Olympe de Gouges (with Leah Redmond Chang)

Vulgar History Podcast

Olympe de Gouges (with Leah Redmond Chang) 

April 16, 2025

Hello, and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women’s history comedy podcast. This is Season Seven, which is the season that I’m doing in chunks. The overall theme is How Do You Solve A Problem Like Marie Antoinette? and it’s all leading up to a discussion of Marie Antoinette herself. And she lived in a very, what people then might have called, unprecedented times. And so, Season Seven, Part One, we looked at what was happening in the Western Hemisphere in what is now America and Canada, and namely the American Revolution and how that interacted with people in France and how that sort of led to, contributed to, shall we say, to the French Revolution of it all. Season Seven, Part Two was “Meanwhile, Back in France…” where we were talking with some people who were in France and the Revolution happened, and how it kind of affected them, but the people we talked about were not specifically revolutionaries. This, we are now in Season Seven, Part Three, and now you’re starting to see my master plan and how it’s all coming together because now we’re looking at the Revolution itself. We’re going to be looking at women who were literal revolutionaries, people who were in the Revolution, on the Revolution side. 

You know, people like to listen to this podcast for an escape from the everyday, and I’m here to tell you that’s what we’re going to be doing for the next… I think it’s seven weeks, but I keep finding more revolutionary women, but I’ll say seven weeks, but we’ll pencil it in. But right now, international affairs in the year 2025, April 2025, news, there’s breaking news, like 12,000 times a day. And these episodes of this podcast, Vulgar History, are recorded, it’s like a week in advance or so and so, by the time you hear this, like 10,000 more things will have happened so I’m not even going to try and, like, stay timely to connect what we’re talking about with the French Revolution to today’s political landscape because things are changing so often. We’re staying focused on the French Revolution era. 

Now imagine, if you will, this was a time when the top 0.1% of people were living these absurdly wealthy, luxurious, ridiculous lives, spending money on things that other people might have felt were kind of foolish and kind of silly, but when you have that much money, you know, that’s just what you do. Meanwhile, everybody else, the majority of people, were barely able to scrape by enough money to buy a dozen eggs because things were getting really expensive for people, because there had been some climate change. There had been some really bad agricultural seasons. You know, in the beginning of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, the animated film, the woman who’s like, [sings] “I need six eggs, that’s too expensive,” like, that was the vibes. The vibes was just, like, no one could afford eggs, if you could imagine. Also, the people selling the eggs, the market women, might stab you and then mount your head on a pike is the vibes that are going on. Like again, I know it’s hard to imagine, but you know, this French Revolutionary era, politicians were corrupt, they were being bought off by the wealthy elite, the wealthy elites… evil villains. And recent events in America had upended international trade. Wars and revolutions were breaking out all over the place. And the everyday people—like again, everyone who’s not that 0.1%—were at a breaking point, they’d had enough of all of this shit. Astrologically speaking, Pluto was an Aquarius and shit was just fucking bananas every single day. Again, this is late 18th-century Paris, perhaps some other time periods are similar, I don’t know. 

On this podcast, we talk about the past, and so much was happening so quickly in this French Revolutionary era. I’ve got some, coming up in these next several weeks, there’s a lot of episodes where it’s just me talking, but I’ve also got some guest experts, including today. And even they, when I’m like, “Oh, this is so complicated!” they, people who are experts in this, are like, “Yeah, it is. It’s so complicated.” People kept switching sides, changing teams. People were friends and then enemies and then friends again. And then suddenly, someone’s head gets chopped off and stuck on a pike by the market women. Again, this happens. Over the next seven weeks, we’re going to hear a lot of hints on pikes. So, for this, the first episode of Season Seven, Part One, I really wanted to get us going with feeling educated, feeling confident about what we’re doing—by us, I mean, myself. I really wanted to make sure that I really understood the vibes of the French Revolution and all. And also, I haven’t mentioned, but Season Seven, Part Three, I like to title the parts of my podcast and this is called “Liberté, Equalité, Sororité: You Can’t Stop the Women of the Revolution,” and I sing that in my head to the tune of “The Children of the Revolution” from the movie version of Moulin Rouge. 

Today’s guest, thank god she agreed to do this. It’s a woman who has been on the podcast before. Leah Redmond Chang was on one of the episodes during our Mary Queen of Scots series. She was on at that point talking about Mary Queen of Scots’s sister Elisabeth of Valois. And she was on that because at that time she was promoting her book, Young Queens: Three Renaissance Women and the Price of Power, which was about Mary Queen of Scots, Elisabeth of Valois and Catherine de’ Medici. Leah knows so much about French history, French Revolutionary history, and that is why I brought her on for this episode to talk about this person, to really just get us going. So, she’s here to explain, to help us all understand, and again, by us I mean me, the French Revolution, how things were just spiralling out of control. You couldn’t really keep up with who was on what side and what was happening. So, she’s here to explain that history to me, to all of you, just so we’re starting this next seven weeks, women of the revolution miniseries, just kind of knowing, knowing what’s going on. 

