Olympe de Gouges: ILE with an accent on SEE

"Man alone has raised his exceptional circumstances to a principle. Bizarre, blind, bloated with science and degenerated - in a century of enlightenment and wisdom - into the crassest ignorance, he wants to command as a despot a sex which is in full possession of its intellectual faculties; he pretends to enjoy the Revolution and to claim his rights to equality in order to say nothing more about it."

"Madame de Gouges is one of those women to whom one feels like giving razor blades as a present, who through their pretensions lose the charming qualities of their sex... Every woman author is in a false position, regardless of her talent." - a hostile contemporary review

One of the most famous pre-XIX century feminist figures, de Gouges (1748-1793) a French playwright and political activist who wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen met her end at the revolutionary guillotine, was the embodiment of Talanov-style "anti-Di" non-conformism. 

Married against her will, she never re-married after her husband died in a river floof accident several months after the marriage, later calling the institution "the tomb of trust and love". Soon after she began a relationship with a wealthy businessman from Lyons, de Rozières, moving to Paris with her son from the marriage. While nobody likes forced marriages, her willingness to denounce the institution (plenty of people would react in a "marriage good in general, forced marraage bad" way) reflects both ILE's free-thinking nature and SEE's non-conformism. 

In Paris, she began her writing career. From the start, she engaged in grand, utopian program-building (which is more ILE or even EIE than IEE, who generally uses the flood of original ideas to reconcile and unite people with each other, and, while valuing the right to deviate, rarely engage in projecteering to replace the whole total order — even Woody Guthrie's radicalism was more ethical identification with the poor, carried inside a movement as a fellow undisciplined traveller). She was friends with many writers, was socially skilled enough to be invited into salons, pushed her plays into the theaters by persistence and personal connection, and was not above bending the truth to gain social status — she adopted a "noble" name, and encouraged rumors that she was the illegitimate daughter of a nobleman  (impossible to verify or debunk) or even Louis XV himself (which is definitely not true), which points to a certain social-charmer SEE accent. 

Despite this, her political sympathies were by no means aristocratic. She signed her public letters with "citoyenne" (a double-challenge both to monarchism and patriarchy), and her anti-slavery play, L'Esclavage des Noirs, created a major scandal, with a lawsuit against it and hecklers paid to sabotage the performance. As Britannica notes, "she became active in political causes and took up social issues that ranged from road improvement to divorce, maternity hospitals, abolitionism, and the rights of orphaned children and of unmarried mothers, and she wrote prolifically in defense of her ideas." In 1791, in response to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, she wrote her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, where she claimed,

A woman has the right to mount the scaffold. She must equally have the right to mount the speaker's platform.

The whole argument there is ILE-style: take an established framework, run it on an unexpected case, and expose the contradiction.

She constantly wrote pamphlets throwing off ideas faster than any could be developed, in a very stereotypical Ne manner. Despite her salon charm, she was more the non-conformist Alceste than the compromiser Philinte from IEE Moliere's play, drafting whole new social arrangements (a voluntary patriotic tax, national workshops, maternity hospitals, a rewritten marriage contract) and standing almost alone against the Jacobins with a poster that sealed her fate. She had advocated against Louis XVI's execution, writing that he was guilty as a king, but innocent as a man, which already made her a persona non grata in more radical circles, and after she published a poster "The Three Urns, or the Salvation of the Fatherland, by an Aerial Traveller," demanding a plebiscite for a choice among three potential forms of government: the first, a unitary republic, the second, a federalist government, or the third, a constitutional monarchy (echoes of Gavriil Myasnikov's demands on the young Soviet republic), she was arrested and eventually guillotined. And this dissent against whoever holds the orthodoxy in favor of multiplying choices is also a characteristic ILE, and anti-Di, move.

Comments