Reading Olympe de Gouges

C. Sherman

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137346452
• eBook ISBN: 9781137343062
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Art General
• Index: History

Olympe de Gouges has been called illiterate, immoral, and insane while being mentioned solely for her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and [the female] Citizen. This book uncovers her radical views of the self, the family, and the state and accounts for her vision of increasing female agency and decreasing the entitlements of aristocratic males.

1

Reception

Abstract: This chapter traces the history of de Gouges’s reception and refutes the calumny her reputation has suffered. It cites the work of a number of critics and names the ones who carry on the denigration as well as those who take her seriously and read her carefully.

Sherman, Carol L. Reading Olympe de Gouges. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137343062.

Until recently de Gouges was known almost uniquely for her Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne (Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the [female] Citizen)¹ (1791), which she wrote in reply to the French Constituent Assembly’s Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen (Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen) (1789), expanding and correcting the latter by stating the rights and needs of women and children. Her other works were rarely mentioned until 1978 when Samia Spencer called her to the serious attention of literary and social historians by describing her eloquent application of natural right to the powerless. Interest in her work increased shortly thereafter. In 1989, the historian Olivier Blanc wrote a biography based on archival materials and augmented it in 2003, having meanwhile published two volumes of her political writings (1993). In 1997 Mary Trouille published a work on the relation between each of seven female writers and Rousseau: de Gouges was among this number. Not having the benefit of Blanc’s revised biography, the critic presented her by listing the epithets that have carried her devaluation for over two centuries and that have mostly insisted on her violent death: a “semi-literate woman of working-class origins turned courtesan and then playwright, whose radical feminist and republican manifestoes eventually led her to the guillotine” (237). In 1991 and 1993, Gisela Thiele-Knobloch published two volumes of her plays (Théâtre politique, 2 vols. Paris: Côté-femmes, 1991–1993) and in 1997 issued “Quelques thèses sur l’oeuvre littéraire d’Olympe de Gouges” (Several Theses on the Literary Work of Olympe de Gouges), which crisply contradict the distortions her reputation has suffered. In 1996 Mary Cecilia Monedas urged reading her texts, citing the kinds of disdain and insults that have led to her neglect (43–44). The French government has begun to acknowledge her importance: the Place Olympe de Gouges was inaugurated in 2004 (Arguelles-Ling, 250), and a plaque stands at the site of one of her dwellings on the rue St. Honoré. She was neither illiterate nor unlettered, as Blanc has definitely shown and as any reader of her plays can see.

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La Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne

The Déclaration has been much circulated: in the last 15 years, at least five editions have appeared.² The rediscovery of her writings that has been occurring bears new motivators: some want to reveal her as an early feminist; others, as a republican revolutionary, which she was not solely; and most recently, some historians have deprecated her by calling her self-contradicting and “self-fashioning.”³ Such descriptors have contexts, both past and present forces that propel them through time and that motivate the tortured revisionisms I have just named. The most vicious of these is misogyny. An article written by an apparently misogynist woman, Megan Conway (“Cruel Fortune . . .”), qualifies the author as an “obnoxious personality” (231) and as having a “persecution complex” (212). It cites no sources for these characterizations.⁴

Reprintings of the Déclaration pay homage to its remarkable demands for women’s political equality and for the protection of all children, rights soon to be only partially granted by the Revolution and most then to be swiftly abolished by Napoleon’s Code civil. At the same time, the history of focus on this document seems due to its claims to gender-parity. After being either ignored or the target of various calumnies, its author is now viewed by some as prescient and modern because she expressed back then parts of what we think now (Kadish et al.). It does not belittle her genius to qualify the Déclaration as political—women have the right to participate in government—and practical—all children are valuable—rather than as an essentialist reflection on the profound implications of sexual difference.⁵ She seized upon the concept of natural right and followed its legal and financial consequences for persons viewed as ciphers. She included herself in this number. In a brief article of 2006 and without distorting her life or thought, Edmond Jouve, for example, celebrates the courage of the Déclaration and of her other beliefs. Already in 1989, quoting one of Benoîte Groult’s phrases, Marie Maclean declared that the text was a revolution within the Revolution, that it based its claims on inclusion and not on tactics of opposition between male and female (172). De Gouges is not asking for “fair play” within the given circumstances but puts forth a truly transformative vision based on the equality of natural right.