Content warning: People’s heads will be cut off and mounted on pikes in this episode and in most episodes over the next seven weeks. So, here is my conversation with Leah Redmond Chang about our first woman of the Revolution, Olympe de Gouges. 

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Ann: So, I’m joined today by Leah Redmond Chang, who is going to help gently hold my and all of our hands to explain the beginning of the French Revolution. Welcome, Leah and thank god you’re here. 

Leah: Oh, no. It’s such a pleasure for me to be here. 

Ann: It’s such a confusing situation. I could not… I was trying to understand it myself, and I just… I saw that you’ve been posting on the Substack about the French Revolution, and I thought, oh, wait a minute, this is someone who can help me. So, thank you. 

Leah: Oh, no, no problem. And I share the feeling that the French Revolution is thoroughly confusing. Yeah, I think right now there’s just been a lot of posting on the French Revolution, but I think that the French Revolution doesn’t exactly go the way people often think that it went. So, it’s good to kind of have a conversation, unpack it, locate the places where it gets incredibly confusing and see what we can understand about it. 

Ann: Well, and also what I try to do in this podcast, and this is for myself and for the listeners, but I think it’s also just the way that I try to approach history is really trying to be in the moment with a person who we’re talking about, not to say, like, “Little did she know that was the last time she’d see him.” So, we’re talking about Olympe de Gouges and her story… It has twists and turns, so if we just kind of go through her experience of this all, like I think that that might help to explain the stages of the French Revolution and what was happening because she lived through it all, and she was just a person trying to write plays and live her life. And she wound up in the midst of all of this drama. Relatable. 

Leah: She does. Yes, yes. Olympe de Gouges is definitely a really fascinating witness to the French Revolution. I think one of the things that is really interesting about her is that… Well, first of all, let me point out, she’s a middle-aged woman by the time that the French Revolution really begins, you know, officially, as historians would see it in 1789, which gives her a slightly different maybe take on what was happening in Paris at the time. She’s also not a Parisian by birth. So, she’s coming at this differently than perhaps someone who was born and raised in Paris. 

And finally, Olympe is not either a royalist, meaning that she does not fully support the monarchy, and she is not a rabid revolutionary either. She’s somewhere a little bit more in the middle, which is what a lot of French people were at the time. I think that looking at her is quite interesting, not only because she was an incredible woman—and as we tell her story, I think people will come to understand just how incredible and brave, just incredibly courageous she was—but also that in some ways she represents a good swath of the population, certainly in Paris at the time. 

Ann: Yes, exactly. So, if we start at her beginnings. So, she’s born 1748 in, I don’t know where any of this is, but not Paris, near Montauban. 

Leah: Montauban in the south. She is from the south in France so, far from Paris. She doesn’t even speak French, technically. She speaks a dialect of French called Occitan, which is actually quite important because it is something that people will make fun of her for later. They will make fun of her accent, the way she speaks, how she writes, and that is very much related to her origins in the south. It’s something that she has to fight about, and it’s something that later, she will be sort of delegitimized for. But yes, that is something that’s important to know, that she does not start life as a Parisian. 

Ann: And I think also this, I find this interesting, and I don’t know how much you know about this. Actually, I do just want to say… So, my information, like, you were coming on as an expert, so I just wanted to kind of familiarize myself. So, my beloved Women in World History encyclopedia that we have at my public library, I’m always excited when someone I’m researching has an entry, because they’re essays by academics and scholars, and so, it kind of helps. That’s my main reference. It is from the 1990s, and so there’s probably some information here that’s changed. But what this says is that she was the daughter of Pierre Gouze, a butcher, and Olympe Mouisset. But later she claimed that her father was somebody else. 

Leah: Yes. Okay, so that, first of all, gives you a sense of the class that Olympe de Gouges is born into; you know, middle class, sort of a merchant class but someone who is not necessarily extremely wealthy. This is not the wealthy bourgeoisie. As you’ve said, her official father is a butcher. But Olympe de Gouges later would claim that her father was actually the local marquis, and there is potentially some truth to that. A number of historians, I think most historians actually at this point, accept that that very well may have been the case because her mother’s family and the family of the marquis, this was the Marquis de Pompignan, that that family had been related or kind of intertwined for quite a long period of time. 

