Olympde Gougeard

Olympe de Gouges was a feminist writer and political activist of the French Revolution whose proposed declaration demanded the abolition of masculine privilege. In Simone de Beauvoir’s account, the failure of that demand—and de Gouges’s execution—exposes the limits of a revolution that proclaimed freedom while excluding women from political power.

Political Intervention

In 1791, de Gouges proposed a Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, designed as an equivalent to the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Its demand was direct: masculine privileges were to be abolished. Her intervention gave explicit political form to the contradiction between the Revolution’s universal language of rights and women’s exclusion from the political community.

De Gouges was not the only voice making such claims. Simone de Beauvoir also points to similar ideas in Poor Javotte’s Motion, published in 1790, and in other satirical pamphlets. Yet despite support from Condorcet, these efforts proved abortive. De Gouges founded the newspaper L’Impatient, while a handful of other short-lived papers appeared, but this emerging print activity did not secure women a lasting place in revolutionary politics.

Exclusion from Revolutionary Politics

The broader setting makes de Gouges’s defeat part of a wider pattern rather than an isolated failure. Women took part in demonstrations and riots, and working women marched to Versailles in search of the royal baker and his family. But, Simone de Beauvoir emphasizes, the people who led the Revolution and reaped its rewards were not these women. Women’s visible participation in moments of upheaval did not translate into political authority.

Women’s clubs, meanwhile, were largely absorbed into men’s clubs and taken over by men. In 1793, after Rose Lacombe and a delegation of women forced the doors of the Conseil Général, women were barred from entering it and soon excluded even from the clubs where they had learned politics. This closure helps explain the institutional weakness confronting de Gouges’s program: women could articulate political claims, but the spaces through which claims might be organized and exercised were being shut to them.

Defeat and Historical Significance

Simone de Beauvoir identifies de Gouges’s execution as the starkest consequence of the failure of revolutionary feminism: Olympe de Gouges perished on the scaffold. The revolutionary order had relaxed some inherited restrictions—the right of the firstborn and masculine privilege in succession were eliminated in 1790, and divorce law was established in 1792—but these gains remained feeble beside women’s exclusion from political life.

De Gouges’s story also belongs to Simone de Beauvoir’s analysis of class as well as sex. Working-class women could possess a degree of economic independence through their labor, whereas bourgeois women were integrated into the family and, in her account, lacked an economic basis for solidarity as a separate political group. Yet women from the agitating class were condemned to stand aside because they were women. De Gouges’s declaration thus marks both an effort to claim women’s equality and the boundary the Revolution enforced against that claim.