* * *

L’Esclavage des noirs (Black slavery)

A further example of current values influencing choice of emphasis on the past consists of the attention paid almost exclusively to a single play, the one called L’Esclavage des noirs (The Enslavement of Blacks) in the printing of 1792.⁶ It was reissued alone in 1989 (L’ Esclavage des noirs ou l’heureux naufrage, éd. Éléni Varikas, Paris: Côté-femmes, 1989) and in 2007 (L’Esclavage des nègres. Version inédite du 28 décembre 1789, éd. Sylvie Chalaye et Jacqueline Razgonnikoff. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007) and was presented and translated along with three other women’s writings on slavery in 1994 (Kadish, Doris Y. and Françoise Massardier-Kenney. (eds) Translating Slavery Gender and Race in French Women’s Writing, 1783–1823. Imprint Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1994). Like Varikas, Félix Castan chooses the version of 1792 for his edition of de Gouges’s Oeuvres complètes, Tome 1. Théâtre, éd. Félix Castan. Montauban: Cocagne, 1993.

This is a very early clamor for the rights of a horrendously suffering underclass. (Its title in 1788 was Zamor et Mirza, ou l’heureux naufrage [Zamora and Mirza or the lucky shipwreck].) It is typical of de Gouges’s moral vision that the group of island-dwelling natives is both victim and beneficiary of French colonialism. This characteristic attracts the attention of today’s so-called cultural studies, part of which ceaselessly deplores colonialism’s negative effects on various peoples, but that is not her thesis. Misread by seeing her only as a very early abolitionist—it is true that rich slave traders opposed the representation of her play—the pedagogy of her drama is more revolutionary in that it erases both class- and race-related value systems and judges each character according to her or his actions. Some of them imagine peaceful cooperation among classes and races. Masters are cautioned against cruelty; slaves, against bloody revolt. The attitudinal result protests contemporary slave trade—no human being should be in bondage to another—but it does not preach violent revolution.⁷ In a recent chapter on teaching this author, Lisa Beckstrand (2011) writes of the same two texts—the Declaration and The Enslavement of Blacks—explaining their opposition to exclusion from rights on the basis of gender and of race. The article makes errors of fact regarding details of the play’s plot.⁸

Beaumarchais was de Gouges’s contemporary. He refused to support her as a fellow playwright and launched some of the long-lived epithets that have kept her works out of standard curricula. Blanc ascribes to Beaumarchais’s hostility much of the calumny that she has suffered for over 200 years, in sum, that she was an illiterate woman of loose morals and questionable mental health.⁹ Her struggle to get his attention was prolonged. The preface to the printed play says that she wrote to him after sending him the first version of her Mariage inattendu de Chérubin (Cherubino’s Unexpected Marriage). He answered her courteously but without promising any action. She also sought to interest the whole Société des Auteurs Dramatiques (Society of Playwrights) in her cause since they were all at one time or another badly treated by the group (v): out of the forty letters she wrote, she received only four replies (among which that from La Harpe, who had written favorably of her Chérubin in the periodical Mercure de France; Blanc 65). Finally, in the printed play itself, she writes a plea for the recognition of women writers, inserting a reference to herself into a conversation between Figaro and the count (II 25, 60). She also has Figaro speak to the audience at the end of the play (III 15, 66) and plead for tolerance of female authors.

In his introduction to the first volume of Ecrits politiques (Political Writings), Blanc describes some of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century accounts of her (24 ff); they reveal stunning hatred and fear. Presenting the second volume, the historian says that many contributed to blackening her memory, and he names Desessarts, Rétif, and Dulaure (36). Furthermore, he refuses the comparisons made between her and Théroigne de Méricourt and Marie-Antoinette, associations by which she too was accused of loose morals (36–37).