The marquis was actually, he was about five years older than Olympe de Gouges’s mother, and he was technically her godfather. [laughs] But because the families were actually close in proximity, they grew close, the future Marquis de Pompignan and Anne Olympe Mouisset, Olympe de Gouges’s mother. Such that for a little while, the marquis de Pompignan was actually sent away from his home because they were worried that they were getting too close. And while he was away, Olympe’s mother is married to this butcher. She has children by this butcher, but then the Marquis de Pompignan comes back, and she has this other child who is the future Olympe de Gouges. So, that is where you start to wonder a little bit of who is the father of this child. 

Olympe de Gouges would also later claim that the marquis was actually quite good to her as a child and that in many ways she was close to him. But the other thing to note is that the marquis was himself a literary person; he wrote plays, he wrote essays. He wasn’t that great, Voltaire made fun of him, but he was a writer. And this is something that eventually Olympe de Gouges would become too. So, there definitely is some evidence that there is substance behind her claim. 

One thing to note is that Olympe de Gouges, that is not her real name. She was baptized Marie Gouze, and she adopts the name Olympe de Gouges later. But perhaps we should go on with sort of other points in her life before we get to that point where she adopts that name. 

Ann: For sure. And I do just want to say I’m glad she adopted that name because there’s far too many people called Marie in France at this time. 

Leah: Almost every girl. 

Ann: Every woman! Every woman. 

Leah: Yes. 

Ann: You just don’t name a daughter. It’s just like, “It’s a daughter. Marie.” That’s just the default. 

Leah: Exactly. At some point, I was working on something on French women in the Revolution right now, and I’m realizing that they are all named Marie, and they all end up going by different names, I think, partially to avoid that confusion. I mean, everyone, even then in the late 18th century, must have been confused because everyone was technically named Marie. 

Ann: Well, yeah. This whole segment of my podcast we’re talking about women like Olympe, people who are involved in the Revolution. The next segment, spoiler, is going to be Marie Antoinette and her family, which, speaking of people called Marie, is all of them, frankly.

Leah: Yes, exactly. Exactly. 

Ann: So, I appreciate anyone from this era who changes their name because it makes our research a lot less confusing. [both chuckle] 

So, I want to talk at this point, like, she gets married at age 17, and I think this is a place where we can talk about the role of women in French society at this time. I mean, I’ve done so many episodes where people get married at 17. This is similar to most of those situations. Like, she didn’t, I’m presuming, you’re going to tell me, most people didn’t choose this. It’s just, like, your father is in charge of your life, and you’re handed from a father to a husband, and it’s that sort of culture, right? 

Leah: I think so. At this point in time, certainly women of Olympe de Gouges’s class, so middle-class, upper middle-class, aristocratic, certainly, you know… Well, you know, aristocratic, I would say. There are two options: you can go to a convent, or you can get married. For the most part, yes, you are married in a way that is going to benefit your family, and that also, hopefully, responds or corresponds to something about your own class status. So, Olympe de Gouges certainly expected that she would marry someone of her class status or possibly even a little higher, because remember, she thinks she’s the illegitimate daughter of a marquis. According to Olympe de Gouges, this was a little bit of an open secret. You know, people kind of knew this. So, she expected to make something of an advantageous marriage. 

But instead, at the age of 17, she is married to a man named Louis Yves Aubry, who is a caterer or a restaurateur or something incredibly middle-class. This family is actually of a lower station than hers and less wealthy. So, Olympe is really offended by this idea that she’s marrying him. It’s really not clear why this arrangement was made, and she hates it. She actually despises her husband. We really don’t know much about what went on with that marriage, but it’s clear from some of her later writing that she hated it so much that you start to wonder if it was abusive on some level. What you have to understand is that there’s no way for a woman to get out of these marriages; women did not have the right to initiate divorce at the time. So, if a woman is in a marriage like this, she just has to endure it. Olympe has a son by this marriage, his name is Pierre. This is the only child that she has of this marriage. She may have gone on to have other children, but they did not survive. So, this is the only child that she raises to adulthood, and she’s quite close to the son. 

But after about two years of marriage, this husband, Louis Yves, he dies. It’s a little bit unclear. It looks like perhaps there was a flood in the town of Montauban, and somehow he was drowned, or somehow his death ensues from this flood. And so, by then, she’s widowed. But at least one scholar I have read has suggested that it’s also possible that even before he died, Olympe de Gouges had run away from that marriage because again, it was clearly something that she found utterly repugnant and was very happy to. 

Ann: I have some quotes here. 

Leah: Yes, go ahead. 

