the king and queen were to have survived as refugees on foreign territory without being supported by a counterrevolutionary coalition of allied princes, could there have been a hap­pier outcome for the nation and longer lives for themselves. And finally, there is the question of the queen’s intentions, what she envisioned for a France reclaimed from the revolutionaries. Intentions are often obscure, of course, and hers before Varennes are particularly controversial. A letter dated 3 February 1791 has been much discussed as evidence of her goals; it makes the Royal Session program of 23 June 1789 a reference point and so allows for significant concessions, including an Estates General to meet regularly with full legislative authority over taxation and finance. However, the letter is probably a later fabrication, and in any case, it was unknown at the time.11 Genuine papers of both Fersen and Marc-Marie, marquis de Bombelles, do show that supporters and agents beyond the immediate reach of the Revolution shared an uncompromisingly reactionary spirit, but they too were unknown to the queen’s political enemies.12 It might be simplistic but would not be wrong to say that she conceived the Flight primarily as an escape from the danger and indignities of revolutionary Paris, not an approach toward anything better defined than a restoration of the proper order of things in which an untrammelled royal authority mattered most. What her political enemies did know was quite bad enough. In March 1791 police in the service of the Revolution intercepted a dispatch from Mercy, who had taken refuge in Brussels. Addressing the queen, the old ambassador and confidential counsellor began by counting the troops in the Netherlands under Austrian command and vouching for their discipline, as if responding to an inquiry about their number and reliability. Having given such encouraging information, he explained that the potential opposition of the Prussians and the English made the use of these troops in France problematical, whatever the good intentions of the emperor. He



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went on to caution: “You can count on interior means [counterrevolutionary movements within France] alone, perhaps supported by some slight assistance.” But he also speculated about adding to military pressures on Paris by supporting an incursion of armed émigrés into Alsace and royalist movements both in Brittany and in unnamed provinces of the south. And he surveyed the principal courts of Europe as potential allies in a counter-revolutionary coalition, dependent primarily on “the escape of ... [ellipsis in the text]. This will be the decisive stroke. It will bring over to the king all who are faithful ... Then the foreign powers will come forward.” Some­how, this intercept went unexploited at the time, although it so clearly linked the queen and the Austrians not just to an escape attempt by the royal family but also to threats of subversion and invasion by foreign powers.13 Perversely, the queen’s brother Leopold and the king’s brothers, Provence and Artois, were jointly responsible for making matters much worse for them by a mismatched combination of diplomatic threats and political gamesmanship just when the king was reluctantly preparing to accept the Constitution as the condition for regaining royal powers of any sort and Gouges was putting together The Rights of Woman, with its dedicatory letter. The Declaration of Pillnitz, signed by Leopold and Frederick William on 27 August 1791, is familiar to historians and can be admired by those who appreciate cleverness or savour nastiness. Before becoming emperor, Leopold had been grand duke of Tuscany, and that in itself made contemporaries alert for a Machiavellian pursuit of interest belied by a professed idealism. The problem for Leopold was as follows. On the one hand, rebellious subjects had risen against, arrested, suspended, and confined the king of France, who had particular claims upon his assistance both diplomatically as his most important ally and dynastically as his brother-in-law. Furthermore, Louis’s émigré brother the comte d’Artois, backed by an entourage of counter-revolutionary militants, including the prince de Condé, was importuning him. Finally, his own sister Marie-Antoinette was personally exposed to the hatred of the rebels. On the other hand, Louis himself had not requested Austrian intervention. Even when interrogated after his arrest at Varennes and enforced return to Paris, he had repeatedly declared his allegiance to the nation and its constitution-making. Especially if he were to take a formal oath to the completed constitution, as

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expected in the near future, war declared by his foreign relatives would put him into an untenable position. Furthermore, it was not entirely a bad thing for Austrian interests that the power of France, for the past generation an uncooperative ally and traditionally the dynastic enemy, should have been effectively neutralized by the ascendancy of the National Assembly, and warfare against what was still potentially the Grand Nation would entail grave risks. Finally, Marie-Antoinette was a virtual stranger to Leopold, who had his sister’s blessing not to heed the appeals of her brothers-in-law.14 On 20 August Artois had drafted a ten-point program that betrayed the princes’ preoccupation with an immediate political threat and prescribed how best to meet it. The threat was constitutional government in France. If Louis xvi were to sanction the constitution as presented to him, he would thereby accept for himself and his heirs a much-reduced position as a mere “hereditary representative,” not a monarch in the manner of his Bourbon ancestors, who had truly ruled as well as reigning by the grace of God. This would have potential implications not only for Provence and Artois, then second and third in the line of succession, but also for the Church, the parlements, the nobles, and so on. The king had to be encouraged to resist, and his oppressors intimidated enough to return to obedience. These goals required decisive action of several sorts, most of it by Leopold. The princes were to issue an uncompromising manifesto rejecting the usurpatory National Assembly and all its works and reaffirming “the inalienable rights of the crown.” Doing so would be easy enough. The agenda for Leopold was more demanding: the emperor was formally to recognize “the title and the rights” of Provence as regent and so head of state during the captivity of the king, to lead in the formation of a counter-revolutionary coalition that would also include the rulers of Spain, Naples, Prussia, Sardinia, Sweden, and Russia, to mobilize for military action, and, finally, to authorize the princes to raise funds for their cause within his territories.15 The emperor could hardly agree to all this. In fact, he flatly rejected it.16 In his service Anton, Baron Spielmann, drafted the Declaration of Pillnitz, which neatly met Leopold’s every need in just four sentences. It began as a response to “the requests and representations” of Provence and Artois, affirming that the situation of the king of France was a matter of common concern to all sovereigns and that they should take concerted action to free Louis and



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his family and restore monarchical government. The two signatories appealed to other European rulers in general terms to join them in the formation of a grand coalition: “Then and in that case [emphasis added], Their said Majesties, the Emperor and the King of Prussia, are resolved to act promptly, in full agreement, with the forces necessary to attain the proposed common objective. In the meantime, they will give their troops such orders as are necessary to have them ready for action.”17 The condition, “alors et dans ce cas,” effectively nullified any nominal pledge of military action, because there was no risk that a George iii happily returned to mental competence would commit the forces of the United Kingdom to a Continental war against France, nor even that all other European heads of state would join such a coalition. At the same time, the sabre-rattling alone might placate Artois and Condé and perhaps even restore the sanity of French rebels, so easing the situation of the king and the queen at no cost or risk. This was clever. However, the Declaration did not fit the needs of Provence and Artois, and the princes were clever too – clever and nasty. They lacked the means to ride into Paris in military triumph, but with the assistance of advisers they tried to convert their diplomatic defeat into a political victory. They did so by drafting an elaborate cover letter, nominally addressed to their captive brother and dated from Coblenz on 10 September, for publication in France with the Declaration. In it they deliberately misrepresented that document as committing both “the wise Leopold” and Frederick William to military action, and they falsely stated that “[t]he other Courts share the same dispositions as those of Vienna and Berlin.” They minimized the prospect of French resistance and warned that any further “grand crimes” would incur “a terrible punishment ..., the vengeance of Heaven ..., and the most rigorous repercussions.” All this prefaced their impassioned appeal to Louis xvi that he was duty bound not accept the Constitution that had been presented to him on 3 September. They protested in the name of the king himself, his peoples, the religion of his fathers, the fundamental maxims of the monarchy, and “all the orders of the state ..., the rights of the clergy ..., the rights of the nobility ..., the rights of the magistracy ..., finally, the rights of proprietors.”18 This was nasty. First of all, it was nasty because the princes’ stated goal was to prevent the establishment of a limited monarchy that could resolve the fundamental constitutional conflict of old and new sovereigns,

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the king and the revolutionary nation. By the Flight to Varennes, Louis xvi had brought down upon himself a suspension of all royal powers, and only by accepting the Constitution could he be reinstated. Only so was there any hope of a compromise settlement, an end to the Revolution. The princes’ letter was all the nastier because their attempt to make rattling noises with others’ sabres could only aggravate the king’s political difficulties in Paris, where he was already denounced as “the perjuror-king,” while they remained secure in their retreat across the border. They pounded the drums and sounded the trumpets for what they proclaimed a counterrevolutionary crusade. In the event, this would not move a single Austrian regiment, but it would help to provoke the French to take up arms against declared enemies. The nastiest aspect of the document is that in making the king’s position less tenable, whether or not he would take an oath to uphold the new Constitution, the princes were taking a giant step toward the throne that Provence would claim in 1795 and that he and Artois would occupy in succession after the Restoration in 1814. In none of this did the princes or the Austrians name Marie­Antoinette. But in all of it they effectively tarred her, reinforcing associations in the popular mind that tied her to her origins in ­Austria and to the most imposing foreign enemy of the French ­Revolution. In this context, it was courageous for Olympe de Gouges to have dedicated her most important pamphlet “To the Queen” in such a way as to make those words seem almost its title – courageous but also reckless.

the queen’s politics and gouges’s cause Quite apart from the question of how this dedication would have appeared to the rest of Gouges’s potential readership in September 1791, there is the question of how Marie-Antoinette herself would have received its appeal that she sponsor the cause of the rights of women, had she so much as read the pamphlet. This part of “To the Queen” is closest to a conventional dedication, but, whether deliberately or not, Gouges insulted her dedicatee even here: “It falls only to her whom chance has raised to eminence, to give impetus to ... The Rights of Woman ... If you were less well informed, Madame, I might fear that your particular interests could prevail over those of your sex ... Reflect, Madame, that one is immortalized by the



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greatest crimes, as by the greatest virtues. But in the annals of history, how different” (Rights, lines 32–9)! Chance, interests, and crimes! Each word would have stung, especially the last. “Chance”? Marie-Antoinette had been schooled by her mother to believe that it was an all-seeing God, not blind luck, that had raised her to eminence at Versailles. Maria Theresa had made this her very first maternal counsel in her earliest letter to her daughter at the court of the king of France: “So, there you are, where Providence has destined you to live.”19 The dauphiness never doubted it, and the queen in later years never questioned her right to her place. “Interests”? Marie-Antoinette would not have understood her politics as a defence of her “particular interests” and did not identify herself with other women as a member of an oppressed sex. Nor, despite her mother’s example as a powerful and strong-willed empress, did she ever show restiveness under the traditional constraints of the Salic law on her and her daughter in France. She would have thought primarily in terms of the king’s God-given and time-honoured rights, only secondarily of her own rank as his queen, and not at all in terms of rights extended or withheld on the basis of her sex. Despite what Gouges had said earlier in the summer about the “liberalism” of her youthful defiance of court etiquette, there is no evidence whatsoever that the queen herself thought of that or of her adoption of simpler and freer styles of dress as “women’s issues” in broadly feminist senses, with herself as somehow the champion of Everywoman. “Crimes”? From the perspective of the queen or anyone in her entourage who troubled to read libellous publications, there could hardly have been a more offensive term, especially when reiterated and related to “the annals of history.” September 1791 was the month not only of The Rights of Woman by Olympe de Gouges but also of Les Crimes des reines de France, depuis le commencement de la monarchie jusqu’à Marie-Antoinette (The Crimes of the Queens of France, from the Beginning of the Monarchy to ­Marie-Antoinette), which is now generally attributed to Louise de Kéralio. While Gouges was a feminist and a royalist, Kéralio was a misogynist and a republican.20 An elaborate engraved frontispiece, meticulously explicated, sets the tone for Kéralio’s book. The central figure, rising from a royal bed, is a naked siren who extends a poisoned cup and daggers to the submissive courtiers on the viewer’s left. In her other hand, she grasps the sceptre from a dying king, who slumps on his throne

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Frontispiece for Les Crimes des reines de France: Un peuple est sans honneur, et mérite ses chaines, quand il baisse le front sous le scepter des reines (A people is without honour and deserves its chains, when it bows down before the sceptre of queens)

after having been drugged and stabbed. His son has also been killed. Above the siren is the bust of a leering satyr; behind, a masked and two-faced personification of politics; and beneath, a proud peacock dominating the Gallic cock. Truth raises the curtain to shed light on all this, while the Genius of History, “struck with horror, ... tries to take up the pen and to record the hateful spectacle.” The Foreword includes a succinct statement of “the intentions of nature” with respect to women: they should stay at home and care for their families. Of course, such natural domesticity was virtually impossible in the artificial world of the court.21 The book prepares its climactic account of Marie-Antoinette’s reputed crimes with 434



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pages on a millennial history of the monarchy going back to Clovis, while providing what amounts to a theoretical explanation of why, whatever her character, a queen almost had to be criminal. With the example of Marie-Antoinette in mind, Kéralio could argue that the traditional pattern by which kings of France had married foreign princesses had also meant importing “the hereditary and inveterate hatreds that divide the several nations.” But even if a prince were to marry one of his own subjects, any young woman so favoured, however good she was by nature and however virtuous she might have become in other roles, would be corrupted by court life. Surrounded by “flatterers, courtiers, and lackeys paid ... to exalt her,” she would become “as much the enemy of mankind as the most perfidious Italian or the most brazen Austrian. It is the throne that is the root of evil.”22 The Crimes of the Queens dresses relentless innuendo in the robes of impartial justice. The above quotation, for instance, associates the Austrian Marie-Antoinette with the Italian Catherine de’ Medici, whom good patriots remembered as the criminal mastermind behind the St Bartholemew’s Day Massacre. As for ­Marie-Antoinette herself, “Does she deserve such marked hatred and scorn?”23 A rehearsal of old accusations of prodigal expenditures, libertine adventures with male and female partners, and a willing betrayal of French interests to serve her Austrian brothers helps readers to answer the question, and much worse follows. The imprint of The Revolutions of Paris may have lent a sort of credibility to new accusations that the queen had conspired at every turn not just to defeat the Revolution but also to kill Frenchmen, especially Parisians. In July 1789, supposedly, the queen’s suggestive dancing had inflamed the German troops who were to have bombarded, fired, and sacked Paris. The October Days, the Day of Daggers, the Saint-Cloud Affair, the Flight to Varennes, and finally the Massacre of the Champ de Mars become so many further episodes in the same story of her homicidal intent.24 The litany of innuendo –“is it true ...?”– culminates in an open threat: “[I]f you are still plotting, look out, Antoinette, look out! ... You will stand alone against twenty-four million men ... Only you can pass judgment on yourself; only you can say to what extent the nation is right to hate you. These are the crimes of which you are accused.”25 Louis Prudhomme, the publisher of The Crimes of the Queens, had also published the Reproche véritable par la Majesté du peuple à

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l’épouse du roi sur ses torts (Truthful Reproach from the Majesty of the People to the Wife of the King on Her Misdeeds) in the previous year; its very concision facilitates exposition. The unnamed author, “a Free Citizen,” rebukes Marie-Antoinette for a long list of familiar offences, including extravagant expenditure, marital infidelity, scornful airs, the indoctrination of her surviving son, and, perhaps worst, the political seduction of her husband. For present purposes, a central set of charges is most interesting for anticipations of criticisms that would become much weightier after the failed Flight to Varennes: “You are reproached for not having wedded the interests of France in marrying the king of the French, and for having remained Austrian among a people who would have wanted you to be French ... You are reproached for that mysterious correspondence with your brothers [Joseph ii and Leopold ii]. People go so far as to say that under your name and by your orders part of the national finances took the route to Germany ... You are reproached for holding in your hands the threads of plots for so many months, the goal of which is to entwine the king [in a series of abortive escape plans before the Flight to Varennes] ... You are reproached for the aristocratic councils held in your private apartments, that Austrian Committee, the influence of which is felt in the very bosom of the National Assembly.”26 These points were all to be elaborated in The Crimes of the Queens, and they all looked more plausible after the Flight.27 Marie-Antoinette cannot have appreciated Gouges’s fingerwagging in The Rights of Woman about possible future “crimes” – that is, if she was aware of it. Such polemics were systematically unfair to the queen, of course, but the authors were right about her enduring ties to Austria, her “mysterious correspondence” with her brother the emperor, her plotting to spirit the king out of Paris, and her aristocratic sentiments. The widespread suspicion in 1791 that she had charmed Antoine Barnave into defending the interests of the crown also turns out to have been realistic. The relationship between the queen and the deputy led to confidential letters that survive and, critically read, provide good evidence of her unwillingness, even in desperate circumstances, to make substantive concessions to revolutionary principles.28 She realized that, to regain any semblance of royal authority, the king would have to accept the Constitution, but she thought of nominal “acceptance” as an expedient, no more. She was utterly unconvinced by Barnave’s assurances that the revised docu-



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ment was truly monarchical in spirit, and she showed no interest whatsoever, even feigned, in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen as a document that could be accepted or revised, either to restrict or to extend is principles. There was simply no prospect that Gouges could ever have enlisted the queen’s support for a complementary women’s declaration, even had she been able to present her with a more acceptable dedication. As the king and his counsellors were preparing the formal letter and the brief speech to the National Assembly with which he would swear to uphold the Constitution, Marie-Antoinette, on his behalf, was addressing Leopold and attaching a long memorandum to the contrary effect. This ought to be seen as the fullest, most candid statement of her political views at the time of The Rights of Woman. After preliminary courtesies, the queen’s letter of 8 September gets right to the point: “[W]e have no recourse other than to you and no confidence other than in you. Here is a memorandum that can show you our true position.” She then appeals to her own brother to restrain the king’s brothers, fearing just the sort of open letter that they would date from Coblenz two days later: “[T]he king is going to accept the constitution, being unable to do anything else.” The émigré princes, who declared against it, would not only damn themselves but also increase suspicions of their royal relatives, whose own nominal acceptance was to be a desperate attempt to restore confidence. “That’s the only way the people ... will return to us and turn against the authors of their ills.”29 The attached memorandum is far more forceful in its appeal for intervention, which Marie-Antoinette advocated as being necessary for France, feasible for the powers, and beneficial for both. Although her memorandum was actually dispatched from Paris on 12 September, sixteen days after the Declaration of Pillnitz had been signed near Dresden, it betrays no knowledge of the latter, which was received and publicized in France with the princes’ letter only after 18 September. The queen’s memorandum begins with a staccato succession of peremptory one-sentence paragraphs that could be bullets: It is up to the emperor to end the troubles of the French Revolution. Compromise is no longer possible. • Armed force has destroyed everything; only armed force can restore it.30 • •

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There follows a tendentious discussion minimizing the likelihood of civil war. If foreign powers led by the emperor were to declare themselves with sufficient firmness and to present themselves at the frontier with sufficient force, rebels would return to their senses and throw themselves on the mercy of the king. This was doubly wishful thinking, reflecting both the queen’s incomprehension of the patriotic fervour of subjects-become-citizens and an unfounded confidence that her brother and other heads of state would be willing to risk war on French soil on behalf of a ruler who had formally accepted a reduced role in a constitutional regime. The queen was no fool, of course, and she offered two reasons of state, quite apart from treaty commitments and dynastic relationships, to explain why action against revolutionary Paris would be in the interest of imperial Vienna. First, revolution in France threatens “the tranquility of Europe” by its fundamental principles: “[T]he Revolution ... is an insurrection against all established government. Its principles tend to subvert all nations against their sovereigns. These principles are those of an equality that destroys all authority, a licence that leaves no refuge for liberty, and a corruption that destroys morals and laws.”31 Such dismissiveness with respect to democratic conceptions of rights goes hand in hand with favourable references to rights in aristocratic and monarchical senses, which anyone more sympathetic to the Revolution would have called privileges and prerogatives. With these fundamental convictions, Marie-Antoinette could never have made a willing standard-bearer for any political campaign on behalf of “the rights of woman.” She was determined, contrarily, to attract the Austrian military support that would enable her to crush even such a revolution as did exist. The queen’s second argument for this assistance was also couched in terms of Austrian interests. It was that the formation of the National Guard in France upset the balance of power in Europe and legitimated pre-emptive action by other states in defence of their own security: “They have raised, uniformed, armed, and equipped up to four million men ..., not counting troops of the line ... [or] the officers and troops dedicated to the navy ... One nation can be regarded as the enemy of all Europe when it alone can attack all nations with impunity. It is this armed force that imprisons the king, that has destroyed the monarchy, ... and that could ... suddenly compel the Assembly ... to declare war. No state can be secure, facing an insurrectionary people [that is] so powerful militarily.”32



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Having so magnified the military threat posed by France, the queen’s memorandum had then to explain how it could be met by a coalition mobilized against the Revolution. Her recommendations for a joint manifesto are simple but far-reaching. With respect to France itself, they come down to demands for “the liberty of the king, the honour and dignity of his crown, [and] his restoration to the inalienable exercise of his royal functions”; these changes would have to entail the dissolution of the National Assembly and, implicitly, wholesale rejection of its pretensions and reforms. A detached passage itemizes further demands pertaining to foreign relations: first, other powers must compel the French to respect the commitments of existing treaties; second, they must pledge to arrest and punish French agents of subversion working abroad; and third, they must refuse to recognize the tricolour flag.33 The queen was quite willing to recommend military intimidation or even repression. She thought that prudent Frenchmen would capitulate when confronted with the armed forces of a coalition and an imminent threat of invasion, even that they might supplicate their good king to resume his powers and mediate on their behalf. If they did not, she was quite willing to contemplate mass arrests or even wholesale slaughter, invaders claiming “the right of conquest” and subjecting entire cities to “all the rigours of the right of war.”34 The queen’s hostility to the Revolution was an open secret, and her prominence as the dedicatee of The Rights of Woman could have been enough to make the whole seem counter-revolutionary. Perversely, Leopold preferred to act as if his sister had come to terms with the Revolution, professing to accept at face value her assurances in a letter that had been dictated by the moderate deputies whom, in the world upside down, she had had to court in an effort to preserve the monarchy. In it, she had dutifully but insincerely defended the Constitution as essentially monarchical and the key to future stability. No matter that within a day she took particular pains to disavow all this.35 She was contrarily contemptuous of the Constitution, as she later made quite clear in letter after letter. “It’s a tissue of unworkable absurdities” (7 August). The relevant committee report is “a tissue of absurdities [and] insolence,” and “it’s now a matter of ... [preparing] to overthrow the monstrous work at the earliest time” (21 August). “It would have been nobler to reject it, but in the circumstances that was impossible” (26 September).36

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Marie-Antoinette unburdened herself only to her most confidential advisers, and so Gouges could not have had good evidence of the queen’s true sentiments. Yet her bannered dedication would have alienated most other potential readers and could not have won the support of the queen for the extension of the very liberal and egalitarian principles that she rejected out of hand.

part two The Declaration In every present, we back into the future, our eyes fixed on the past. The subjects of our historical inquiry could have done nothing else. Even the self-conscious revolutionaries of 1789, to whose ­Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen we still look back as the charter of the Democratic Revolution, themselves looked back to the Old Regime. When they envisioned a very masculine Regenerated Man in all his natural nakedness, holding up the Declaration and looking to the heavens and toward a more equitable future, they could not forget the past. They represented him alone, stripped of the trappings of a rejected social order, resting his powerful right hand on the blunt mattock with which he has smashed not only a crown and a censer, symbols of the throne and the altar, but also the coats of arms of a privileged nobility. Similarly, Gouges, the visionary feminist of 1791, to whose ­Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Citizen we also look back as a charter for a more nearly complete democracy, herself looked backward to 1789 and beyond. As importantly, her first readers would have had to do the same. We have seen the powerful hold of a traditional monarchy on her mentality, even after the Old Regime had collapsed institutionally and financially in the summer of 1788 and the Third Estate had mounted its revolutionary challenge in the late spring and summer of 1789. Aristocracy also exerted a continuing hold as she matured as a pamphleteer. ­Chapter 3 situates Gouges socially and culturally in this aristocratic past. Chapter 4 systematically compares her celebrated Declaration of 1791 with the men’s Declaration of 1789, which both inspired her by its nominal universals and provoked her by its exclusion of women.

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3 Gouges’s Patriotism and Aristocratic Sentiments Prior to 1791

The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Citizen has become the irreducible core of Gouges’s historical identity. We can hardly imagine her as ever having been anything but a first feminist. However, she was not a feminist at first. It was to be only in 1791, as a self-conscious patriot addressing the National Assembly, that she composed that Declaration. Thus, it was the first revolution, best represented by the men’s Declaration of 1789, that eventually made Gouges a feminist, before a second revolution, that of the regicide Republic and the Terror of 1793, turned decisively against her. Gouges was not only an inveterate royalist and monarchist, as argued in chapter 1, but also someone imbued with attitudes that were called “aristocratic” in the political vocabulary of 1789.1 Rather than contributing to an egalitarian impetus that went back at least to the pamphleteering of that winter on the structure and procedures of the forthcoming Estates General, she resisted it. Rather than bringing to the Revolution a ready-made feminism or immediately extending its principles to women, her pre-revolutionary plays and early pamphleteering reflect predominantly traditional attitudes with only glimmers of what was to come. These are the concerns of this chapter.

earlier resistance to an egalitarian revolution Shortly before the publication of The Rights of Woman, Gouges had felt compelled to respond publicly to a dismissive characterization of her politics: she was “an aristocrat.”2 Self-styled patriots

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had made this a term of abuse for all defenders of a traditional social and political order, especially after the October Days, a season when Gouges had already felt the sting of the rebuke and attempted to laugh it off, even as she indignantly submitted her case to the National Assembly. She asked the deputies to judge her work and vindicate her good name as a patriot who loved both the people and the monarch and had “no other ambition than to reconcile Frenchmen with their king ... Nevertheless, some want to call me an aristocrat, [while] the aristocrats claim that I’m a democrat. I find myself reduced to the situation of the poor man in his final agony, asked by a stern priest to answer with his last breath: ‘Are you a Molinist or a Jansenist?’ The dying man replied, ‘Alas! I’m an ebonist.’ Like him, I don’t belong to either party. The only one that really engages me is that of my fatherland, that of France, that of my country.”3 The anecdote of the artisan confronted on his deathbed with the demand that he prove his orthodoxy by choosing correctly between competing theologies of grace is a good one, made the better by the facts that neither Molina nor Jansen had been a Frenchman and that the victorious party of the former, the Jesuits, had been driven from France after that of the latter had been condemned and persecuted there. Gouges had surely been sincere in her early claim that she felt herself above or at least apart from the partisan political fray. She was probably also correct in thinking that when opponents still called her an aristocrat in 1791 and later years, it was primarily because of her regard for the king and a monarchism that she considered not just compatible with but required by her sense of patriotism. Consider the rhetoric of the published Repentance of Madame de Gouges, which preceded The Rights of Woman by only eight or ten days and followed The Urgent Counsel to the King within a day or two. First, unrepentantly, she minimizes her offence: “Two lousy pages ...” Then she tries sarcasm: “Me? I’m an aristocrat? All right, yes, that’s what I am, and for good reason. I admit it; I confess it; I accuse myself; and I boast of it. But I forget my justification.” Then, on the way to a qualified acknowledgment that she had been seriously mistaken in her Urgent Counsel, she does offer an excuse of real historical interest. She explains that she had been so eager to contribute her own ideas – which we can identify as those of the Declaration – to the constitutional debate that when, to her great surprise, she heard that the National Assembly had just completed its work on the Constitution and submitted it to Louis xvi,



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she had momentarily lost her head: “A thick mist suddenly overwhelmed my senses and my reason, and I left my rooms intending to do something desperate. I was going to throw myself in the river, and [instead] fell into the aristocratic swamp.” In plainer terms, she then relates that, without so much as a manuscript in hand, she had gone to her printer’s, impetuously dictated a broadside to the compositor, and, when the pressman had finished his work, herself distributed fresh copies “everywhere,” particularly in the chamber of the National Assembly.4 The stagecraft fog, the melodramatic suggestion of suicidal intent, and the comic image of an urbane lady tumbling into swampy waters are all so many ways of distracting readers of her Repentance from the simple fact that she never quite confesses the fault of her Urgent Counsel. No known copy survives, but it certainly existed, and in a much later reference she does tell us all we need to know: she had urged the king not to accept the Constitution.5 On the face of it, it seems unlikely that her advice was ever brought to his attention or that it could have made any difference to him even if it had been. But we can take her word for it that the patriotic deputies and other opinion-makers were appalled, amused, or both at her professed “aristocracy.” The great interest for us is that the strange and unfortunate episode offers good contemporaneous evidence that Gouges really did want her Declaration to be taken seriously as a proposal for prompt legislative consideration but that she had made it all the easier for deputies to toss aside or laugh off her Rights of Woman. In the same curious pamphlet that so closely preceded the work which most concerns us, Gouges confounds accusers with a selfserving list of the good causes that she has supported, including her opposition to slavery, her patriotic fund, and her advocacy for relief efforts and works projects. All this is true enough. She also says that she has called for “the responsibility of ministers, etc., etc.,” and for the adoption of a fitting title for the ruler of a free people: “the King of the French.” This assertion is more dubious. She goes so far as to claim credit for “the principles of equality, justice, and humanity in the Constitution. That’s my true aristocracy.” This assertion is simply false, but it allows her rhetorically to pose as the legitimate political heir of Rousseau, to turn the tables on those accusers, and to blame them for not having rewarded her with the pension that she merits so much more than the philosopher’s servant and companion, Thérèse Levasseur.6

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There was more to the charge of aristocratic politics than Gouges readily admits. Consider, first, her important contribution to the prerevolutionary debates of 1788–89 on the structure and procedures of the Estates General; second, her many pamphlets from May and June 1789 on the standoff between the Third Estate and the Nobility; third, her published criticism of the direct democracy of that year in Paris, Versailles, and the provinces; and fourth, her idiosyncratic appeal to the arch-reactionary and early émigré Artois at the very season when the National Assembly was laying the foundations of a new democratic order in the August Decrees and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. She had effectively invited the readers of her Memoir of Madame de Valmont to regard her as the natural daughter of an Old Regime marquis, but that would not have mattered much, if at all.7 What did matter for her later reputation as an aristocrat politically was the pattern of opposition to the Democratic Revolution of 1789 in her early pamphleteering. First, there is Primitive Happiness from that winter. Strange as it may seem, given Gouges’s place in our historiography as having been more radical than her most radical contemporaries concerning what most counts to most of her modern readers, in the one early work in which she betrays ambitions as a political philosopher, she warns against “the enthusiasts of liberty” who expose the fatherland to the dangers of “a fearful anarchy and a frightful equality” and against the “bad citizens who favour a regime of equality, who regard independence as perfect happiness.”8 In late December the crown had agreed to double the representation of the Third Estate without settling the related question of whether the deputies of the three orders would sit together and vote “by head” or meet separately and vote “by order.” In the former case, lay commoners could hope to prevail with even minimal support from sympathetic deputies among the Clergy and the Nobility; in the latter, they would have to fear being regularly outvoted, two to one, by these privileged orders. In January the abbé Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès published the most influential pamphlet on the crucial issue, Qu’est-ce que le Tiers Etat? (What Is the Third Estate?). In it, he argues, first, that the Third Estate, which includes the sole productive elements of the nation and comprises over ninety-nine per cent of its total population, is effectively “everything”; second, that in the institutional structure of a regime dominated by the privileged orders, it has been “nothing”; and, third, that it must become “something.”9 That indefinite term, while memo-



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rable in this 1–2–3 sequence and seemingly modest, introduces truly radical demands. Sieyès already adopts the revolutionary language of citizenship, equal rights, and a national assembly.10 This is the position that Gouges then contests. She wants her readers to know that any “primitive happiness” of natural equality is gone forever and that the very notion that all men, being equals, could rule at one and the same time is simply madness. For moderns, “true happiness” must be found in the present time. A just social order now requires men to remain in their fixed ranks, to perform their several duties, and to accept the limits of their graded estates: “I would like all men, in every rank and every class, to be raised in the vocations and the estates of their fathers.” Yet supposedly civilized men are all too prone to be deceived by scoundrels, frondeurs, or rebels, who “assure [them] that the entire universe is tending to the same goal, equality: What a sinister presage for posterity!”11 Bringing this preliminary fantasizing and conservative theorizing to bear on the pre-revolutionary constitutional debate, Gouges concludes her most important chapter emphatically: “Oh, Third Estate, what are you doing? Is this the way to treat the goodness of the most just of kings? I address you directly: ... Your passion will be the death of the fatherland. The king has granted everything; the greats have deliberated; in your turn, you ought to set an example of prudence and modesty.”12 The greats particularly in question are almost certainly either the Assembly of Notables or the princes of the blood, led by Artois and Condé, whose December Mémoire des princes présentée au roi (Memoir of the Princes Presented to the King) following the Second Notables had warned of the “reasoned insubordination” of the partisans of the Third Estate. They too used the language of “rights” insistently, as would Sieyès and the revolutionaries of 1789, but the term meant something so different for them as to be diametrically opposed. From their lofty perspective, “rights” were the time-honoured prerogatives of the monarchy and the legal privileges of the Clergy and the Nobility, including exemptions from impositions, exclusive opportunities for service in positions of authority, and the varied honours of high social status.13 The Third Estate was properly subordinate, being defined by default as a residual category of lay commoners without such rights. With Primitive Happiness, Gouges put herself in the princes’ camp, metaphorically arming against the Revolution before it began.

