Olympe de Gouges
| Olympe de Gouges | |
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| Born |
7 May 1748 Montauban, Guyenne-and-Gascony, Kingdom of France |
| Died | 3 November 1793 (aged 45) Place de la Révolution, Paris, French First Republic |
| Occupation | Activist, abolitionist, feminist, playwright |
| Spouse(s) | Louis Aubry (1765-1766) |
| Children | General Pierre Aubry de Gouges |
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Olympe de Gouges (French: [olɛ̃p də ɡuʒ]; 7 May 1748 – 3 November 1793), born Marie Gouze, was a French playwright and political activist whose feminist and abolitionist writings reached a large audience.
She began her career as a playwright in the early 1780s. As political tension rose in France, Olympe de Gouges became increasingly politically engaged. She became an outspoken advocate for improving the condition of slaves in the colonies of 1788. At the same time, she began writing political pamphlets. Today she is perhaps best known as an early feminist who demanded that French women be given the same rights as French men. In her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen (1791), she challenged the practice of male authority and the notion of male–female inequality. She was executed by guillotine during the Reign of Terror for attacking the regime of the Revolutionary government and for her close relation with the Girondists.
Marie Gouze was born into a petit bourgeois family in 1748 in Montauban, Quercy (in the present-day department of Tarn-et-Garonne), in southwestern France. She believed that she was the illegitimate daughter of Jean-Jacques Lefranc, Marquis de Pompignan and his rejection of her claims upon him may have influenced her passionate defence of the rights of illegitimate children.
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