Olympe de Gouges was a playwright, feminist, and abolitionist during the French Revolution. Olympe was born Marie Gouze into a small bourgeois family. Her father was a butcher and her mother was the daughter of a cloth merchant. Olympe was convinced that she was the illegitimate daughter of a local nobleman, the Marquis de Pompigan, who had simply refused to acknowledge her. It is believed that this is why she often stood up for illegitimate children in her writings. In 1765, she married Louis Aubry, a man that she did not love. He died early in their marriage and eventually Marie moved to Paris with her young son and took the name Olympe De Gouges.
In Paris, Olympe gained access to some salons and had the opportunity to meet other writers and political figures. Olympe began her writing career in the 1780s. She was a very prolific writer with as many as forty works attributed to her writing. She wrote several plays such as Zamore and Mirza and L'Esclavage des Negres. Most of her work was about social issues, such as slavery and the rights of women. One of Olympe's most well known works is The Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Female Citizen. Olympe wrote her own women oriented Declaration in response to The Declaration of the Rights of Men and the Male Citizen. Olympe was eventually arrested after creating and posting a poster called The Three Urns or, Salvation of the Father Land by an Aerial Traveller. This poster upset the radical Jacobins who did not like that her poster asked its audience to pick one of three types of government. Olympe was arrested in 1793 and while imprisoned and on trial, she did not have the right to an attorney. Olympe defending herself against a jury of men who were all against her cause and the fact that she was a meddling women, was sentenced to die by the guillotine. Olympe had passionately joined in the revolutionary spirit, perhaps hoping that a regime change would be an appropriate time for women, and other people without the same rights as men, to join together and get the rights that they deserve. She was courageous and was not afraid to write and publish anything that might get her killed. She died for supporting and believing in her own words.
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