Ann: So, this is from her later novel, her book. She wrote, “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.” And she later called the institution of marriage “the tomb of trust and love.” So… 

Leah: Yeah. [laughs] She hated the idea of marriage. It’s very interesting because if you read Olympe de Gouges’s writings later in life, you can tell how much she detests the institution of marriage, but I think that comes from two different things. One is her experience in marriage herself as a young woman, and the other one is the experience of her mother. Because if you follow the logic of Olympe de Gouges’s claim that she was an illegitimate daughter of a marquis, you realize that marriage also trapped her mother. This mother might have been in love with the Marquis de Pompignan, but there was no way to kind of make that love official. And because the marquis wasn’t married to her mother, he didn’t have to treat her well. There was nothing obliging him to acknowledge that perhaps they had had this child out of wedlock or anything to kind of compel him to treat her well. So, in that sense, marriage is this form of prison for many women, particularly women of the middle class. 

Ann: So, I think this is, I just want to highlight for the listeners, like this is the 17… It’s like, late 1770s when this is all happening, when her marriage ends because he dies, she has this child. This is well before the French Revolution. And she’s having these ideas. 

Leah: Yes, it’s in the 1760s. And actually, I haven’t— 

Ann: 1760s. 

Leah: Yes, 1760s. But let me, if I can quote something else about the culture and the fact that the culture isn’t necessarily looking at women, certainly, again, middle-class women as anything other than an appendage to the men in their lives. 

I want to quote from probably the most popular author of the 18th century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. We think of Rousseau as this kind of, you know, fuddy-duddy 18th-century enlightenment author, a philosophe, a philosopher, right, but I do want to emphasize that he is really the most popular writer of the 18th century. People just absorbed his books and his ideas, like, I kind of compare him to Malcolm Gladwell, [laughs] which, you know, I don’t know if that’s exactly right, but in terms of sort of popular thinking. Well, this is what Rousseau has to say about women and education, and it’s related to marriage. He says this: 

Female education must be in direct relation to men. To please them, be useful to them, to be loved and honoured by them, to raise them when they are young, look after them when they are old, counsel them, console them, and make their life pleasant and gentle. Those have been women’s duties throughout time and should be taught from childhood. 

Olympe de Gouges really just didn’t like this idea at all. [laughs] So, you know, after her husband dies, she’s liberated from this marriage, and she never marries again by choice. She decides to go off and, to the extent that is possible, establish an autonomous life as an unmarried woman, which is really an extraordinary move at the time, particularly for a 19-year-old, which is how old she was when she was widowed. 

Here’s what Olympe has going for her. By all accounts, she’s actually quite beautiful. She’s incredibly witty. The extent of her education is a little bit unknown; it looks like she was probably, like most girls of her station at the time, educated at least for a little while in a convent by nuns, so she has some education. She has a very sharp mind, and so it’s quite possible that, you know, at the age of 19, she knew that she could probably get one man or many men to kind of help her out financially using sort of the assets that she had physically, and that’s exactly what happens. 

We don’t actually know a lot about Olympe de Gouges in the ‘60s and ‘70s, but by 1767, she has met a man from Lyon whose name is Jacques Biétrix, and he will become her lover. He’s quite well off, and they make an arrangement where he supports her financially, but she refuses to marry again. This is very important to her. So, he’s willing to kind of keep her as a kept woman. I hate that phrase, but you know, that is sort of what’s going on. And what is unclear, I think, to most scholars is whether or not there were many men who did this for Olympe, or if it was mostly this Biétrix guy. Some scholars, I mean, certainly in the 19th century, but well into the 20th and 21st century, some scholars call her a courtesan, and a courtesan is a kind of high-class prostitute, if you will, or that’s one way to define it but I don’t know if that’s exactly the right word. We don’t really know the nature of these relationships. 

Ann: I’ve had some other, this series, talking about women in France… We’ve spoken with some other women who had kind of this sort of thing, where they’re not sex workers, but they’re kind of like, a man supports them, and then they go to another man who also supports them, and kind of that’s what they were doing. To me, this fits into that same sort of mode, because what she wanted to be doing was going to salons and, like, learning and engaging and writing, and she… 

Leah: And how’s she going to do it? Yeah. 

Ann: Yeah. She needs to live somewhere. She needs to start her lifestyle of just kind of unofficial university learning. She just wants to learn stuff. She seems to me, in reading about her, just like, so hungry to learn and to engage with other academics. 