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Second, when the Estates General opened on 5 May, fundamental issues of structure and procedure, deliberation and decision by head or by order, were still unresolved. Timothy Tackett has argued persuasively that the Thirds became revolutionaries in the next two or three months.14 Having done so, they repeatedly defied the king’s will, usurping sovereignty by declaring themselves a National Assembly, taking an oath to give France a constitution of their own making, and refusing to accept renewed relegation to a traditional subordination. Butcher’s daughter though she apparently was, Olympe de Gouges remained hostile to the pretensions of the Thirds, as the irregular series of six minor pamphlets from the end of April to the end of June allows us to see. The originals are now quite rare, and the texts had never been collected and republished before Blanc’s edition of her Political Writings. They were by definition occasional, and none seems to have been influential, so that it is unsurprising that they have not commanded scholarly attention. But a definite pattern does emerge: for all Gouges’s personal independence and intellectual idiosyncrasies, her consistent opposition to democrats served the interests of those aristocrats who wanted to maintain the traditional orders or estates, with their graded ranks and privileges. What follows is necessarily summary. In the Dialogue allégorique entre la France et la Vérité (Allegorical Dialogue between France and the Truth), dedicated to the Estates General and apparently published immediately before its opening session, a personified France charges the Estates to “fix authority” and “maintain the good constitution” of the kingdom, rejecting the “vain reformers” whose projects would “disturb public order and the general welfare by disturbing the foundations of the ancient constitution.” A personified Truth fully concurs, counselling against change: “The most successful Estates have been those that respected the laws established by our fathers.” In her last speech, Truth says that she wants to make the government of France unshakable, “to secure the rights of the Greats and the Clergy and the happiness of the Third Estate” (emphasis added).15 In her own voice, an anonymous Gouges then ends by cautioning deputies “to distrust heads that are too fanatical” and “to conserve your rights” by maintaining royal authority and “the wisdom of our fathers.”16 This argument does not need much commentary. Le Cri du sage (The Cry of the Sage) comes from later in May, when deputies of the Nobility had duly verified their credentials but



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the Thirds had not, exercising political power by refusing to prepare for business as a separate order, apart from the privileged estates. Gouges preaches the wisdom of reconciliation, knowing that this will require a concession by the one or the other, nobles or commoners. She clearly wants the Estates General to function somehow, whether by head or by order, but her preference is clear enough: “[T]he Third Estate ... doesn’t have the right by itself to decree new laws.” Acknowledging that the nobles’ attachment to their privileges is a “prejudice,” she concludes by asking: “These prejudices, aren’t they their rights, and these rights, aren’t they the glory and the support of the monarchy?”17 The Avis pressant, ou Réponse à mes calomniateurs (Urgent Coun­sel, or Response to My Calumniators), which Gouges mentions as new work in a 12 June letter,18 is personally defensive, as the title suggests, but it also includes telling recommendations concerning ministerial personnel, the Estates General, and political thought. She begins by looking to “the elite” to save the state and proposes the recall of the authoritarian noble Charles-Alexandre de Calonne to serve as finance minister alongside the liberal commoner Necker. The proposal is extraordinary in any number of ways, even if Gouges could not yet have known that Calonne would go on to denounce the Revolution a year later, with greater detailed knowledge if less rhetorical force than Burke, and to become an idea man for the émigré counter-revolution. But she surely had some idea of the contrary social and political identities of the two men.19 She then suggests that the Estates General be suspended for a period of six weeks, which would have rendered moot the fateful decision taken by the Thirds on 10 June to verify not only their own credentials but also those of the privileged orders, as if they were, in Sieyès’s terms, not just a “something” but a “national assembly.” And she discourages the creation of “new laws” or any reference to the works of the most prestigious liberal and democratic political thinkers of the century, Montesquieu and Rousseau, let alone the “incendiary” or “seditious writings” of the moment.20 All coheres. The Discours de l’aveugle aux Français (Discourse of the Blindwoman to the Frenchmen), which Gouges does not mention in the 12 June letter, must have been written shortly afterward, effectively on the eve of the 17 June vote by which the Thirds formally declared themselves a National Assembly, thus usurping the king’s powers as lawgiver. This work is signed, and it begins and ends with further

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personal defensiveness and now almost elegiac reflections on her political pamphleteering, as if she were admitting a final defeat and retiring from the field. But the fault is with others for their “deafness,” not with herself for her “blindness.”21 Undaunted, Gouges restates her case for the king and the monarchy in the strongest terms, some of which I have translated in chapter 1.22 She reiterates her support for Calonne. She defends the queen. And in shocking terms, she condemns the Thirds: they are so many “pygmies” who act as if they were “giants” and so expose themselves to the thunderbolts of a vengeful deity. Twice, in this context, she speaks of “rights,” once with particular reference to the Nobility and once with reference to the Nobility and the Clergy, in that order. She refers to the Thirds as “the Chamber of the Commons,” not to dignify them by the example of English institutions, but to ridicule their pretensions to a constitutional role that is alien and unprecedented in France.23 One more time? At least one: Pour sauver la Patrie, il faut respecter les Trois-Ordres (To Save the State, We Must Respect the Three Orders) must have been written between 20 and 23 June. It shows Gouges’s knowledge of the Tennis Court Oath, which she roundly condemns as a source of future woes, but not the Royal Session, which she eagerly anticipates. She makes a wild proposal of her own while waiting: let the decision on structure and voting, by head or by order, be made afresh on every issue by lots specially drawn from an urn. The Thirds already considered themselves the National Assembly, and deputies from the Clergy were beginning to join them. But Gouges would not accept this parliamentary revolution: “[T]he nation can only assemble publicly when the three orders are reunited and agreed upon the general welfare.”24 In the Royal Session the king reassembled the Estates as such in an attempt to reassert his authority, to discipline the Thirds, and to soften the intended rigour of his constitutional and social conservatism by a declared willingness to entertain specific proposals for liberal reforms. It was a fiasco. The Thirds immediately defied the king again, and he capitulated politically once more, although he had also begun to issue marching orders to troops of the line. The Clergy had by now voted to join the Thirds, and a large contingent of liberal nobles, led by Orléans, also came over to them. More marching orders followed. Having no better political option, on 27



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June the king publicly “ordered” the Nobility to join the Thirds and the Clergy.25 And Gouges? Thinking that the crisis had finally passed, she too put the best face on a defeat, claimed victory, and quickly urged “the Estates General,” which she still called by its old name, to adopt her old idea of a “patriotic” or “voluntary imposition,” which she now called a “gift”: Mes Voeux sont remplis, ou Le don patriotique (My Wishes Have Come True, or The Patriotic Gift).26 Her language of giving is characteristically sentimental, of course, but it is also aristocratic. The Old Regime clergy had offered “free gifts” in lieu of imposed taxes,27 and nobles had prided themselves on their generosity in private life. For them, a “patriotic gift” – to the king, of course – would have the great advantage of avoiding the humiliation of being imposed upon by an Assembly in which the majority of deputies would be commoners. Third, the Gouges whose pamphleteering had been consistently aristocratic with reference to the Estates General was to be as consistent in her revulsion from anything like the direct democracy of 1789. That attitude can be summarized more quickly, as having nothing directly to do with her Declaration. The most destructive crowd violence had come in the Réveillon riots of late April; the most celebrated was to follow in the assault on the Bastille on 14 July; the most widespread was to characterize the Agrarian Rebellion associated with the Great Fear of July and August; the most decisive and most inclusive of women was to come in the October Days. With the exception of the assault on the Bastille, on which she was tellingly silent in 1789, Gouges condemned the lot.28 For the Festival of the Federation, celebrated on the first anniversary of the fall of the fortress-prison, she did compose patriotic verses. The most striking aspect of these is her chosen focus on the glory of Louis xvi and, second only to that, the heroism of Lafayette. She offers perfunctory praise for “democrats,” for lesser National Guardsmen, and for the Assembly. There is none at all for the people or the nation, as such, and no reference whatsoever to the Bastille or the events of 14 July 1789.29 Of course, there were also non-violent aspects of informal popular involvement in the political processes of 1789, most of which allowed for participation by women, including the explosion of print journalism and pamphlet literature, informal association in the

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Palais Royal, observation of the meetings of the Thirds and then the National Assembly from the galleries of their chamber in the Menus Plaisirs, and the formation of both political clubs and the citizens’ militia units called the National Guard. In passing remarks, Gouges was critical of most of these efforts too.30 I shall pay particular attention to women in the next section of this chapter. Fourth and last, as evidence of traits that made Gouges an “aristocrat” in the parlance of 1789 and after, there is her persistence in seeking personal distinctions for herself even while disparaging the common people as an undifferentiated, barbaric horde. In her Allegorical Dialogue, the personified France instructs the Estates General before its opening session: “We must agree that a woman who works incessantly for the good of her country deserves not only the esteem of every man but also a few distinctive marks.”31 Then in her own voice, Gouges turns to the Réveillon riots as a particular instance of what she takes to be universal truths about “the people” as cruel, barbarous, and conscienceless killers and arsonists: “The people in general are unjust, ungrateful, and in the end rebellious. They ought to be assisted in times of catastrophe, but if they’re given too much at other times, the risk is that they’ll become lazy and [so] be left without any resources.”32 Gouges’s National Order, or the Count d’Artois was at least nominally addressed to the king’s reactionary brother sometime following his flight in the aftermath of the collapse of efforts to restore royal authority and reverse the course of the Revolution. Merely to address Artois that summer would in itself have smacked of aristocracy, the prince having been at or near the centre of an aborted counter-revolution and then at the head of the early emigration.33 The policies that Gouges recommends were also quintessentially aristocratic: she was realistic enough to fear that the prince and other émigrés might try to return in arms, backed by foreign armies, but hopeful that the prospect of exceptional honours might entice him to return peacefully. He would become the grand master of a newly created chivalric order, personally entrusted with the task of dispensing patriotic honours.34 That is, the Revolution of 1789 would go the way of the most benighted kings, Louis xi, creator of the Order of Saint Michael in 1469, and Louis xiv, creator of the Order of Saint Louis in 1693.35 It would invent new sorts of inequality to replace the old and entrust one of its bitterest enemies with the responsibility of singling out its most deserving citizens. As



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one of the latter, Gouges asked in so many words to be considered for “this mark of distinction.” Her services in this pamphlet include the extended denunciation of the peasant “brigands” on whom she blamed disorders related to the agrarian rebellion against seigneurial dues and feudal rights; they should be exiled, to reassure Artois and his sort.36

earlier unconcern for the rights of women We tend to look back at Gouges and her work, knowing that her 1793 would follow her 1791, her 1791 would succeed her 1789, and her 1789 come after her Old Regime. This sort of retrospection is nowhere better exemplified than in the handsome volume of Théâtre (Drama) published in her native city on the bicentennial of her execution. Félix-Marcel Castan acknowledges in the Introduction that, like the rest of us, he had initially encountered ­Gouges as the author of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Citizen. This later identity, in turn, would surely have conditioned the editors’ presentation of her political pamphlets, had their ambitious project of an Oeuvres complètes (Complete Works) continued beyond the first volume, as it obviously conditioned their readings of her pre-revolutionary plays. Castan concludes his Introduction by echoing Blanc and honouring Gouges as a thinker who had conceived feminism and categorically advanced its claims “in all its dimensions [and] implications, socio-economic, political, moral, psychological, symbolic, cultural, [and] humanistic.”37 One truncated speech from L’Homme généreux (The Generous Man), dated on its title page to 1786, is the only textual support offered for this grand pronouncement. In it Madame de Valmont, the fictional daughter of a marquis, tells her male counterpart: “That’s how vulnerable our poor sex is. Men have all the advantages ... [editorial ellipsis]. They have excluded us from all power, from all learning.” The words editorially omitted at the ellipsis happen to be telling, and when they are restored, the proto-feminism of this passage is overwhelmed by a dramatic context in which males are not only the active villains but also the active – and eponymously generous – heroes. Men’s advantages are these, according to the character who seems to speak for Gouges: “We’ve seen some of them, rising from the lowest origins, reach the greatest fortune[s] and sometimes dignities. And women, without employment, remain in misery, that

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is, if they’re virtuous.”38 The speaker means to emphasize gender inequities in opportunities for promotion in the hierarchical society of the Old Regime. In other words, the common man can at least occasionally rise by his own efforts, enriching and even ennobling himself, but a woman can only sink, prostituting and degrading herself. These themes are not developed in the play, nor is there a democratic critique of the hierarchical society, gender inequities in education, employment, and marriage or, for that matter, the plight of prostitutes. To the contrary: from her very first scene, the author focuses sharply on her noble hero, the comte de Saint-Clair. His eyes are fastened on a lovely young woman. It hardly matters to him that she is a poor commoner; what counts is her beauty and the youth that it presupposes: “Ah, Marianne, your image haunts me everywhere! What, then, is the invincible power of beauty? ... Can I forget her touching grace, her enchanting features, her noble and simple bearing? No, I’ve never seen an object worthier of pleasing [me]. All that is admirable and attractive comes together in her.” The modern editors found this monologue from the 1780s so inappropriate for the Gouges whom they wanted to honour in the 1990s that they literally wrote it out and substituted something more acceptable to themselves.39 Gouges’s plot exposes the beautiful young girl to a vile seducer before finally giving her to the count, whose own worthiness is proven not so much by his wealth or his title, although both do matter, as by his spontaneous generosity in giving a thousand louis (24,000 livres) to her hard-pressed father, who owes only a fraction of that sum (4,000 livres), and by his unflinching courage in drawing his sword against the villain, all without any apparent expectation that he can buy or conquer the object of his desire. In the end, of course, the generous nobleman easily wins the attractive commoner; falling to his knees, the count asks for Marianne’s hand and requests her father’s permission. She faints and, upon reviving, exclaims: “[H]ow fortunate is my destiny, to have been granted the happiness of belonging to you!”40 Gouges’s other pre-revolutionary plays reflect a similarly conventional mindset on gender relations. With a will, a modern feminist can see signs of potential for later development. However, no early play is political even in extended senses, and none reflects the revolutionary rights-consciousness of her later Declaration.



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Consider, very briefly, her earliest known comic drama, Le Mariage inattendu (The Unexpected Marriage), conceived in 1784 as a sequel to B ­ eaumarchais’s Figaro; the most important, Zamore et Mirza (Zamore and Mirza), successfully submitted to the ComédieFrançaise in 1785; the most “philosophical,” Le Philosophe corrigé (The Philosopher Corrected), written in 1787 or 1788; and the most historical in its cast of characters, Molière chez Ninon (Molière at Ninon’s), also written shortly before the publication of her Oeuvres in 1788. The Unexpected Marriage opens with a scene in which Figaro and a matured Cherubino, now a marquis and a seigneur in his own right, discuss the latter’s romantic fixation on the beautiful F ­ anchette. Figaro crudely supposes that “the master of the chateau” will exercise his droit du seigneur and claim the privilege of sexual favours; more generally, he uses the language of “cruelty” for any woman’s denial of any man and “goodness” for any woman’s indulgence of a man’s desires.41 But he is not centre stage, and for all his and Almaviva’s rather heavy-handed subsequent allusions to this obviously abusive caricature of a right, all that really counts in the rest of the play is Cherubino’s pure but seemingly impossible love for Fanchette and hers for him. The impossibility is a matter of his rank as a nobleman and hers as, apparently, a peasant. Each accepts that this gross social inequality prevents any romance or marriage, and the resolution comes only when it is disclosed at the end that she is actually the daughter of a duke, which explains her “noble and decent” appearance and her “elevated” sentiments throughout.42 Thus the play both does and does not contest the norms of the hierarchical society. But there is no contesting traditional gender relations; as long as she thinks of herself as a peasant’s daughter, Marianne properly subordinates herself and dutifully obeys the will of her supposed father, however cloddish he is and however repugnant she finds the similarly cloddish husband whom he intends for her. In the happy ending, she gets her man, the nobleman, through none of her own doing. Zamore and Mirza is unique among Gouges’s plays for having been published in one version in 1788, performed in another at the end of 1789, and published again in yet another in 1792. It is this last version that is now commonly read, especially for its treatment of race and slavery, which I shall address in chapter 6. Here I would comment much more briefly on gender relations in the

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­ re-revolutionary first edition, with a weather eye on the declarap tions of rights to come, the men’s and her own. The primary dramatic problem is to reconcile the much younger male slave Zamore, who has fled after killing a homicidal overseer in self-defence, to his paternalistic master, the comte de Saint-Clair, a high-minded and sensitive colonial governor who feels duty bound to punish even his own beloved slave.43 Each man has a worthy woman as his partner, and to serve as vehicles for the reconciliation, the dramatist introduces yet another young couple, shipwrecked Europeans who are rescued by the fugitive slaves. A secondary problem is for the shipwrecked young woman, an illegitimate child, to find her long-lost father.44 Of course, he turns out to be Saint-Clair, and, of course, the fact that it is Zamore who has saved his daughter from the waves allows her to make doubly affecting appeals on the slave’s behalf after a climactic reunion. All three couples are quite traditional in their roles and relationships, and even Saint-Clair’s premarital fatherhood is made perfectly excusable.45 This is a dramatic world ruled by father-daughter and father-surrogate-son sensibility, and there is no revolutionary or feminist rights-consciousness. The Philosopher Corrected is hardly different in the latter respect, although it has been introduced in grand terms as “the first authentically feminist play in the history of the theatre.”46 The lead character is a married marquis who maintains an unnatural equipoise and perfect dispassion, even in the face of what he supposes is the infidelity of his wife.47 This is the primary meaning of his “philosophy,” although he also defends or rationalizes it in lapidary maxims delivered in stagey dialogue with other men of his own station if not temperament: “The woman/wife is the companion of the man, but the man/husband ought not to be the tyrant ... Freedom is a more reliable guardian than constraint ... If you ever marry, be a tolerant husband, and you will be your wife’s friend ... I think that two persons, independent as much by their rank as by their fortune [even if] united by marriage, ought to remain equal masters of their own fate and of their conduct.” In short, the marquis seems to be the rare man who is willing to tell other men that they make themselves “ridiculous” by their “pretensions” to gender domination and claims of superior “rights.”48 However, the “philosopher” is himself a comic character who must be “corrected,” and so he is. The primary problem is that his wife is timid sexually, even with him, not that she has found another



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partner. His own coolness is secondary and reactive. Other women successfully conspire with the timid wife and lure the unwitting husband into masked trysts with her. He thinks that he is being unfaithful; she knows that he is not, any more than she is. The women’s plot works like a charm: the wife overcomes her bashfulness and becomes pregnant, and the husband, assuming that he has been betrayed, finally loses his philosophical cool and explodes momentarily in righteous wrath, threatening to confine her for life. This is emphatically a good thing. After all is revealed, it allows a happy ending in which a more conventional and mutually more passionate married life can begin. The last scene begins and ends this way: “The marquis, running up to the marquise: ‘Oh, most adorable woman! On my knees, I abjure a false philosophy that was never mine in my heart. A sensitive man can suppress his passions only by the blunders of his mind.’ The marquise, with the greatest joy: ‘Oh, my friend, my dear husband!’ The marquis: ‘Rather, your lover! Your most passionate lover.’ ... Blaise [the gardener]: ‘The good seigneur!’ Babet [the nursemaid]: ‘The good master!’ All the peasants, at once: ‘The good seigneur, the good master!’”49 Finally, in search of something like Gouges’s mature feminism in a pre-revolutionary play, we come to Molière at Ninon’s. To be sure, in this drama Ninon de Lenclos is both liberated and cultivated, and Queen Christina is both an independent woman and a philosopher, a term honouring her intellectual interests and willingness to relinquish power. But for our purposes, the more interesting character is an “Olympe,” and the question seems to be, what role in life would the author herself have wished to play? As Gouges turned forty, a playwright frustrated and angered by her treatment at the hands of the actors and actresses of the Comédie-Française, she fondly imagined herself well-received by the great men and great women of the Splendid Century. This imagined self would have been emphatically young and beautiful, wealthy and nobly born, independent and intelligent, and, despite it all, unfortunate in love.50 The great problem for the sixteen-year-old character is that her titled parents, the marquis and his marquise, have chosen a sixtyyear-old to be her husband, rejecting the young man whom she loves because his birth is “obscure.” Ninon, a patron of lovers, promises to intercede on her behalf, and it turns out that she is the previously undeclared mother. The father is someone known to the marquis and valued as a soldier and a friend, but it remains an anomaly

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that the illegitimate son is styled a “chevalier,” a form of address conventionally reserved for the higher nobility. This may only be a signal for audiences that he really is “well-born.”51 Molière gets to be the sage and the hero, saving the day for the lovers by persuading the girl’s father that the boy’s illegitimacy does not matter: any man characterized by “honour” and “distinguished sentiments” has “rights to the public esteem that he merits.” The reassuringly aristocratic language of “rights” as the function of a man’s honour, distinction, esteem, and merit carries the day, and the marquis yields.52 In a stereotypically happy ending, the young lovers can marry. This is the stuff of fantasy, not feminism. Gouges prefaced her 1788 edition of these plays with the comic epistolary romance that makes up most of the Memoir of Madame de Valmont; prefaced that, in turn, with a brief correspondence between herself as author and her character Valmont; prefaced that, in turn, with Valmont’s protest narrative; and prefaced that, finally, with a “Preface for the Ladies.” She had a weakness for prefaces, as her printers noticed and she admitted.53 These materials have commanded exceptional and mostly unfortunate attention, Olivier Blanc making them the stuff of history and Lisa Beckstrand most recently making them the stuff of feminism. Joan Scott’s emphasis on the creative “imagination” seems more instructive here.54 There are at least proto-feminist aspects to this “Preface for the Ladies,” but they do not come unmixed. Gouges initially protests against a Rousseauist relegation of women to the roles of pleasing men and conducting households. She defends her intellectual life and literary ambitions. And she pleads for solidarity among women. But all this is so as to deflect criticism from her own published work. Not to put too fine a point on it, she thinks of other women as naturally catty, gossipy, and prone to find fault with one another. Rather than looking forward self-consciously to a modern feminism, she looks backward with a fond nostalgia to an “antique chivalry.” She wants to be considered both “respectable” and “attractive,” like the ladies of old, but is apprehensive that the “circles” – a code word for the highest aristocracy – of the court, the theatre, and the Church will combine against her.55 As for the rest of the Memoir, its fantasies are transparent. The fictional Valmont, who begs to be confused with “the author” herself, repeatedly heaps up proofs of noble origins in order for Gouges to display them to us.56 Valmont is remarkably restrained in the



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­ arrative treatment of and epistolary approach to the man whom n she claims as her father, the old marquis de Flaucourt, a literary figure for the unnamed but easily identifiable Jean-Jacques Le Franc, marquis de Pompignan.57 Even when rebuffed by him at the end of his life, she does not fault him for having in his young manhood exploited his superior status as an aristocratic male to impregnate and then abandon her poor mother. Rather, she lays the onus of blame on almost anyone else – his despicable servant, his devout widow, his surviving brother. The implicit claim that the widowed marquise de Flaucourt, a literary figure for the historical marquise, née Marie-AntoinetteFélicité de Caulaincourt, owes her late husband’s former mistress an old-age pension long after his love child has matured into an independent woman is truly extraordinary.58 If we take the fictional Olinde as a pathetic figure for the historical Anne-Olympe Mouisset, Gouges’s mother, any historical claim would be even ­ more extraordinary, in that this woman had long been married at the time of her daughter’s birth and had remarried after the death of her first husband, all well before Caulaincourt took Le Franc de ­Pompignan as her own second husband in 1757.59 The related claim on the brother is historically more curious, because Jean-Georges Le Franc de Pompignan, archbishop of Vienne, was elected to the Estates General and became a leading figure within the National Assembly. Although it seems heretical even to suggest the possibility, there may have been something like the threat of blackmail in Gouges’s almost libellous denunciation of the “ingratitude and ­cruelty” of these distinguished survivors. Hypothetically, the ambitious Primitive Happiness could have allowed for a full expression of Gouges’s feminism before the Revolution – if, that is, she had been a full-fledged feminist at the beginning of 1789. She was not. Her imagined “first man” is an idealized patriarch who lives and dies good, wise, and preachy, and she has almost nothing to say about his female “companion.” The strong male in the next generation also has a female partner who effectively fails to think, talk, or act for herself or other women. The most startling aspect of this vision of primal social relations, given what we know of the author’s later Rights of Woman, is her enthusiasm for indissoluble marriage as “the most beautiful institution of the happiness of man and natural law.”60 When Gouges turns to consider others’ egalitarian demands on behalf of lay commoners

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in the forthcoming Estates General, she does not take the occasion to make claims for women. Even her call for the establishment of a new “National Theatre” that would also be a “Women’s Theatre” betrays a pre-political, excessively personal, predominantly moralistic, and pervasively aristocratic mindset.61 Olympe de Gouges was already forty years old, but she was not yet a feminist. This is nowhere clearer than in her Allegorical Dialogue. On the eve of the Estates General, she personifies France as “a superb woman” on a precipice who must be saved and Truth as “a wholly naked woman,” a voice of natural wisdom who can tell the nation in peril how to restore her “first splendour.”62 For the historian of feminism, the most telling dialogue is the following: France: Who knows whether a woman might be worth a man in the politics of this century of frivolity and egotism? A truly patriotic heart can hit upon virtuous projects and make fortunate discoveries; the history of all countries proves well enough that women are not always useless.   Truth: Women aren’t like men; all of them don’t devote themselves to the welfare of the fatherland, because that demands too many sacrifices. Whether it’s a matter of their character or a quirk of their sex, one can make a distinction in this respect.   France: This sex, always subordinated, has always sought to enter the lists with the other, which has always laid down the law. It seems to have the right to raise its voice only in great crises. It’s unjust of men not to open [public] affairs to capable women and to surrender a few powers to them ...   Truth: I don’t quite agree. You must be more interested in the sex than I am. Its enthusiasm [and] sometimes clever ideas have been a great resource ..., but it should refrain from ... serious matters. As long as it lacks authority, it will accomplish wonders; if it were given power, it would constantly blunder.63 France persists, to the extent of recommending “distinctive marks” for the “one woman” who works incessantly for the public welfare and “sacrifices herself like a Roman.” Truth is ready to agree. In the weeks following 5 May and the opening session of the Estates, rather than looking forward to possible liberations, Gouges preferred to look back again “to our wise ancestors, to those noble French cavaliers who defended both Fatherland and ladies.” What



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had gone wrong? How had they failed? Whose fault was it? Gouges placed the blame squarely on women for having “hurled themselves” at men, thus surrendering a domestic “empire” based on “natural graces” and “noble modesty.” Once upon a time they had made themselves “touching” and “cherished” by devoting themselves to their households and their children. Now that they had turned away from such domesticity, their arts of seduction and perfidy made them “at once weak and all-powerful ..., the deceivers and the deceived.” Corrupt themselves, they had corrupted and feminized men too.64 Even at this early date, Gouges did note the exclusion of women from “all national assemblies,” but she did not protest, having found that she could have her say in print. And she and other women could also observe the proceedings from the galleries around the great hall of the Menus Plaisirs. However, by the time the contest between the Thirds and the Nobility over structure and procedure came to a head in mid-June, she had become so disgusted by the way in which noisy and disorderly members of the general public had impeded debate that she recommended closing the galleries. The striking fact is that she was more critical of the women than of the men and more fearful about their nefarious influence on the deputies: “The ladies [sic] who daily flock to this court [sic] have already passed the barriers [that is, occupied the spectators’ galleries]; soon, they will reach the deputies’ benches. That’s what they say, what they affirm, and what I fear. Those [deputies] who have been gifted with facility, eloquence, and a good speaking voice constantly urge the public, especially the ladies, to enter their Assembly.” Gouges regrets that these men often make fools of themselves, playing to women in the galleries.65 The world turned upside down! At this stage of the Revolution, as she saw it, men were eager to engage “ladies” in the political process, and she, Olympe de Gouges, wanted to shut them out! On two occasions in September and October 1789, women played particularly dramatic but quite different roles at Versailles. Gouges was not actively involved with either event, but her response to each is telling. On the morning of 7 September a deputation of fifteen married women and six girls came before the National Assembly to make a patriotic donation of their jewellery. The statuesque Madame de Moitte, a sculptor’s wife, led the women, while a male advocate who was also a deputy, the aptly named Charles-François Bouche, spoke for them in making the presentation. The women likened themselves to the Roman matrons who had brought their

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jewels to the Senate after the fall of Etruscan Veii, enabling the dictator Camillus to satisfy a vow to Apollo. Similarly, the offerings of the Parisian women would help the modern state to meet its commitments to its creditors: “[T]he wives and daughters of artists are coming to present to the august National Assembly the jewellery that they would blush to wear when patriotism compels its sacrifice. Well! What woman would not prefer the inexpressible satisfaction of making so noble a use [of ornaments] to the sterile pleasure of satisfying vanity!” Deputies applauded enthusiastically, having found no better solution to the financial crisis.66 Gouges herself had played no known role in inspiring these women or in organizing their self-conscious display of patriotic virtue, but a year earlier she had advocated a “patriotic” or “voluntary” tax. Now she celebrated her own idea as a grander contribution than their gifts and rushed into print with the Action héroïque d’une Française, ou La France sauvée par les femmes (Heroic Action of a Frenchwoman [sic], or France Saved by Women).67 In the following weeks and months, many others, men and women alike, also offered patriotic gifts, everything from the king’s silver plate to the deputies’ silver shoe buckles, but gestures that initially boosted morale eventually interrupted business without ever meeting the financial need.68 Modern admirers of Gouges’s Declaration are sure to make more of the noisy march of protestors to Versailles on 5 October 1789 than of the silent tableau of patriotic donors on 7 September. In retrospect, we see the October Days as the peak moment of women’s activism for the entire Revolution, a decisive event that not only compelled the king to sanction the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and the preliminary Constitutional Articles but also forced him and his family to abandon Versailles, where they had been surrounded by parasitic courtiers, and to relocate to Paris, with its restive populace. It is instructive that on the night of 5 October, Gouges feared an insurrection and saw the marchers as either “the enemy” themselves or the dupes of “the enemy.”69 No one consulting only her Antidote would have any way of knowing the gender of the marchers or their role in helping to secure royal acceptance of the Declaration and the Constitutional Articles. She was not then a feminist or an advocate of rights-consciousness. In time, she would be revolutionized by the Revolution.

4 Gouges’s Declaration and That of the National Assembly

Gouges did like prefaces. She prefaced her celebrated Declaration with the dedication “To the Queen,” then an address to “Man,” and only then a Preamble in the manner of the men’s Declaration from 1789. The prefatory address to “Man” consists of a scathing indictment of men’s injustice, arrogance, and ignorance in their oppression of women (Rights of Woman, lines 73–92 with Gouges’s note). “The stupidest animal”! However justified her angry outburst, it cannot have been politic, if she meant to win men’s support for her feminist complement to their foundation document. I will return to this prefatory outburst in my concluding chapter. Her Declaration follows, headed by an italicized statement of purpose that ought to be taken at face value: “To be decreed by the National Assembly in its last sessions or in that [sic] of the next legislature” (lines 95–6). In its structure and much of its language, Gouges’s Declaration follows the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen so closely that its variants are telling. We start with the preambles, theirs and hers.

the preambles of 1789 and 1791 Assembly, 1789: The Representatives [masc.] of the French People, constituted in [the] national assembly, ... have resolved to set forth in a solemn Declaration the natural, inalienable, and sacred rights of Man, ... so that the acts of the legislative power and those of the executive power can be compared at any moment with the purpose of every political institution.1 Gouges, 1791: The mothers, the daughters, the sisters, representatives [fem.] of the nation, demand to be constituted in

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[a] national assembly ... [They] have resolved to set forth in a solemn declaration the natural, inalienable, and sacred rights of woman, ... so that the acts of power of the women and those of the power of the men can be compared at any moment with the purpose of every political institution. (lines 98–109) The deputies adopted the language of their Preamble on 20 August 1789, not long after a majority had voted for a sweeping abolition of privileges and in weeks when individuals elected from the three orders had begun to mix more freely, rather than sitting in coherent blocs within the common chamber.2 In this political context it was imperative to affirm their faith that “the French People” was one, “the National Assembly” was one, and “Man” was one. They needed to believe that they fully represented a united people and a united nation and could speak for a universal man and all citizens. All this mitigated against differentiation by gender in constitutional law. Similarly, “the legislative power,” their own, selfdefined, was one, and as the self-declared Constituent Assembly, they could also delimit “the executive power.” That was still the crown, of course, although nowhere in their Declaration would they name Louis xvi or refer explicitly to the king or the monarchy, the elephant in the chamber. Enter Gouges. Her characteristic manner of composition by dictation, her idiosyncratic pride in her own verbal facility, and her acknowledged impatience with revision and correction all worked against precision and leave us with tasks of interpretation, even in the Preamble. Given her intended audience and literary identity as the author of sentimental plays concerned with family relationships, a natural reading of its first line (98), in keeping with the italicized reference to the National Assembly immediately above (line 95), might be that it was her reminder to the male deputies, directly addressed as “representatives of the nation,” that they all had female blood relatives, on whose behalf she was making her appeal or, more bluntly, her demands. A first curiosity is that Gouges makes no reference here to wives alongside or ahead of mothers, daughters, and sisters. Can she mean to endorse traditional but inequitable principles of couverture? And a first problem is that, for the otherwise natural reading, “representatives” without the direct article would have to be a masculine noun, and it is not. It is possible that she intended a masculine form and that a secretary or compositor



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slipped carelessly, a slippage that the context might have invited and she might not have noticed or, if she did notice, might not have troubled to correct. The possibilities are necessarily compounded and so logically lessen the probability of such a slip. Then again, if there was a slip, it might even have been her own, unintentionally disclosing a true wish, namely, for women to serve as legislators. As the printed text reads, with “representatives” feminine, Gouges may mean to claim that she speaks on behalf of all women, the natural equals of the elected deputies; informally, they, too, represent the “nation.” Why not just say so, if that is what she means? Why this list, including daughters but not wives? Just one more wonder: why begin by addressing female “representatives,” if the proper audience for her Preamble, like the men’s, is “all members of the social body” (lines 105–6)? In any case, the term “nation” seems to rule out gender-specific representation, women only by other women, even if there is nothing here as clear as the egalitarianism and ­gender-inclusiveness of her Article vi. There Gouges uses language which guarantees that female citizens and male citizens alike will have the vote and be eligible for office but also rules out different sets of laws for the two sexes or different rules for the franchise or eligibility: “[The law] must be the same for all” (lines 144–7). Ambiguities also lurk within the reference to “national assembly,” printed in lines 99–100 without an article or capitalization. Does Gouges mean to refer to the National Assembly, properly speaking, the unicameral legislature prescribed in the Constitution, as in the preceding italics but with women granted the franchise and women eligible to compete for office? Or is it only a national assembly in some other, unspecified sense? Can it be that she envisions two gender-exclusive chambers that might even decree gender-specific laws, which would be unexampled even in our own era of genderconsciousness? Reference to the differentiated “acts of power of women and those of the power of men” may imply some such radical demand (lines 107–8). However, without her guidance in the form of explanatory prose or persuasive argument, both major omissions, it is hard to say what she does mean here, and she may simply have adapted separation-of-powers language from the Assembly (“acts of the legislative power and those of the executive power”) without giving much thought to the implications of her feminist version. In what follows she stays close to the language in which the deputies had ­articulated

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­ rinciples of a unitary sovereignty based on a general will, and in p words of her own she rejects exceptionalism with respect to the criminal law (Articles iii, vi, vii, and ix). In any case, in the aftermath of bruising battles in the Estates General over separate orders and in the Constituent Assembly over a proposed two-chamber legislature, no scheme for a bicameral legislative body or suggestion of separate codes of law for different categories of citizens could have been well received. Gouges herself had not anticipated proposals for extending the franchise or making women eligible for office in prior pamphlets, and she would not develop them in her later works. In fact, as recently as the last week of June 1791, she had gone out of her way to deny any such ambition. She then told the deputies that she was meditating “a crowd of ideas” that she would “submit to your wisdom,” ideas “on the ability, the strength, and the courage of my entire sex.” She had also claimed to “represent” women, which perhaps implied that as men they could not do so, but then asked only that an elite of “active female citizens” be selected to serve within the Tuileries palace in what would have been an ambiguous role as both “modern Amazons,” maintaining surveillance by standing guard over the female members of the royal family after their enforced return from Varennes, and a democratized Household of the Queen, supplanting previously favoured courtiers. This would be glory enough. She then said that she had no political ambitions for herself or her sex; quite the contrary: “Messieurs, we will not permit ourselves to enter into competition with you in politics and [public] affairs. Our sole purpose is to make ourselves useful. Today, women mix [with men] in the public Assemblies [and] in the Clubs; they are deserting their homes. We must bring them back by a noble emulation. Women are more susceptible to the point of honour when glory animates them.”3 Here she weds innovation to reaction, with implications that are apt to seem traditional to a fault in our retrospect: politics ought to be a man’s affair, and a woman’s place is in the home. A women’s honour guard for the palace would reward the most virtuous homemakers and inspire all others. And this is Olympe de Gouges at the beginning of a summer that would end with The Rights of Woman! In the Preamble of her Declaration, one other slight but perhaps telling deviation from the model provided by the men’s Declaration



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may deserve mention. While they had more simply stated that, in articulating the Rights of Man, their goals were to serve “the maintenance of the Constitution and the welfare of all,” hers are to serve “the maintenance of the constitution, good morals, and the welfare of all” (lines 112–13; emphasis added).

article i Assembly, 1789: Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be based only on the common welfare. Gouges, 1791: Woman is born free and remains equal to man in rights. Social distinctions may be based only on the common welfare. Gouges’s first sentence may seem to say it all: woman free, man’s equal. Then, taken verbatim from her model, comes a vague qualification that is potentially more problematical. Deputies had adopted their defence of “social distinctions” from a draft declaration in which Lafayette, a titled nobleman and a war hero, had expressed his conviction that the maintenance of public order required a martial aristocracy; within days, he was to be given command of the National Guard. Hypothetically, utilitarian arguments could serve other special interests too, among them a husband’s in keeping his wife at home at the cost of denying her the rights of active citizenship.4

article ii Assembly, 1789: The goal of every political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of Man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression. Gouges, 1791: The goal of every political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of Woman and of Man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and especially resistance to oppression.

