This is a story about a democratically-elected male leader with authoritarian tendencies who demonized and disappeared his female political rival.

The French Revolution started in 1789 with the storming of the Bastille. That year, two members of the new legislature, l'Assemblée nationale constituante (the “National Assembly”), wrote La déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen (“Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen”). The Declaration of the Rights of Man will sound familiar to anyone who has read the U.S.’ Declaration of Independence. (Indeed, the French authors consulted Thomas Jefferson when they composed their Declaration.) The Declaration asserted that men’s rights are universal, and “the natural and imprescriptible rights of man” are “liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.” It established freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and forbade arbitrary arrests.

In October 1789, French women rioted in Parisian marketplaces over the scarcity/high prices of bread. These riots culminated in the Women’s March on Versailles, during which thousands of women sacked the city armory, marched to Versailles, confronted King Louis XVI, and forced the royal family to return with the protesters to Paris. After the Women’s March, a group of French women submitted a petition for égalité (women's “equality”) to the National Assembly. Although French citizens submitted thousands of petitions to the legislature, many of them repeatedly, the National Assembly never accepted or debated the Women's Petition.

The Declaration of the Rights of Man claimed to establish the rights of “all men,” but it actually only included “independent” men over age 25 who paid a poll tax. It provided no rights for women, the poor, or enslaved Black persons in the French colonies.

La declaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne (“Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen”)

Olympe de Gouges was a famous feminist, abolitionist, playwright, and political activist in France. She rose to political fame with her pamphlet Réflexions sur les hommes négres (“Reflections on Black men”) and her anti-slavery stage play, L’esclavage des Noirs (“Enslavement of Blacks”). In Réflexions, de Gouges asserted that “Men everywhere are equal… Kings who are just do not want slaves; they know that they have submissive subjects.”

Two years after the National Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man but conspicuously failed to consider the Women’s Petition, Olympe de Gouges published a new pamphlet, La déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne (“Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen”).

She opened the Declaration of the Rights of Woman with a thunderous question: “Man, are you capable of being just? A woman asks the question: you will allow her that right at least. Tell me? Who gave you the sovereign right to oppress my sex?” The rest of de Gouges’ Declaration closely mimicked the Declaration of the Rights of Man, except it substituted all references to men’s rights for the inalienable liberties of women. Here are some highlights:

• “Considering that ignorance, forgetting, or contempt for the rights of women are the only causes of ... government corruption, [we have] resolved to set out, in a solemn declaration, the natural, unalterable and sacred rights of women…”
• Women have a right to liberty, security, property, and resistance to oppression.
• “The only limit to the exercise of the natural rights of woman is the perpetual tyranny of man who opposes them” and that “these limits must be reformed by the laws of nature and reason”.
• “Women have the right to mount the scaffold, they must also have the right to mount the speaker's rostrum.” That is: if the state can subject women to capital punishment, it must also extend them the right to free speech and political representation. This particular line was one of the most popular in France in 1791.
• “[Y]et can reason pretend that all other paths to fortune are closed to a woman purchased by a man, like a slave on the coasts of Africa. ... If the master frees the slave with no recompense at an age when the slave has lost all her charms, what becomes of this unfortunate woman? The plaything of scorn, even the doors of generosity close on her; she is poor and old, they say, why did she not understand how to make a fortune?” In her own way, this quote demonstrated de Gouges' understanding of the concept of intersectionality. Her hypothetical about the old freedwoman savagely critiques racism, sexism, ageism, and classism in two eloquent sentences.

In the postscript of the Declaration, de Gouges exhorted her sisters: “Woman, wake up; the tocsin [drum] of reason is resounding throughout the universe: acknowledge your rights!”

She added another piece to her postscript, the Forme du contrat social de l’homme et de la femme (“Social Contract Between Man and Woman”), modeled on the Social Contract of Enlightenment darling and fellow Frenchman Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In de Gouges' Social Contract, she argued for women's equality in marriage and recompense for “widows and young women cheated by the false promises of men they have become fond of”. She added that marriage was “the tomb of love and trust,” and even wrote a boilerplate prenuptial agreement where a hypothetical man and woman contracted to protect their assets before marriage.

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