In spite of Blanc’s work—the first version of the biography appeared in 1989—several recent critics have contributed their deprecation of the author. Bonnell avers that she makes contradictory descriptions of herself (82–85).¹⁰ Vanpée sees the variety of her self-descriptions as a series of “performances” (“Révendication,” in Cragg, Sexualité). Similarly and repeatedly, Gregory Brown calls her presentations “self-fashioning.” Vanpée and Brown appear deliberately to ignore what classical rhetoric calls ethos, any and every author’s creations of the personas s/he designs in order to gain the confidence of readers. Brown labels her Chérubin a “parody” of the Mariage de Figaro, which makes one wonder if he has read either play (Ch. 5). Blanc classifies Joan Scott’s and Brown’s commentaries as anachronistic and misogynist, respectively (171, 251). Their misogyny, not to mention some apparent ignorance of both literary history and social custom, takes the form of name-calling in her regard: she is a fake who believes nothing that she claims. To cite only one example of Scott’s “paradoxes,” repeated by Trouille (277), de Gouges compares the good functioning of executive and legislative arms of government to a good marriage, even though she was not married. According to both, this is troubling. In fact it is naïve to imagine that a writer’s words and acts must be consistent, either with each other or with themselves over time. Study of the plays shows the careful attention she pays to preserving marriages. For her, for most of her contemporaries, and for most civilizations, the institution of marriage assures order. The metaphor of state as a family headed by a good father has powerful currency even today. Stable unions, viewed as small states, guarantee the safety of their child-citizens, which is of permanent importance to the author, both personally and politically. This is not a paradox. Unlike her critics, she is not prisoner of a consistency that gives rise to distortions when applied in other contexts.

Superior to recent critics, La Harpe, her contemporary, recognized that her Chérubin was neither parody nor criticism of Le Mariage de Figaro but a sequel (Blanc, 1989: 53). A cursory glance at the status and age of its characters shows it to be an imagined continuation and a very serious one, as I shall elaborate below.

The epithets I have just quoted illustrate only some of the discounting of de Gouges’s works and of her person. One reason her writings are belittled is that they respond immediately to events. Another, related to the former, is that they are written in haste, as she often says. Haste and immediacy would then make them uninteresting or at least lacking in artistry, or so goes the negative reasoning. A third, following from the previous two, says that since she contradicts herself, that is, changes her positions or holds contradictory opinions at the same time, we cannot take her seriously since that is the sign that she is faking. Further, since she is supposedly illiterate and uncultured, her writings are naïve and superficial in form and content. If she displays her works—this was said of most women who wrote—it is because having been of easy virtue and having now lost her charms, she turns to writing as a substitute for gaining sexual attention.¹¹ Further denigration consists in repeating that she was ignorant of the French language and probably did not write the works she signed. Once again, Blanc brings reason and historical information to bear on this topic (2003: 26–27), presents documents written in her hand, and observes the rapidity with which this speaker of Occitan learned French once she arrived in the capital, no doubt inspired in part by the example of her natural father, a poet and playwright. She had been no more ignorant than the other six million subjects who spoke first of all the dialect of their regions.

Where two descriptors—that her writings are occasional and are written in haste—are acknowledged by the author herself, the conclusions drawn by male contemporaries and by later critics do not follow. Where assertions are false—that she is illiterate, uncultured, and immoral—the supposed consequences in her works have never been shown, except to dismiss her and them from consideration. The entire history of her reception bristles with misogyny’s influence on assessment and on canon formation, which has until recently excluded most other female writers as well. The threat must be formidable.

Her work’s occasional nature and speedy production are undeniable. The compression of her writing life is a fact: born in 1748, she had married at seventeen, given birth at eighteen and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Reception
• 2  The Drama of Rhetoric
• 3  The Rhetoric of Drama
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Index