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Again, Gouges’s addition of “woman” may seem to say it all: women fully share rights that need not be given to them and may not be taken from them. The adverb added to the second sentence is surprising from an author who otherwise consistently opposed revolutionary violence.

article iii Assembly, 1789: The principle of all Sovereignty rests essentially in the Nation. No body [and] no individual may exercise authority that does not emanate from it expressly. Gouges, 1791: The principle of all sovereignty rests essentially in the Nation, which is nothing but the union of Woman and Man. No body [and] no individual may exercise authority that does not emanate from it expressly. Gouges’s theoretical redefinition of the sovereign nation emphasizes the ideal unity of the sexes as well as of the nation, which is perfectly consistent with her acute sense of gender oppression in the parts of The Rights of Woman that frame the Declaration. The unitary principle does raise questions about the constitutional dualism apparently envisioned in her Preamble. In 1789 the corresponding article had concerned the relationship between the unicameral National Assembly and the king, the deputies defiantly reasserting in August the law-making sovereignty that they had usurped in June. Further, it implied that the remaining powers of the crown were subject to the constitutional decrees of the Assembly. In 1791 as in 1789, ­Gouges was a royalist.

article iv Assembly, 1789: Liberty consists in [the right] to do anything that does not harm others; thus the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits other than those that assure other Members of Society the enjoyment of the same rights. These limits can be set only by the Law. Gouges, 1791: Liberty and justice consist in restoring to others all that is theirs; thus the exercise of the natural rights of woman has no limits other than the perpetual tyranny with which man



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opposes it. These limits must be reformed by the laws of nature and of reason. Gouges takes great liberties with this article, substituting a restoration principle of justice for a no-harm principle of individual liberty, explicitly asserting that men’s dominance over women is a form of tyranny, and raising “the laws of nature and of reason” as apparent alternatives to statute law. While a classically educated Frenchman could have cited Plato’s Republic in support of some of this argument, Gouges herself scorned that sort of thing and spoke from the heart, not memories of book learning. Her denunciation of men’s “perpetual tyranny” was her own. But she was at least nominally addressing deputies who shared more legalistic conceptions of rights. So as to end a regime dominated by the will of rulers and ministers with their own ideas of what was “natural” and “reasonable,” they had wanted to begin a regime of liberty and equality under statute law made by citizen-representatives.

article v Assembly, 1789: The Law has the right to forbid only actions harmful to Society. Anything not forbidden by the Law may not be prevented, and no one may be compelled to do what it does not command. Gouges, 1791: The laws of nature and of reason forbid all actions harmful to society. Anything not forbidden by these laws, wise and divine, may not be prevented, and no one may be compelled to do what they do not command. Here again are Gouges’s “laws of nature and of reason,” once more in place of statute law. All restrictions on one’s conduct seem effectively to be internalized, and taken strictly, this article seems anarchical. Rousseau’s Savoyard Vicar might have encouraged her faith that the individual promptings of nature and reason are somehow “wise and divine,” but Rousseauists among the deputies were committed to the rule of written law, adopted by vote after debate. When they had debated this article on 21 August 1789, they decreed it only after explicitly rejecting the notion that they could rely on what each citizen privately considered “evident.”5

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article vi Assembly, 1789: The Law is the expression of the general will. All Citizens have the right to concur in its formation in person or by their Representatives. It must be the same for all, whether it protects or it punishes. All Citizens, being equal in its eyes, are equally admissible to all public honours, positions, and employments, according to their abilities and without other distinction than that of their virtues and their talents. Gouges, 1791: The Law must be the expression of the general will. All female Citizens and male Citizens must concur in its formation in person or by their representatives. It must be the same for all. All female citizens and all male citizens, being equal before it, must be equally admissible to all public honours, positions, and employments, according to their abilities and without other distinctions than those of their virtues and their talents. Gouges has refashioned an exceptionally important but badly written article. I break up her single sentence, in keeping with the men’s Declaration and in order to clarify her adaptation. In what I punctuate as a first sentence, she substitutes feminist prescription for the deputies’ description or definition, her doit être (must or should be) for their est (is). She makes parallel changes in the second and fourth sentences. The effect is to re-radicalize propositions that liberals had initially directed against traditions of monarchical sovereignty and aristocratic privilege. She turns them back against gender exclusion and gender bias. There can be only one law for the two sexes, guaranteeing women equal rights to the vote, implicitly, and equal claims on public office, explicitly. The progression is evident and significant: even if the Revolution of 1789 had not “regenerated man,” in Gouges’s 1791 pamphlet it had generated feminism.

article vii Assembly, 1789: No man may be accused, arrested, or detained except in cases specified by the Law and according to the forms that it has prescribed. Those who solicit, expedite, execute, or cause to be executed arbitrary orders must be punished, but



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every Citizen summonsed or seized in virtue of the Law must obey at once; he becomes guilty if he resists. Gouges, 1791: No woman is an exception. She is accused, arrested, and detained in cases specified by the Law. Like men, women obey this rigorous Law. Here, as in the previous article, Gouges envisions a common code of criminal law for women and men alike, rejecting even the exceptionalism that had tended to favour women. Her adaptation simplifies the men’s prose and generalizes its purport. In August 1789 these men had fresh memories of the lettres de cachet, or executive writs of arrest, by which agents of the king and the minister for the Household of the King had ordered the indefinite imprisonment or exile of subjects without there being any formal accusation of an offence against criminal law or any judicial proceeding. Under the Old Regime, nobles and commoners alike had been able to request them as a way of disciplining wayward family members, but autocratic rulers could also use and abuse them in their own political self-interest. After having repeatedly defied the crown in June and narrowly escaped a counter-revolutionary coup in July, deputies still had reason for anxiety about their own personal and political liberty, even as the Bastille was being demolished. But by September 1791, such lettres had been formally abolished.6 Gouges was then a confirmed royalist with nothing to fear from Louis xvi or his ministers. Revolution had turned the world upside down, and without benefit of constitutional law, criminal law, or judicial proceedings, the Assembly had confined the king in a form of closely guarded house arrest.

article viii Assembly, 1789: The Law may establish only penalties that are strictly and obviously necessary, and no one may be punished other than by virtue of a Law established and promulgated prior to the offence and legally applied. Gouges, 1791: The law may establish only penalties that are strictly and obviously necessary, and no one may be punished

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other than by virtue of a Law established and promulgated prior to the offence and legally applied to women. Gouges repeats the men’s Article viii verbatim, appending only two words, “to women.” The men’s goals had been to rule out unnecessarily severe sentences, ex post facto laws, and arbitrary court proceedings or criminal punishments. Supposing that her goal was to ensure that these same protections would be extended to women, as seems obvious, she could simply have changed “no one” from masculine to feminine, adding a singular “woman” here for emphasis. There would then have been no need for anything else. What she did publish risks implying that women’s law should be different from men’s, reintroducing the exceptionalism rejected in her Articles vii and ix.

article ix Assembly, 1789: Every man is presumed innocent until he has been found guilty. If it is considered essential to arrest him, all severity not necessary to take him into custody must be strictly forbidden by Law. Gouges, 1791: If found guilty, every woman [must be punished with] all severity prescribed by the Law. Gouges unfortunately departs from her model, making this article a corollary to the rigour of her Articles vii and viii, while ignoring the men’s principle of the presumption of innocence for the accused person and their prohibition of unnecessarily forceful or violent action by the police. These are significant omissions.

article x Assembly, 1789: No one may be disquieted for his opinions, even religious, provided that their demonstration does not disturb the public order established by the Law. Gouges, 1791: No one may be disquieted for opinions, even fundamental. Woman has the right [sic] to mount the scaffold; she must also have that of mounting the Rostrum [Tribune],



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­ rovided that her pronouncements [manifestations] do not disp turb the public order established by the Law. This article had been particularly controversial in August 1789, when religious differences bitterly divided an Assembly that included good believers as well as good skeptics. The established Church and its institutional defenders had long presumed not just the right but the duty to repress the public expression of free thought and unorthodox beliefs. Yet Enlightenment ideals of religious toleration and civil liberty threatened the venerable traditions of a Catholic kingdom in which the one true faith was defined by the creeds and the Church was universal. There could never have been much doubt about Gouges’s sympathies. On the eve of the Revolution, she had likened herself to “the great Voltaire” on a number of counts: “like him,” she had written plays; “like him,” she had also written a novel in the manner of an epic; “like him,” she had ranged over philosophy, politics, and morality; “like him,” she had been mistreated by critics; “like him,” she had responded vigorously.7 Unlike Voltaire, we might add, she did not seize every opportunity to make war on Catholic Christianity. Gouges’s political principles, moral values, and perhaps even her woman’s nature often led her to try to reconcile opposing parties. In her Article x she calms troubled waters by the simple expedient of deleting the qualification “religious” for the protected opinions and substituting “fundamental.” Then she adds something truly striking, quite unlike anything in the corresponding article from the men’s Declaration, a melodramatic argument for political free speech by women. In her most memorable turn of phrase, marred only by calling it a woman’s “right to mount the scaffold” after a death sentence, while it is properly her civic duty, she points out that a woman who can be hanged has a right to be heard. Her grim juxtaposition of the scaffold and the Rostrum (or Tribune, the term for the speaker’s podium on an elevated platform in the National Assembly) is particularly affecting for all who understand that she herself was to be executed for thought crimes directly related to attempts to address the great issues of the day in print. Having remained free for almost two years after publishing The Rights of Woman, she was to be arrested only in July 1793, a month after the adoption of the Jacobin Constitution of 1793, a week after her nemesis Marat was murdered by Charlotte

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Corday, and three days after she called for a referendum on forms of government in which voters could have chosen either to restore the monarchy or to resort to a federalist republic. She was to be executed in November, two and a half weeks after Marie-Antoinette and three days after the proscribed Girondin deputies. Her trial and execution did come in a season of rampant Jacobin misogyny, but she was to be prosecuted as a royalist.8 Long ago Léon Abensour made the hasty suggestion in a doctoral thesis that verses from Voltaire’s Tancrède had inspired Gouges’s rhetoric on the scaffold and the Rostrum or Tribune, which, he said, was “paraphrased” from that play. Unfortunately, he overstated his case, misrepresented Voltaire’s play, misquoted Gouges’s Declaration, and missed relevant circumstantial evidence.9 But his suggestion is intriguing, and a more patient inquiry and a more nuanced exposition can teach more substantial lessons about Gouges and her feminism than that “the eighteenth century ... explains the Revolution.”10 At the risk of digressing, I revisit the literary history at some length. Despite the fact that Voltaire dedicated his play to Madame de Pompadour, he did not seek, in Abensour’s words, to vindicate “the political capacity of woman,” an idea that was generally foreign to him.11 Correspondence from the winter of 1759 shows that the proud seigneur of Ferney wanted something from Louis xv for himself, a royal brevet confirming certain old rights, exemptions, and privileges for his new estates. This was a war year, of course, and he tried to produce something worthy of the proud martial traditions of the French aristocracy, but that was not enough. As the sage of Ferney, both worldly-wise and distant from Versailles even if he could still style himself an “Ordinary Gentleman of the King,” he knew full well that the royal mistress had unique access and great influence. Hence the dedication to this woman and the heroization of a woman in his Tancrède. It was what he called “a pot-de-vin,” his gesture of gratitude and deference to patrons at court.12 Voltaire sets the play in the early eleventh century, with Norman knights defending Syracuse against Moorish besiegers. The title character is a perfect cavalier, an exiled knight who returns incognito to save both his fair lady and his home city, fully living up to his motto, “Love and honour.” More of the dramatic interest focuses on the noble Aménaïde, whose love for this hero compels her not only to reject another match that her old father has arranged for political



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reasons but also to send a secret summons to Tancrède that other Syracusans intercept and misinterpret as evidence of a plot to betray their city. She is put on trial for her life before a “tribunal,” where what might have been a fuller speech in her own defence, explaining everything, is interrupted by the hero’s sudden intervention: “Stop, Citizens! I am undertaking her defence. I am her cavalier.” In that role, Tancrède throws down the gauntlet, challenging the disappointed rival, who has become her unforgiving prosecutor; of course, in the ensuing duel, he triumphs, killing the unworthy man.13 So much for the scaffold and the Rostrum or Tribune? Almost an execution and almost a speech, but neither the one nor the other? No. Then comes the act 4, scene 6, dialogue between the old father and his noble daughter that Abensour remembered and supposed that Gouges had paraphrased. Aménaïde now assumes that a happyever-after with Tancrède is out of the question and knows that she has narrowly escaped a shameful death as a convicted traitor. But she is heroic in her own right, and she vows to join her father and the other knights in defence of the city, risking or seeking a glorious death on “the fields of honour.” She too will fight. The concerned father tries to discourage her, acknowledging that in some “other climates,” if not in “these places,” where “our customs and our laws don’t allow it,” women are scarcely distinguished from men and do fight alongside them. Yet she claims that her great sorrows and his error in having assumed her guilt give her “some rights,” and the unjust treason trial has made her deeply critical of laws other than “the laws of the heart.” She will fight.14 Then Aménaïde adds the following lines, which I reproduce in French so as to facilitate others’ assessment of Gouges’s hypothetical textual reminiscence or adaptation of the poetry and translate freely so as to convey in English my sense of their meaning: Et le sexe en ces lieux, conduit aux échafauds, Ne pourra se montrer qu’au milieu des bourreaux! L’injustice à la fin produit l’indépendance. (Here, a woman, [when] led to the scaffold, Can come forward only amid her executioners! In the end, [such] injustice begets independence.) 15 Formatted for ready comparison, the relevant passage from ­Gouges’s Declaration is this:

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[L]a femme a le droit de monter sur l’échafaud; elle doit avoir également celui de monter à la Tribune. (A woman with the right to mount the scaffold ought likewise to have that of mounting the Rostrum.) 16 The formal features of Voltaire’s verse, his anapestic metre and his rhyme scheme (échafauds/des bourreaux, indépendence/insolence, not to mention citoyens/d’infames liens or victoire/ma gloire in the same speech), ought to serve memory by imposing regularity of a sort that does not characterize prose. Yet most readers of this book will have forgotten the Voltaire passage, if they have ever read it, and will have remembered the Gouges, if they have read any of her work. That raises two questions: Why is it Gouges’s prose that we remember, not Voltaire’s verse? And if even we bookish types do not remember the Voltaire, why suppose that she did, especially given her self-representation as an untutored natural who owes nothing to books? I can answer the first of these questions only for myself. I remember the Gouges passage because it elicits an affective response. I imagine a woman on the scaffold, confronting a violent death after having been denied a voice. My sense that this image is particularly outrageous must depend at least in part on continued susceptibility to long-standing conventions grouping women with children as innocents who ought to be protected from the rough-and-tumble world of men and their disputes. At the same time, it has become vitally important to me that women be allowed an equal voice and all that goes with it. Most importantly, I cannot forget that Gouges herself demanded such a voice and was to be executed for having exercised it. Now Voltaire: The very formality of his poetry seems to regulate and limit my emotional responses. His characters, including Aménaïde, seem formulaic, and his plot contrived. Above all, I know that he rode out the storms of his last years as the lord of his own little domain, personally secure even while fighting the good fight against injustice, intolerance, inhumanity, and irrationality with the pen that was his voice.17 My answer to the second of these questions is related. It must be because the passage reflects her engagement as its author that Gouges can make it engaging for me as her reader. Her dramatic and fictional works do show a particular susceptibility to sentimental stories of father-daughter ties, and Voltaire knowingly



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played to just such attitudes in this scene and the rest of his tragedy. Gouges’s gender, her sense of herself as a patriot, and her conviction that she too had been the victim of grave injustices would all have made the figure of Aménaïde particularly appealing to her. But such sentences are subjunctives. A historian ought to want evidence and argument. For all the potential emotional resonance of the character, the scene, and the plot, échafauds/échafaud in the first quoted lines is not much to go on verbally, and le sexe/la femme does not add enough to make a persuasive argument. But Gouges’s monter may be a homophonic echo of Voltaire’s montrer, and her Tribune, of his tribunal. More broadly, there is the dramatic conceit of a heroic woman’s defiant assertion of her “right” to assume patriotic roles that have conventionally been reserved for men. This does begin to add up. Act 1 of Tancrède opens with a long patriotic speech in which the heroine’s noble father vaunts “liberty” as “the most sacred right” of virtuous men, and act 2 opens with a scene in which she herself gives quietly impressive speeches on resistance to “tyranny,” on the “liberty” of “a free people,” and on her exiled lover’s proper defence of his “rights.” They are impressive only quietly, because they are delivered privately to a trusted domestic.18 All this is suggestive, not decisive. What I take to be the conclusive evidence for a later reminiscence comes from the odd pamphlet that Gouges addressed to Artois in the summer of 1789, The National Order. It seems unimaginable that this prince could ever have been tempted to relinquish his own “rights” in order to reward those claimed by the scorned Thirds. There is something quite strange about the association of the royalist mythology of chivalric orders with the revolutionary patriotism of 1789, even if Gouges’s idea of honouring lady cavaliers along with gentleman cavaliers must appeal to us. She had found a precedent of sorts in Voltaire’s play from thirty years earlier; it is all about patriotic chivalry, and his heroine is honourable for having wanted to fight heroically for her city. Tellingly, Gouges prefaces her pamphlet by saying: “I take as my text this verse of Aménaïde from Tancrède: ‘In the end, injustice begets independence.’”19 There may be no other instance of such a formal text for a political pamphlet in the entire body of Gouges’s voluminous works. This verse, accurately quoted and identified by the dramatic source, ends the brief excerpt that we have been considering.

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Furthermore, Gouges paraphrased the same line in Le Couvent (The Convent) a year later. In the climactic scene a sympathetic patriot-priest, for her a real concession to the constitutional Church, announces the Revolution and acknowledges the share of the Church in “the abuses [and] the tyrannies” that have provoked revolt: “La constante persecution produit à la fin l’indépendance [Constant persecution produces independence in the end].” The idea is certainly Voltaire’s from Tancrède, and her last six words are his reordered.20 There are also several circumstantial reasons to suppose that Voltaire and Tancrède were on Gouges’s mind in the gestational period for The Rights of Woman, particularly Article x of the Declaration. First, the greatest civic festival in the summer of 1791 was the Pantheonization of Voltaire’s remains on 11 July.21 Second, the great man was then honoured as a prophet of religious toleration, the concern of the deputies’ Article x. The colossal chariot that bore his sarcophagus was inscribed, in part: “He inspired tolerance; he declaimed the rights of man.”22 Third, the Comédie-Française, having become the Theatre of the Nation, kept many of his plays in its active repertoire and performed Tancrède three times in 1789, four more in 1790, and yet another four in 1791.23 Fourth, Gouges may have seen an idealized figure for Artois or Condé, émigré warriorprinces then arming against the Revolutionary regime, in the exiled hero Tancrède, a knight who returns from exile to save his city on the battlefield. Having tried and failed to lure Artois back in 1789, she volunteered to try again with Condé in 1791: “[T]here is still a way to save us ...; return to France ...; a brave soldier is always jealous of glory.”24 All this said, the rhetoric and the ideas of Gouges’s celebrated Article x were wholly her own and, I would argue, clearly superior to those of Voltaire’s play. She was no poet, of course, but her telling juxtaposition of the scaffold and the Rostrum, which cannot be made to rhyme, is also more forceful than the formally correct échafauds/des bourreaux of Voltaire’s couplet. Ideas mattered more than words to her, and her apparent idea here, the right of women to think seriously about politics and express themselves before policy-making bodies, has no true counterpart in Voltaire’s play. His Aménaïde is the centre of dramatic interest because fidelity to her beloved puts her at odds with her father and other knights. However, despite the patriotism that she shows by her secret attempt to recall the warrior Tancrède and by her own determination to



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fight in defence of her country, she has no thoughts about politics, never yearns to participate in the Assembly or the Senate, and never attempts to make a generalized case for women or women’s rights. She gets affecting speeches, but critics in 1760 found it strange that she does not forestall the crisis by simply explaining her conduct: “When will she speak?”25

article xi Assembly, 1789: The free communication of thoughts and opinions is one of the most precious rights of Man. Therefore every Citizen may speak, write, and print freely, subject to responsibility for the abuse of this liberty in cases determined by the Law. Gouges, 1791: The free communication of thoughts and opinions is one of the most precious rights of woman, because that liberty ensures the legitimacy of fathers [sic] with respect to their children. Therefore, without a barbarous prejudice forcing her to disguise the truth, every female Citizen may freely say, “I am the mother of a child who belongs to you,” although she must answer for abuses of this liberty in cases determined by the Law. Gouges privatizes and domesticates free speech. Another way of saying this is that she feminizes or even maternalizes it, asserting the right of the mother to name the father of her child, a right that would be pointless or even offensive for most married women, who could not have welcomed a suggestion that their sexual morals and, with them, the legitimacy of their children were always questionable. Gouges’s primary concern must be with the unmarried or otherwise-married mother, who, by implication, would be granted the legal authority to require support payments from the man she names as the father of her child. A further implication is that this child would be ensured the civil status and legal rights traditionally reserved for legitimate children. Gouges has more to say on such issues in her Postamble, the subject of my chapter 5. What she does not do in her Article xi, of course, is to address the issues of public speaking, writing, and publishing that had concerned the deputies in their corresponding article in August 1789. Given her own prolific publication on controversial issues both before and after that time and her eventual fate at the hands of a regime that

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was to curtail the freedom of the press, her silence on these civil liberties in September 1791 may seem surprising. Then again, from the start of her career as the most prolific female author of political brochures, she was ready to blame others’ “seditious” or “incendiary writings” for arousing the people, while of course praising her own work. What follows comes from her first political pamphlet: “[I]ntellectuals ... impel the people to the greatest lawlessness by seditious speeches or writings ... Woe to those whose frightful talent is to sow poison and discord by wicked works! ... Oh, sublime truth, which has always guided me ...! Posterity ... will see that a woman who put her all into her work merited not only the benevolence of the great but also the esteem of every man.”26 Quite apart from her sensitivity to gender issues, Gouges was to remain suspicious of “men of letters,” most of whose works she considered generally harmful to the public welfare. For that reason, the abstract ideal of “liberty of the press” made little sense to her, even after the National Assembly had completed its Declaration. In a pamphlet from September 1789, for instance, she addresses deputies from behind a two-layered mask, imagining a dream sequence within which she puts words into the mouth of the duc d’Orléans. Her dream prince speaks: “Wicked tongues and harmful writings have hurled France into an abyss ... Let us have only a single opinion, setting aside the liberty of the press ... Let us decree that every writing which does not exhibit the character of patriotism, public order, [and] the respect that we owe to the sovereign [sic] and to the safety of the state will be declared infamous, its author an enemy of the nation, condemned to perpetual banishment.”27 In later years Gouges shared with many others a revulsion from irresponsible journalists who encouraged bloodshed. Marat was the worst. On 20 May 1791, a month before the Flight to Varennes, he was already warning his readers that the émigré princes were forming a counter-revolutionary army, that “[t]he Austrians are ready to support them with all their forces,” and that they were also in league with fellow conspirators in Paris, including traitors within the National Assembly itself. What was to be done? He screamed for fifty thousand heads.28 On 20 July, a month afterward, he was all the more incensed by the actions of the Assembly and the municipality. The deputies had decided to respect the constitutional inviolability of the king while initiating criminal prosecutions only against the military men who had organized and served a notional c­ onspiracy



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to abduct him. Then the mayor had declared martial law, and ­Lafayette had broken up republican demonstrations on the Champ de Mars. Marat ranted: “[T]he Friend of the People ... regards your decrees against the Declaration of Rights as so much toilet paper. If only he could rally ... two thousand determined men! To save the country, he would go at their head to tear out the heart of the infernal Motier [Lafayette] in the midst of his numerous battalions of slaves [the National Guard]. He would burn the monarch and his henchmen in his palace [the Tuileries]. He would impale you [the deputies] upon your seats and bury you under the flaming debris of your lair [the adjacent Manège]. Good God, if only he could spark in the hearts of his fellow citizens the fires that devour his own!”29 This was so far beyond the pale that Marat had to suspend publication and go underground. Gouges reacted more quickly than the deputies, who had been threatened more directly. She published a signed piece, Observations on Foreigners, that was intended to silence Marat, although she cast her argument in terms of policy, not personality, suggesting new legislation to restrict foreigners from talking or writing on French affairs.30 Marat had been born in Neufchâtel and so was not a native Frenchman. Of course, such a law would have been illiberal, but many others also took offence at the incendiary call for mass murder, the killing of the royal family and all about them in the Tuileries, the deputies and all about them in the Manège, and Lafayette and all serving under him. Having reaffirmed the Declaration, with its qualified guarantee of freedom of the press on 8 August, the Assembly then debated and adopted a decree for the “Repression of Offences Committed by Means of the Press” just two weeks later.31

article xii Assembly, 1789: The guarantee of the rights of Man and of the Citizen necessitates a public force. This force is therefore established for the advantage of all and not for the particular service [l’utilité particulière] of those [masc.] to whom it is entrusted. Gouges, 1791: The guarantee of the rights of woman and of the citizen must serve the general welfare [une utilité majeure]. This guarantee must be established for the advantage of all, and not

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for the particular interest [l’utilité particulière] of those [fem.] to whom it is entrusted. Gouges’s adaptation of Article xii echoes the words of the men but seems confused. In August 1789 the point had been clear: A month earlier, when tens of thousands of troops of the line had been marched from frontier garrisons and bivouacked in and around Paris and Versailles, deputies had felt threatened by military preparations for an imminent political repression. The indiscipline of these troops, the ineptitude of their commanders, and the reluctance of the king himself to use this force together made possible the triumph of the Revolution in the Memorable Week, 11–17 July.32 Afterward, the deputies had to assert the principle that the army itself was national, not royal; its proper purpose was to defend the nation, not to subject it. Two years later much had changed, but the liberal principle of Article xii as first adopted remained crucial. Gouges makes no reference to a “public force.” It is unclear what she does mean by the half-borrowed and probably misplaced terms that I have translated freely as “general welfare” or by her repetition of the word “guarantee.” Given the military concerns of the men’s corresponding article, the feminine plural pronoun in her second sentence could suggest that she has in mind the right of women to commands in the army and navy. However, given the obscurity of her language here and the lack of better support from her other writings than can be found in problematical passages in The Philosophical Prince, this most radical interpretation should probably be rejected as anachronistic.33

article xiii Assembly, 1789: For the maintenance of the public force and for the expenses of administration, a common tax [contribution] is indispensable. It must be equally assessed on all Citizens, in proportion to their means. Gouges, 1791: For the maintenance of the public force and for the expenses of government, the taxes [contributions] on woman and on man are equal. She shares responsibility for all corvées [and] for all [other] burdensome obligations; therefore she must



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have the same share in the distribution of positions, employments, offices, honours, and jobs. Here again is a major departure from the men’s Declaration: ­G ouges affirms a strictly equal tax liability for women, premised on an equal share in public benefits in the form of “positions” for women. She repeats the terms places, emplois, and dignetés from Article vi, where the adjective publiques properly restricts all three. She does not repeat that qualification here, but it should probably be understood. That is, she limits her demand to the public sector, without intending to claim women’s rights to equal employment in the private sector. Her Article xiii adds offices, the term for venal judicial and financial magistracies in the Old Regime, and industrie, which I translate loosely as “jobs.” Although there are obvious dangers of anachronism in reading back the concept of parity from the feminist thought of the 1990s into Gouges’s manifesto from the 1790s, she does indeed anticipate something of the sort, not just nominally equal opportunities to compete for public positions but an equal share of those positions.34 A crucial distinction is that here she is probably thinking solely of appointments, not elections.

article xiv Assembly, 1789: All Citizens have the right to verify, by themselves or by their Representatives, the need for public taxation [contribution], to consent freely to it, to know its use, and to determine its amount, assessment, collection, and duration. Gouges, 1791: Female Citizens and male Citizens have the right to verify, by themselves or by their representatives, the need for public taxation [contribution]. Female Citizens can comply with the [obligation to pay taxes] only if admitted to an equal share of [private] wealth and public administration and [given the authority] to determine the amount, assessment, collection, and duration of the tax [impôt]. Gouges’s second sentence, as punctuated and expanded here, my bracketed “private” qualifying her “wealth” (fortune), departs

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radically from her model and approaches modern thinking on women’s rights. Her principal point must be that gender equality in tax liability would be possible only if there were also gender equity in the control of financial resources. Her paired demand for an equal share of “public administration” reiterates the evident point of the second translated sentence from her Article xiii, so clarifying her meaning and reinforcing that remarkable adumbration of modern parity theory. Both articles illustrate the radical potential of revolutionary principles, and both deserve much more attention than they have been given by Gouges herself as well as by students of her Declaration.

article xv Assembly, 1789: Society has the right to demand an accounting of his administration from every public Agent. Gouges, 1791: The mass of women, joined for [purposes of] taxation [contribution] to that of men, has the right to demand an accounting of his administration from every public agent. The echoed principle of the accountability of public officials is clear enough, but the institutional implications of Gouges’s lower-case “mass of women” and “that of men” are obscure, as is the joining of what may seem to be two gender-exclusive collectivities “for taxation” (pour la contribution). This uncertainty is particularly unfortunate, in that nothing else in the numbered articles gives substance to what may be a separate women’s lower-case “national assembly” or gender-exclusive lower-case “acts of power” in the Preamble.

article xvi Assembly, 1789: No Society has a constitution unless Rights are guaranteed and the separation of Powers is definite. Gouges, 1791: No society has a constitution unless rights are guaranteed and the separation of powers is definite. The constitution is null, if a majority of the individuals who make up the Nation has not cooperated in drafting it.



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Gouges repeats the men’s Article xvi verbatim, giving their prose at least its due; I have recast the sentence to emphasize the rigour of its negation. By insisting on a guarantee of rights, the deputies had meant to make a case for their own Declaration, although their language recalls that of Article xii on the armed forces. By “the separation of powers,” they had meant to reinforce Articles iii and vi and their own law-making powers as the National Assembly. In what I punctuate as a second sentence, Gouges adds something of her own. Taken literally, her demand for direct democracy in constitution-making would nullify the Constitution of 1791 at the very moment of its completion by the Assembly and acceptance by the king. Gender apart, “a majority of the individuals who make up the nation” had not so much as mandated that their representatives produce a constitution, much less cooperated in the drafting or been allowed an up-or-down vote in a plebiscite. But Gouges’s celebratory Postscript, written upon first learning of the king’s acceptance, is enough to show that she did not mean to scuttle the newly reconstructed ship of state even before it had slid down the ways, whatever she had said in Article xvi. She must have written that article before completion and acceptance made the constitution a fait accompli and then published it without revision. The original intention would have been to make a case for women’s active engagement in the constituent process or at least the deputies’ approval of something like her Declaration. Wounded veterans of composition by committee in less troubled circumstances will think it unlikely that she ever thought through the implications of this article, as written and published. This is democracy reduced to absurdity. Some early readers may well have wondered whether this was the intended point.

article xvii Assembly, 1789: Properties [sic] being an inviolable and sacred right, no one may be deprived of them unless a public necessity, legally verified, obviously requires it, and [then only] upon condition of a just and prior indemnity. Gouges, 1791: Properties belong to [persons of] both sexes, [whether] united or separated. Each [person] has an inviolable and sacred right to them, [and] no one may be deprived of them,

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the true patrimony of nature, unless a public necessity, legally verified, obviously requires it, and [then only] on condition of a just and prior indemnity. The crux is Gouges’s first sentence, as punctuated and freely translated so as to serve comprehension. She again privatizes a crucial article, as in Article xi. Here she wants to ensure that women, even married women – especially them – enjoy property rights that are equal to those of men. The issue is obviously important, and she could have made her case more emphatically in this article of her Declaration or in the discursive Postamble on marriage contracts or partnership agreements, to which we turn in chapter 5. A conclusion on Gouges and her Declaration cannot be simple. She later reports that the comte de Mirabeau, who did not live to see her Rights of Woman, had said of her: “She’s an astonishing woman.”35 Just so. Gouges astonished this most powerful champion of the Revolution of 1789 because, coming from modest provincial origins, lacking a formal education beyond the rudiments, and living in a society in which even women with greater advantages and greater intellectual sophistication were expected to defer to men on anything to do with politics and the law, she had sallied forth in print time and again, undaunted by past failures, with strikingly original proposals on the great issues of the day. In a self-serving Preface to her memorial tribute, Mirabeau in the Champs-Elysées (April 1791), she reproduced a gracious acknowledgment that he had sent her in September 1789, complimenting her in general terms as a quick-witted and strong-minded woman but saying nothing more about what ideas he had encountered in the pamphlets that she had distributed to deputies.36 We are left to speculate on the willingness of such men to consider them seriously either in 1789 or in 1791. Then again, few men or women, apart from specialists, still read Mirabeau; we are reading Gouges. Gouges should astonish moderns because she so clearly understood that women’s rights are every bit as important as men’s and must be given formal constitutional protection at the same time and with the same legal force and because she so boldly said so in print, addressing better-born, better-educated, and better-positioned men who were unable to accept this implication of their own fundamental ideals. That is far more important than the conceptual deficiencies or verbal infelicities of this or that article in her Declaration. She



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had confessed, time and again, to being “ignorant,” and so she was, by the standards of most politically engaged men. She had admitted, time and again, that her works were full of “faults,” and so they are, this one too.37 Nevertheless, the perspective allowed by the passage of time and the development of democracy should permit us to appreciate the significance of her attempt, quite apart from any assessment of her achievement by historically inappropriate standards.

