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Olympe de Gouges

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life, ideas and works of the Frenchwoman who wrote The Declaration of the Rights of Woman in 1791 during the French Revolution

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the French playwright who, in 1791, wrote The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen. This was Olympe de Gouges (1748-93) and she was responding to The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen from 1789, the start of the French Revolution which, by excluding women from these rights, had fallen far short of its apparent goals. Where the latter declared ‘men are born equal’, she asserted ‘women are born equal to men,’ adding, ‘since women are allowed to mount the scaffold, they should also be allowed to stand in parliament and defend their rights’. Two years later this playwright, novelist, activist and woman of letters did herself mount the scaffold, two weeks after Marie Antoinette, for the crime of being open to the idea of a constitutional monarchy and, for two hundred years, her reputation died with her, only to be revived with great vigour in the last 40 years.

With

Catriona Seth
Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature at the University of Oxford

Katherine Astbury
Professor of French Studies at the University of Warwick

And

Sanja Perovic
Reader in 18th century French studies at King’s College London

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Available now

49 minutes

Last on

Thu 21 Apr 2022 21:30

LINKS AND FURTHER READING

CONTRIBUTORS








READING LIST

In English:

Gregory S. Brown, ‘The Self-Fashionings of Olympe de Gouges, 1784-1789’ (Eighteenth-Century Studies, The Johns Hopkins University Press, vol. 34, no 3,‎ 2001)

Geneviève Fraisse, Reason's Muse: Sexual Difference and the Birth of Democracy (Chicago University Press, 1994)

Karen Green, A History of Women's Political Thought in Europe, 1700-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2014), especially the chapter 'Anticipating and experiencing the revolution in France'

Carla Hesse, The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern (Princeton University Press, 2001)

Sophie Mousset, Women's Rights and the French Revolution: A Biography of Olympe de Gouges (Routledge, 2017)

Carol L. Sherman, Reading Olympe de Gouges (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013)

Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Harvard University Press, 2021), especially chapter 1


In French:

Olivier Blanc, Marie-Olympe de Gouges, 1748-1793: des droits de la femme à la guillotine (Tallendier, 2014)

Isabelle Brouard-Arends, ‘Olivier Blanc, Marie-Olympe de Gouges : une humaniste à la fin du XVIIIe siècle (Cahors, Éditions René Viénet 2003)

Olympe de Gouges, Écrits politiques, présentés par Olivier Blanc, vol. I: 1789-1791, vol. II: 1792-1793 (Côté Femmes Éditions, 1993)

Olympe de Gouges, Œuvres présentées par Benoîte Groult (Mercure de France, 1986)

Benoîte Groult, Ainsi soit Olympe de Gouges: La Déclaration des droits de la femme et autres textes politiques (Grasset, 2014)

René Tarin, ‘L'Esclavage des noirs, ou la mauvaise conscience d'Olympe de Gouges’ (Dix-huitième Siècle, no 30,‎ 1998)


RELATED LINKS





Olympe de Gouges: France’s forgotten revolutionary heroine - The Forum, ´óÏó´«Ã½ World Service



Broadcasts

  • Thu 21 Apr 2022 09:00
  • Thu 21 Apr 2022 21:30

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