Olympe de Gouge and the limits of the citizenship in revolutionary France

Abstract

This article examines Olympe de Gouges’s Declaration of the Rights of Women and Citizens [1791] in the light of its political context. To this extent, the article is divided in three parts: in the first, the writing of women in the context of the French Revolution is discussed as an effective political participation besides to other intervention strategies, although it was not considered legitimate by the public opinion, which defended a certain conception of “nature” in regards to women; the second presents the Declaration as one of the most attentive objections to the universalism of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen [1789], as well as a set of claims that stress inequality between men and women; in the last part, some methodological considerations are presented to position the work in a specific type of exercise of political theory, which considers the uses of the past. This article contributes to the acknowledgment of a specific dynamic engendered by the language of rights, through which revolutionaries extended autonomy to many social groups, but disallowed them to the women. Noticing their possibilities of political participation denied, the writing of these women pointed to the limits of the normative vocabulary of the period (“equality”, “universal rights”, “citizen”).