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part three The Postamble Gouges was almost as fond of postfaces as of prefaces. This trait does weaken the formal coherence of her work, but we are very much the gainers if we read to the end, because she often expresses herself most freely in such additions. For instance, to the Memoir at the head of the first volume of her Works, she added not only the Dialogue, in which she reviews and defends her compositions against past and future criticism, but also a separate Postface, in which she again acknowledges formal failings while affirming substantive worth. Similarly, she supplemented the two works that command greatest modern interest, The Rights of Woman and Zamore and Mirza, both in its first edition and in its revision as The Slavery of the Blacks. To excise her postfaces editorially or to neglect them critically is to limit historical comprehension. In The Rights of Woman the Declaration proper begins only on her page 6 and ends on page 12 (my lines 93–215); it is followed by a compounded Postamble, which comes to an apparent end on page 20 (line 385) before being extended onto page 22 (line 420). The tail is already longer than the dog, and after it has fully grown, Gouges adds another, the narrative of her dispute with the cabby, and yet another, the Postscript on late-breaking news. The Postamble does not offer explanatory material on her Declaration as such, but it does extend its principles to women in domestic relationships and to men of colour in the colonies. That is not all: she touches more briefly on education, inheritance, illegitimacy, adoption, breach of promise, prostitution, clerical celibacy, and the constitutional powers of the king. At the cost of simplification, I focus on her two principal concerns, married women in chapter 5 and men of colour in chapter 6.

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5 The Social Contract between the Man and the Woman

Gouges refused to accept a neat distribution of politics and society into what later theorists would conceptualize as a public sphere and a private sphere: for her, the publicly protected rights of women reach into the household and the bedroom. Her Declaration itself reflects this conviction in at least two articles. Article xi attempts to convert the men’s constitutional protection of free speech into a woman’s guarantee that no single mother would have to bear alone the costs of supporting of her child. Article xvii transforms the men’s protection of proprietors from arbitrary or uncompensated takings by the state into a woman’s protection of her property rights even within marriage. Most of Gouges’s Postamble is devoted to relations between the sexes and an attempt to conceptualize democratized spousal or partnership relationships. Its feminism is arguably even more radical than that of her Declaration itself, starting with its initial address to “woman” and more emphatic challenge to “women” (lines 217, 224). They must take stock of their situation and demand recognition of their rights. Patriotic men had loudly declared their own without thinking to acknowledge those of women, apparently presuming fundamental sex differences and, with a more-than-feminine vanity, their own “natural” superiority. But if women as well as men are born and remain free and equal in rights, then a husband cannot legitimately claim authority over a wife by appealing to his traditional “marital power.”1 In practice, Gouges comes close to sounding a clarion call for women together, apart from men, to storm the barricades of institutionalized gender bias, confident in the righteousness of their cause and their potential power as citizens: “You have only to will it” (lines 224–45). For the better, as most modern

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liberals see the world, but also for the worse, as most of her contemporaries across the political spectrum saw their different world, she brings the Revolution home.

the terms of the social contract as a revolutionary document The “Form of the Social Contract between the Man and the Woman,” which Gouges also calls a “conjugal convention” and “the conjugal act that I propose for adoption,” departs more radically from traditional marriage law and customary morality than anything ever endorsed or even proposed by the male deputies who sat in successive revolutionary legislatures (lines 323–44).2 This is so obvious that we may miss the essential point that the principles of the two Declarations, theirs and hers, are fundamental to her feminism in this Social Contract, too. She knew that its terms would seem “bizarre” to more religious, conventionally moralistic, and legally sophisticated contemporaries, and she qualified its exposition in such a way as almost to invite legislators to refine it (lines 316–20 and 345–6). Nevertheless, it is impossible to imagine that she could ever have compromised on women’s essential rights to liberty and equality, and this feminist rights-consciousness, in turn, so revolutionized her conception of marriage and the family that those venerable terms no longer seem appropriate for the sort of male-female partnership that she envisioned. A woman would enter it and could leave it freely. Within it she would remain an equal, with full authority over her person and her property. This concept was unprecedented in its defiance of both the orthodox Catholic understanding of marriage as a sacrament and the related written law in Montauban, where she had been married in her youth, or the customary law in the Paris area, where she spent her adult life.3 For purposes of analysis, I distinguish six numbered provisions in her Social Contract between the Man and the Woman: [1] We, name and name, unite with one another of our own free will, [2] for the length of our lives and for the duration of our mutual inclinations, on the following conditions: [3] We understand that we willingly put our fortunes into communal ownership, reserving for ourselves, however, the right to separate them



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in favour of our children and those persons for whom we may have a particular inclination, [4] mutually recognizing that our assets belong directly to our children, from whatever bed they come, and that all without exception have the right to bear the name of the fathers and mothers [sic] who have acknowledged them. We commit ourselves to respect the law that punishes the denial of one’s own blood. [5] In case [our union ends in] a separation, we also obligate ourselves to divide our wealth and to set aside for our children the portion that is specified by the law. [6] In the case of a lasting union, the one who dies first will divest himself of half his property in favour of his children; if he dies childless, the survivor will inherit by right, unless the decedent has disposed of half the common property in favour of whomever he thinks proper. (lines 325–44) The very heading of Gouges’s “Social Contract” recalls Rousseau as the philosophical founding father of the French Revolution, of course, and its first numbered provision is already so radically liberal and egalitarian that here l’Homme cannot be envisioned as a husband, la Femme as a wife, or their union as a sacramental marriage in traditional senses. “The man” and “the woman” reach their own agreement, and there is no priest to pronounce the ­time-honoured words, “Ego vos coniugo in matrimonium, in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti” (I join you in matrimony, in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit). It is as important that no parents grant their formal permission and metaphorical blessing. Finally, no magistrate stands in for priest and parents. In the first respect, Gouges was one with revolutionary deputies in the National Assembly who had made it a matter of constitutional principle that “[t]he law considers marriage as only a civil contract” without yet expanding upon that principle in more detailed legislation.4 In the last, she went far beyond the limits of what they would ever legislate. The radical implications of Gouges’s secularism can be suggested by simply reviewing definitions of key terms in the dictionaries of the Académie Française, which were exactly the same in 1798 as they had been in 1776, when the devout Le Franc de Pompignan, whom she wanted to claim as her father, had occupied one of the forty chairs. For the male Immortals after as well as before the Revolution, the word “man” denotes, first of all, a “reasoning animal” of either sex, but illustrative usages show the continued primacy

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of Christian beliefs and masculine perspectives: “All men sinned in Adam. All men are redeemed by Jesus Christ.” We are more interested in “woman,” for which word the first meaning is this, with all illustrative usages: “Femme, s.f. The female of man. (God drew woman from the side of Adam. Women are naturally timid. There are more women than men in a certain city. A certain man is given to wine and to women. A married woman.)” The second meaning of femme is the wife or married woman, and one of the illustrative usages reminds us, “The wife [is subject] to the power of [her] husband.” This, too, goes back to Genesis, as we shall shortly see. The noun mariage (marriage), according to the Academy, denotes the “union of a man and a woman by the conjugal tie. (Marriage is a civil contract and one of the seven sacraments of the Church.)” Similarly, the verb marier (marry) means “To join a man and a woman by the conjugal bond, according to the rites of the Church.” Thus it is properly the priest who marries the couple and, by extension, the fathers, by their “paternal authority.” It is also worth noting the several meanings of the noun famille (family): first, “all persons of the same blood”; second, those of the same blood on the father’s side; third, “all persons who live together in the same household under the same head.” Patriarchy ruled in the home as well as in the state. Gouges was sharply aware that her feminist alternative to traditional marriage flew in the face of orthodox beliefs, and she confronted them head-on. Her Postamble opens with a depersonalized wake-up call: “Reason” rings the tocsin and alerts “woman” to claim her rights. “Nature” rules, apparently having overcome “prejudice, fanaticism, superstition, and lies.” A “torch of truth” has burned through “all the clouds of folly and usurpation.” These are code words for a child of the late Enlightenment. Taken by themselves, they imply that a gender-neutral battle has been fought and won against the irrationality of a religion premised on the traditional authority of Catholic Christianity (lines 217–21). However, an equally abstracted man then rears his ugly head: he has prevailed in his revolution without extending liberty, sharing any other advantage, or even according a decent respect to “his companion.” These are fighting words: a new battle is joined. As if provoked by her own term, Gouges repeats her wake-up call with greater urgency, alerting other flesh-and-blood “women,” all of them, as I have translated her femmes. In context, the primary meaning of sa compagne (his companion) is certainly wife, old style, not ­partner,



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new style. Perhaps, then, the preferred translation of her doubly emphatic address, “O femmes! femmes,” should be “Oh, wives! wives,” without worrying unduly about the exclusion of unmarried women and widows (lines 222–30). That is the implication of what follows immediately, namely, reassurance to the sisterhood that they can and should question conventionally Christian attitudes to marriage as a sacrament and women as beings created to be different from and subordinate to men: “What would you have to fear in so fair a cause? The bon mot of the Legislator of the wedding of Cana? Are you afraid that our French Legislators, the reformers of that morality, having tried everything possible, fair or foul, in ways that are no longer acceptable, may repeat: ‘Women, what is there in common between you and us?’ [Gouges: ‘Femmes, qu’y a-t-il de commun entre vous et nous?’] You could answer: ‘Everything’” (lines 230–6). The “Legislator of the wedding of Cana” is Jesus. He performed his first miracle when he turned water into wine for a marriage feast at Cana and thereby “manifested forth his glory, and his disciples believed on him” (John 2:1–11). The entire passage remains of particular importance for Catholics, because it can be used to support belief that marriage is a sacrament, with implications for the indissolubility of resultant unions and sexual exclusivity within them. As for the “bon mot,” that is her irreverent term for the first saying attributed to Jesus at Cana. Of course, a believer would have to find such language shockingly bold when applied to words of the Son of God, the Lamb of God, the Messiah, or the Christ, all terms from John 1. Having been so set apart from and above other men, Jesus addresses his mother, Mary, asking, in the version of Lemaître de Sacy, “Femme, qu’y a-t-il de commun entre vous et moi?” or, as the King James translators would have it, “Woman, what have I to do with thee?” (John 2:4). Gouges echoes and adapts the words of Jesus, somewhat as Jesus echoes and adapts the words of his ancestor King David ­(Catholic, 2 Kings [= Protestant, 2 Samuel] 16:10). However, she does not speak in her own voice (lines 235–6, as above). Rather, if I read her adaptation correctly, she neatly turns the tables on devout and pseudo-devout traditionalists both within and outside the National Assembly, “the tartuffes, the prudes, and the priests,” whom she expects to react in horror at the terms of her radical Social Contract (line 346–8; compare 359–62 with Gouges’s note). She suggests imaginatively that it is the deputies who address Jesus’s question to

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Frenchwomen, as if these impious men consider themselves to be so many gods, elevated far above lesser beings, particularly women. Any sacrilegious offence would be theirs, not hers. She answers the echoed question with a single, unequivocal word: “Everything.” This is to assert human universality and deny differences between the sexes that could legitimate the exclusion of women from equal rights in not only public but also private life. The problem goes all the way back to the biblical account of Adam and Eve. Man, of course, comes first, and woman is made both for him and from him (Genesis 2:18, 21–2). After the Serpent tempts Eve with the forbidden fruit and Eve, in turn, tempts Adam, the Lord God descends to announce graduated punishments for each of the three, with their different natures and different degrees of culpability: “Unto the woman he said, ‘I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee’” (Genesis 3:16). Eve and all women after her, apparently, are to be obedient wives and dutiful mothers. Implicitly, a woman’s very essence, unlike a man’s, is to be inseparable from her sexuality, her children, and her subordination to her spouse. Furthermore, her sexuality is already associated with God’s punishment for her sin. Explicitly, of course, in the Ten Commandments and related prohibitions the Old Law would condemn the adultery of either partner, and in the Sermon on the Mount the New Law of Jesus would interiorize the Old and pointedly condemn men’s sexual desire apart from marriage (Exodus 20:14; Matthew 5:27–30). As importantly, Jesus also provided the scriptural basis for one of the defining features of Christian marriage in canon law, its indissolubility. The Law of Moses had given apparently wide latitude to the husband to repudiate his wife upon his own finding of “some uncleanness” in her (Lemaître de Sacy: “quelque défaut honteux”; Deuteronomy 24:1). In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus makes the wife’s adultery the sole permissible ground for such a repudiation, without considering procedural protections for her or practical consequences for either party and without raising the possibility that a similar offence on the husband’s part could give her a complementary right ­(Matthew 5:31–2). When later challenged by the Pharisees and asked whether it is legal for a married man “to put away his wife for every cause” (Lemaître de Sacy: “de quitter sa femme pour quelque cause que ce soit”), he responds with what was to become the principal proof-text



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for marital indissolubility. His apparent intent is to deny a husband the arbitrary authority to discard his wife at will, but in practice the rejection of repudiation by the husband, interpreted in canon law as a prohibition of all divorce, means that a wife could not regain her independence even from a tyrannical husband: “[T]hey are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder” (Matthew 19:3, 6). Jesus himself had little else to say about family structure and marital relations, but Paul and Peter said more than enough. In Romans, Paul explicitly reiterates the principle of marital indissolubility as specifically binding the wife during the lifetime of her husband ­(7:2–3). In 1 Corinthians he teaches that sexual relations are permissible only within marriage and that they are obligatory at the demand of either the husband or the wife. This may sound more gender-neutral than it is, given that he also says that, as the head of the man is Christ, so “the head of the woman is the man” (6:15–16; 7:1–11; 11:3). In Ephesians, Paul preaches that wives must submit to their husbands and likens this submission to that of the Church to the Lord (5:20–33). In Titus, God’s word for Christian wives is to be “discreet, chaste, keepers at home, good, and obedient to their own husbands” (2:5). Finally, in 1 Peter the apostle underscores principles of wifely “subjection” and chastity even in conversation (3:1–2). All this teaching informed the canon law and Christian morality that nominally governed Old Regime marriages, however deviant was the actual behaviour of husbands and wives, especially among the aristocratic elite. We are now in a position to appreciate the radical secularism of the second, third, and fourth provisions of Gouges’s Social Contract. Her initial nod to traditions of lifelong marital commitment is no more than that; she immediately and explicitly undercuts it by reference to “the duration of our mutual inclinations” (lines 325–7). She envisions a partnership, not a marriage, and there are to be no vows. If the “inclination” of either partner is to be sufficient warrant for a rupture, there is obviously no indissolubility. But, curiously enough, Gouges does not use the language of divorce but only that of separation (lines 337–9), for which there was good precedent in Old Regime law and practice.5 This restraint is surprising, given the fact that already in early 1790 she had composed, if not published, a play entitled La Nécessité de divorce (The Necessity of Divorce) in which she imagined the transformative effect of a divorce law

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on the behaviour of a straying husband and a confirmed bachelor alike. Paradoxically, she predicted, the very possibility of a future liberation by divorce would make men the more willing to form and respect marital unions.6 On 17 February 1792, as her first known publication after The Rights of Woman, Gouges was to post without signing a related appeal in the name of liberty, equality, and justice, entitling it Le Bon Sens françois (French Good Sense): “[W]e must regulate, in accordance with the Constitution and its plan, the first and most important contract, which links the human race ... Don’t heed the objections of the Church or those of the lawyers. The People[, ... guided by the] torch of the Constitution and of philosophy, demands a decree, a single decree that reduces to rubble the remains of our old customs, ... a decree that establishes equality between husbands and wives, ... assures the property [rights] of each, and permits them to break up under the supervision of family tribunals charged to judge by the light of reason and reason alone.”7 Even under the cover of anonymity, Gouges still avoids waving the red flag of divorce, as such, but she was attuned to the revolutionary process. Four days earlier the Legislative Assembly had received a petition on behalf of married women and their children, seeking relief from “paternal and conjugal despotism.”8 In the next six months the deputies returned time and again to related aspects of liberty and equality, before finally passing, as one of their last acts, a comprehensive divorce decree that still ranks as one of the most liberal in the historical record. By the law of 20 September 1792, they granted married persons of either sex the right to reclaim their liberty, with full rights of remarriage, even on grounds as broadly permissive as an alleged “incompatibility of disposition or character.”9 The third and fourth provisions of Gouges’s Social Contract show that even a year earlier she had wanted still more. Despite a nominal community of marital property, the woman is to retain the right to transfer her assets to her children, apparently including those not fathered by her partner, and to other favoured persons, perhaps including lovers, even within the lifetime of her contractual partner. By the terms of her quasi-marital partnership agreement, she apparently also claims on behalf of all her children full rights to the names and a share of the assets of their fathers, whoever they may be, her partner or other men, otherwise married or not (lines 327–37). The radical effect of this claim is to substitute every father’s duty to ­fulfill



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the obligations of paternity for any wife’s duty to remain sexually faithful to her husband. By clear implication, even within such a “social contract,” the woman would retain an unrestricted right to sexual liberty. Of course, the male deputies never went so far as to legislate free love for themselves, let alone for married women. Yet they did attempt to come to terms with the problem of illegitimacy. Gouges, too, was concerned with the issue, which she viewed consistently from the perspective of unwed or otherwise-wed mothers, not their illegitimate children (lines 285–97, 310–16, 363–8). Contrarily, deputies tended to ignore the plight of these mothers and to focus instead on the children and their natural rights: if “men are born and remain free and equal in rights,” the marital status of the parents should not affect the rights of a child. Many years ago, without showing much interest in either the mothers or their children, Crane Brinton devoted a slim monograph to the history of related legislation from the Revolution of 1789 to the Napoleonic Code in 1804. The subject appealed to him because it allowed him to argue that this most fundamental democratic ideal was doomed to fail, even in the minds of the most committed patriots. The insuperable obstacle was that its democratic theory, however rational, conflicts with the enduring force of familial sentiments, however prejudicial.10 From my present perspective, there is considerable irony in the fact that the National Convention adopted a radical a­nti-discriminatory decree in favour of illegitimate children on 2 November 1793, the very day when the Revolutionary Tribunal convicted and condemned Olympe de Gouges.11 The fifth and sixth provisions of her Social Contract concern the property rights of partners at the termination of their relationship, whether that comes in the form of a separation during the lifetimes of both or at the death of one. Gouges’s purpose in these two provisions seems to be the same, although her relevant sentences do require explication. If I interpret them correctly, her predominant concern is to ensure that the woman’s financial interests are protected. By the fifth, at a separation the woman is to retain the right to control a fair share of what had been communal property, rather than losing it irrevocably to her former partner, and the man is to be obligated to support his children, even if a custody agreement or decision leaves them with their mother. By the sixth, in which Gouges seems to presume that it is the man who will predecease

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the woman, she intends to guarantee that at least half his property will go to the woman. If he leaves any children, they are collectively to receive only one-half, and the rest is to go to her as the survivor; “if he dies childless, [she as] the survivor will inherit [the whole] by right unless the decedent has disposed of half the common property in favour of whomever he thinks proper” (lines 335–44). An appropriate measure of the radicalism of these terms is to compare Gouges’s proposed Social Contract from 1791 with the actual marriage contract that she had signed as a sixteen-year-old in Montauban on 7 February 1765. The notarial record still exists in departmental archives, and even if she had little to do with negotiating its terms and had long forgotten the details, the contrast with her later proposal is instructive. First, the notary invoked “the name of God”; having identified the persons to be married, he also recorded their promise “to join one another in the sacred bond of marriage ... in a Christian manner in front of the church, the banns having been proclaimed.” The intitulé, or “enunciation of the parties to the contract, [giving] their names and qualifications and those of their fathers and mothers and the persons present as witnesses,”12 not only named Louis-Yves Aubry as the fiancé but also identified his local parish in Montauban and that of his baptism in Paris, specified his “office” in the household of his distinguished employer, gave this employer’s name and title, named his parents and qualified them as married and as bourgeois of Paris (a distinction), and both named and qualified a representative who would seek their formal consent to the marriage. In the event, the marriage was to be celebrated eight months later even without it, so he must somehow have satisfied the priest that he had passed his majority. A one-sentence paragraph devoted to Gouges, an unemployed local girl whose widowed mother accompanied her and acted for her, could be simpler but was comparably complete. Then, to business: On Gouges’s behalf, her mother, who had herself remarried a few years earlier and had then married off one daughter at an even younger age, promised as a dowry only 800 livres in furnishings at the time of the wedding and the prospect of another 600 livres in money at her own death. The fiancée renounced all other claims and stipulated that these sums were “the whole of her worth.” It was not much, but it was more than Aubry could offer: On his own behalf, he promised 399 livres, 19 sous, that is, a trifle less than half the nominal value of what furnishings



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­ ouges’s mother was willing to provide. He also formally affirmed G that this was his total worth. In the event, a subsequent notarial record shows that shortly before the wedding he had to borrow the full amount and more from his bride’s family; there is no evidence that his own parents, who formally “consented” to the marriage only after the fact, ever provided any financial support. The only other provision was that both parties agreed that in the event of a death, the survivor would make no claim on the property of the recently deceased spouse.13 The Social Contract that Gouges proposed twenty-six years later was altogether different and may reflect her own youthful experience as a wife, as well as the political principles of the Revolution and the cultural values of the Enlightenment. Hers would be a truly democratic agreement between equals, each partner apparently acting independently and each leaving the other free, should “inclinations” change. Neither parents nor priests would be involved. There would be no dowry given over to a husband to administer, nor any presumption of his “marital power” over the person and the property of his wife. The woman would be assured of paternal support for her children, all of them, and there would be no renunciation of her own claims on her partner’s estate, should he predecease her. Gouges proposed that a Social Contract in the spirit of her Postamble be adopted by the National Assembly as the law of the land, but she also understood that her ideas of a secularized, liberalized, and democratized marriage, quasi-marriage, or partnership agreement would seem “paradoxical” and “bizarre” to clerics, the devout, and the conventionally moralistic (lines 297–8, 314–22, 345–8). She had evidently given a great deal of thought to how best to respond to or even forestall such criticisms, and she extends herself far more in this effort than she does in the two peremptory paragraphs with which she prefaces the Declaration proper (lines 217–322; compare 73–92). If the scope is different, the spirit is much the same, at least initially. She begins the Postamble and first prefaces her Social Contract by defying the Church and the devout, sounding “the tocsin of reason” and throwing their Bible back at them, more or less as she begins The Rights of Woman and prefaces her Declaration by defying an abstracted “man” and the male deputies, appealing to “nature in all its grandeur,” and throwing their foundation document back at them (lines 216–45; compare 72–92). But with the expanded scope of the Postamble comes a more determined effort to

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convince women that gender relations under the Old Regime have been pervasively immoral and that marriage itself in its traditional form is much of the problem (lines 245–322). This attempt involves something unusual in Gouges’s free-form compositions, a self-conscious digression addressed to women or perhaps more properly married women, from “Now, let us turn to the appalling spectacle of what you have been ...” to “I return to my discussion of morals” (lines 245–310). But this passage is all moralistic and so not truly digressive, and it serves to preface the Social Contract. Start to finish, I believe, the governing idea is that it is the “constraint” and the “force” inseparable from indissoluble, patriarchal marriage that has led to all manner of immoral behaviour: “Marriage is the tomb of trust and love” (lines 250–1, 310– 11). Rightly judged, Gouges’s radically liberal and egalitarian Social Contract promises to serve morals, even to save morality. Without using the revolutionary language of “regeneration,” she does seem to subscribe to the concept, emphasizing a restructuring of private lives as essential to public happiness and reifying the abstract man into flesh-and-blood men and women. In a hyperbolic paragraph, Gouges suggests a long nightmare of criminality, betrayal of state secrets, and especially a “nocturnal administration” that governed all appointments to positions of wealth, status, and power, even in the Church, under the Old Regime. Greedy and ambitious royal mistresses, best exemplified by Madame de Pompadour, provide the jewel in the crown for this argument (lines 250–73 with Gouges’s note).14 Then in a new paragraph, holding her own head high, she effectively defends less spectacular mistresses below the stratosphere of the court as having been quite sensible, if not quite virtuous, in trading beauty and charm for money and respect (lines 264–77). After all, this had been her own story as the femme entretenue (kept woman) of the wealthy military contractor Biétrix.15 But she had aged, his fortunes had turned, and the Revolution had come. Shifting from past to present tenses and from the vices or supposed vices of such women to those of the men who captivate and victimize them, Gouges condemns the man who “buys [a young woman] like a slave on the coasts of Africa,” only to discard her “when the slave has lost all her charms” (lines 278–88). Has she had any real choice? And is she the one whose conduct deserves reproach? This passage, too, is probably to some degree self-referential. In a similar



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vein, she condemns the man who seduces a young woman, maintains her only for a time (bad if short and worse if long), perhaps fathers children, and then abandons her and them, breaking every promise. Such a man can “trust ... in the laws” and, if married, rationalize his infidelity to his mistress. Has she had any real choice? If she lacks wealthy parents and exceptional artistic talent, could she have supported herself in any other way (lines 287–306)? An obvious response to such rhetorical questions might be that the young woman should marry, but Gouges will not hear of this. Married women, like married men, find other sexual partners, and unlike unwed mothers, they can impose any adulterine children on their husbands. All this brings the Postamble back to the plight of the unwed mother. And that, in turn, prompts a call for new laws and directly prepares for the Social Contract (lines 310–16). The unstated assumption is that if the marital commitment were less absolute, men might be the more willing to form families and to behave responsibly. Gouges’s stated goal, which she says others might consider “paradoxical,” is to conceive a quasi-marital institution within which members of her sex can be both “honourable and just.” The apparent paradox is at least double: under the Old Regime, she says, women were “despicable but respected,” while in the Revolution they have become contrarily “respectable but despised” (lines 262–3, 316–19). This is clever, if a bit too neat, and it concerns only the past and the present. Gouges’s dominant eye is on the future. Her great problem rhetorically is to find ways of preparing readers to accept her radically liberal and egalitarian alternative to traditional marriage, knowing that many, perhaps most, might otherwise dismiss it out of hand as thoroughly immoral. There is paradox here too: her solution to that problem is to emphasize the vice and misery that indissoluble, patriarchal marriage itself has indirectly caused.

the cultural significance of the social contract Gouges’s primary concern in The Rights of Woman as a whole is to make a case for citizens whose rightful equality had not been recognized by the National Assembly, namely, women of every civil status, as in the Declaration; married women, as in the Social Contract; and “the men of colour” – her gendered reference – and

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perhaps even the slaves – a term that she avoids – in the colonies, as in the long paragraph at the end of the tail. Politically, she may be at her boldest in presuming to rewrite or even “merely” to supplement the men’s Declaration of Rights, extending rights across the great divide between the sexes. Socially, especially in a retrospect that takes into account an explosion of the enslaved blacks on SaintDomingue which had yet to reverberate in France, she may be at her boldest in her championship of the restive free men of colour in the colonies. But culturally, she is at her very boldest and most aggressive in challenging the doctrinal foundations of the institution of Catholic marriage. If men and women alike are rights-bearing equals in their private lives as well as full citizens in their public lives, then an ideology of family structure based on sex difference and male domination, as the Church had taught, is simply untenable. Gouges was right to think of herself and her compatriots as beneficiaries of an Enlightenment that had challenged Catholic Christianity on other grounds, but she was also so accustomed to playing a role of her own scripting, namely, that of a child of nature speaking the simple truth, not a philosopher or woman of letters accustomed to look back to the works of Voltaire and Rousseau, that she did not attempt to challenge or otherwise engage their ideas. I am modestly aware of how much those two philosophes differed from each other and how extensive, varied, and complex was their heritage, but some things are simple: the two giants of the high Enlightenment both emphasized sex differences in such a way as to justify the subordination of women in marriage. Consider Voltaire’s articles “Man” and “Woman” from the Dictionnaire philosophique (Philosophical Dictionary). The former is an unimpressive effort from an aging man that drifts somewhat after beginning with melancholy reflections on the unhappy physical changes that come with advancing years, but if it is bad for men, he says, it is worse for women: “The female, being weaker, becomes still more disgusting and more frightful in her old age. The most hideous object on earth is a decrepit woman.” This is not pity; it is misogyny. Voltaire’s “man” is quite simply superior physically and intellectually, more capable of sustained attention, rational thought, and original ideas. One of his goals in this essay is to venture opinions on racial differences and the inferiority of Negroes; another, to



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ridicule Rousseau’s myths of natural man; yet another, to hammer away once again at the orthodox doctrine of original sin. Praise for the ordinary wife and mother can serve the last, but Voltaire’s highest praise for her in this context is negative: busied with children, confined to the household, and excluded from degrading work, she is normally incapable of barbarous actions or great crimes.16 The mindset is much the same in the latter essay. Again, ­Voltaire begins with the body and proceeds to the mind: “The physical always governs the moral.” Again, the human standard is masculine: compared with a man, Voltaire’s woman is less – less strong, less tall, and less able to work. Then again, by other measures, she is more – displaying more hair on her head, more prominent buttocks, wider hips, and a fatter stomach. Considering woman’s essential sexuality, Voltaire quickly turns to the debilitating effects of menstruation, menopause, pregnancy, nursing, and childcare. All this means to him that women cannot accomplish much more than “little tasks” and “light” work. “It is unsurprising that in every land man has made himself the master of woman, everything coming down to strength” and the male being ordinarily much superior “in body and even in mind.” Great learning is possible for a few women, but never invention or creativity. “In no republic have they ever had the least share in government.” He dutifully recites a short list of great queens (Isabella, Elizabeth, Maria Theresa, Catherine the Great) and then turns his agile mind and aging hand to the more alluring topic of polygamy and such personally compelling questions as whether the good Muslim or the bad Christian may marry his niece.17 Notoriously, Rousseau, the first modern democrat in other important ways, is even more emphatic on sex differences and their consequences for gender roles. For readers of a book on Gouges, extended rehearsal of his theorizing about women in Émile, Book 5, cannot be necessary, but three points about it merit particular emphasis. First, having begun his massive excursus on woman’s nature and Sophie as an abstraction, not yet a character or a person, with only token acknowledgment of the human likeness of man and woman, he stresses natural sexual differences and their necessary consequences for woman’s social roles as wife and mother. This passage culminates in a heavy-handed emphasis on woman’s duties, not rights, that in another context might almost have satisfied the sternest Jansenist or Calvinist. In a world of “general corruption,” those duties are

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primarily the wife’s perfect obedience and absolute sexual fidelity to her husband. She must learn these from a “catechism of morality that ought to be as short and clear as a catechism of religion.”18 Second, for all their differences and their radicalism in other ways, Voltaire and Rousseau shared many ways of thinking about woman and traditional attitudes toward women. They do not appeal to Scripture, but their naturalism leads to similar ends. Voltaire’s voluminous correspondence from the 1760s is full of contemptuous references to Rousseau’s Julie, apart from the letter on suicide, which, he says, almost makes him want to kill himself, and to Émile, apart from the Creed of the Savoyard Vicar, which, he says, he would like to bind apart in rich Moroccan leather. He dismisses Rousseau himself as a “strange madman,” an archifou, a brainless idiot, and a heartless misanthrope who “hurls as many insults at the philosophes as at Jesus Christ.”19 For all that, he tends to spare the novelist’s vision of the virtuous wife and to my knowledge never hurls mud at the discussion of woman’s nature and social role in Émile, Book 5, that now seems so objectionable. Third, most Enlightened men also shared such attitudes. This can be argued efficiently in three ways: a rapid overview of early reactions to Émile, with special attention to its discussion of women; a similar review of the set of articles on “Woman” from the great Encyclopédie; and a review of how Gouges’s friend and mentor Mercier generalized on the subject in his Tableau de Paris (Scenes of Paris) and particularly honoured Rousseau as a philosophical founding father of the Revolution at the very time when The Rights of Woman was in gestation. Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, co-editor of the Encyclopedia and a contributor with a particular grievance against Rousseau’s public criticism of that project and his own article on Geneva, put together a thoughtful assessment of Émile for Julie de Lespinasse. He dismisses most of the new book as a wholly impractical, even sophistic, attempt to shock readers but openly admires its discussion of women: “As he is much more attached to this half of the human race than the other, he is also more usefully concerned with providing for its education. Almost all that he has to say on the subject is true, well thought out, and above all practical.”20 Louis Petit de Bachaumont, in his Mémoires, called Rousseau’s discussion of women and his narrative of Émile’s courtship “a masterpiece,” true to nature



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and moving for the sensitive reader.21 Even Friedrich Mechior Grimm, a former intimate who was about as nasty as he could be in five substantial segments of the Correspondance littéraire (Literary Correspondence), objected only to one “absurdity” in the author’s long Book 5, his dictum that for a woman, unlike a man, reputation determines honour; he was willing to concede that the story of Sophie is “nevertheless full of great beauty.”22 The Encyclopedia, almost by definition, is not full of “great beauties” from towering literary and philosophical giants, but it is all the more valuable for that, if our historical objective is to sample the opinions of less-original men of letters who might better represent typical opinions of thinking people. Sets of articles on “Woman” or “Wife” and on “Marriage” each allow a review of multiple perspectives. While there are differences, the degree of agreement among the authors is impressive evidence for the weight of relevant tradition on even this great engine of cultural change. The first, an “anthropological” article on femme in both senses, “woman” and “wife,” is a rather pedestrian review of the vast relevant literature by PaulJoseph Barthez, a young doctor particularly allied with d’Alembert. Unsurprisingly, Barthez begins with the body and reproduction as then understood. Then comes a rapid review of views on women in ancient and modern cultures, with particular emphasis on religions other than Christianity and particular interest in assertions of gender differences that would now be regarded as belittling and demeaning to women: Jews have doubted that woman was created in the image of God, Manicheans have believed that she was the work of the devil, Muslims have believed that she is man’s inferior and must obey him, and so on.23 The chevalier Louis de Jaucourt was a Protestant polymath educated at Geneva and Cambridge, so versatile and energetic that he is credited with some seventeen thousand articles. He discusses the natural law pertaining to the wife in a more mature exposition of his own thinking. After what amounts to an initial invocation to the Supreme Being in which he states matter of factly that the purpose of marriage is the procreation and raising of children, he then offers a resolutely secular exposition of arguments both for and against the authority of the husband and the submission of the wife as a matter of natural law or social necessity. As someone not schooled to revere marriage as a sacrament, he can show an impressive ­theoretical

