THE REVOLUTIONISTS

OLYMPE de GOUGES was a French playwright and political activist. At age 16 she was married against her will to Louis Aubry, about which she later noted “I was married to a man I did not love and who was neither rich nor well-born. I was sacrificed for no reason that could make up for the repugnance I felt for this man”.

When her husband died the following year she moved to Paris with her son to live with her sister. In Paris she started a relationship with the wealthy Jacques Biétrix de Rozières, but refused his marriage proposal, calling the institution of marriage “the tomb of trust and love”. She remained close to Rozières throughout her life and with his support established a theatre company.

A passionate advocate of human rights, Gouges was an outspoken advocate against the slave trade in the French Colonies, writing the play L’Esclavage des Noirs ou l’Heureux Naufrage (Black Slavery, or the Fortunate Shipwreck). She greeted the outbreak of the French Revolution with hope and joy, but soon became disenchanted when égalité (equal rights) was not extended to women. In response to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, she wrote the Déclaration des droits de la Femme et de la Citoyenne (Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen). In that pamphlet she expressed, for the first time, her famous statement: “A woman has the right to mount the scaffold. She must possess equally the right to mount the speaker’s platform.”

An unfinished play entitled La France Sauvée ou le Tyran Détrôné (France Preserved or the Tyrant Dethroned) and featuring both a character named Olympe de Gouges and Marie Antoinette was found by the authorities following her arrest. The tribunal judging her used it as proof she wasn’t sufficiently committed to the Revolution. Admitting to being the author of this unfinished play, in part, cost her her life.

Olympe was executed by guillotine Nov 3 1793.

CHARLOTTE CORDAY is known to history as the woman who assassinated Jean-Paul Marat. She was born in a small hamlet in the commune of Écorches, in Normandy. An early supporter of the Revolution, once the Reign of Terror was underway and she witnessed first hand the slaughter, she began to sympathize with the more moderate Girondins over the Jacobins who advocated a radical approach to the revolution, including the idea that the only way the revolution would survive invasion and civil war was through terrorizing and executing those opposed to it.

Jean-Paul Marat, a member of the Jacobin faction was a journalist. He exerted power and influence through his newspaper, L’Ami du peuple (“The Friend of the People”).

Corday’s decision to kill Marat was stimulated not only by her revulsion to the September Massacres, for which she held Marat responsible, and the execution of King Louis XVI, but by her fear of an all-out civil war. She believed that Marat was threatening the Republic, and that his death would end violence throughout the nation.

Corday left home, carrying a copy of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, and went to Paris, bought a kitchen knife with a 6-inch blade, and took a room at the Hôtel de Providence. On July 13 1793 she went to Marat’s home, claiming to have knowledge of a planned Girondist uprising. As Marat was writing down the names of the Girondins she was giving him, she pulled out the knife and plunged it into his chest.

Charlotte was executed by guillotine July 17 1793.