"Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the French playwright who, in 1791, wrote The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen.*
 |
| Portrait de Olympes de Gouges |
This was Olympe de Gouges (1748-93) and she was responding to The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen from 1789, the start of the French Revolution which, by excluding women from these rights, had fallen far short of its apparent goals.
Where the latter declared ‘men are born equal’, she asserted ‘women are born equal to men,’ adding, ‘since women are allowed to mount the scaffold, they should also be allowed to stand in parliament and defend their rights’.
Two years later this playwright, novelist, activist and woman of letters did herself mount the scaffold, two weeks after Marie Antoinette, for the crime of being open to the idea of a constitutional monarchy and, for two hundred years, her reputation died with her, only to be revived with great vigour in the last 40 years.
With, Catriona Seth, Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature at the University of Oxford, Katherine Astbury, Professor of French Studies at the University of Warwick and, Sanja Perovic, Reader in 18th century French studies at King’s College London
Producer: Simon Tillotson"
Picture; Portrait de Olympes de Gouges, 18th century, Alexander Kucharsky, Private collection, Photographer Own work, Bonarov, 11 November 2018, I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby publish it under the following license: w:en: Creative Commons attribution share alike. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license
*Olympe de Gouges, https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0016hdj
No comments:
Post a Comment