Leah: Absolutely. It’s clear that in her early life, she felt extremely stifled. So, she follows the Biétrix to Paris in the late ‘60s, and she’s there by ‘73. Again, we keep losing sight of Olympe de Gouges in the archives, we don’t know where she was at certain times. But by the early ‘70s, she’s in Paris, she’s followed him there. And yes, she kind of spends the rest of the ‘70s just giving herself an education, sort of financed by this guy, Biétrix, and whatever lovers she has, because that is the way she’s going to do it. I mean, there are so few options. So, she takes advantage of what she has; she is going to the salons, she’s going to the theatre. It’s actually a very liberal time in Paris. 

Ann: Mm-hm, this, like, pre-Revolution time. 

Leah: Yes. Yeah, it’s an incredibly liberal time, not only among the wealthy middle class, the wealthy bourgeoisie, but also among liberal aristocrats who are themselves actually quite educated, very interested in the changing nature of society, very engaged with the thinking and writing of the French philosophes, you know, Enlightenment thinkers, and they’re willing to socially mix. 

So, here comes this young woman from the South, with her accent and her funny way of speaking official French—because remember, it’s not her first language—and I think that she kind of makes a splash in these salons because she’s unusual. She’s gorgeous and she’s unusual, and Paris at the time likes quirky characters. They’re interested in them, and she is definitely one. She’s, as I mentioned before, she’s very witty, she’s impulsive, she’s quick on her feet, and she’s very open to new ideas. So, this is what attracts many people who were quite active in the salons to Olympe de Gouges. So, she seems to integrate herself quite easily into this world. And that’s what she’s doing in the ‘70s; she’s kind of acquiring this education, and she’s also starting to write. Particularly, and she writes— Well, first of all, let me just say Olympe de Gouges is a prolific writer. She writes novels; eventually, she writes political pamphlets. But what she really starts to write in the ‘70s and ‘80s are plays. 

Should we back up and talk about the name change a little bit? 

Ann: Yes, because that happened around the same time she moved to Paris, I presume? 

Leah: I think it’s when her husband dies or around that time. So, she goes from being Marie Gouze to being Olympe de Gouges. Olympe is her mother’s middle name. So, Olympe was very close to her mother; this is clear, you know, until her mother’s death, she’s very close to her mother. She adopts her mother’s middle name. She changes the last name a bit. Gouze and Gouges, Gouges seems to be a play on Gouze. She adds this little “de”, right, which is an affectation, kind of makes her sound like she’s from the nobility because that’s what noble names sound like. It’s so-and-so de something. But a lot of people in the middle class at the time were doing this. So, again, it’s not really clear that she changed the name to be socially ambitious, or if she’s just kind of giving herself this new identity as she breaks away from her southern roots and her marriage and aspires to this independent Parisian lifestyle. 

Ann: It reminds me of in contemporary times, you know, people… I’m picturing her, like, 19 years old. A lot of people, myself, was in university at that time, and it’s like you grow up and your name is Ann and then you go to university and you’re like, “You know what? I’m Anastasia.” Like, you just kind of like, this is a time where you can just be like, “Guess who I am?” You know? This is a time where so many people reinvent themselves. And of course she did, especially if she’s moving to this new sphere. It’s kind of like, you know, “The old me is in the past. This is the new me. I’m going to go by my middle name now.” Yeah… Relatable, I think, especially when you consider her age, that she rebrands herself. 

Leah: Totally relatable and successful because, you know, she clearly succeeds to some degree in this new Parisian environment, which, again, just sort of affirms her choice to reinvent herself as Olympe de Gouges. It’s working. 

Ann: So, she’s there. And again, she’s in kind of a university-type thing, like, during her twenties, like she’s just learning. I think when you’re around, it makes sense to me that she wound up writing too, because if you’re around all these writers and thinkers… I’ve seen this with other people we’ve talked about on the podcast, like, of course, eventually you start writing, too, because everyone around you is. So, why wouldn’t you? That’s just kind of what everyone’s doing. 

Leah: Exactly. 

Ann: And I mean, I just want to say, just sort of like, this is what she’s doing. And you’re saying it’s kind of this, I don’t know. I’m thinking of this, like, Weimar Republic type era, where it’s just kind of like creative people having a nice time just before something really horrible and world-changing is about to happen. So, she’s living, like, she didn’t know that this is what was about to happen, but that’s hanging over her, to us, when we’re thinking about this. 