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openness to alternative family structures. For him, “marriage is by nature a contract,” and anything not clearly forbidden by natural law may be negotiated.24 A certain Desmahis, a minor playwright recommended particularly for a single comic drama and an article on the “fop,” was somehow entrusted with “woman” or “wife” as viewed by a moralist. It is by far the longest of the four articles on the principal aspects of the subject. More straightforward expressions of opinion frame a long central drama, the imagined story of Chloé, who is a coquette and so perhaps the proper counterpart to his fop, but a woman and so, in his mind, essentially different from any man in heart and mind as well as in body. Yet Desmahis likes to think that he accepts women as in some senses men’s “equals,” however different: ­“[T]he two sexes have advantages that are almost equal. To the one, nature has given strength and majesty, courage and reason, to the other, grace and beauty, delicacy and sensibility. These advantages are not always incompatible.” Women complement men. Chloé ought to have known her place – at home. The article ends with a happy alternative to her sad story. The good woman is a wife and mother, caring for her husband and children; the happy woman, one who remains at home rather than flitting about in a vain search for pleasure.25 The last of the four articles is a succinct but authoritative summary of the law pertinent to women by Antoine-Gaspard Boucher d’Argis. Most of it turns out to be negative: women cannot aspire to ecclesiastical, administrative, military, or judicial employments, a set of exclusions justified by the “fragility and natural delicacy of their sex.” There are other legal incapacities: women cannot be named guardians for any but their own children, they cannot witness wills or notarial acts, their testimony in court is particularly open to challenge, they cannot be received into most trades, and so on. Boucher d’Argis does not think to question any of this. In none of the four articles, varied as they are, is there any consideration of what Gouges would later call the rights of woman.26 When we turn from articles on “woman” or “wife” to those on “husband” and especially “marriage,” the focus shifts decisively to the primacy of theological and legal considerations, in that order. Boucher d’Argis wrote the single article on the “husband”; he begins with the principle of indissolubility, nods to the marriage contract and the church wedding, and then quickly turns to Scripture for



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the absolute justification of the husband’s power: Genesis and the Epistles of Paul and of Peter. Only then does he turn to “marital power,” defined by the husband’s authority to compel obedience, to “correct” his wife, to represent her at law, and to determine her place of residence.27 Marriage is then considered by de Jaucourt and Boucher d’Argis in terms of theology, natural law, and civil law, in that order. Even the last article works from the premise that “marriage is a divine institution” and must be sacramental.28 So much for Enlightened opinion among mid-century Encyclopedists. Traditional models of marriage and ideals of women’s behaviour remained very strong. Fast-forward to Gouges’s Paris in the 1780s and early 1790s. Her friend Mercier was a versatile and prolific author in his own right and far more comfortable as an observer of Parisians than as a philosopher, but even he drew from Rousseau for his sketch “Of Women.” He agrees that they are wrong to involve themselves in public affairs, “writing letters, pressing solicitations, besieging ministers, wearing out commissioners.” So they hurt themselves without helping others, because when they attempt to escape the “eternal subordination” that is woman’s lot, they make themselves “hateful and ridiculous.” Their proper place is in the home: “Women who hardly comprehend a single political idea, even if it is neither very far-reaching nor very complicated, have a wonderful grasp of domestic order and economy ... Foreign to the ties of patriotism, they hold the sweet ties of sociability marvellously. That is their true empire.”29 Mercier particularly praises wives who are “[d]evoted to their husbands and their children, careful, economical, [and] attentive to their households; they offer models of prudence and hard work.” Rather than advocating reforms in related law and custom, he expresses the fear that the existing customary law of Paris has granted women too much, making them imperious and demanding.30 And this from Mercier, to whom Gouges tossed a bouquet as a man “whom I cherish and whom I esteem on several counts,” as if he were much more than a mere friend!31 Mercier’s tribute to Rousseau, “one of the principal authors of the Revolution,” in June 1791 reflected his familiarity with the man’s troubled life after the publication of the second part of the Confessions and exceptional knowledge of the works as co-editor of an ambitious Oeuvres complètes (Complete Works) in thirtyseven volumes. In his reading, Émile merits pride of place for its

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moral and political ideas; it is “necessary” reading, a timeless and universal masterpiece.32 There is no criticism of the philosopher’s discussion of women, even from a well-informed reader and writer who has come to think of the entire legislative work of the National Assembly as the realization of the democratic ideal stated in Le Contrat social (The Social Contract): “[R]ather than destroying a natural equality, to the contrary, the fundamental compact substitutes a moral and legal equality for whatever physical inequality nature may have imposed on men [or mankind]; however unequal in strength and intelligence, they have all become equals by convention and by right.”33 If Gouges read Mercier’s new book in the summer of 1791, she might have remembered it. She might also have known that the sole reference to marriage in The Social Contract comes in an author’s note at the very end, to the effect that marriage is properly a “civil contract,” not subject to ecclesiastical authority.34 Unsurprisingly, then, when deputies in the National Assembly voted honours for the philosophe in whose works they had found inspiration, it was for Rousseau as the author of two prized books, Émile as well as The Social Contract. He was the revered teacher of women’s virtue and men’s liberty. Ange-Marie Eymar, who sponsored the motion to commission a bust of the philosopher to oversee the debates of the Assembly and then moved to double the amount of a pension for “the widow of Rousseau,” remarked without intended irony that the notoriously irresponsible father manqué had “recalled mothers to the sacred duties of nature.”35 It is a pity that no deputy seems to have thought to honour Gouges for having recalled all women, including wives and mothers, to “the sacred rights of nature”! Most readers of this book will suppose that she was right to think of herself as a patriot, right to extend the principles of the Declaration to domestic relationships, and right to attempt to conceive a liberal and egalitarian alternative to indissoluble, patriarchal marriage. She was also right to think of herself as a beneficiary of the Enlightenment, right to look all the way back to Scripture as an ultimate grounding for believers in the essential difference between the sexes, and right to look forward apprehensively to opposition from “the tartuffes, the prudes, the priests,” who would thump their Bibles and cite the rest of their books (lines 217–21, 228–45, 245–8, 359–62 with note). The great question for us may seem to be why the deputies who disregarded her work in 1791 went wrong.



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But this may also be a question that is badly posed, historically anachronistic, and tone-deaf to the politics of that difficult time. It is worth asking ourselves whether in any real sense they were right. To my knowledge, the National Assembly first considered a decree on marriage on 18 July 1790, in the immediate aftermath of both passage of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, the rock on which the constitutional monarchy and the liberal Revolution itself would eventually founder, and celebration of the Festival of the Federation, which reflected the aspiration to unite citizens and king, nation and Church. The issue, as raised four days later on 18 July, was quite narrow but could be pressing in individual cases: what could be done when a bishop, otherwise hostile to the new regime, refused to grant a couple a dispensation from canonical impediments to marriage? This question could be urgent, if the woman were already pregnant, but the wary deputies quickly voted to refer the matter to committee. The same issue came up twice that November, once in response to the petition of a wigmaker who had been denied permission to marry his pregnant sweetheart and once in response to a couple, second-degree relatives who had also been denied a dispensation, although their child was already eight months old.36 A draft decree was finally scheduled for debate on the first day of the next year, but two prominent deputies argued persuasively late on New Year’s Eve 1790 to defer it indefinitely. Jérôme Pétion addressed the narrow issue of canonical impediments and ecclesiastical dispensations: “I think that few members are presently prepared to pronounce on this important matter.” That was probably true, if not the whole truth. Then Charles-François Bouche addressed the broader issue of civil marriage: “To treat these questions would be delicate, thorny, dangerous. If you concern yourself with dispensations ..., that will inevitably lead to related motions that would be very imprudent in present circumstances. I demand that we refer all this to the next legislature.” The Assembly voted accordingly.37 Nevertheless, issues of family law and religion would not wait. On 10 May 1791 the municipality of Paris formally petitioned the Assembly to consider civil records of births, marriages, and deaths “in a form consonant with all religious opinions.” That bare mention in a cover letter from the respected mayor, Jean-Sylvain Bailly, was enough to provoke murmurs from concerned deputies. Even before the petition itself was read, one deputy objected: “This proposal is unwise and can only provoke disorders in the entire

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­ ingdom.” Another, François-Denis Tronchet, himself a Parisian and k one of the most distinguished lawyers in the Assembly, also objected: “One of two things must be true: either you want to make a new law or you only want to maintain that [of 1787, a legally controversial royal decree permitting civil registry for Protestants]. If you want to keep that, there’s nothing more to be said ... If you want to change it, I submit that in fact it won’t be possible to do so without opening up the entire question ... of the form of marriage.”38 Over these objections, the petition was read four days later and referred to committee. When it was reported out later in the month, debate was stormy, and moderates, if we can call them that, eventually prevailed: “We aren’t yet ready, and our manners and morals in this regard aren’t formed.” Again: “This will inflame the provinces.” Yet again: “The Assembly would make a big mistake in rushing its ­deliberations.” Finally: “We ought not to treat so important a question in such a cavalier way ... I demand that the question be adjourned until after [the completion of] the Constitution ... You’ll provoke a counterrevolution.” This argument was decisive, and over noisy protests, the Assembly voted to adjourn the limited issue of civil registra­tion indefinitely.39 And Gouges? She apparently wanted to dispense with the religious ceremony entirely. To deny parents a voice on the marriages of their children. To decapitate the family, cutting off its head by redefining the male partner’s role. To empower women as sovereigns of their own persons and property, even within quasi-marital partnerships. To treat their bastard offspring as the equals of legitimate children. To allow them to end such relationships at will, taking substantial assets with them. Quite apart from her attempt to feminize the issues, all this was to stride into an ideological and political minefield already fraught with danger.

6 The Rights of Persons of Colour and of Blacks

Had Gouges ended the Postamble at line 383 or 385, her pamphlet would have been more unified in its concern for women’s rights. Instead, without addressing ways in which race relations in the colonies also involved women’s issues, she added a substantial paragraph to defend “the decree in favour of the men of colour” (lines 386–410). The decree in question, adopted on 15 May 1791, had broken the legal colour line by granting full political rights in the colonies to some free persons of colour and some free blacks. The affected rights were circumscribed and the number of qualifying persons was limited, but colonial authorities saw the egalitarian principles of the decree as such a threat to the slave system that they managed to avoid implementing it, and colonial interests in France organized a vigorous and eventually successful effort to repeal it.1 Gouges denounces the colonists and their representatives in the National Assembly for failing to heed the sentimental pleas of their coloured children, and she emphatically affirms a liberty that is incompatible with slavery itself. The paragraph itself is not well composed and might now be dismissed as a tangentially related afterthought, having little directly to do with the feminist themes of her Declaration or even her Postamble, were it not for its obvious personal salience, its immediate political importance, its relationship to her celebrated Slavery of the Blacks,2 and what both the discussion in The Rights of Woman and the dramatization in this revised play show us about the apparent inability of even so remarkable a woman and so precocious a feminist to comprehend her revolutionary world in terms of race, class, or even gender as we conceive them. Gouges’s disinterested advocacy on behalf of persons of colour is impressive, especially contrasted with the relative timidity of

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­ eputies who had attempted to reassure slaveholders that French d legislatures would never interfere with their peculiar institution and who would soon rescind even their own decree in favour of free men of colour and free blacks.3 The historical context for this portion of Gouges’s Postamble is complex enough, unfamiliar enough to non-specialists, and important enough for the comprehension of her relationship to the politics of her day to require an extended explanation, after which we can return to reconsider both her contribution to the ongoing parliamentary debate in The Rights of Woman and the final version of her play. Much of the interest lies in the way in which this extraordinary woman confronted the conjoined evils of sexism and servitude.4

colonial society and the controversial decree of 15 may 1791 The decree of 15 May, which granted political rights in the French colonies to those otherwise qualified persons of colour and blacks who had been born of two free parents, was the culmination of the most extended and most passionate debate that the National Assembly would ever devote to questions of race and slavery. It is crucial to understand that the decree did not free a single slave; to the contrary, it was premised on a commitment made two days earlier, as “a constitutional article,” that “no law on the status of non-free persons” would ever be enacted “without the formal and unprompted demand of the colonial assemblies.”5 Those assemblies could be relied upon never to “demand” an end to slavery. In the event, enslaved blacks would rise up to take what whites had refused to give, and knowing this, modern students of the Haitian revolution have tended to discount the decree, emphasizing its limitations.6 However, in September 1791, when colonial interests attacked the decree of 15 May and Gouges defended it, the more salient fact was its unprecedented extension of rights across lines of colour, and no one in Paris was yet aware of the cataclysmic slave uprising that was then sweeping the North Province of Saint-Domingue.7 The demographic structure of the colony helps to explain the anxieties of the white minority, the eventual success of the black majority, and the crucial position of free persons of colour. Numbers were disputed, but the estimates in modern scholarship do suggest the reasonableness of what might otherwise seem an incomprehensible



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paranoia among whites: whites, 30,000; persons of colour, 28,000; and slaves 465,000. “Persons of colour” as a category counts both free mixed-race persons and free blacks, the latter a substantial minority within the minority.8 Lines of colour and servitude were not quite identical. All whites were free, of course, and the overwhelming majority of blacks were slaves. However, some blacks had been freed even without white ancestry, while some coloured persons were still enslaved despite mixed ancestry. Many free persons of colour were slave-owners and unashamed to promote themselves as such. The population of non-whites was growing rapidly: in boom years at the end of the 1780s, the number of slaves annually purchased about equalled the total number of resident whites.9 Furthermore, Médéric-Louis-Elie Moreau de Saint-Méry, the bestinformed man in the National Assembly, thought that the number of free persons of colour had almost doubled within the single decade of the 1780s, and his figures for 1788 and 1789 show a 14 per cent increase in that single year.10 Viewed “from the top,” of course, the gravest threat was that the slaves already outnumbered the whites by a factor of at least fifteen to one, a disproportion far more extreme than anything known elsewhere in the Caribbean or the Americas. Whites were caught in a double bind: they had to depend on free persons of colour to police the slaves, but they could not treat them as equals without thereby undercutting the racial assumptions on which the society was based. Even before 1789, some sophisticated and ambitious free persons of colour “looked up” from the middle, seeking such recognition, and the coming of the Revolution gave them a ready-made ideology of equal rights and unprecedented prospects for political support in France.11 In 1789, the very day after the National Assembly voted the August Decrees, a sweeping rejection of privilege in various forms, beginning with the uncompensated abolition of serfdom, colonial deputies warned constituents of the danger posed by revolutionary principles in the minds of free men of colour. In fact, within weeks of the promulgation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, a delegation of men of colour appeared before the National Assembly to protest unequal treatment and to request representation.12 The decree of 15 May presupposed an indefinite continuation of race-based slavery in the colonies, pre-eminently Saint-Domingue, even as it extended some rights to some free persons of colour

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and some free blacks. Its single sentence incorporates three provisions, here numbered for the sake of clarity: “The National Assembly decrees that [1] the Legislative Body will never deliberate on the political status of persons of colour not born of a free father and a free mother without the prior, free, and unprompted will of the colonies, [2] the colonial assemblies that presently exist will be maintained, but [3] persons of colour born of a free father and a free mother, provided that they meet the requisite conditions [of citizenship], will be admitted to all future parish and colonial assemblies.”13 By the first provision, the deputies attempted to reassure fearful colonists that neither they nor their elected successors in France would ever take the initiative to discuss – let alone impose on the colonies – legal changes in the political status of free persons of colour and blacks who could not establish that at the date of their birth both their parents had also been free. This requirement raises issues of gender relations in the colonies that are now more salient than they seem to have been for Gouges. A free father would have been the norm for persons of colour, but the mother’s status would have been another matter entirely. The population of Saint-Domingue was disproportionately male, and the imbalance was greatest for whites. Jean-Philippe Garran de Coulon’s monumental Rapport sur les troubles de Saint-Domingue (Report on the Troubles of Saint-Domingue), published between 1796 and 1799, drew the following data, in all its spurious precision, from François de Barbé-Marbois, who had been the principal civil administrator on Saint-Domingue in 1789:14

Whites Persons of colour Slaves

Total

Males

Females

 35,440  26,666 509,642

 24,660  14,602 284,307

 10,780  12,064 225,335

Whites are probably over-counted here and persons of colour correspondingly under-counted, not only because light-skinned persons of colour were tempted to pass for white in racial self-declarations so as to escape humiliating restrictions and to arrogate racial privileges, but also because a white husband might declare a mixed-race but light-skinned wife or mistress and her children as also white so as to claim a higher status for them. Nevertheless, the breakdown



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by gender is telling: whatever their actual number, there were not nearly enough white women or even, if these figures can be relied upon, enough free coloured women. Other evidence suggests a surplus of women among free persons of colour, manumissions having favoured them. In a slave society in which white men monopolized power, wealth, and status and outnumbered white women by a factor that might actually have been something like three to one, the effect was countless couplings between them and coloured and black women. Free men of colour in France, themselves the offspring of unequal relationships, denounced related abuses in grievance lists prompted by the dramatic events and democratic ideals of the Revolution. A Cahier contenant des plaintes, doléances, et réclamations des citoyens libres et propriétaires de couleur (Cahier Containing the Complaints, Grievances, and Demands of the Free and Propertied Citizens of Colour) protested particularly against sexual relationships between white men and slave women.15 Somewhat similarly, the Précis des gémissements des sang-mêlés dans les colonies françoises (Précis of the Laments of the Mixed-Bloods in the French Colonies) called attention to the “frightful libertinage” of the plantation society and appealed to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The leading American historian of the persons of colour on Saint-Domingue, John Garrigus, says flatly: “Almost all Frenchmen who came to make their fortune ... took women of color as concubines.”16 Gabriel Debien’s research on manumissions has emphasized that formal grants of freedom were often long-delayed, if they came at all, in part because bureaucratic requirements and heavy taxes discouraged such grants, especially for the manumission of female slaves in their child-bearing years. It was easier and cheaper for the white male owner to extend privileges informally, which had the additional benefit of retaining his own property rights and those of his heirs.17 But unless the mixed-race son, when grown to adulthood as a free man, could formally establish that his mother had been legally free at the date of his birth, he would not qualify for active citizenship by the provisions of the decree of 15 May. Deputies in the National Assembly did not debate the issue of rights for persons of colour in terms of gender relations or patterns of manumission, and Gouges does not do so in her Rights of Woman, but the related limitations would have been quite severe.

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The second provision of the decree of 15 May was also intentionally limiting, even for the apparently small number of potentially affected free persons of colour and free blacks. Existing colonial assemblies were to continue to function without incorporating such citizens or their representatives, and they could be organized and filled before any attempt to implement the decree. In them a concession of eventual political rights across the colour line would have had no immediate effect. In our retrospect even the third provision seems grudging. As drafted, it places the burden of proof on the individual person of colour or black, who would have had to satisfy white authorities not only on his own freedom and capacity to meet other unstated requisites of citizenship but also on the freedom of both parents a generation earlier. Recalcitrant white colons could have been expected to raise bureaucratic and financial obstacles to persons of colour and blacks. They could also have attempted to evade the requirement to integrate “all future parish and colonial assemblies.” In any case, existing bodies would remain all white and, it goes without saying, all male. Gouges does not comment on the relevant exclusions. The decree itself was silent on what must have mattered most to free persons of colour in their daily lives. A whole battery of prejudicial regulations from the Old Regime restricted everything from the professions and trades they could pursue to the names they could adopt, the clothing they could wear, and the company they could keep.18 While many such restrictions were quite petty and others were inconsistently enforced, the intent to maintain a discriminatory colour line was generally served. The decree of 15 May addressed none of these social and economic concerns. It is not surprising that many of the best-informed and most influential historians have tended to discount this legislation, given the facts that the decree of 15 May was never implemented in the colonies, that the number of coloured and black persons to have been given political rights would in any case have been relatively small, and especially that, while administrators delayed and deputies debated the constitution, beginning on 22 August slaves on plantations in the North Province of Saint-Domingue rose in a massive, destructive, and ultimately successful revolt.19 However, the first word of this uprising would not reach Paris until the end of October. In mid-September, when Gouges was completing her pamphlet, the great fact about the May legislation, for her and for most



The Rights of Persons of Colour and of Blacks 169

c­ ontemporaries who were also opposed to the slave trade and slavery itself, was its extension of political rights across racial lines. For the best-informed and most influential defenders of the old order, this was already a catastrophic breach in what they regarded as a necessary “barrier” between free whites and enslaved blacks.20 September 1791 was to see the published results of a remarkably modern exercise in the use of democratic political techniques to serve undemocratic social ends. Colonial and commercial interests worked effectively to enlist support for their cause, especially from chambers of commerce in the great port cities of France. Petitions were solicited, selected, excerpted, and arranged by or for the joint committees whose proposals in May had been swept aside in the bitter floor fight between advocates for the free persons of colour and free blacks and defenders of the slave system. These edited documents, dated by the committee deliberations of 12 September, just a day or two before Gouges gave the final touches to her Rights of Woman, were then printed and distributed to deputies. There was enough material supporting the decree to make the presentation seem like neutral fact-finding and more than enough opposing it, including strongly worded communications from authorities on Saint-Domingue, among them the governor general, the Provincial Assembly of the North, and the Superior Council of Le Cap, to make it clear to deputies who were otherwise determined to “terminate the Revolution” that the only prudent course would be to retreat in September from what they had advanced in May.21 So informed and so motivated, they voted on 24 September to rescind the decree of 15 May. The political campaign against that decree is the historical context for Gouges’s remarks in its defence. She initially focuses on “the troubles” that others, she says, have blamed on it: “It was absolutely necessary for me to say a few words about the troubles that, they say, the decree in favour of the men of colour causes on our islands ... where division and discord agitate the inhabitants” (lines 386–91). In fact, in the following lines Gouges has nothing definite to add about particular “troubles” in the colonies, taking that word in the senses preferred by opponents of the decree. Fearing a mass uprising of enslaved blacks, they predicted that disorders would be provoked by any extension of political rights across the colour line. Because the revolt of the slaves was not yet known in France, it did not yet matter that the nightmare prospect had already become a

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waking reality, even without the implementation of the decree on Saint-Domingue. Gouges seems to have had a very different sort of disorder in mind, past and not future, disorders caused by quite different groups. Supposing that she uses the term “inhabitants” advisedly when speaking of “division and discord” among them, she reflects a colonial usage according to which the habitation is the plantation and the habitant the planter. Especially in the most populous and most prosperous provinces of Saint-Domingue, the North and the West, “the inhabitants,” properly speaking, were the white planters and no one else. It was indeed they who had been the principal agents of the most significant known troubles when Gouges wrote about “fermentations” on the islands, and “incendiaries” in the Assembly shared responsibility for having provoked them. There is historical sense to her seemingly wild suggestion that deputies in Paris have been among the firebrands (lines 391–4). It had become commonplace for colonial deputies to fulminate against the “incendiary writings” of the Société des amis des noirs (Society of Friends of the Blacks), a philanthropic organization whose declared objectives were the abolition of the slave trade and the gradual emancipation of the slaves.22 Although Gouges’s name is not on lists of members, she was sympathetic with its causes and seems to have adopted the rhetorical strategy, at once a defence and a counterattack, whereby the abbé Henri Grégoire and Jérôme Pétion, both members of the Friends and both deputies in the National Assembly, had each attempted to turn the tables on parliamentary opponents in the first days of the great debate in May. They had blamed the “troubles” in the colonies on the colonial deputies themselves for having sounded an alarm as early as 12 August 1789 in a letter about the spirit of liberty in Paris and its potential effect on free persons of colour and on the Colonial Committee for having written and rushed through the Assembly the unfortunate decree of 8 March 1790, which had refused concessions to such persons.23 In the former, which the Friends acquired and republished, the colonial deputies had warned against the danger that subversive ideas from the metropolis posed for the plantation society of the colonies, and in the latter the committees serving their interests had tried to insulate the colonies from principles incompatible with their slave systems by guaranteeing substantial self-determination. Anxiety about what the Revolution in France might mean for them had



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been largely responsible for the abortive attempt by the Assembly of Saint-Marc to assume control, compelling the governor to mount military operations. A rump of that assembly eventually escaped and sailed to France, only to be finally discredited by a decree of 12 October 1790. But that outcome did not reconcile the whites of Saint-Domingue with one another, and in the following year it was the governor who was forced to flee after his principal military commander was lynched. Both political opposition and violent action had been white on white.24 There was more. Even if neither Gouges nor anyone else in France yet knew of the massive slave uprisings of August when she published her Rights of Woman in September 1791, every informed person did know about the short-lived Ogé rebellion of October 1790 and its brutal repression. Vincent Ogé the younger had been an exceptionally wealthy free quarteron, born to a white father and a mulatto mother on Saint-Domingue but resident in Paris in 1789. Without identifying himself by race, he had first presented himself to the planters’ Club Massiac as a willing defender of the social order. By rights, he must have thought, they should have been receptive, but this was a dead end for the man of colour.25 In October, soon after the promulgation of the newly sanctioned Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, he then joined other mixed-race men in an appeal to the National Assembly. The deputies received them courteously and heard their white spokesman but denied them representation in Paris and took no action to secure their rights in the colonies. In 1790 Ogé returned to Saint-Domingue, where he was rebuffed yet again, by both the governor and the Assembly of the North Province. Only then did he turn to rebellion, arming free persons of colour against repressive whites. Thus, when Gouges blamed troubles on the colons and their deputies, she had a point: it had been the intransigence of the whites who had rebuffed each of Ogé’s overtures that had driven him to rebellion. What most appalled her was the unnatural indifference of white fathers, easily imagined but only imagined, to the rightful claims of their still-enslaved coloured sons (lines 394–405). Remarkably, given her focus on the rights of women in the rest of the pamphlet, she pays no attention at all to the grossly abusive patterns of gender relations in the colonies and the difficult situations of black and coloured mothers and their daughters. At least in our retrospect, it does tell very much for her that she did not attempt to make a

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case for free coloured sons in terms of their potential usefulness to whites in repressing the unfree. Whatever their personal distaste for this line of argument, even Grégoire, Pétion, and, most surprisingly, Robespierre had been willing to remind opponents in the May debates that the free persons of colour and free blacks were useful allies of the whites in maintaining the subordination of enslaved blacks.26 Brown arms defended white rule. Addressing the Jacobins on 12 September, Jean-Pierre Brissot, the founder and principal publicist for the Friends of the Blacks, made the same argument.27 It tells even more strongly for Gouges that she rises from defending the decree of 15 May to insist on personal liberty in terms that condemn slavery itself: “A divine hand seems to extend everywhere the birthright of man, liberty [author’s emphasis, here alone in her text]; the law can rightfully repress this liberty only if it degenerates into licence, but it must be equal for all. It is this [liberty], above all else, that the National Assembly, guided by prudence and by justice, must reaffirm by its decree” (lines 403–11). While this statement of principle is impressive, it was impolitic in a defence of the decree of 15 May. The strongest argument against the extension of political rights in the colonies even to already-free men of colour had been and still was the claim that the measure would push France down a steep slope toward a veritable abyss: Rights for the free men of colour and free blacks would lead to increasing clamour for the abolition of the slave trade. Without that trade, the slave system could not be sustained. Without slaves, the formerly productive plantations could not be worked. Without plantations, the French colonies themselves would founder. Without colonies, the fortunes of the navy and the great port cities would sink. Without the navy and the port cities, the economy of metropolitan France and the stability of the monarchy could be jeopardized. The expression of abolitionist sentiments that most appeals to us would have added another problematical element to a pamphlet that was already controversial in its challenge to norms of gender roles and marital relations, while weakening Gouges’s intended support for the decree.

and rights-consciousness

t h e s l av e ry of t h e bl ac k s

We are so used to thinking of Olympe de Gouges as having been the most forward advocate for women’s rights at a time when even the



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most radical men lagged behind, a woman who was far in advance of the men who sat in the successive revolutionary legislatures in her rights-consciousness, that it comes as something of a surprise to witness not only her subsequent failure to reflect her feminist ideals in revisions of her own most celebrated play but also her retreat with respect to the rights of persons of colour and blacks. Yet that is the way it was. In papers first delivered to an audience of French historians and then published for students of eighteenth-century literature and culture, Gregory S. Brown has called into question the easy assumption, later encouraged by Gouges herself, that when she first published her Zamore and Mirza in August 1788, she was already a “militant abolitionist.” He focuses primarily on the pre-revolutionary playwright and emphasizes that her “self-fashionings” changed over the course of time, “her public persona as a champion of ‘liberty’ for black slaves” being constructed between December 1789, when the Comédie-Française finally produced a second version of her play as The Slavery of the Negroes, and March 1792, when she herself published a third and more substantially revised version as The Slavery of the Blacks.28 The last is the now the best known, having been edited by Eléni Varikas in 1989 and Félix Castan in 1993 and translated by Maryann DeJulio in 1994. Independently of Brown, MariePierre Le Hir, Gabrielle Verdier, and René Tarin have all qualified the abolitionism of even The Slavery of the Blacks. Christopher Miller, too, contributes important qualifications.29 My present interest, as a student of The Rights of Woman in its historical context, is with how its evolved feminism did not prepare even this most intrepid woman herself to rework her play in light of what would now seem to be the obviously relevant categories of race, class, and gender. In principle, working from the text as first published in 1788 or the script as performed in 1789–90, Gouges could have retouched her characters and retooled her plot to reflect a heightened consciousness of the abusive treatment of black and white women alike and to support the principle that they too had rights. She could also have abandoned the ethnic identity of her title characters as ­“Indians,” a neither-nor racial category that she probably adopted from wellknown plays: Voltaire’s Alzire ou les Américains, in which the hero is the Inca prince Zamore, and Nicolas Chamfort’s La Jeune Indienne, in which the title character is a Indian maid who takes in a European shipwrecked on her island in the Antilles.30 In the real world of France’s Caribbean colonies, native populations had died

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out by the 1780s. But even after the men’s Declaration of 1789 and her own of 1791 and at a time when persons of colour and blacks were demanding rights for themselves, Gouges did not revise her play to champion their cause unequivocally. Even if she had been unwilling to undertake changes of a sort in her script that might have seemed tantamount to an unacceptable acknowledgment of her own primary responsibility for the failure of the 1789–90 production, she could have devoted a new preface or postface to the pressing issues of the rights of free persons of colour and free blacks, men and women alike, or to liberal prescriptions for what to do about the slaves and their unrest. In this way, she could have confronted the colonial and commercial interests that had successfully combined to disrupt the first performance of her play, to reverse the decree of 15 May, and to prevent any restriction of the slave trade or of slavery itself. In the event, she did none of these things. In her revised text, although she did add a supporting role for one strong slave woman, Gouges did not dramatize women’s grievances or claim women’s rights. She also failed to make substantial changes in other female characters or her story of their relations with one another and with men. More surprisingly, she failed to exploit the radical potential of a play on slaves and their masters, despite her new title, her awareness of the cataclysmic slave uprisings on SaintDomingue, and others’ progress at just this time toward a first broad extension of political rights to all free men of colour and free blacks. Contrarily, she backtracked vigorously in a new preface. Consider the feminist potential of Gouges’s play in its earlier versions and her failure to realize it in the revisions incorporated into the 1792 version, despite her authorship of The Rights of Woman in the interim. Her plot weaves together two strands. First, there is the sad story of Zamor (the 1792 spelling) and Mirza, “Indian” slaves who are lovers. In prior action, a wicked commander or driver had lusted after Mirza, who had virtuously resisted; the jealous villain had then ordered Zamor to inflict the punishment for this affront, but he too had virtuously resisted; now enraged, the commander had attempted to kill Zamor, only to be struck down when the slave defended himself. The pair had then fled into marronnage. In staged action, the two are captured, returned to face summary judgment, and in the end pardoned by Zamor’s master, Governor de Saint-



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Frémont, whose good heart overcomes his misguided sense of obligation to enforce the social order by punishing an apparent crime. Second, there is the drama of Sophie and Valère. She is a young woman who sails the seas in search of a father who had been tricked into deserting his young lover, her mother; he is her own faithful husband. In all versions, the play begins with their shipwreck and rescue by the heroic slaves and ends happily with the recognition of Sophie by Saint-Frémont, the father whom she has never known, their emotional embrace, and her intercession on behalf of her rescuers. The threads are thus intertwined at the start and neatly knotted at the end. The roles of Mirza, Sophie, and Madame de Saint-Frémont all have a feminist potential that now seems obvious. A playwright making hypothetical revisions in this spirit could also have found ways of giving voice to Sophie’s mother, Claire, and dramatizing the victimization that she had suffered in the past. Among these women, Mirza merits pride of place: her character could easily have been strengthened, if only by allowing her to relate the story of her own harassment at the hands of the wicked overseer and her virtuous refusal to comply with his sexual demands. Those lines could have been much extended, and briefer versions of comparable stories of other young women could have been added, all in the interest of generalizing what remains quite particular in the play as we have it. At the cost of diminishing Zamor’s heroic role as her protector, a revised text could even have allowed Mirza herself to strike back against her abuser, either alone or in league with Zamor. Instead, it is Zamor alone who acts decisively and Zamor who tells Mirza’s story, even in the revised version of the play, published six months after The Rights of Woman. In the first scene of the first act, the first words are his: “My dear Mirza, calm your fears.” She responds: “Zamor, I fear only for you.” This exchange suggests what would now seem to be pejorative stereotypes of women as naturally emotional, particularly vulnerable, and wholly absorbed in their romantic attachments. In the same scene, Mirza depends on Zamor to explain fundamental aspects of the servile state that both have experienced and comes close to acknowledging intellectual inferiority: “What little I know, I owe to you ... I’d be really happy to be as well informed as you are, but I know only that I love you.” While he acts courageously to save a young woman from the waves, she

