At the age of twenty, Olympe de Gouges moved to Paris. She lived with her sister and her son, though her income was provided for by a wealthy businessman named Jacques Biétrix de Rozières who she had begun a relationship with.

 

She acclimated quickly to fashionable Parisian society, socializing at salons with other dramatists such as Madame de Montesson, Comtesse de Beauharnais, La Harpe, Mercier, and Chamfort; as well as early-career politicians such as Brissot and Condorcet.

 

Her career picked up in the 1780s with the publication of her first novel in 1784, and a slew of public letters, plays and pamphlets shortly after. Her public letters helped establish the feminine term for citizen, citoyenne, as an official replacement for Madame and Mademoiselle in more political spaces.

 

Throughout the 1780s, she passionately penned works focusing on the plight of slaves in the French colonies. For Gouges there was a direct connection between the autocratic monarchy in France and the institution of slavery. The public took notice of her 1785 play l'Esclavage des Noirs, which was staged at the famous Comédie-Française, and earned her many threats. The slave trade lobby actively campaigned against this production, and paid hecklers that eventually sabotaged the show enough to force it to close only three performances into the run. This would not be the last of l'Esclavage des Noirs.

 

Olympe de Gouges’ most notable political piece was her 1791 pamphlet entitled Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne, or, Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen. This pamphlet was created as a direct response to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (which you can read more about on The French Revolution page), which had been adopted two years earlier by the National Assembly. This piece demanded equal rights for women, stating that women, like their male counterparts, have natural, inalienable, and sacred rights. She fought for equality in property ownership, taxation and finances, she fought for the right for a woman to publicly name a man as the father of her children in order to hold men, regardless of their marriage status, accountable as providers for their children. She urged readers to consider these inequalities, and to think of how to resolve these injustices for future generations.

 

In the French colony of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), free people of color and African slaves revolted in response to the ideals expressed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. When Gouges published her earlier play l'Esclavage des Noirs in print, the mayor of Paris accused her of inspiring the revolts. When her play was finally staged again in 1792, a riot erupted in Paris.

 

When Louis XVI was put on trial to be executed, Olympe wrote to the National Assembly offering to defend him, stating she believed he was guilty as a king, but innocent as a man, and that he should be exiled rather than executed. He was executed, her writings ignored.

 

Olympe de Gouges was associated with the Girondins, one of the factions of the Jacobins. The other primary faction of the Jacobins, the members of The Mountain, gained political power throughout the early 1790s, and began imprisoning prominent Girondins, who were later sent to the guillotine in October of 1793.