Leah: Yeah. And I think that’s the hard thing about being a historian, right? Is that you sort of see these patterns, as you just said, you kind of see the Paris Revolution is almost like a Weimar Republic. But of course, if you’re in her shoes, you don’t see it that way, and no one really saw it that way in the ‘70s, in the early ‘80s. It’s an incredibly liberal time. They’ve had this problematic king, Louis XV, who is a very… That court is pretty corrupt. Louis XV himself is kind of a philanderer; people know this about him, they don’t love it. But then the new king, Louis XVI and his very young queen, Marie Antoinette, take the throne. They’re very young, it’s very refreshing, and people actually have a lot of hope in them because Louis XVI is quite pious, he seems like this standup guy. It looks like he might be the one to usher in a kind of new age for France, a sort of reformed France, and so people are quite excited. So, to your point, no one really has the Revolution, you know, in sight at all. 

Ann: And yet… [chuckles] 

Leah: And yet. [laughs] 

Ann: Somehow, the Revolution happened. Because like, we’re in the 1780s. It’s a real unprecedented time, things are coming, things are changing.

Leah: Things are changing. And it’s in the air, I should say, even though people don’t see the Revolution in the air, revolutionary thinking or new ways to think of things are in the air. And that is where Olympe de Gouges really starts to stand out, in the ‘80s, because Olympe starts to write about abolition, and she starts to kind of toy around, in her plays, the idea of women’s rights. These are incredible topics to be taking on in the ‘80s. 

I think you’ve already spoken about, on a different episode, the Haitian Revolution. So, perhaps your listeners are familiar that, you know, France has these sugar colonies in the Caribbean, which are totally dependent on the work of enslaved people. I mean, they are slave colonies. And Olympe de Gouges is an abolitionist; she is really against the idea of slavery. She claims that as a young girl in the South, she had an encounter with a Black woman from the islands, or it might have been a woman of colour, and by that, I mean a woman who had Black ancestry, but might have also been a child of a French white man, which frequently happened in the sugar colonies, for instance, current day Haiti or Martinique, et cetera. Olympe claims that from that age, she had this visceral reaction to slavery. I believe her. Her writing is quite fervently abolitionist, at least for the time. I should say that if you were to read some of that writing today, it wouldn’t seem as abolitionist as you would think, because, of course, our thinking has really progressed as a society on that. But for someone writing in the 1780s, her ideas are pretty radical. 

So, in the 1780s is when she writes her first or her most famous abolitionist work, which was a play called Zamore et Mirza. It will eventually get renamed, but that was its original name. She writes it in 1784, and it is the first play written from the point of view of an enslaved person. She wants the Comédie-Française, which is the big theatre in Paris, she wants them to stage it, and they won’t do it. [laughs] And she fights for years to get this staged. And the reason why they will not do it is that the theatre is really an aristocratic place. So, if your listeners are familiar at all with Dangerous Liaisons, either the novel or the movie, you know, with John Malkovich later, they will know that the theatre is definitely a place for aristocrats to see and be seen. The patrons of the theatre are aristocrats, the people who go are aristocrats, and the aristocrats are the plantation owners, for the most part, in the colonies. So, they really have no interest in seeing a play like this put on stage. You know, she’s feisty and she’s very stubborn, and she will fight for years to get this play staged by the Comédie-Française. 

Ann: I have a quote on this topic. She says, “I’m determined to be a success, and I’ll do it in spite of my enemies.” 

Leah: Yep. So, for years. I mean, how many of us actually have that kind of determination to sort of keep on going, fighting to get this play staged? She does eventually get a stage in 1790 after the Revolution has taken off. 

Ann: But it’s just… It’s so, like, everything you’ve described so far, it’s so impressive to me, like how brave she is just kind of like she’s a woman, she’s unmarried, she’s spending time with all these scholars, even though she has this accent and she doesn’t speak French as her first language. And she’s not just writing like, “Oh, here’s my nice little play. It’s a nice little love story.” She’s like, “Here’s my abolitionist play. God damn it.” [Leah laughs] I admire people like that who are just like, she has a point of view, she has a voice, and she’s going to do it against so many odds, right, that people are… And one of those things is the Revolution that’s about to happen. 

Leah: Yeah, I think that this sort of early tendency to be stubborn is also, unfortunately, it is also a weakness of hers. You know, she’s very impetuous. She kind of gets it into her mind to do something, and then she carries it through, perhaps not necessarily thinking about the consequences. But on the other hand, that is perhaps an element of bravery. And I think that where her courage comes in is that even when she does meet up with those consequences, she doesn’t stop. You know, she doesn’t decide, “Okay, that was a bad idea. Now I’m going to retreat and hide.” She keeps on going, being brave. She just continues on this very courageous path until the end. So, even though sometimes you kind of wish she would have thought things through a little bit more before she acted, she doesn’t seem to want to pull back. 

Ann: So, I don’t know if you have anything else from the 1780s to talk about, but the next point I have to bring up is the women’s march. 

Leah: This is the time where we just don’t know very much about her. 