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wrings her hands over a young man who has been washed up on shore: “What will I do? (She calls:) Zamor, Zamor!”31 Mirza is not Everywoman or Every-enslaved-woman but a child of nature who is somehow at once institutionally uncorrupted and conventionally feminine. In any case, she is unaffected by anything like the feminist principles that we associate with Gouges’s Rights of Woman. Nevertheless, her persona appealed particularly to the playwright and fit her own sense of herself. In the first paragraph of the 1792 Preface, she disclaims learning and “metaphysics” in terms that liken her own “natural” thinking to that of her “savage” and “coloured” characters: “The learned can weigh themselves down and lose themselves in metaphysical observations. As for me, I have studied only the good principles of Nature. I don’t pretend to define man, and my savage mind has taught me to judge matters only by my soul. Furthermore, my productions have no colour other than that of humanity.”32 Sophie’s role would have had an almost equal potential for feminist development, especially factoring in the related story of her mother. Her maternal grandfather, apparently a single parent whose military service had not allowed him to supervise his daughter’s upbringing, had placed Claire in a convent. Before departing for the war in which he would meet his death, he had charged his friend Saint-Frémont to look in on her in his absence. The good friend had done that and more. After Claire had conceived a child by him, he had intended to marry her, he says, but his own parents, who opposed the match, deceived him into believing that she had died and shipped him off to remote parts of the world.33 Here is another story that could have supported feminist elaboration and commentary. Yet we do not hear it from Claire herself, a woman whose fate was to have been cloistered, orphaned, seduced, impregnated, and abandoned in her youth, or even from Sophie, the daughter whom she has been left alone to support and to raise, but from SaintFrémont, whose melancholy mixes some guilt with a great deal of self-pity. In staged action, Sophie and her husband become patrons of the fugitive slaves who have saved their lives. Valère, whose very name establishes his manly courage, begins the third and culminating act of The Slavery of the Blacks by addressing Zamor and Mirza in terms that reflect gender and racial stereotypes at their most traditional: “Now, you are free! I am flying to the head of your comrades.”34 He



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tells them that his wife will join them, but in fact Sophie’s engendered role is to fall at the feet of the governor’s wife in supplication, to hold hands with Zamor and Mirza as a way of fending off armed soldiers, and finally to fall at the feet of the governor himself. Her emotional appeal is decisive, in large part because the good man recognizes her as his own natural daughter.35 There must have been a degree of identification here too between a playwright who liked to think of herself as the natural child of an aristocratic father and this illegitimate but eponymously wise and good daughter. But Gouges’s newly matured feminism does not mark the Sophie of 1792 or distinguish her role from what it had been in 1788 and 1789. Madame de Saint-Frémont’s position as the governor’s wife gives her both a reflected status and proximity to power. She is another wholly sympathetic figure, her heart beating truly for her husband without skipping a beat at the belated revelation of his frustrated love for the attractive young woman whom he had long ago unwittingly abandoned. Her sentiments also extend naturally both to the fugitive slaves, despite Zamor’s “crime” and his flight with Mirza, and to the shipwrecked couple, despite the fact that Sophie turns out to be the child whom she had been unable to give her husband. Yet nothing that the character says or does reflects the feminism that Gouges had confidently articulated six months earlier. In her 1792 Preface the playwright claims that she has merely reprinted an unrevised script that had already satisfied the vigilant censors of the Old Regime: “Today, in the fourth year of liberty, I present this drama just as it was approved under the despotism of the press.”36 This statement is simply untrue. Gouges had already made many minor changes for the performances of 1789–90, and she made more substantial ones in the play for this second published version, eliminating some minor characters and subplots and whole blocks of short scenes, revising many of the scenes that she did retain, and adding a female slave named Coraline. Azor pays this intelligent woman a high compliment in chauvinistic language: “You think like a man!” What she thinks about, though, has nothing to do with her own gender or with gender relations. Instead, Coraline thinks about the particular misfortunes of Zamor and Mirza and, more generally, what she takes to be the happier prospects for all slaves.37 Between the disastrous opening performance of The Slavery of the Negroes in December 1789 and the publication of The Slavery of the Blacks in March 1792, the National Assembly had stripped

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the Comédie-Française of its Old Regime monopoly and effectively freed playwrights.38 Gouges need have felt no further constraints of the sort she had claimed in 1788 when she explained that the “Indian” identity of Zamore and Mirza as racially ambiguous “savages” had been forced on her by the Comédie.39 In 1792 she could have made the family dynamics of her play both more affecting and more topical, had she simply made Zamor a man of colour and in the last act revealed him to be the governor’s illegitimate son and Sophie’s half-sister. This change could have been made without her adding a coloured or black mother to the cast of characters or going into any greater detail on that relationship than she had done in the case of Saint-Frémont and Claire, Sophie’s mother. It would have tied the two strands of the plot together more tightly and given the final resolution greater emotional impact. Of course, it would also have further complicated the sexual history and moral identity of Gouges’s white male hero, and perhaps for that reason among ­others, she made no such changes. We now come face to face with questions of race. In this ­crucial respect, Gouges did make revisions, if far fewer than we might have expected. Already in 1788 she had protested in the Preface to Zamore and Mirza that the Comédie-Française had compelled her to alter her script and effectively to whitewash her plan to treat “the History of the Negroes”; in the appended Reflections on Negro Men, she made a plea for performances by actors in blackface.40 In 1789 she had given her play a newly racialized title, The Slavery of the Negroes, and in 1791 the crisis on Saint-Domingue thrust issues of race relations and the status of persons of colour and blacks in the colonies into unprecedented prominence in France. In 1792 Gouges no longer billed The Slavery of the Blacks as an “Indian Drama.” She now set the play in “the Indies,” not “the East Indies.” Mirza now informs Valère and Sophie that the intendant or commander killed by Zamor was “a white,” and in turn Valère now compliments her as a “Negress.” The troops sent to arrest the fugitives are now also “Negroes,” and Saint-Frémont once calls Zamor’s supporters “blacks.” Stage directions for the third act now refer to “cabins of the Negroes,” and Azor says that he and his father were “bought on the Guinea Coast,” that is, that they are African-born. But, strangely, in the cast of characters Zamor and Mirza are both still “Indians,” as is the commander who arrests them. Furthermore, although the Preface newly written for this version does twice



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address “slaves, persons of colour,” leaving the race of the former and the legal status of the latter unspecified, there is not the slightest hint of mixed-race persons in the play itself.41 Gouges faced a delicate balancing act in the 1792 Preface, because news of the slave revolts on Saint-Domingue, in which whites were killed and plantations burned, made the implications of her primary storyline seem even more problematical than they had been before such upheavals.42 After all, her new title, The Slavery of the Blacks, invites us to identify Zamor racially as a black, and the difficulty in presenting him is that he has fled a good master – a white, of course – after having killed a commander or driver who is now also identified racially as having been white. The playwright makes us want to blame this white victim and vindicate his black killer, who is defended by an equally heroic Frenchman and pardoned in the end by the noble governor. As ominously, she describes other slaves as having arisen to protest the arrest and impending execution of Zamor, burning crops or structures “everywhere”; incomprehensibly, they too seem to be forgiven.43 On the one hand, Gouges wanted reader approval for her “philanthropic production” as an Old Regime “prophecy” of the “disastrous reports [sic] of the woes of America.” What might once have seemed an old-fashioned fairy tale, she says, had been shown by the march of events to be “the faithful picture of the actual situation in America.” She would not change her primary storyline and did not qualify her sympathy for Zamor and Mirza. But, on the other hand, she was anxious to deny responsibility for having provoked insurrection. Although the colonial establishment had reacted vigorously when The Slavery of the Negroes was staged in Paris, some twenty months before the servile uprisings on Saint-Domingue, she now defends “the purity of [her] maxims” and the morality of her intentions: as an author, she has had “no other purpose than to recall men to the beneficent principles of Nature.” Therefore “I make no retraction.”44 Even in the most general sense, The Slavery of the Blacks was not prophetic of the disorders in the colonies, especially Saint-Domingue, that had been or would be occasioned by the Revolution. The governor of Gouges’s imagination is universally loved,45 and there is no sign in her play of political divisions among whites, of colonial assemblies, or of tensions between colonial interests and those of the metropolis. There is neither a representative of an ­intermediate

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group of mixed-race persons in the cast nor any reference to the aspirations or demands of such a group in the script. Most importantly, the one case of interracial personal violence is in every way exceptional, and neither the slave who kills in self-defence nor the other slaves who seek to defend him attempt to destroy the social system or free themselves.46 Once Zamor has been pardoned, order is restored, leaving the slave system intact. Astonishingly, as we see the world, although he and Mirza are both offered their freedom, each refuses it, preferring to return to a good master. Several passages do look forward briefly and vaguely to a brighter future in which slaves might be emancipated, but all were added after the Revolution to the text of the Old Regime first edition, all presume that emancipation will be an unforced gift from European whites, and none makes a case for it in terms of the principles of liberty and equality.47 A systematic search of Gouges’s 1792 text for evidence of an expli­ cit extension of the principles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen to persons of colour and blacks is very disappointing. In act 1, scene 1, the single great anti-slavery speech of the fugitive Zamor ends with a sort of prayer, newly composed for The Slavery of the Blacks, that God may “return to man the right [of liberty] that he has lost in the very bosom of Nature.” These words do claim personal freedom as a natural “right,” but then they undercut the claim by acknowledging that the right has been “lost in the very bosom of Nature.” The Preface clarifies the author’s meaning, unfortunately, by rooting both enslavement and cannibalism in African soil and implicating Africans themselves; doing so allows European slave traders to be excused as rescuers and slave owners as civilizers. In any case, Gouges’s hero-slave fails to couple this theoretical principle with anything like revolutionary action. Zamor first doubts and then flatly denies the power of slaves to work for their own liberation; he explains that he has been careful not to share his ideas with others, and his prayer is that God may soften the hearts of the masters.48 In act 1, scene 6, Zamor again speaks of “rights,” this time giving the term an apolitical, even sentimental, sense: misfortune entitles the sufferer to others’ benevolence. He tells Mirza, who fears for her lover and herself, that, as unfortunates, the survivors of the shipwreck must have a place in their hearts. Valère responds gratefully,



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addressing Zamor with the familiar tu-toi; Zamor’s heart can make social distinctions, and he uses the more deferential vous form.49 In act 1, scene 7, Valère predicts that the French people will re­claim “rights written in the laws of Nature,” especially political liberty. In the same speech, he seems to accept “the power of a single ­master,” the king, even in France, while in the immediate context he implicitly rejects anything like constitutional rights for slaves, telling Mirza only that once the French have become free themselves, they will “improve your lot.”50 In act 1, scene 9, the Indian who has come to arrest Zamor and Mirza justifies harsh treatment of the slaves, calling them an “accur­ sed race” and saying that they would kill without pity if treated humanely. Sophie rebukes him, her Rousseau implicitly trumping a proof-text for race-based slavery from Genesis; she rejoins that Nature has made no slaves and adds that “these unfortunates understand the rights of pity better than you do.”51 In act 2, scene 9, throwing herself at the feet of the governor’s wife, Sophie again appeals to “pity.” She calls on Madame de SaintFrémont to pity her as an unfortunate stranger, and having herself been pitied by Zamor, she says that “what he has done for me ensures [his place] in my heart [by] the rights of Nature.”52 That is, a benefactor, having responded to the claims of pity, thereby gains a reciprocal claim on the feelings of the beneficiary. In act 3 the language of rights is spoken only in the anticlimactic scene 8. Valère would plead on behalf of the recaptured fugitives, but the governor, however wise and good, will not give him a hearing: “[Y]ou have no right to defend them or to change the laws and customs of a country.” To this, the young Frenchman can only oppose his own “right [sic] of gratitude” and Zamor’s “natural right of [self-]defence.” A draconian colonial judge refuses to distinguish between justifiable and criminal homicide, refers summarily to laws that condemn killers, and asks rhetorically: “Can you change them?” Astonishingly, Valère’s answer is “No.” This is Gouges’s ­valiant Frenchman, as scripted for a French readership in 1792! At best, he pleads for judicial leniency in the case of “an involuntary crime.” In so many words, the answer to that is another no.53 Of course, we can still hope to hear from the slaves themselves, particularly the killer. Zamor does get a climactic speech, heroic in its own way, but only after a nameless slave falls to his knees before

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the governor, pleads that Zamor be pardoned, and vows that he and his fellows will bear “the most terrible punishments,” perform “the most arduous labours,” and do it all on diminished food rations. The governor exclaims over this heroism, this grandeur of soul, this generosity, equity, and courage, but his answer is yet another no: Zamor must die.54 Then it is the turn of the condemned man, who has had nothing remotely like a trial in a court of law: Zamor confesses his responsibility for the homicide, admits that he deserves the death penalty, and for the welfare of the colony, accepts this fate, pleading only that Mirza be spared. In lines added in 1792, Gouges’s hero-slave exhorts the other slaves: “[M]y dear friends, listen to me in my last moments ... Take care not to make yourselves guilty in order to defend me. Take care especially to avoid the spirit of discord, and never give yourself over to excesses in attempts to escape slavery. Take care not to break your chains with too much violence. Rest all your hopes in divine justice and in the passage of time.” Zamor’s exhortation is a no-no-no, a triple rejection of resistance to oppression, whether by himself or by others attempting to defend him against an unjust condemnation, and it culminates in his recommendation of prayer and patience as the only recourse for other slaves. He tells them all to work hard and remain steadfast in their devotion to the governor, his master and their “good father,” cherishing him with “a filial tenderness.”55 Had Gouges wanted to turn The Slavery of the Blacks into a rights-based political argument against the institution of slavery, she could have done so, but that would have come at a predictably high cost to the sentimental climax. In every version of the play SaintFrémont’s recognition of his long-lost daughter is followed hard by her plea on behalf of Zamor and Mirza, in which the governing ideas, insofar as ideas do govern, are pity for the unfortunate and a reciprocity of benefactions. But it is the shared emotion of the father-daughter bond that rules: “What happiness to find myself in your arms again! I can’t express all the feelings that overwhelm me. But these unfortunate beings, oh, my father, their fate is in your hands. Without their aid, your daughter would have perished. Grant to nature the first favour that she asks of you. Planters, slaves, fall at the knees of the most generous of men; it is at the feet of virtue that we can find clemency. (All fall to their knees, except the judge and the soldiers.)” The governor’s heart opens, and he extends a pardon



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and then offers Zamor and Mirza their freedom, which they refuse, happily returning to subjection.56 Hypothetically, a feminist who was also an abolitionist in a more nearly modern manner could have rewritten this happy ending in any of a number of ways: for instance, by having Valère fail in a first attempt to sway the governor and the judge by citing the principles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, before Sophie would succeed in reiterating these constitutional principles and reinforcing them with a heartfelt appeal on the basis of her personal relationship. Saint-Frémont and a freed Zamor could then have lauded a revolutionary Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Of course, such a conclusion would have been a radical departure from what Olympe de Gouges actually wrote. For her own last word in her own voice on issues of rights and race, slavery and the slave trade, we must return to Gouges’s Preface to The Slavery of the Blacks. That happens to be impossible in what is otherwise the most ambitious modern edition of her plays, which omits her prefaces, at great cost to historians.57 In 1792 her overriding concern was to vindicate herself as having been in no way responsible for the uprisings of blacks and persons of colour that had recently convulsed Saint-Domingue. She does so in three ways: First, she puts herself on trial, playing multiple roles, not only that of the accused, who is innocent, of course, but also those of a prosecutor whose accusation is mostly implied and a defence counsel whose case is argued vigorously. Second, she exhorts slaves and persons of colour at greater length, scripting for herself a speech as an unequivocal defender of the social order, not human rights. Third, she contrasts her philosophy with that of Brissot, the founder of the Friends of the Blacks and in March 1792 the principal advocate for extending the full rights of active citizenship to all otherwise qualified free persons of colour and free blacks.58 To make sure that critics do not mistake her intentions, Gouges clearly states that her play is not “incendiary”; she is not ­preaching “insurrection”; her goals are not immoral. No, no, no! Then in her own voice she unequivocally condemns the violent uprisings of the slaves and free men of colour and justifies the enslavement of Africans. And to make triply sure, she distinguishes herself from the most prominent Friend of the Blacks and most vigorous advocate for free men of colour and allies herself with critics who have seen in him a threat to property. All this prepares a conclusion that is

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fundamentally conservative: “Even for the most ignorant, it’s easy to make revolutions on a few sheets of paper. But, alas, the experience of all peoples, including that which the French are getting, teaches me that the most learned and the wisest men never establish their doctrines without producing harm of all sorts. That’s what the history of every country shows us.”59

part four The Addenda and a Conclusion What Gouges added after completing the Declaration would qualify how her Rights of Woman was to be received. The tail is longer than the dog. Depending on how we want to measure, we can say that her lower-case addenda start with the Postamble itself and her argument for a Social Contract as an alternative to traditional marriage. She could have concluded after this but did not, despite a ringing exclamation proclaiming its morality and predicting “the perfection of a happy government” (lines 348–50). The end? No: within the Postamble, she then added briefer policy recommendations on other matters of particular concern to women, apparently intending to reach a conclusion after making them, judging from the lofty tone of her paragraph on “elevat[ing] the souls of women” with its sweeping demands to “join them in all the activities of men” or at least “share their wealth,” thereby felling prejudice, purifying morals, and restoring natural rights. But even this is not the end. Then come quick afterthoughts: “Add the marriage of priests and strengthen the king on his throne” ­(379–85). At last, the end? No: still within the Postamble, she also added a defence of the 15 May decree on the men of colour and related remarks on the “inhumane colons” and their slaves. Then she did conclude: “[May the National Assembly reaffirm the liberty] of France, paying as much attention to new abuses, which are becoming more frightful each day, as it has paid to the old! My opinion would still be to reconcile the power of the executive with that of the legislative, because it seems that the one is everything, the other, nothing, from which will come, perhaps unfortunately, the fall of the French Empire. I consider these two powers [to be] like a man and wife,

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who make a good household when united as equals in strength and in virtue” (lines 414–20). The word order of the French text corresponding to the first translated sentence quoted here is at best awkward, but Gouges’s meaning could hardly be clearer, and I have reordered her prose to convey it: the republican agitation of the summer after the Flight to Varennes had gone much too far. The king had been arrested, suspended, and returned to a form of house arrest, and he must be restored to a proper throne. The second sentence could be awkward too, for anyone unaware that the National Assembly had decreed all this and provisionally taken over executive functions. And the third sentence? “Man and wife”? Gouges cannot mean an old-style head of the household with his obedient wife; if it is her own new-style domestic partners, equal in rights, then perhaps the translation should be “man and woman”? At this point, she added an explanatory note in the form of a reference to a recent theatrical entertainment: “In The Magic Supper by M. de Murville, Ninon asks, ‘Who is the mistress of Louis xvi?’ She is answered: ‘It’s the Nation; that mistress will corrupt the government, if it takes too much power.’” The printer then drew a line, as if he were done at last. But Gouges was not done: having returned to the print shop to review page proofs, she found almost three full blank pages at the end and filled them with what I label the upper-case Addenda. First, she added the narrative of her fare dispute with the nameless cabby of my title, which had to be typeset in a smaller font. ­Second, probably after yet another return, she super-added the Postscript on the king’s acceptance of the Constitution and ­Lafayette’s Amnesty Decree, for which the printer had to resort to a still smaller font, so that it would all fit. These added materials are to be the subjects of chapter 7. Then it will be my turn to conclude.

7 The Addenda

the dispute with the cabby over a fare In the grand scheme of things, the cabby himself and the cab fare just do not matter. That is true now, and it was also true then for everyone but Gouges and the otherwise unknown man. But if she matters and her pamphlet matters, as they do, then we can hope to learn something about both her and what she herself called “her fate” by paying close attention to her lengthy narrative of the petty dispute (lines 421–80). First, there are Gouges’s incidental remarks on her visit to the printer’s shop on the rue Christine to correct proofs for the rest of her pamphlet. It is reassuring that she who had boasted in print about never revising and never correcting did care to do something like that in this instance, but at the same time it is also disconcerting that she claims to have devoted only “about twenty minutes” to the tasks. I do not doubt her count. Perhaps she was anxious not to waste time while the cabby waited and the fare mounted, or perhaps she simply wanted to save time for a leisurely bath and a good dinner. In any case, it is remarkable how she spent those twenty minutes: to hear her tell it, she wanted to make sure that her pages were “well composed and filled” (lines 437–40). This was probably a matter of economy as much as vanity, for which the body of her work and this added narrative provide good evidence in other ways. She was properly concerned with her personal finances. As a young wife and mother in Montauban in the mid-1760s, she seems to have had virtually nothing. Her situation as a still-young widow or perhaps even runaway might also have been precarious. But in the Testament politique d’Olympe de Gouges (Political Testament

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... ) that she offered to the National Convention in gloomy days when she feared the worst for herself after the proscription of the Girondin deputies in June 1793, she was to claim to have had a substantial fortune in 1788, some 30,000 livres in hard money and another 50,000 livres in credits – 80,000 livres in all.1 The context could have invited exaggeration, but the archival records of rentes previously constituted in her favour by her wealthy protector, Biétrix, make the claim generally credible.2 Then came the Revolution, personal and financial as well as national and political. On the one hand, she was to incur extraordinary expenses by her pamphleteering. As a matter of principle, she declared at the start, when she could have had no way of predicting what was to come, that she would not “make a trade” in her works, which she offered freely as “the fruit of nature.”3 She felt that she could afford formal title pages, even handsomely engraved frontispieces, with herself as a lady bountiful, extending her hand and her works to the queen and as if by magic relieving the distressed people (see above, page 48). As the Revolution progressed and the number of her pamphlets increased, she spoke in upbeat moods of heroic “sacrifice” and in more discouraged moments of having “ruined herself by printing [costs] while trying to save the fatherland.”4 On the other hand, her income had suffered indirectly from the sudden downturn of her protector’s fortunes in 1788, when the ministry of Loménie de Brienne was compelled by the financial crisis to reform support services for the army and navy. Gouges understandably looked for other ways of bringing in money. She was so confident in the patriotic worth of her own offerings that she made repeated and only thinly veiled appeals for financial support from the crown, the duc d’Orléans, and the National Assembly itself. Addressing deputies whom she had offended just days before the publication of The Rights of Woman by urging the king to reject the Constitution, she ended her recantation with the rueful words: “Farewell, pension.” She was stung by the fact that the same deputies who persisted in not rewarding her, the true spiritual heir of Rousseau and a servant of the fatherland, had voted a pension for Thérèse Levasseur, whose only merit was to have been the philosopher’s “companion.” The question of public honours for him was immediately current in early September 1791 because of pressures to relocate his remains from the Isle of Poplars to the Panthéon.5 But what about her? She felt that she deserved “marks of esteem” and



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knew that she needed money, even as she was giving it away with her patriotic offerings. In The Rights of Woman, the long story of the cab fare and the short Postscript on more significant political events had to be typeset in successively smaller fonts in order to avoid additional costs for paper that would have been incurred had the additional material required an additional sheet. Again and again, in the course of her career as a pamphleteer, she filled octavo quires exactly. In this case, too, she demanded to speak her mind and to get her money’s worth, filling all twenty-four pages. That, her narrative suggests, was the principal purpose of her visit to the printer’s shop on the rue Christine on the mid-September day to review the proofs of her new pamphlet. In twenty minutes she can hardly have hoped to clarify her ideas, strengthen her argument, cut extraneous material, make sentence-level corrections, or even look carefully for typographical errors. Second, there is her lapse of judgment, astonishing for someone who was already a seasoned pamphleteer, in so publicizing her inability to get her own way in a quarrel over a few sous. Even if she had been right about the proper fare, to have concluded the pamphlet with such a trivial anecdote would have been to betray her obliviousness to the predictable reactions of her readership and to risk trivializing fundamental constitutional and legal issues. The rights of women? Wives? Persons of colour? Slaves? After she has concluded with a ridiculous rant on a disputed cab fare, who could take her seriously on anything else? For all her fury at the demanding cabby and the unsympathetic magistrate, men who had, she thought, cheated her, dismissed her arguments, and failed to show her the proper respect, she strives for a light-hearted tone, introducing her anecdote as a word or two “in jest” and ridiculing the magistrate as a contemptible buffoon, a comic character (lines 421–3, 461–7). In this context, the rhetorical effect is unhappy for her and the controversial causes that she tried to support. Gouges was demonstrably in the wrong about the cab fare. This judgment in a low-level court of historical appeal does not depend on testimony from the cabby or the magistrate. Nor does it rest on doubts about the veracity of her account of her “fated” troubles on the September day. Nor is it a matter of differences over distances travelled on the two legs of her trip in the cab or possible discrepancies among various timepieces, the two watches and the clocks on

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the customs house and the bathhouse. She says that she left her home in Auteuil at 8:00 o’clock one morning and, as a matter of economy, walked for almost an hour before reaching the customs barrier that defined the Paris city limits. There she rested briefly and looked for a cab without finding one. Instead, after hearing the customs house clock ring 9:00, she took a coach into central Paris and then hired a cab at the stand near the Pont Royal; by two watches, presumably her own and her driver’s, she says that it was then 9:15. The cabby took her to the printer’s shop on the rue Christine, waited for her while she made her corrections, and then drove her across the river to a bathhouse somewhere near the Temple, where they arrived at 10:45. Then it was time to pay the fare: “I owed the cab driver for an hour and a half, but, so as not to quarrel with him, I offered him 48 sous.” She says that the cabby demanded more – payment for a full two hours – and that she refused, confident both that she hadn’t occupied him so long and that the regulated fare should have been lower (lines 425–48). As a matter of principle, Gouges was willing to be generous, but she wouldn’t be cheated: “I threatened him with the law.” But by his reckoning, it was she who was the cheat, and rather than accepting the 48 sous, he readily agreed that they should refer their dispute immediately to the sectional magistrate. She seems to have done most of the talking, but, not recognizing “the woman who had written with beneficence and equity,” the magistrate didn’t seem to listen: “[H]e pitilessly condemned me to pay the cabby what he demanded.” She protested; he insisted. He wouldn’t let her go, leaving the full fare unpaid, and angrily threatened her with prison. She wanted to appeal to the mayor of the city or even the Department, but he wouldn’t hear of that either, sarcastically suggesting that she take her case all the way to the National Assembly. Concluding that he was either an incompetent fool who didn’t know the law or a crooked captive of special interests who wouldn’t give her justice, she “hurried off.” This must mean that she paid up, although she doesn’t admit that or ever say how much the cabby demanded (lines 428–66). The French Revolution touched more or less everything, including the organization of public transportation in Paris. The day after patriots assaulted the Bastille, owners of stables made their own break from a past dominated by the monarchy, discontinuing payments to a privileged monopolist who had made a mutually



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­ eneficial contract with the crown ten years earlier. But what was b good for the king and this monopolist was not necessarily good for the owners of stables, the drivers of the cabs, or their passengers. On 24 September 1789 the Police Commission of the new municipal government issued provisional regulations stipulating minimum standards for the safety and comfort of passengers and publicizing the fare structure for trips within the city limits and to and from outlying communities. On 1 October the commission confirmed this Règlement provisoire (Provisional Regulation) concerning passenger cabs and delivery services, and the Chronique de Paris published a summary. On 19 January the Moniteur reproduced the full text.6 The relevant rates were unchanged from those that had been established by royal ordinance in August 1787, and they were still in force in September 1791. As important for our story, the reputation of the drivers was also unchanged: cabbies were thought to be coarse, occasionally violent, and frequently abusive, especially to women travelling alone. That does not mean that Gouges’s man was wrong about the fare and she right. The basic structure for daytime service within the old city limits distinguished between a flat rate for a single trip, point to point, and an hourly rate, which was steeper for the first hour but then held constant for each additional hour. If the cab was hired for a single trip, the fare was always 24 sous, whatever the locations of the pickup and the drop-off within this zone. But if the hire was by the hour, the rate was 30 sous for the first hour and 25 for each additional hour, however spent.7 It is quite possible that when a hurried Gouges made the hire near the Pont Royal, she did not specify more than the location of the printer’s shop as her first destination. However, nothing in her narrative suggests either that he asked for payment for the point-topoint trip upon arrival at the shop or that she offered it. This can only mean that they must have come to an understanding that he was to wait for her. The 48 sous that she eventually offered would have been just right for two point-to-point trips, the first from the cab stand at the rues du Bac and de l’Université to the shop on the rue Christine and the second from there to the bathhouse near the Temple. On the face of it, the exact equivalence between the money that she offered and what she would have owed for two separate trips strongly suggests that this is the way that she calculated the fare before the cabby objected, demanding more money.

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Unsurprisingly, her way of counting favoured herself. The problem must have been that the 48 sous she offered would not have covered the time that he had spent waiting, while she was reviewing proofs. Her emphasis on the total time elapsed, the hour and a half between 9:15 and 10:45, is telling. Turning to the alternative hourly rate structure, as seems necessary, her 48 sous would have been a bit generous, as she suggests, only if there were a half-hourly rate. There was not. By the full hour, she would have owed 30 + 25 = 55 sous. Gouges was even more furious with the magistrate than with the cabby himself, but both men were right that her 48 sous was too little. Nevertheless, she was convinced that she was the victim of a great injustice and leaped to dismissive generalizations about the revolutionary regime and citizen magistrates who didn’t know the law and couldn’t administer justice or keep order. Her indignation did not subside until she had also denounced the new disorder of things with respect to parcel services. It was all so aggravating that she was ready to conclude that the public had been better served under the Old Regime (lines 465–79).

the postscript Then, in a night-and-day shift of mood and tone, comes Gouges’s celebratory Postscript, occasioned by the king’s acceptance of the Constitution and other late-breaking news, all good. She felt compelled to add remarks on Talleyrand, Lafayette, and the émigrés, among whom the princes of the blood were most important. This all conforms to a significant pattern, even if most of it has nothing to do with the rights of women. These men were instantly identifiable as great noblemen, even after the abolition of nobility itself as a legal distinction. In the new world of nominally equal citizens, ­Gouges still revered rank. What suddenly fired her enthusiasm was the prospect that, after all, the deep wounds in the body politic might yet heal. In such a vision, fraternity trumped liberty and equality, and sentiment was more important than principle. Now that Louis xvi had given up his opposition to the Constitution, Talleyrand was no longer defying the pope as a constitutional bishop, and Lafayette was no longer enforcing martial law as the commander of the National Guard, there was hope: the king had committed himself to the rule of law, the former bishop to public schools under the aegis of the state, and the general



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to an amnesty for offences on both sides of political divides. Given their reactionary politics and armed encampments, the princes may seem not to fit this pattern, but still Gouges hoped and in her last lines prayed for their return and a reconciliation (lines 481–93). It all fits. First, Talleyrand: When Gouges says that his “name will always be dear to posterity,” she tosses a bouquet at a man who is remembered as having been the greatest accommodator of his era, a Voltairean who had served the Church, a deputy elected from the First Estate who had moved the nationalization of ecclesiastical property, an aristocratic émigré who was to return to serve the Republic and then Napoleon. Even in September 1791, before he had successively betrayed both the Revolution and the counter-revolution, he would not have inspired terms of endearment. What he had done was more important: he had said mass at the Festival of the Federation, so consecrating the first Bastille Day celebration on 14 July 1790. More than any other occasion, this grandiose, theatrical coming together, the first of the great revolutionary festivals, had symbolized the union of all Frenchmen and Frenchwomen in the name of “the Nation, the Law, and the King.” Gouges’s friend Mercier had long observed all that was wrong with the present and had once imagined a better future only for 2440, not 1790, but even he was moved.8 Fourteen months after the Federation, Gouges still cherished its vision. More immediately, Talleyrand had chaired the Constitution Committee of the National Assembly and in that role had presented its lengthy report, running to 123 pages in its printed form, on a new scheme for public schools that was rightly understood to be essential for the cultivation of an informed and enlightened citizenry: the Rapport sur l’instruction publique (Report on Public Education).9 Over the course of two days, 10–11 September, he read it to deputies who were enthusiastic enough to interrupt with cheers and then, two weeks later, their work on the Constitution finished and their patience exhausted, prudent enough to table implementation indefinitely.10 In a manner befitting an enlightened rationalist and patriotic liberal, Talleyrand began with principles: the liberty of “men” and the equality of “men.” Of course, this long after the fact we are likely to suspect the exclusion of women, but that is not what follows. When applied to public education, revolutionary principles led Talleyrand logically to

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five corollaries: First, education ought to be offered to citizens of all classes, the poor as well as the rich. Second, it ought to be offered by any citizen, if not by all, that is, by lay as well as by clerical teachers. Third, “instruction ought to be universal” in its subject matter and its concern for “a common good.” Fourth, it “ought to exist for the one sex and the other,” women as well as men; “this is [only] too obvious, since it is a common good.” And fifth, “it ought to exist for all ages,” the old as well as the young. In short, everyone, rich and poor, male and female, young and old, ought to be taught everything by everyone else. Talleyrand did not shrink from the consequence that this all-inclusiveness would have to mean public schooling for girls as well as boys.11 This surely explains Gouges’s enthusiastic response. Some one hundred pages after these theoretical preliminaries, pages from a committee of men addressing an assembly of men on the education of boys, Talleyrand again picks up the thread of the education of girls, here reconsidering it in terms of “political rights” and women’s roles. Clearly, if women’s rights were to be the same as men’s, their education would also have to be the same. Just as clearly, “[i]f we think that their portion ought solely to be domestic happiness and the duties of interior life, they must be formed from an early age to fill this destiny.” The apparent slippage from men’s rights to ­women’s duties is of course telling, but it was fully conscious, frankly defended, and so no mere slip: One half of humankind excluded by the other half from all participation in government, native-born persons [made] foreigners by the law ..., female proprietors without direct influence and without representation, these are political phenomena that it would seem impossible to explain in [terms of] abstract principle. But there is a way of thinking in which the question changes and can be resolved easily: the goal of all institutions ought to be the welfare of the greatest number. All that leads away from it is an error, all that leads toward it, a truth. If the exclusion from public employments pronounced against women is a way of increasing the sum of their mutual happiness for the two sexes, it is thereby a law that all societies ought to acknowledge and to consecrate.12 Although Talleyrand’s rationalism fails him on the fundamental question of women’s rights, his utilitarianism saves him: “[I]t seems



