Australo-Bavarian Cattle Dog @Eurofurence 2026

November 3, 1793. A butcher's daughter from Montauban was guillotined in Paris for publishing a pamphlet suggesting the French people should be allowed to vote on what kind of government they wanted. Two years earlier she had written that a woman has the right to mount the scaffold, and must therefore also have the right to mount the rostrum. She got the first half. Olympe de Gouges was born Marie Gouze in 1748, the daughter of a semi-literate butcher. At sixteen she was married off to a much older man, and he died about a year later, which freed her. She refused to remarry and refused to use his name. She went to Paris in 1770, renamed herself, and became a playwright. She wrote over forty plays, which for a self-educated woman with no formal schooling in eighteenth century France is remarkable on its own. And she used them. Her 1788 pamphlet Réflexions sur les hommes nègres attacked slavery outright, and her play L'Esclavage des Noirs was staged in 1789, with pro-slavery groups turning up to disrupt the performances. Her position was that men everywhere are equal, and that there was no such thing as real liberty in a country that held slaves. She was writing that in the capital of a country whose Caribbean colonies were the most profitable slave economy on earth. Then the Revolution, and in 1789 the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which was universal in its language and did not extend to women in practice. So in September 1791 she published the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, rewriting the 1789 document clause by clause with women included, and dedicated it to Marie Antoinette, which was either a clever appeal to the one woman in France with political weight or a catastrophic misjudgement, depending on the year you read it in. Its most quoted line is the one about the scaffold and the rostrum. The argument underneath it is sharper than the slogan. If a woman can be tried, convicted and executed by the state, the state has already conceded she is a citizen with full responsibility, so it cannot coherently deny her the vote. Nobody in the Assembly answered that argument. They did not need to. Her politics were moderate, which in 1793 was the fatal category. She wanted a constitutional monarchy rather than a republic. She was close to the Girondins, whose execution I posted about on October 31. And she opposed killing the King, arguing for exile instead, and offered to help defend him at his trial. Then in 1793 she published Les Trois Urnes, which proposed a national plebiscite, three urns, where the French people would choose between a republic, a federal system and a constitutional monarchy. Asking the people to vote on whether to keep the republic was, in the summer of 1793, sedition. She was arrested in July. She spent months in prison, writing and smuggling out texts the whole time. Her trial was before the Revolutionary Tribunal and she was denied legal counsel, reportedly on the grounds that she was perfectly capable of defending herself, which was both a compliment and a death sentence. She defended herself anyway, and well. The evidence against her was her own writing, including an unfinished play critical of Marie Antoinette, which tells you how little the content mattered next to the fact of a woman publishing on politics. She was condemned and guillotined on November 3, 1793, two weeks after Marie Antoinette and three days after the Girondins. Her reported last words were a condemnation of the Revolution's injustice. Like most reported scaffold lines, treat the exact wording carefully. And then what the authorities said about her, which is the part that should be in every post about her. The official revolutionary commentary on her death did not argue with her ideas. It said she had forgotten the virtues appropriate to her sex, that she had wanted to be a statesman, and that the law had punished a conspirator who had forgotten what she was. It was published as a warning to other women. It worked. The Jacobin government had already shut down the women's political clubs the previous month, and organised feminism in France went quiet for decades. Two days after she died, Madame Roland was guillotined. She was a self-taught butcher's daughter who wrote against slavery before abolition was respectable, and argued for women's political rights before anyone in Europe was listening, and the Revolution that proclaimed universal rights killed her for suggesting the people should get a vote.