Ann: Exactly. She’s there. She’s writing plays. She’s trying to get them produced. She’s that’s what’s up. And then suddenly, I mean, you can explain this probably, but the French Revolution didn’t just happen. There was a bunch of events that sort of… A bunch of things happened, and now, in retrospect, we look back and say, “This was the French Revolution.” But one of these things was October 5, 1789, the women’s march. This is something else that I’ve seen. I mean, part of this episode’s thesis is just to kind of myth bust people being like, I saw somebody being like, “Oh, there was this women’s march. Why don’t we do that?” It’s just, like, stop looking to the French Revolution for inspiration. But this is the women’s march. So, can you explain what that situation was? 

Leah: Yes. Okay, so the women’s march of 1789 was not at all like the women’s marches of, you know, 2016, or the women’s marches that get put on today. The first thing I want to say about the French Revolution is that it was an incredibly violent revolution. It’s violent from the beginning. It reaches an apex of violence that is difficult to wrap your mind around. But you can see hints of this violence from the very beginning, including in the women’s march. 

So, what happens is, you know, first of all, before the fall of the Bastille, which is what everyone kind of knows about in 1789, there is already a lot of sort of burbling and dissatisfaction. The country is hungry; there have been a lot of bad harvests. 

Ann: Like literally, literally hungry. 

Leah: Hungry! Hungry. 

Ann: People are starving. 

Leah: They’re starving. There’s been grain shortages. There is no money in the treasury, in part because the French really helped the Americans with their revolution, and so they are now short of funds. So, things are basically just not going well. The Bastille falls, which, you know, also has elements of violence. It’s not probably quite as violent as you think, but people are killed. 

And then in October, the market women ring the tocsin, this starts in Paris. They ring the tocsin, which is like the bell that alerts people to something that is going on. You know, they start ringing the bells and they converge on the Hôtel de Ville, which is the town hall. And they convince the National Guard, which has already shown itself to be favourable to the people more so than to the monarchy, to join them and protect them, and they go on a march on foot from Paris to Versailles, which is outside of Paris. And as they do this, again, these are market women, so these are not educated women; these are fishwives, these are women hawking things, you know, in the market. These women have been incredibly dissatisfied, not only by the hunger that is ravaging France, but also because they have been left out in many ways; they are not protected in their own trades. So, there’s been a lot of anger among this class of women. As they start marching, other people start joining them, too, including people from the middle class, people who are already very much engaged in this kind of revolutionary thinking. They start marching to Versailles, and they are armed. You know, they’ve armed themselves with whatever they can arm themselves with, including pikes. The National Guard is also armed. They get to Versailles, where they threaten the royal family. 

So, the reason why they’re in Versailles is because that’s where the royal family is and they want to compel the king and queen and the rest of the royal family to come back to Paris, to live in a much more supervised state where, essentially, the people will oversee what the king is doing and the kinds of decisions that he is making. So, they managed to do this. They kill a number of guards in order to compel the royal family. They also threaten the queen. And on the way back, they surround the king’s carriage, having beheaded these guards that they’ve killed, so they surround the carriage with the heads of the guards on these pikes that they’re carrying. So, this is a very threatening march, this is not a peaceful march at all. 

This is a very threatening march, and the reason why this march in particular is so important is that it’s the first time that women have been very, very visibly engaged in the kind of revolutionary thinking and actions that have already been taking place since the summer. They might have been aware or involved in the Bastille, but that was seen to be something that was mostly a male action. But the women’s march, you see that women have been radicalized, that they’re very engaged in these revolutionary actions. 

The other thing that is very important about the march is that it’s clear that the king has, in the people’s eyes, lost any kind of, almost, sacred stature. It used to be that the king was seen as an almost quasi-divine figure, and the market women and the king in particular had almost a special relationship. There was sort of an understanding of, you know, the market women as kind of emblematic of the people’s reverence for their king. But now, this march is showing that that is completely gone. It’s completely evaporated. Now, the king is really at the people’s mercy, and that is thoroughly represented by the fact that it’s the women who are now bringing him back to Paris. 

Ann: So, this, what you talked about earlier, the Rousseau of it all, the kind of like, women, their whole role is to be subservient and to raise boys to become men and then marry those men… So, this is upending, this is challenging, the concept of what women should be doing in society, which I think, in parallel to what Olympe is kind of wanting and hoping to see for herself, at least, that women’s role in society could change. So, this is sort of a pivot point where it’s like, “Oh, maybe things will get better for women. Maybe women’s issues will be part of this revolution.” 