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to us incontestable that the common welfare, especially that of women, requires that they not aspire to political rights and functions.” He sought and found women’s truest interests by consulting “the will of nature”: physical weakness, peaceable inclinations, and maternal duties are all so many revelations of that will, “calling them ... to interior cares.” With some justification, Talleyrand has sometimes been treated as the consummate political realist in a den of revolutionary idealists, even to the point of cynicism.13 But in this Report his rhetorical effusions on the romantic appeal of wives and the happy lot of mothers sound sincere. He concludes that men destined for public lives need public educations, while women destined for domestic lives can be better educated in “the paternal household.” To be sure, girls are to get a public primary schooling “up to the age of eight years”; about a hundred pages earlier, he had stated that such primary schooling could begin at “the age of six or seven.”14 What a pity that Gouges never came to terms with this question! Presumably, she had not yet read the lengthy Talleyrand Report to the end, if she was ever to do so. That was to be left for Mary Wollstonecraft, whose great Vindication of the Rights of Woman was to be provoked by her reading of this Report, not Gouges’s Rights of Woman. Neither woman survived long enough to consider the Mémoires that Talleyrand drafted under the Restoration and of course accommodated to the contrary ideology of that later day. In them, he reduced the early Revolution to the assault of “the plebian class” on “the noble class” and dismissed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen as “nothing but a theory of equality” that should have been no more than “a passing sickness.”15 Second, Lafayette: Simon Schama’s colourful and popular account of the Revolution encourages readers to remember Lafayette as the other great accommodator, more principled than Talleyrand if also sillier in his enthusiasms. He, not the king or Talleyrand, had been the cynosure at the Festival of the Federation. Even the king’s first formal oath-taking and Talleyrand’s unaccustomed celebration of the mass were somehow less impressive to contemporaries than Lafayette’s melodramatic role in leading the Fédérés in their oathtaking, his unsheathed sword extended to the Altar of the Nation.16 He was to put it this way some forty years later in words that surviving family members assembled into Mémoires after his death: “The [Festival of the] Federation of 1790 was one of the great events of

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the Revolution. Fourteen thousand representatives regularly elected by more than three million National Guardsmen [and] deputations from all units of the Army and the Navy came in the name of the armed forces of France to abjure the Old Regime and take an oath to constitutional liberty and equality.”17 Looking forward on the previous day to the great event, Lafayette had addressed the National Assembly in a livelier spirit, with “holy enthusiasm.” He congratulated the deputies for having asserted the principles of popular sovereignty and the rights of man and for having completed the Constitution. Then he spoke more particularly for the National Guard: “[M]aking your wisdom the standard for our trust and your benefits that of our hope, we will unhesitatingly carry to the Altar of the Fatherland the oath that you have prescribed for its soldiers. Yes, Messieurs, we will raise our hands together, at the same hour, at the same moment; our brothers from all parts of the kingdom will swear the oath that will unite them. With what transports will we unfurl our banners before their eyes, pledges of our unity and the inviolability of our oaths! With what transports will they receive them! May the solemnity of this great day be the signal for the reconciliation of factions, forgetfulness of resentments, peace, and public happiness!”18 As a perfect accommodator, Lafayette had then presented himself to the king at the Tuileries, where his briefer speech began with a reference to “the imprescriptible rights” of citizens and ended with an informal pledge of the guardsmen’s obedience and their love for Louis as their “citizen-king.” According to his memoirs, the king had responded in kind, from the heart, acknowledging a new fraternity with “fellow citizens” even while reiterating the old language of a patriarchal father-king: “Repeat to your fellow citizens ... that their king is their father, their brother, their friend.”19 All this had been well and good in July 1790, but a year later the same king evaded Lafayette’s watch over the palace and fled from Paris. The Flight to Varennes and its disastrous failure all but ended illusions of the paternal solicitude of the king and his fraternal unity with the people. Thanks to Barnave’s role in making a persuasive case for his personal inviolability, the king himself did escape being put on trial as a criminal, but this was not the end of the matter. Immediately after Barnave’s speech on 15 July, the National Assembly decreed accusations against the general who had commanded the troops that were to have protected the king, had the Flight



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succeeded. The charge was that Bouillé had masterminded a vast conspiracy to overthrow the Constitution, carry off the king and the royal family, and usher in foreign armies. This was the crime of lèse-nation in the world-upside-down law of the Revolution. Such accusations were also voted against thirteen subordinates and coconspirators, including the queen’s admirer Axel de Fersen. Eight others were to be arrested but not charged, including one woman, Madame de Tourzel, the governess of the dauphin or, in the politically correct terms of the new regime, the “royal prince.”20 Thus, even if Bouillé had emigrated and Fersen had also found refuge outside France, charges literally hung over the heads of the highestranking soldiers and intimates who had attempted to save the king and queen. Days later, the Massacre of the Champ de Mars drove additional wedges deep into the ideal of a unified nation. An open-air petition drive on 17 July calling for the abolition of the monarchy led to popular violence, the declaration of martial law, and the killing of many demonstrators by guardsmen under Lafayette, perhaps three or four times the thirteen victims acknowledged by responsible municipal authorities. This affair led in turn to a wave of repression that included the arrest of about two hundred activists, the silencing of the most radical journalists, including Jean-Paul Marat and Camille Desmoulins, and a sort of prudent counter-emigration by others, notably Georges-Jacques Danton.21 Lafayette had already been suspected of complicity in the flight of the king in June, and the killings of July and repression of August 1791 transformed the heroic liberator of two worlds into a badly compromised enforcer of public order.22 Gouges was unfazed, her admiration unaffected. Already on 5 October1789, when the women’s march threatened disruption at Versailles, she wrote of Lafayette as “a god” who could calm the waters, and on 14 September 1791 she again hailed him as “a god” for his further services in reconciling opposing factions (line 489). In the letter of 13 September in which Louis xvi announced his acceptance of the Constitution, he also called on the National Assembly to enact an amnesty decree for political crimes, thinking especially of loyalists on the right who had attempted to protect his flight but not forgetting radicals on the left who had been hounded after the Champ de Mars affair.23 This was yet another revolutionary role reversal in a world upside down: the king had once laid down the

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law and issued pardons at will. For Gouges, with her consistent distrust of faction, her residual royalism, and her ideal of a unity of hearts, it was the best possible news that Lafayette and, after him, the other deputies should have freely acknowledged Louis’s beneficent intentions and unanimously decreed the amnesty. Third, the émigrés: Gouges consistently played up to princes of the blood, whatever their politics. This posture went back at least to the pre-revolutionary dedications of volumes of her Oeuvres both to the “liberal” Orléans and to the “reactionary” Condé. It is most striking in the deference that she showed to Artois, the king’s younger brother, who was already notorious before the outbreak of the Revolution for his heedless drinking, gambling, and womanizing and for the intransigence with which he had taken the lead in opposing royal concessions to the Third Estate. He was the first signatory of the Mémoire des princes présentée au roi (Memoir of the Princes Presented to the King) in December 1788; it tellingly reserves all “rights” to the throne, to the princes themselves as princes, and to the two privileged orders, the Clergy and the Nobility.24 Mercier had served in the household of Artois and so had some basis for his harsh judgment on the prince’s primary responsibility for “the ruin of the court” by his prodigality and his offensive manners. As a tennis player, for instance, Artois reportedly insulted even onlooking courtiers as being so many “Jews” and “bastards.”25 That sort of thing helped to lend credibility to stories of his reaction on hearing that deputies of the Third Estate were being made to wait in the rain before taking their benches for the ceremonial opening of the Estates General on 5 May 1789: “Good. Let them splash in the mud, to remind them where they come from and where they should return.”26 In the crucial period between the Tennis Court Oath and the Memorable Week of 11–17 July 1789, he was instrumental in persuading the king to oppose liberal policies that could have placated rebellious Thirds. His apparent preference for a resort to military force already verged on a counter-revolution, and he set the example for a first emigration. At the moment of decision on 16 July, Artois is supposed to have asked Condé what he would do and to have been told (this on the later authority of yet another reactionary courtier): “One of two things, either fight the rabble [here] or leave the country so as to wage war on it.”27 Even in August 1789 Gouges was quite aware of the threat of counter-revolution, but while peasants did their best to destroy



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the “feudal regime” in the countryside and deputies did theirs to eliminate graded privileges as the basis of the social and political order, Gouges counselled the nation to throw out all the troublesome “brigands” and call back Artois. Her happy idea was to ask him to head a new chivalric order that would include deserving women among its honourees, provided, of course, that they could furnish satisfactory proofs that they had actually written the works that bore their names. She tried to convince readers to share her “respect” and “veneration,” reminding them that Artois had proven himself to be “the defender of the rights of all gentlemen” while predicting that he would embrace a new role within the Third Estate. She would be his Mentor, he her Telemachus.28 As late as July 1791, when she was already meditating her Rights of Woman, she imagined for herself an active role in guiding Condé back into the national fold. She would replace Duveyrier as the intermediary between the king, now suspended, and his cousin, still a fugitive. Condé was then busily organizing an émigré army at Coblenz, having declared himself in a manifesto published in the previous year, after the revolutionary abolition of nobility. He had identified his cause as that of “the unfortunate king” and “all princes, all gentlemen,” surely using that last word restrictively, properly limiting it to those few nobles who could claim four generations of nobility. Then he had also pledged to lead “the nobility of all nations,” sword in hand, against the radical factions and any other Frenchmen who refused to be “good.”29 If Gouges seriously imagined herself in the role of Duveyrier, she must have understood the gravity of the situation. On 11 June the Assembly had ordered the prince either to return to France within fifteen days or to withdraw from his armed encampment on the frontiers, publicly disavowing any hostile intent, on pain of being declared a traitor and losing income from French properties. He remained, declaring just such an intent and organizing an army, while Artois and Provence, both now émigrés, actively sought commitments from foreign powers.30 It is no wonder that Gouges’s final appeal for a mutual reconciliation between the princes and the nation is more a hope and a prayer addressed to Divine Providence than an invitation to men who knew that the revolutionaries thought of them, with some justice, as traitors and enemies (lines 490–3). She was no fool, but she was either a little unlucky or committed to a hopeless cause on behalf of irreconcilable principles. While she was dictating the excited

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last words of her Postscript, Provence and Artois were forwarding the threatening Declaration of Pillnitz from Emperor Leopold ii and King Frederick William ii under their own disingenuous but uncompromising cover letter, along with another from Condé, Bourbon, and Enghien. That is, no sooner had she finally finished her most important pamphlet, beginning with her dedicatory letter to MarieAntoinette and ending with another gesture toward the émigré princes, than they waved the banners of their treason. This was a little unlucky. Circumstantial bad luck was not the only problem. Gouges’s own principles and political preferences were unreconcilable. Granting that there is a deep fault line between what we would call the selfconscious feminism of her Rights of Woman and the self-conscious chauvinism in Talleyrand’s Report, each was rare in 1791. It was far more common to accept traditional notions of gender without much thought. The first premise with which Lafayette, schooled by Thomas Jefferson, had begun the draft declaration of rights that he presented to the National Assembly on 11 July 1789, thus launching debates that would culminate in August, had limitless potential: “Nature has made men free and equal.”31 Women as well as men would be slow to realize it, but the promise was already there. The deeper fault line in 1791 was between such democratic principles and those of unreconstructed aristocrats. This is nowhere clearer than in the princes’ cover letter for the Declaration of Pillnitz, which was almost exactly contemporaneous with Gouges’s pamphlet. Neither Provence nor Artois could see beyond archaic notions of “rights” as the privileges of the few. Thus they or ­Calonne on their behalf could say that, far from declaring rights, the National Assembly had annihilated all rights and be perfectly true to the past. They could air their “grievances” against the new regime and be perfectly true to a time-honoured conception of human society: as they saw it, the Revolution had violated “the rights of the Clergy ..., the rights of the Nobility ..., the rights of the magistracy ..., the rights of proprietors” – in short, the rights of “all Orders.”32 So it had, but it had also conceived broader rights of a new sort. Gouges’s lasting greatness, as I see it, is that she understood better than any contemporary that liberty and equality would have to be extended to women in many ways, including full political participation and mutual freedom in family relationships. Even she did not understand all that doing so would imply or how long it would take



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– and is still taking. But at the same time, she wanted the Revolution to end in a metaphorical embrace, if not on 14 July 1790 at the Federation, then on 14 September 1791, when the king again took another oath to uphold a constitution that he and, even more, his queen and the princes found repugnant. For them, it was not the basis for a new order but the destruction of all order. Nor did the aristocratic heroes of her Postscript, the accommodating Talleyrand and the chivalrous Lafayette, really share her vision: the former was to become an émigré a year later, and the latter was to become a traitor in the strictest senses before defecting to the Austrians and being imprisoned by them. At least in retrospect, to have embraced them, as she did, was to have exposed herself and her feminist ­ideals to suspicions that she and they were somehow allied to the counter-revolution. Gouges wanted it both ways: on the one hand, she wanted to admonish Marie-Antoinette and to appropriate for her sex the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, but, on the other hand, she began by formally deferring to the queen as a regal patroness for her feminist cause and denouncing the men who had made the Revolution. She wanted equal citizenship for women, but she also wanted Frenchmen to strengthen the king, embrace the princes, and honour Talleyrand, Lafayette, and their kind. She wanted to substitute a new form of partnership agreement for traditional marriage, but the terms that she imagined would leave each partner as free sexually and as independent financially as a single person. She wanted all fathers to honour their financial obligations to support their children, but she also wanted poor mothers to be entitled to outplace any that they could not support. She wanted equal rights for persons of colour and blacks, but she feared the prospect of the oppressed taking their liberation into their own strong hands and clung to the sentimental notion that good slaves would prefer to remain subject to good masters, even when offered their freedom.

A Conclusion: Gouges’s Feminism in the Context of 1791

The fact that the National Assembly neglected to act on what is now Gouges’s most celebrated work has served historians hostile to the Revolution as a stick with which to beat revolutionaries for failing to realize the implications of their own Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.1 From a feminist perspective, sins of omission became sins of commission two years later: in the fall of 1793, Jacobins closed down women’s political clubs (30 October) and guillotined not only Gouges (3 November) but also other prominent women, including Marie-Antoinette (16 October), Madame Roland (8 November), and Madame du Barry (7 December). Even if none of these other victims was a feminist, this succession of political trials, together with some of the justificatory rhetoric, has made the Revolution itself suspect, to adopt a term from the vocabulary of that terrible season. A deadly misogyny leaves a lasting stain. However, cultural assumptions of gender roles long antedated 1789, and they were more formidable barriers to the sorts of change that Gouges sought than any hypocrisy or misogyny peculiar to the later Revolution. September 1791 was a season of amnesty, not terror, but it was also a time when historical circumstances ensured her political failure. In my judgment, this failure is more than offset by an astonishing intellectual success: her breakthrough to a feminism that remains impressive even when compared with that of more sophisticated contemporaries who were also inspired by revolutionary ideals rather than being stifled by revolutionary regimes.

an unsurprising political failure and its overdetermination Gouges addressed her Declaration to the National Assembly, apparently hoping that it could be enacted into constitutional law without



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delay, and she also sought to influence legislators with the policy recommendations of her Postamble and perhaps even the grievance expressed in the appended narrative of her fare dispute. However, I see no evidence that she converted a single deputy to her causes. Perhaps more remarkably, The Rights of Woman does not seem to have provoked polemical opposition by men outside the Assembly or serious discussion by women. Like it or not, this lack of response must mean that even if we can agree that the pamphlet does matter now, politicized compatriots agreed that it did not matter then. Why not? I do not suppose that it means we alone are intelligent and they were all fools, excepting only that folle, Olympe de Gouges. In Paroles d’hommes, 1790–1793, Elisabeth Badinter has edited and introduced a slim volume of pronouncements on women by male revolutionaries. She honours Condorcet as a shining light of feminism in a single opinion piece from July 1790, but with only a very few other exceptions, all from 1792 and 1793, darkness otherwise prevails. Badinter prefers a psychological explanation: men felt so threatened in their masculinity by a radical challenge to traditional gender roles and civil status that they embraced Rousseauist orthodoxy on women and the family.2 Quite apart from the difficulty of historically documenting the psycho-sexual depths of a nation, there are other limitations to this explanation: Badinter sets aside the year 1789 and the words of women themselves, then and later. She seems to presume that there was sufficient challenge after 1790 to provoke a defensive response from men. She pays disproportionate attention to anti-feminist materials from a single major journal, the Révolutions de Paris, and a single very short and dark period, three weeks in October and November 1793 (eleven of her twenty-two numbered documents are from this one paper or this one short period). She attends only to what men did say when they focused on these issues, which imposes a complementary inattentiveness to questions raised by their more general silence. A tempting explanation for what we are apt to consider a failure of male contemporaries, not Gouges, has to do with their gender and hers. She suggests as much in the two passionate paragraphs between her Dedication and her Declaration proper: Briefly addressing a universalized “MAN” as the unjust oppressor of universalized woman, she denounces him as “the stupidest animal,” unnatural, tyrannical, foolish, bizarre, blind, bloated, ignorant, despotic, and peremptory in his refusal even to discuss gender equality. He claims to enjoy the Revolution as if it were his alone, reasserts his rights to

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equality as if women did not also have such rights, and then simply says no more about it (lines 74–92 with Gouges’s note). The last claim was virtually true. Maurice Genty has put together a useful list of the decrees by which the Constituent Assembly addressed questions related to the exercise of citizenship. Between December 1789 and September 1791, there were seventy-seven such laws, the first of which meticulously stipulated conditions for active citizenship, but neither this nor, unless I am much mistaken, any of the other seventy-six explicitly mentions women, not even to deny them the vote or eligibility for office!3 The debates of August 1789 that culminated in the piecemeal adoption of the several articles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen were premised on the widely shared belief that such rights are natural, knowable, and articulable and that regular reference to a formal statement would make governments responsible and citizens both good and happy. Yet deputies were silent almost to a man on the issue of women’s rights. The one notable exception was the abbé Sieyès, the great pamphleteer of the previous winter and a member of the first Constitution Committee. He succeeded in persuading other deputies that his own “reasoned exposition” of the distinction between “passive” and “active” citizenship made perfect sense, even as he failed to convince them that they should preface any declaration of rights with something of the sort. He also failed to provide a rationale for the gender exclusion that he incorporated into his concept of passive citizenship: “All inhabitants of a country ought to enjoy rights as passive citizens: All have the right to the protection of their persons, their property, their liberty, etc. But not all are active citizens: Not all have the right to take an active part in the formation of public powers. Women, at least under present conditions, children, foreigners, [and] those who make no contribution to meeting the expenses of government ought to have no active role in influencing public affairs.”4 It is curious that Sieyès does not expand upon what “conditions,” in his judgment, then disqualified women from active citizenship or what potential developments might eventually qualify them for political participation. It is the more curious that no one, even Gouges, seems to have objected at the time to this exclusion, by which women were grouped with minor children, aliens, and the indigent. It bears repeating that Sieyès was exceptional in mentioning women even to exclude them from equal rights.



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One way to approach the problem of documenting a more general traditionalism on the issues addressed in The Rights of Woman is to survey the attitudes of Gouges’s particular heroes. By his rank, his stature as an early darling of other liberals, the enormous wealth that allowed him to subsidize a stable of radical writers, and his attractiveness to her in 1788 and 1789 as a possible patron, the duc d’Orléans would merit precedence. However, in the Instruction for the guidance of electoral assemblies prepared for him in the winter of 1789, Choderlos de Laclos fails to consider women, and even in the Traité ... de la loi du divorce (Treatise on the Law of Divorce), published under Orléans’s name in June 1789, the author makes the argument in terms of a utilitarian Enlightenment, not the egalitarian Revolution, much less a women’s revolution: “[Wives] love the slavery of amour, and they love nothing else.”5 By his heroic military service to liberty on both sides of the Atlantic and his authorship of “the First European Declaration of Rights,” Lafayette had made himself an iconic figure with a particular claim on rights advocacy. Gouges still idolized him in September 1791 (line 489), but in the draft declaration of rights that he had presented to the Assembly in July 1789, he had made no reference to women.6 By his speeches in the National Assembly and advocacy for patriotic causes as a journalist, the comte de Mirabeau had made himself uniquely influential, and after his sudden death in April 1791 Gouges immediately dashed off a theatrical tribute. On her stage the shade of Ninon de l’Enclos tells the great man, newly arrived in the Champs Elysées, that a champion must arise to defend women’s rights. However, even this imagined Mirabeau is noncommittal, and in a posthumous publication the real man speaks from the grave: “Their main purpose is to make babies.”7 What we would call the inveterate sexism of what Gouges called “the stupidest animal” must be a substantial part of the explanation for the failure of these and other Frenchmen to anticipate or to follow her on the rights of women, but there is no evidence that in this respect most contemporary women were any smarter, whatever their activism or their politics. Consider the marchers of the October Days, whose role was crucial in motivating the king formally to accept the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen; the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women, with which Gouges has been erroneously associated; and Madame Roland, whose lively intelligence is documented in a voluminous correspondence and

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c­ elebrated memoirs and whose influence over her husband made her the most important political wife in the period following the publication of The Rights of Woman and within the Girdondin circles with which Gouges herself is also sometimes loosely associated. Gouges alludes to the women of the October Days in her Postamble, where she implies that they had served men’s interests at a time of their need for assistance (lines 321–2). The women’s march on 5 October did prompt the king to sanction the men’s Declaration, which he accepted “purely and simply” that evening after having refused to do so in a letter read to the deputies that very morning. This was a political triumph for patriots, quite apart from the king’s agreement the next morning to relocate to Paris, but there is no evidence whatsoever that the women had sought royal sanction for the men’s Declaration, much less the adoption of a complementary Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Citizen. The one woman’s pamphlet, other than Gouges’s own wholly unsympathetic Antidote, that must have been written and published immediately after the events of that day and in ignorance of the trauma and the triumph of the next morning is uniquely valuable as evidence of the marchers’ understanding of what they had sought to achieve. In it, Marie-Louise Lenoël, an articulate tradeswoman, begins with a straightforward summary of their purposes: the provisioning of Paris, the relocation of the king, and the replacement of politically suspect body guards by patriotic National Guardsmen. That’s it: no rights. Lenoël then proudly reports that the National Assembly had duly prohibited grain exports and promised price regulation for wheat and for meat. That’s it: no rights.8 When officials from the court of the Châtelet got around to taking sworn testimony on the crimes of 6 October, they heard from 388 persons, among whom I count only 13 who were Parisian women who admitted to having marched to Versailles the ­previous day. Their thirteen “depositions” or affidavits generally confirm Lenoël’s statements, although they do also offer hearsay evidence of violent threats against the queen. The women who had been deputized to represent marchers before the Assembly and the king are of particular interest, and by 5 March 1790, when the first of them gave her testimony, it was clear to everyone, court officials and witnesses alike, that the king had publicly committed himself to the Assembly and its constitution-making.9 There need have been no hesitation about claiming credit for rights advocacy, if, that is, that



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had been among their purposes in October. Indeed, that should have served the immediate self-interest of any deponent. None made any such claim. However implausibly, each woman claimed independently to have been forced to march, even if several of them offer evidence of ­others’ purposes. Jeanne Martin had been part of a women’s deputation to the Assembly on the afternoon of 5 October; she reported that they asked for bread. Marie-Catherine-Victoire Sacleux and Catherine Potheau reported the same concern. Madeleine Glain was also part of the deputation to the Assembly; she reported demands for meat as well as bread. Elisabeth Girard confirmed this. ­Louise-Marguerite-Pierrette Chabry is the prize witness: she was the young and beautiful spokesperson for a small deputation admitted to see the king, still only seventeen years old when called to give testimony in late April 1790, and she reported having asked for “bread and food”; she had been given a paper by the king but said nothing about its contents, apparently because she could not read. Louise Rollin and Marie-Rose Barré, who were also very young and also part of the deputation to the king, repeated that bread was the concern. Jeanne-Dorothée Delaissement, Françoise Maillon, MariePierre Louvain, Anne Forets, and Marguerite Paton would say nothing useful about intentions.10 These are the Paris Thirteen: no marcher suggested a feminist rights-consciousness for herself or any other woman. The 375 other deponents were also silent on what is for us – but was not for them – the crucial issue. At some point, even an argument from silence becomes forceful. Scholars sympathetic with radical groups and feminist causes have paid particular attention to the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women, which was formed in May 1793 and closed down at the end of October. We might suppose that, four years into the Revolution, the members’ hypothetical frustration at having been denied active citizenship would have led these most militant activists to press for recognition of their rights and an end to the exclusion of women from voting and office-holding. A late and problematical source, Le Château des Tuileries by Pierre-Joseph-Alexis Roussel, does describe a session of this club at which a certain Sister Monic and Olympe de Gouges herself are given voice. Monic vaunts women warriors and advocates women’s eligibility for public office. So inspired, the society debates the conscription of prostitutes into the army and the admission of women into “all branches of the government”

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before settling on a historical but comparatively trivial demand that “women wear the national cockade.” Next, Gouges agrees that women have ruled men in the past and recommends that they should exploit their sexuality in the present: “Nothing can resist our seductive organ.”11 Unfortunately, perhaps, all this is a pastiche, part of a Napoleonic satire, ridiculing the radical Republic by reducing its ideals to absurdity and vulgarity. The society did advocate a cockade decree, but its members were fervent republicans, even enragées: they first met in the basement of the Jacobins and first served on the grand stage at the expulsion of the Girondin deputies, with whom Gouges was more sympathetic. Not to put too fine a point on it, they were terrorists, to the left of Robespierre, ever vigilant to detect and denounce the enemies of the Republic, and they would have been hostile to her, while she could never have shared their militancy. Nothing from them reflects concern for the principal causes that she had supported in 1791: the rights of women, the reform of marriage law, and the rights of persons of colour. Her dedication to the queen, her support for the king and the émigré princes, and her adulation of Talleyrand and Lafayette would have been more than enough to condemn her in their eyes (lines 1–71, 384–5, 481–93). Furthermore, at the date of the cockade decree, Gouges was a prisoner of the Republic and could not have addressed the society.12 Madame Roland’s voluminous correspondence and prison Mémoires together make her the best-documented case of a highly literate woman who matured as a committed patriot. On the cusp of adulthood, Marie-Jeanne Phlipon had venerated Rousseau and made his wisdom her own. In a letter to her best friend written when she was twenty and still unmarried, she particularly praised both Émile and Julie: “I don’t deny that there are a few paradoxes in his Émile, a few proposals that our ways make impractical. But how many are good and profound! How many useful precepts! How many excellent ideas ...! His Héloïse is a masterpiece of sentiment. The woman who has read it without becoming a better person or at least wanting to become better has a fouled spirit or an insensible mind.”13 Her Rousseau was her “breviary.” Writing to another young woman, Phlipon was ready to accord “a certain superiority” to males and to commit herself to the idea “that the role and the duty of a wife is obedience and devotion.”14



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What makes her case the more telling is that as Madame Roland she was to become a patriotic wife, apparently abler than her husband, without ever questioning traditional gender roles or challenging the men who caucused with her husband in their Paris home. In April 1791, when Gouges was beginning to contemplate a work on women’s rights, Roland was reaffirming contrary beliefs – privately, of course – in a letter to another woman. Even when her husband brought like-minded deputies and their politics into her home, she kept apart: “I do not think that our ways yet permit women to put themselves forward. They ought to inspire the good and to ignite and fan the flames of every patriotic sentiment but must not [even] seem to contribute to the work of politics. They can act openly only when all Frenchmen will have deserved the name of free men. Until then, our frivolity [and] bad ways would make ... [us] at best ridiculous.”15 In her Mémoires Madame Roland admits that she had closely followed discussions among the men, including both Robespierre and Brissot. She would not have missed a session, held four times a week in her residence after meetings of the National Assembly and before those of the Jacobins, but she did not participate or risk even seeming to listen attentively. Instead, she sat silently by herself at a little table by a window, feigning engagement with her own books and correspondence.16 Although Lisa Beckstrand has paired her with Gouges in her Deviant Women of the French Revolution and the Rise of Feminism, she was neither so deviant in her behaviour nor so much a feminist in her writing. Nothing from Roland or other informed persons suggests that Gouges ever influenced her or that the two were ever closely associated. In short, Gouges could not preach to a feminist choir in September 1791, if only because there was no such choir, no grouped sopranos and altos any more than tenors and basses. Indeed, politics apart, I believe that women would have been more likely than men to have found The Rights of Woman offensive. The irreligion of her Postamble would have been a problem for many, of course. But that would not have been the worst of it: the immorality of her Social Contract, judged by more traditional standards, together with the related Article xi of her Declaration and the first related policy proposal in her Postamble, would have tainted the whole. To extend the musical imagery, there was a massive mixed-gender chorus ready to hymn

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the praises of the virtuous wife and devoted mother, even if very few women saw the need to record their opinions on such matters. Geneviève Fraisse has edited a small but carefully selected set of period publications by women on women, including Gouges’s full Rights of Woman. She called upon Marie-Amande Gacon-Dufour, who first published at about the same time as Gouges, to represent others on the eve of the Revolution. In her Mémoire pour le sexe féminin contre le sexe masculin (Memoir for the Feminine Sex against the Masculine Sex), Gacon-Dufour produced a spirited and intelligent defence of women against a recently published accusation – by a foolish man with a fondness for Rousseau – that they were particularly responsible for “the corruption of morals.” She acknowledges that nature makes “our sex susceptible to love” but claims that modesty restrains even the young and that virtue prevents them from corrupting men, then or later, when motherhood has its charms and its joys even within an arranged marriage.17 Having published three other books as well as this substantial pamphlet in 1787, none signed, Gacon-Dufour seems to have fallen silent for the entire decade of the Revolution, before publishing another seventeen books in the first decade of the next century. What could any such woman have made of Gouges’s Social Contract, a quasi-marital agreement in which the man and the woman would effectively license each other to follow any other sexual inclinations at will? What could she have thought of Article xi of her Declaration, in which, as a matter of constitutional right, any mother, married or not, would be authorized to name the father of her child even outside a quasi-marital relationship? What could she have thought of the astonishing proposal of an adoption law that would entitle “the wife of a poor man to have her children adopted by the rich,” that is, to improve upon the shameful example of that notoriously unnatural father, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, by becoming an unnatural mother? Quite apart from the accrued and shared weight of cultural traditions on gender roles, the political circumstances of September 1791 combined to ensure that any argument for women’s rights of the sort envisioned by Gouges would have failed, however made and by whomever. Three seem most important, any one of which might have been sufficient to dash her hopes: the sacralization of the men’s Declaration, the widespread desire for an end to disorder and uncertainty, and the legal obstacles to amending the Constitution.



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First, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen had become sacrosanct. Christine Fauré has emphasized the contingency and the negation of the legislative process that originally produced the Preamble and the seventeen articles decreed on 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, and 26 August 1789.18 By contingency, she means that what was to become the canonical Declaration was not a necessary consequence logically deduced from self-evident first certainties. Its form and content could have been quite different. She makes the point effectively by editing forty-three projects for such a declaration and related statements, most of them from individuals and a few from committees, but all from 1789 alone, other than the great Declaration on which majorities of the twelve hundred deputies, plus or minus, finally settled in separate votes on the several articles. No sooner had Fauré’s book appeared, than Antoine de Baecque promptly added still other projects that Fauré had missed.19 It is significant that none was the work of a woman and that only one, a trivial satire laced with double entendre, even nominally supports anything like women’s rights. The exception, the Déclaration des droits des citoyennes du Palais-Royal (Declaration of the Rights of the Female Citizens of the Palais Royal), is nominally the work of prostitutes. To comprehend the whole, we need not read beyond the first three articles: “Article i. Women are born equal to men and free like them. If they are born free, they ought to remain free until their last sigh. Art. ii. Liberty entails the ownership of one’s body. Therefore, they (fem.) can do whatever they want with their body. Art. iii. Having been declared free by the National Assembly, men can do just about whatever they want ...; if men are free to visit women, women must be free to receive them.”20 The anonymous author or authors surely intended this pronouncement as a hilarious reduction to absurdity of the democratic discourse of natural and civil rights. Along with contingency, negation is a fair characterization of a parliamentary process that was also a revolutionary process. Georges Lefebvre’s now-classic sesquicentennial history of the events of 1789 emphasized the complementary relationship between the denial of aristocratic privilege and the affirmation of equal rights by deputies who looked backward at the Old Regime as much as forward to a more liberal and democratic order.21 Their abstractions made sense in terms of their experience: on principle, they meant to rule out the privileges of the nobles, the legislative sovereignty of ­absolute

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­ onarchs, and the exclusive claims of the established Church. In our m retrospect, we can see many limitations in their work, but they were reasonably consistent and remarkably successful in their attempts to sweep away these aspects of the Old Regime in the course of the next two years. There would be a number of partial political reactions in later years, especially 1794, 1799, and 1814, but no unqualified restoration was ever to be possible. This degree of acceptance comes close to a statement of faith. That is appropriate. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was to become the creed of a civil religion that no patriot could challenge or alter. In August 1791 deputies who had been of many different minds two years earlier revisited their own Declaration. They did replace the singular “property” in Article xvii with the plural “properties,” but that was it. They resisted all other changes. Jacques-Guillaume Thouret reported for the Committee of Revision on 8 August: “This Declaration has acquired, in a manner of speaking, a sacred and religious character. In the past two years, it has become the creed of all Frenchmen. It is printed in all formats, on posters in all public places, in the homes of country dwellers, ... [and in the books] used to teach children to read.”22 From the right, Pierre-Victor Malouet objected fruitlessly that the fundamental principle of popular sovereignty and the ideal of equal rights for unequally qualified men had been “disastrous source[s] of ills,” but he was shouted down by deputies who called the question: “To the vote! To the vote!” From the left, Pierre-Samuel Dupont de Nemours reminded them that when they had suspended work on the Declaration in August 1789, they had envisioned a future return to consider other articles, but when he proposed new social guarantees, he too was shouted down: “The question!”23 This is another case in which the rich iconography of the Revolution can convey widely shared attitudes. Engraving after engraving shows the Declaration as illuminated with a light from above, if not actually handed down from the heavens. Of course, this imagery papered over the fact that it had been the product of acrimonious debates among inexperienced legislators who were attempting to dismantle an ancient and discredited regime. The favourite image of the Declaration inscribed its text on two tablets in the manner of the Ten Commandments.24 Such sacralization made it much more problematical for Gouges to have voiced her impatience with it and to have proposed a woman-made complement.



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Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen (Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen)

A second circumstantial consideration working against the adoption of Gouges’s Declaration was the shared desire of much of the political nation finally to be done with the instability that had characterized public life since the first meeting of the Assembly of Notables in February 1787. Too many changes had come too fast for too long. Traumatic events in the summer of 1791, starting with the king’s flight but not ending with his arrest at Varennes and enforced return to Paris, did push some Frenchmen much further to the left and others further to the right, but a majority in the National Assembly was ready to agree with Antoine Barnave’s great speech

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on 15 July. His purpose was to defend the king, whose powers had been suspended, while avoiding a political prosecution and preserving the prospect of a constitutional monarchy as a regime that could promise not only liberty but also stability. He decried “the indefinite prolongation of our revolutionary fever” and called for “the termination of the Revolution.”25 The ensuing popular protest, demanding a republic, and its forcible repression by the National Guard on 17 July added to anxieties and to pressures for putting an end to radical change. The Assembly, in its final adoption of the Constitution, and the king, in his written and spoken acceptance, formalized the sense of termination – the deputies on 3 September: “The National Assembly, having heard the reading of the constitutional act and having approved it once again, declares that the Constitution is finished”; and Louis xvi on 13 September: “Today, the Constitution is definitively resolved.” An amnesty decree then passed by acclamation, ending the prospect of criminal prosecutions of either royalists who had assisted the king’s attempt to flee or republicans who were considered responsible for the subsequent troubles on the Champ de Mars. This decree helped to make an end to the Revolution itself seem not just possible but actual. Reporting it to the king, deputies assured him that it “erases all traces of a Revolution that [is] henceforth finished.”26 This was precisely the point at which Gouges proposed her Declaration, which reasonable readers could take as a call for a further revolution, at best achievable by peaceful processes, but one that would have had untold consequences in both public and private life. A third consideration working against serious parliamentary consideration of Gouges’s project was not just circumstantial or political but more strictly constitutional. The most straightforward reading of her woman’s Declaration would be that she really did want the National Assembly to adopt it or something very much like it as a complement to the men’s Declaration. If the Constituent Assembly would not or could not get the job done in the few remaining days of its existence, which was inevitable, considering procedural requisites alone, she wanted the task to fall to the Legislative Assembly that would succeed it (lines 95–6). However, the Constitution as finally decreed and accepted would not have allowed either body even to consider such a revision. Title vii, the final part of the complex document, attempted to stabilize



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the new regime by precluding early amendments: Neither the first set of deputies in the Legislative Assembly, whose term was to run from October 1791 to April 1793, nor the second, who were to serve from May 1793 to April 1795, were to be permitted to propose changes. Thereafter, three biennial legislatures would have to agree on a proposed amendment (at the earliest, 1795–97, 1797–99, and 1799–1801); only then could a fourth be augmented to form a Chamber of Revision (at the earliest, 1801). A full decade! There had been sentiment within the Committee of Revision for a thirtyyear moratorium on constitutional change.27 Impatience was essential to Gouges’s sense of herself, and this trait made her particularly ill-suited for the deliberate processes required for organizing and building political support. Then again, others’ impatience at several crucial junctures had moved the Revolution forward. But mid-September 1791 was not such a juncture, not a propitious time for the changes she sought. That, of course, presupposes that Gouges did indeed mean for the National Assembly, either the lame duck deputies of the Constituent or the incoming deputies of the Legislative, to decree her Declaration. If she did, it would almost have to mean either that she was unaware of the constitutional impediments or that she thought that the Constituent would waive them or the Legislative disregard them in her interests. Ignorance of recent parliamentary sessions and the final form of the Constitution seems more likely than such political naïveté. It is not a happy choice. To avoid it, we could consider the contrary presupposition: that is, that Gouges did not hope to effect constitutional change in the immediate future. In this case, we would suppose, her goal would have been to shock readers, men and women alike, into a radical reconsideration of fundamental principles, impelling them toward eventual statutory or constitutional extensions of liberty and equality. But her contemporaries could have turned this supposition inside out and upside down, with some justification. In the immediate past Gouges had opposed the men’s Constitution as decreed and publicly urged the king to reject it. And she had a longer personal history of outspoken support for monarchical authority, for aristocratic privilege, and for the declared opponents of the Revolution, even the most militant émigrés, Artois, Condé, and Calonne. Together with the Dedication to the queen and the very sweep of her

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­ nprecedented demands in The Rights of Woman, all this must have u made some readers suspect that it was only another bad joke like the Declaration of the Rights of the Female Citizens of the Palais Royal. Although the laughter has died out, this sort of joke seems to have had an enduring appeal between 1788 and 1791, perhaps especially among aristocratic males who were all too ready to deride the egalitarian ideals of mere commoners, if only by pointed reference to their inconsistency in not granting equal rights to women. That is no longer funny. But our chosen focus on women’s history can blinker what we see, and our very commitment to egalitarian principles can influence how we interpret it. Even the most learned and most sophisticated academic specialists can find it difficult or impossible to discriminate reliably between men’s sly attempts at humour and serious protest literature by women or on behalf of women. A generation ago Paule-Marie Duhet called attention to this problem, and more recently Suzanne Desan has acknowledged that good scholars have answered questions of probable authorship and intent differently, even that one and the same work, whoever wrote it, can have had mixed motivations, satiric as well as serious.28 Sexual innuendo must always be suspect, while exaggerated demands are often questionable. When they come together, there need be little hesitation. Duhet and Desan agree on making the Requête des femmes pour leur admission aux Etats-Généraux (Women’s Request for Admission to the Estates General) a model of such satire.29 This unsigned pamphlet, nominally addressed to the second Assembly of Notables in 1788, purports to protest the social “slavery” of women and their foreseeable exclusion from the forthcoming Estates. It demands political representation, military commands, and ambassadorial posts. However, all this is laced with double entendre, and the pastiche ends with women on the bottom, murmuring monosyllables, accepting penetration, and seconding motions.30 The very nakedness of what we would call its sexism can distract the modern reader from the veiled purpose of the satire in 1788: he – it must be a he, an aristocratic he – is seriously concerned to ridicule the pretensions of the Third Estate by what seems to him an absurdist exaggeration of the principles of liberal democracy. What, then, of the Requête des dames à l’Assemblée Nationale (Ladies’ Request to the National Assembly), also unsigned and undated but composed just about a year later, after the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen had been sanctioned



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and promulgated and when women’s role in the October Days was recent history? The title echoes the Women’s Request, and from the very start the author or authors protest women’s exclusion “from positions, dignities, honours, and especially the right of sitting among you.” This seems familiar. However, any sexual humour is restrained, and the tone of the whole seems, well, more ladylike. Dominique Godineau probably knows more about the concerns of the women of Paris than anyone else, and having classified the licentious Women’s Request as a satiric pastiche, presumably by a man, she lists the more proper Ladies’ Request with other serious protests by women. Karen Offen quotes it at length as having been among “the most radical feminist statements of the revolution.”31 Duhet had seen different things in the Ladies’ Request and had come to a different conclusion. In brief compass, she had called particular attention to the reference in the text to “the vigorous female intellectuals [académiciennes] of the market,” the numerous ellipses, and line after line of ampersands in the text. She had also cited three of the ten demands with which the pamphlet ends, reading this “False Decalogue” as a caricature of the revolutionary Declaration of Rights: the fifth article would entitle married women to wear the pants some days, taking turns with their husbands; the ninth would allow women to wield marshals’ batons, turn by turn with male general officers; the tenth would permit the ordination of women as priests.32 Duhet did not remark on other articles that demand the equality of the feminine gender in grammar, the equality of wives in households, the equal eligibility of the beautiful and the graceful for judicial offices, and the equal eligibility of women for seats in representative assemblies at all levels, conditional only upon their willingness to take turns speaking, “so that the pretty things that flow from their mouths can be savoured the more easily.”33 Can all this have been serious? I do believe so, insofar as it had a purpose beyond mere amusement, even if its cause was not women’s rights. It was a calculated attempt to undermine equality for men as a constitutional principle. If we return from what I take to be the mock proposals at the end of the pamphlet to the beginning, we do find “the equality of rights for all individuals”: the “humble” cottager and the blue-blooded prince, the “poor” villager and the wealthy seigneur, the “timid” foot soldier and the haughty financier in his splendid carriage, the “modest” curé and the illustrious bishop, the black African, and so on. A brighter day is dawning,

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the golden age being realized, France itself being regenerated, all because “a free people ... has recognized the just equality of rights ... [these last ellipsis points in the original].”34 The sun will shine on women, but that is only their due, given their services to “this astonishing revolution”: they have stoned the archbishop of Paris in June, triumphed over the king in July, made patriotic offerings in September, marched to Versailles in October, strung up victims from street lamps, and filled the galleries of the Assembly, abandoning “the shameful distaff and the trivial and tiresome tasks of the household.”35 This is not best read as militant feminism; its very claims for women make better sense as bitter mockery from an alienated male opponent of the Revolution. Discriminating between the two could have been difficult even for contemporaries, and that fact made the reception of Gouges’ pamphlet, serious as it was, problematical. Patriots had seen too much of what we disdain to notice. Take the Véritable Analyse des deux principaux articles de la Constitution: Liberté et égalité (True Analysis of the Two Principal Articles of the Constitution: Liberty and Equality), signed by “The Good Female Citizen or The French Ladies to Their Fellow Citizens,” which Godineau has classified with serious defences of the rights of women, written by women. I find it a bit suspicious that the authorial persona shifts back and forth between a patriotic mother who begins by admitting that women talk too much and a “self-constituted” group of wives who say that they draw their strength from their loving feelings and “seek only to reanimate impulses of humanity and beneficence.”36 More importantly, the True Analysis is not primarily concerned with women. Rather, it is a long (forty-two-page) and impassioned rearguard defence of seigneurs, nobles, and émigrés in the form of aggressive attacks on “the system of unlimited liberty” and “the equality of rights.” The first half of the pamphlet culminates in a denunciation of the avaricious spirit that has supplanted the seigneurial generosity of the good old days and ends with a paragraph of nominally feminist protest: “So, those are the fruits of that unworthy liberty: All men are born free, and [yet] women are slaves? More numerous than you, often wealthier, always harder-working, they have no right to that so-called liberty. [They’re] less free than the Negroes ..., free [only] to be your servants. Keep it, keep your fantasy! The sex is less ridiculous and less inconsistent than you: Men are born free!”37



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The pamphlet is undated, but it must have been composed in the summer of 1791 at a time of counter-revolutionary threats by militant émigrés. Its author was probably a man who knew that the Constitution was being revised and hoped against hope to expose its myths and to recall émigrés to a restored world in which noble sons might succeed noble fathers.38 The bogey was equality. Emphasis on visible differences in the relative physical attractiveness of women, which any male observer could recognize, was a way of arguing the essential inequality of men: “Isn’t it obvious that there’s a difference between an ugly, little, ignoble creature and a beautiful, wise, and virtuous woman, a good mother, a worthy wife, who adds to these fine qualities talents of elocution, modesty, and the art of pleasing? ... Well, then! There are striking differences between objects of the same sort and similar structure.”39 Perhaps a woman could have written these lines, but I doubt it. Certainly, the unknown author’s goal is to explode the ideology of equal rights, not to extend it. A satirist from the opposite end of the political spectrum could also toy with ideas of women’s rights. On 10 August 1791 the Journal des droits de l’homme (Journal of the Rights of Man) devoted a few paper-thin pages to an article entitled “The Rights of Woman.” Godineau seems to take this one, too, more seriously than I do. The author calls the men’s Declaration “the finest work to have sprung from the heads of our legislators” and, tongue-in-cheek, suggests the need for a complement on the rights of woman. Why? This would show gallant men’s gratitude for “the ideas, pleasant memories, and tender sentiments” that women have inspired and aroused. They know how to move men by sighs, tears, and smiles. The author concludes by proposing a draft decree in something like good form: “Women, who are more intelligent and more enlightened than their husbands, will emerge to devote themselves to public affairs rather than remaining at home, and their husbands will take care of the children at home. If any are still very young, [their fathers] will warm their beds, change their diapers, and await the return of their wives to give them the breast.”40 This passage repeats the old trope of the inversion of gender roles in a world upside down, and the last word on the domesticated daddy, the hungry baby, and mama’s breast recalls what we would call a quintessentially sexist argument against allowing women active political roles. The Journal of the Rights of Man was to have only a short run, just a month from the end of July to the end of August 1791, but

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any patient reader of the daily issues can now see a consistent editorial stance. The dedication to the principles of the Declaration in its masthead is sincere, but it comes from a man convinced that the king, the ministers, the deputies, and the municipal government under Bailly and Lafayette are all so many conspirators in league with one another and with the Austrian enemy against liberty and equality. Again and again, the author protests the continued sufferance of the criminal king after the Flight to Varennes, the forceful repression of the republican left, especially its journals, after the Massacre of the Champ de Mars, and the accommodationist spirit that dominated the National Assembly in its desire to salvage the monarchy in a completed constitution. Gouges could not have been receptive to any of this, and, contrarily, nothing else from the Journal reflects advocacy for the rights of woman. This very issue also includes a transparently satirical letter from Pius vi to Louis xvi in which the pope congratulates the king on the flight, and in the next issue the anonymous journalist, formerly “the author of The Devil’s Journal,” retracts what he had published the day before.41 Antoine de Baecque has suggested that sexual references and rights-consciousness made happier bedfellows in 1791 than we can easily imagine. Writing on corporeal imagery in period politics, he argues that it came to a head that September with the adoption of the Constitution: “Playing on the expression ‘Right of men,’ the Declaration becomes the expression of a new, powerful ability to fuck and procreate.” He reproduces an engraving from that month in which “The Democratic Woman,” modestly clothed but with raised brows, narrowed eyes, and what I take to be a smirk, holds up the “right of man” on a rolled sheet of paper that is unmistakably tipped like a phallus; the caption adopts poissard language for “The Good Decree.” Of course, the adjective droit means “straight” as well as “right.” De Baecque’s interpretation is that “she masturbates it” so as to produce “a ‘political seed’ that will no doubt change her condition as a citizen.” However, I see no warrant for any suggestion that the woman means to lay claim to a manlike potency for herself or active citizenship for all women. If she thinks that the decree is “good,” it may simply be because she takes real pleasure in the exercise of the “right of man.” The joke, a man’s joke, seems to be that, wink, wink, women like it.42 A fortnight after Gouges published her Rights of Woman, the royalist Journal of the Court published its own “Declaration of the



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La Démocrate: Ah l’bon décret! (The democratic woman: Ah, the good decree!)

Rights of Woman and of the Citizen.” This one is perfectly clear. Article 1: “Women are born but do not remain equal in rights.” Article 2: “These rights are beauty, cleanliness, firmness, elasticity, and moderate resistance.” Article 3: “The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the person of their husbands.” Article 4: “Liberty consists in doing anything that doesn’t really hurt anyone else.” Article 5: “The female citizen summonsed or seized in virtue of the laws of love ... becomes guilty by resisting too much.” And so on.43 The contributors to the Journal of the Court hardly intended to extend rights democratically. They wanted to expose the folly and hypocrisy of the National Assembly, and they also wanted to savour the cleverness of their own satire. Had Gouges unwittingly provoked this satire of what she took seriously? Possibly. But it was an old joke, repeatedly enjoyed before

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her Rights of Woman. After all, the same Journal had amused its reactionary readers and attacked its enemies earlier that same year by attributing something of the sort to the young Madame de Staël, apparently confident that the laugh lines were already so familiar that they did not have to be encored in order to be enjoyed. Without their suggestive winking, Gouges does touch on questions of sexual relations even in the Declaration and especially in the Postamble, and this may have been enough to make contemporaries wonder: Can she be serious? Is this only another sly attack on the principles of the Revolution?

an astonishing intellectual breakthrough and gouges’s place in a pantheon It was the Revolution of 1789 and its Declaration that eventually inspired Gouges’s feminism, more or less as it also inspired, quite independently, somewhat similar sentiments in a few contemporaries, French and foreign-born. Among the former, three men, all to be deputies in the National Convention, are most prominent: the marquis de Condorcet, Gilbert Romme, and Pierre Guyomar. I shall argue that, even if Gouges failed politically, as they did also, she achieved more conceptually in her Rights of Woman, without having had the advantage of anything like their formal educations or their political experience. Among the foreign-born men and women of the era, Mary Wollstonecraft is unquestionably the greatest feminist, although the works of a certain Mademoiselle Jodin, Etta Palm d’Aelders, and Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel add to the evidence that the French Revolution inspired feminist or proto-feminist thinking in others. Again, Gouges’s work bears favourable comparison. It would not make much sense historically to seek or to claim to have found the first feminist, but, for all her failings – and they were many – she produced the epochal feminist document of the era to set alongside the men’s Declaration. In received scholarship, intellectual historians have preferred Condorcet for that distinction, as students of English and American literature have preferred Wollstonecraft. There is good reason for both preferences. In parts of French publications that might easily have been overlooked in 1788, Condorcet theoretically extended the American principles of 1776 and made a philosophical argument that women, as “sensate beings, capable of reasoning, and possess-



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ing moral ideas,” are thereby “absolutely the same” as men in natural rights and ought to be the same in political rights.44 Thus the great philosophe does come first. His anticipation and refutation of others’ objections to women’s political rights was also already far more effective than anything that Gouges would ever produce. Yet his idealism is qualified. Before the Revolution he consistently made the exercise of political rights conditional upon property ownership and imposed other qualifications that would particularly affect women: “It must be observed that the change proposed here presupposes a prior [reform] of civil laws that would necessarily produce [a change] in manners and morals and another in the education of women ... before the new order could be established.” So enlightened legislators in some ideal future would have to transform the property structure and marriage itself, and then men and women would have to change their ways and women would have to be (re-) educated? And even then there would be the realities of sex differences: pregnancies, lying-in, and maternal nursing, he concedes, would together rule out any public function with regular responsibilities for any married woman in her child-bearing years.45 On 3 July 1790, as the lead article for an issue of a new journal with a small but elite subscription list that included Sieyès, Talleyrand, Bailly, and Lafayette, Condorcet published “Sur l’Admission des femmes au droit de cité” (On the admission of women to the rights of citizenship).46 Here he restates his earlier case while refining his arguments and abandoning several crippling qualifications from 1788: “For the exclusion of women not to be an act of tyranny, one would have either to prove that the natural rights of women are not absolutely the same as those of men or to show that they aren’t capable of exercising them. Well, the rights of men are due only to the fact that they are sensate beings, susceptible of acquiring moral ideas and of reasoning on those ideas. Thus women, having these same qualities, necessarily have equal rights.”47 Condorcet then devotes the rest of the piece to refuting counter-arguments based on all manner of supposed incapacities related to others’ assumptions concerning the physical, intellectual, and emotional differences between the sexes, the marital and parental obligations of wives and mothers, and the demands of politics and statesmanship. All this is most impressive. On the other hand, it is so pleasing to academics now in part because it was already all a little academic even then. As an

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e­ xperienced writer and profound thinker, Condorcet constructed a disputation and won it with apparent ease. But despite all his advantages over Gouges, he never rivalled her boldness, her verve, or her willingness to put forth feminist proposals for political implementation. His best opportunities would have come in 1789 in the course of the public discussion of projects for a declaration of rights, before the Declaration of the National Assembly had been set in stone, and in 1793 in the course of preparing a Girdondin committee draft of a republican constitution for the National Convention, before the Jacobin alternative was finally adopted. Not for him Gouges’s impatience, her poor sense of timing, or her slapdash composition of bits and pieces by dictation: both his 1789 project of a declaration and his 1793 project of a constitution were timely, coherent, and comprehensive. Yet neither has ever been considered in scholarly discussions of his feminism for the good and sufficient reason that in each he abandons his own earlier feminism. Early in 1789, before the opening of the Estates General, Condorcet was ready with an elaborate Déclaration des droits (Declaration of Rights). Its fifth section, itself much longer than the entire Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, concerns equality. The philosopher begins crisply with first certainties: “Men having joined in society for the protection of their natural rights, and these rights being the same for all, society must ensure for each the enjoyment of the same rights.” Clear enough. “All citizens without distinction will have an equal share in the right of citizenship, that is, the election of representatives ... All citizens will be equally eligible for election to all positions.” Clearer still. But then come five “natural conditions” for citizenship, each entailing exclusions: the propertyless, the criminal, the mentally incompetent, the under-aged, and those “in dependence” must all be excluded.48 Is this clear enough? What of the single woman who, like Gouges, has money but no landed property? What of the married woman who is dependent on her husband? What of any woman? Condorcet avoids the word. Yet he was a systematic thinker and a careful craftsman, and he mentions “the sex” when considering impermissible restrictions on equality and “each sex” when stipulating the “laws necessary to establish equality.” First, no law can mandate preferential inheritance by birth order or gender; second, all civil, criminal, and administrative legislation must respect the “absolute equality among all citizens,” whatever their marital status or



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­gender.49 That is a lot, but it is all; there is no mention of political rights for women. Four long years later the enlightened philosopher who had con­ ditionally favoured rights for some women had become a patriotic journalist on record as favouring rights for all women, and this jour­ nalist, in turn, had become a politician elected to the Convention and entrusted with the principal role in preparing a draft constitu­ tion for its consideration. In an overlong explanatory discourse (80 pages in the octavo edition of his works) that was read out by Condorcet, spelled by a second speaker, in the course of presenting this overlong draft (another 85 pages) on 15–16 February 1793, he rehearses the argument that he had used for the rights of women in 1788 and again in 1790, in almost the same words, but he effectively retracts what had been his own conclusion. He does say that “polit­ ical rights ought to belong to all individuals with an entire equality,” and he does now criticize the Constitution of 1791 for having made active citizenship conditional upon property ownership. But now it is all “men” who are endowed by nature with “political rights” that “derive essentially from their quality as sensate beings, susceptible of moral ideas, and capable of reasoning.”50 Thus Condorcet seems to open the door wide for the first inclusion of women in the politi­ cal life of a modern democracy – only to refuse to usher them in. His new Project for a Declaration of Rights never mentions women in its thirty-three articles. His monumental Project for a Constitu­ tion care­fully defines citizenship without mentioning women or dis­ cussing gender.51 In any case, the deputies voted to print the whole unwieldy proposal without debating it, let alone adopting it. Condorcet had been very interested in education, although late in 1792 his own energies as a deputy had been redirected to work on the new constitution. On 20 December it was Romme who reported a project from the Committee on Public Instruction that was avowedly indebted to the philosopher-deputy. Both men under­ stood that “women ought also to have a place in the general sys­ tem of public education,” for their own, for their children’s, and for their husbands’ sakes.52 Romme’s report shows some of the utopian grandiosity that marks Condorcet at his most visionary. Its concept even of primary schooling for boys and girls from ages six to nine is expansive: in addition to the rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic, young citizens are to be educated in the law and in their rights and duties, in the techniques of agriculture and the trades, and

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in the fundamentals of morals. But having proclaimed that “all citizens of every age and both sexes” are to be freely offered “all human knowledge,” Romme then qualifies these universals. After all, it is not necessary, is not possible, and would not be useful for all persons to master all knowledge. It comes as something of a letdown for us, when we turn to the ten-year-olds and secondary schooling; in one breath, he says that it is “necessary for all citizens” and “consequently the right of all”; in the next, he says that it is “not for the two sexes,” that is, not for girls.53 They are thereby unprepared for broader social roles as adults. On 4 April Romme was appointed to a new committee to reconsider Condorcet’s “Girondin constitution” from February, along with over three hundred other proposals that had been received since the fall of the monarchy. Working quickly, he was ready by 17 April to present a new-modelled Declaration that would be inclusive with respect to gender, positing that all individuals “without distinction of [marital] status or sex” belong to what he variously calls the body politic, the people, the nation, or the commonwealth. Lest there be any doubt, he explicitly mentions “fathers, mothers of families, [and] those who are old enough to be [parents].” The wifeand-mother is still the ideal, even if the husband-and-father cannot speak for her politically. In his proposal for a Declaration of Rights, no fewer than eight articles specify that the constitutional guarantees pertain to “the one sex and the other.” The rest of the document is also inclusive by gender. However, Romme’s proposal was a dead letter: having heard all this, the deputies voted to print it for “the great light” that it would beam “into [every] heart.” Then they themselves moved on to other more pressing business.54 Guyomar’s case is simpler still. As the self-styled “partisan of political equality” for women as well as men, he too attempted to realize more of the democratic promise of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in a new republican constitution. In an undated pamphlet, he advocated that women be admitted to primary assemblies, which he would invest with broad powers, sanctioning and even revising laws as well as electing the legislators. At the same time, he remained so wedded to traditional ideas of gender roles that he could not imagine wives without domestic duties or mothers without particular responsibilities for young children: “A woman cannot abandon the household.” His solution was



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to involve them in local assemblies, while denying them roles on the grander stages of the department or the nation.55 Of course, I am the partisan of Gouges. Condorcet, Romme, and Guyomar were indeed willing to argue variously on behalf of women, each at his own time and in his own way. But as a woman whose great idea was to extend the principles of the men’s Declaration across traditionally gendered lines, Gouges was more than their equal. Whatever her idiosyncrasy as a pamphleteer and her inability to persuade the legislators of 1791 to consider her proposals, she was their superior as a feminist. Her Rights of Woman can also withstand comparison with the most ambitious works of foreign-born authors who, like her, were inspired by the Revolution to reconsider women’s issues in light of its principles: Jodin’s Vues législatives sur les femmes, adressées à l’Assemblée Nationale (Legislative Views on Women, Addressed to the National Assembly) and Palm’s Appel aux Françoises sur la régénération des moeurs et nécessité de l’influence des femmes dans un gouvernement libre (Appeal to Frenchwomen on the Regeneration of Morals and Necessity of Women’s Influence in a Free Government) before Gouges’s signal work and Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects and Hippel’s Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Weiber (On Improving the Civil Status of Women) afterward. Jodin’s Legislative Views (1790) is the work of a woman who identifies herself on her title page as being an unmarried daughter of a citizen of Geneva. That marital status was probably as crucial for her willingness to put herself forward in print on policy questions as her origins in the Protestant republic or the evocation of ­Rousseau’s distinctive public identity as the Citizen of Geneva. It cannot be accidental that Gouges, Palm, and Wollstonecraft were also personally independent, without the potentially inhibiting super­visory presence of either a husband or a father. Yet the concerns of marriage and the family predominate in Jodin’s initial outcry against prostitution, her central proposal for women’s family tribunals, and her final advocacy on behalf of a divorce law. This is all highly moralistic, even puritanical, and she is quite ready to appeal to “the sacred titles of female citizens,” that is, “wives and mothers,” otherwise stated: “chaste wives, tender mothers, [or] in short, true female citizens.”56

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When Jodin informally declares her version of the rights of women, it is not to demand that men share in “the administration of [public] affairs” but to recommend that women play the leading role in re-establishing good order in private households. Duty looms as large as rights, and the greatest virtue for a woman remains her chastity. That is why the fires of prostitution must be extinguished and its vermin exterminated.57 Although she asks that women be made “the legislators of morals,” what she really wants is for them to serve in quasi-judicial roles on “women’s courts,” charged particularly to reconcile troubled marriages and to discipline wayward wives and daughters. Much as Gouges was to cast Marie-Antoinette in the role of a regal patroness, Jodin imaginatively robes Madame Elisabeth, the king’s unmarried sister and a paragon of rectitude, and the duchesse d’Orléans, another eminent figure, as presiding officers for her tribunals.58 But the two authors are more different than not, and if Gouges is to set the standard for period feminism, Jodin is, at best, a proto-feminist. Palm was made of sterner stuff. In her Appeal to Frenchwomen (1791), directed at an intended audience quite different from the deputies of the National Assembly addressed in Gouges’s Declaration, she collected various short pieces and published them as evidence of her patriotism, which had been publicly challenged. In even the earliest of these pieces, from December 1790, she had felt the need to protest against both “the injustice of laws that favour men at the expense of women” and the subtler attitudes about women and gender roles that affected even them. This position already made her far more radical than Jodin, but she could still write of “the holiest duties” that rightly bind wives and mothers, even while protesting their domination by despotic husbands.59 Although Palm, too, showed the due regard for good morals that was expected of women, as the year 1791 wore on, she became far more concerned with the declared enemies of the Revolution. Unlike Gouges, who was not a club woman herself and did not show much interest in organizing other women for patriotic purposes, Palm was an active member of the Cercle Social, which envisioned a network of patriotic clubs at the ward level for female citizens who could together maintain surveillance, assist the deserving poor, disseminate political information, and encourage patriotic sentiments. By mid-year, in a circular addressed to the sections of Paris in the name of her club, she would voice a radical feminism: “For too many cen-



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turies, European civilization has restricted women to a narrow concern for their families ... Deprived of a civil identity, [they have been] subjugated to the arbitrary will of family members, always enslaved, at all ages: daughters to their parents; wives to the caprices of their husbands [who dominate them] as masters; and even when freed by fate from these despots, a servile prejudice [concerning] their sex ... has held them bent under its laws.”60 What Palm did not attempt is as important: she never tried to define the rights of women in anything like a formal Declaration and never tried to explain how marital and parental relationships might be restructured. The relationship of Wollstonecraft’s feminism to the French Revolution merits far more attention than I can give it here. Before 1789 she had worked within the modest limits of traditional women’s interests: the education of girls, religion and morals, and romantic fiction. Then came the Revolution and her abrupt entry into the world of men’s arguments over politics, starting with the Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), in which she answered Burke’s Reflections, defended her mentor and benefactor Richard Price, and anticipated Thomas Paine. Her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) has become an enduring feminist classic, its passionate protest against the limiting aspects of a genteel femininity still resonating. This response is a tribute to her spirit and intelligence, which Gouges could also boast, and to her much broader reading and greater discipline as a writer who had been trained in the school of Joseph Johnson and the Analytical Review, which set her apart.61 It is also a function of the very generality of her concerns and her complementary failure to address more particularly the political realities of her place and time. If Wollstonecraft is to set the standard for all eighteenth-century feminisms, Gouges will fall far short. The pamphleteer was apparently incapable of a comparably sweeping cultural critique of the ways in which women were seduced by ideals that narrowed their horizons and subjected them to dependent roles. On the other hand, if it is Gouges who sets the standard for a revolutionary feminism, it is Wollstonecraft who falls far short. The Englishwoman did address Talleyrand in her Dedication, having read far enough into his Report on Public Education to challenge his utilitarian argument for maintaining the exclusion of women from public life. In her Advertisement and in chapter 9, “Of the Pernicious Effects Which Arise from Unnatural Distinctions in Society,” she did hint that in some future work she would address “the laws

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respecting women, which ... make an absurd unit of a man and his wife.” And she did hint broadly that “women ought to have representatives” and so a “direct share ... in the deliberations of government.”62 Nevertheless, her clarion call in the work as a whole and its “concluding reflections” was for “a revolution in female manners,” not an overthrow of governing institutions or a definite reform of the laws concerning marriage and the family.63 In the five and a half years that were to remain to her, Wollstonecraft did accomplish other things, including defending the French Revolution of 1789 for a British readership in 1794, itself a feat, but she never produced any concrete proposal comparable to Gouges’s Declaration or her Social Contract. For the further reaches of revolutionary feminism as a phenomenon, we can look to East Prussia and works published anonymously by the mayor of Königsberg, Hippel, a lawyer, minor novelist, and familiar of Immanuel Kant. Although he was to be a lifelong bachelor, in his young manhood he had conceived of and eventually published a book of reflections and advice, Über die Ehe (On Marriage). In May 1792 he produced an enlarged edition, revised to reflect his evolving attitudes toward women and marriage from something like misogyny and male supremacy to a much greater respect for women and a more egalitarian view of marriage. Later in that year he also published On Improving the Civil Status of Women, in which he decried men’s systematic injustice and made a case for women’s equal rights, as such.64 Timothy Sellner speculates that Hippel’s late feminism in this second work may have owed a great deal to factors other than the French Revolution, including his experience of a prolonged romantic affair that ended tragically when his beloved committed suicide after bearing another man’s child, his repeated encounters as a lawyer with cases in which women were unjustly treated, and his role as a magistrate working for rational reforms in the spirit of enlightened despotism.65 That is all quite plausible, but the chronology of his publications is telling, as is his attentiveness in the new book to France, the ideal of equal rights, and the failure of Frenchmen to extend that ideal across lines of gender.66 Compared with Wollstonecraft at the time of her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, for instance, he was remarkably well-informed about the Revolution. But Hippel was no Gouges, no Wollstonecraft. While they challenge their readers, he chats with his, informally and i­nterminably,



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beginning with an invitation that they laugh with him if they cannot take him seriously. He presumes a male readership, and his work lacks all sense of urgency or commitment. He does end with chapters on “Suggestions for Improvement” and “The Application of the Ideas Proposed” that criticize the French Revolution for its failures to implement its egalitarian principles, but although he was a trained lawyer and an experienced administrator, his own “suggestions” and “applications” remain frustratingly vague. As a public figure with a career to protect, his last word – in 429 pages – is to discourage any critic from trying to pull off the cloak of anonymity with which he has covered his head.67 I conclude more or less as I began, my initial claims for Gouges still seeming perfectly justifiable. In the early years of the French Revolu­ tion, from 1788 to 1793, she published on current affairs and public policy more often and more boldly than any other woman. She made a more formal and more sweeping demand for the extension of full civil and political rights to women than any prior person, male or female, French or foreign. She appreciated the linkage between the public sphere and a private sphere and tried to rally other women behind a radical extension of liberty and equality into domestic relationships. And she also did what she could to support the extension of rights to free persons of colour and free blacks and to vindicate the full humanity of slaves in the Caribbean colonies. These are not trivial matters, and the one pamphlet in which she addressed the entire range of these concerns is The Rights of Woman. It is an aston­ishing achievement. In the end we can appreciate additional wrinkes in this history. The Revolution that ignored Gouges’s claims also inspired them and those of the other feminist or proto-feminist authors whose works I have briefly reviewed. And it is at least worth wondering whether, paradoxically, the many satires of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen that preceded Gouges’s pamphlet may have also suggested to her and to others a serious consideration of extending its principles to women. That is, utterly insincere advocacy of an equality of rights for women as a way of ridiculing an equality of rights for men, even if understood to be counter-revolutionary satire, can have contributed to the eruption of revolutionary feminism. Providence moves in mysterious ways.

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APPENDIX appendix

femme Facsimile of Les Droits de la femme

LES DROITS DE LA F E M M E .

A L A- R E I N E. MADAME, P E I T faite an langage ijiie Ton tlent ,uix Rois , je n'ewiploiera.i point ['adulation des Courtisans ptyur vous faii'C hommagc de cette smgulj^re production. Mon. b u t , Madame, est de vtrns parler tranche merit ; je n'ai pas attendu , pour m'exjjritner ainst, I'c'poque de la Libertti ; je me suls rnontriie avec la m&me encrgic dans un temps ou 1'aveuglernent cles Despotes pimiasait: une si noble audace. Lorsque tout 1'Empire YOUS accvisait et vous rendait r*;sponsatile de ses calamities , jnoi seule , dans un temps de trouble et d'ongc, j'ai eu la force de prendre votre diffuse. Jc ji'ai jamals pu me persuader ^u'une Princesse, 6lev&v au seiri des grandeurs, cftt tons les vices de la bas^esse, A

( 2 )

Oui , Madame , lorsque j'ai vu le glaive leve stir vous , j'ai jete mcs observations entre ce glaive etla victime ; inaisiLUJnurd'hui que je vcris qu'on observe de pres la ibule tie mvrtins scHi