Leah: Well, yes. Although we have to be a little bit careful, because again, this is mostly seen as a lower-class women’s march. Even though there were other women involved in this, this is really seen as the work of the mob. And so, when Rousseau is writing, he is really writing about a certain class of woman, you know, middle-class to upper middle class or upper class. He’s not necessarily thinking about these lower-class women. 

And the thing about Olympe de Gouges’s relationship to the women’s march is that she actually was disturbed by it, which is interesting. So, Olympe de Gouges was in Versailles at the time; she was actually living nearby, and so she probably witnessed something of this. And it disturbed her because Olympe de Gouges is a pacifist; she hates violence. She hates it. And over and over again in her writing over the coming years, you see this pacifist strain in her writing. So, what disturbed her about the women’s march was, first of all, the kind of mob rule feeling to it and also that it was violent. But to your point, it is also showing, and at least it is shown to historians, that women can take an active role in the revolution. 

So, there are a number of different things, you know, like any political movement, from the long view of history, you kind of see patterns, but in the moment, there’s a lot of chaos and a lot of tensions. And I think that one of those tensions is between class and gender, particularly in the women’s march. 

Ann: Thank you. This is part of where I’m just kind of like… Because I’m, like a lot of historians, I think, trying to look back and trying to put everything in a box and be like, “Okay, this was this. This is what feminists were thinking.” It’s like, no, everyone… The class of it all is such a crucial component of this, too. It’s not just like, “Yay! Support women.” It’s just kind of like, well, no, like the fishwives are in a completely different situation from what Olympe is up to. 

Leah: Absolutely. And we haven’t really talked about sort of what comes before this or before the fall of the Bastille, which is when—without going into too much detail because it is just so complicated and hard to follow—but, you know, one of the sort of initial triggers for the French Revolution is that Louis XVI, the king, has called, for the first time in well over 100 years, he’s called the Estates General, which is really a kind of convening of the different classes of France, the First Estate, the Second Estate and the Third Estate, to kind of talk about the situation in France. The First Estate is the clergy, the Second Estate is the nobility, and the Third Estate is, you know, everybody else, the commoners. And at that convening, there was a push that ended up being successful to double the size of the Third Estate. And the Third Estate starts to conceive of itself as representative of the people of France. 

So, this is where you’re starting to see a total change in even the conception of, you know, who should be dictating the legal decisions and the financial decisions that are happening in France. You know, this is where you start to see a real shift in understanding that the will of the people needs to be respected. But inherently, France has always been this incredibly classed society, right? So, even the fact that the Third Estate could say, “No, it’s our turn,” is a recognition of, you know, a kind of class hierarchy in France. And so, those things don’t just evaporate, you know, once the Revolution starts. People are very aware of who is engaging in what kinds of activities. And Olympe de Gouges would have been very aware that market women were the ones who seemed to be initiating this women’s march and the ones who seemed to be engaged in the violence of the women’s march. 

Ann: And again, just when I saw somebody— It was when I was getting ready to do this episode with you, and I saw someone posting, like, an artistic rendering, and then they said, like, “Yeah, did you know, like in 1789, this women’s march. Why don’t we do stuff like that?” And I think what people are focusing on today in 2025, when they’re kind of looking at what they like the sounds of, is cutting the heads off of the one percent. That’s the one thing that people are like, “Let’s also do that.” Where it’s like, but that’s not what was happening at this march. What they were doing was cutting off the heads of the National Guard, actually. 

Leah: Yeah, exactly. And going on rampages, acting on feelings. Acting on feelings and defying the rule of law. That’s happening. 

Ann: Yeah. So, there’s people like Olympe and her social circle, I would think, like the philosophers, the writers who are just kind of like, “Oh, let’s like think about this philosophically. What are people’s rights?” or whatever. And then there’s kind of the fishwives and the poor people who are just like, “We’re goddamn hungry.” Like, it’s not the same battle. It’s different things. And this is part of where I think I get so confused, because it’s not just one grassroots thing where everyone is on board with the Revolution together. It’s just kind of all these things are happening at once. 

Leah: Exactly. And so, the common people, you know, sort of the people in the streets, there’s a French name at the time for these people, they’re called the sans-culottes. And the sans-culottes means without breaches or britches. We don’t really have a good name in English. 

Ann: They were not people running around— I just want to be clear. They’re wearing pants. They’re just not wearing a certain kind of pants. To me, the sans-culottes sounds like… 

Leah: [laughs] Something else. 

Ann: That’s I always think, and I have to be like, “No, they’re wearing pants. They’re not just running around in underpants.” 

Leah: They’re wearing pants, but they’re wearing long pants. That’s a physical, sartorial clothing marker between the upper classes and the lower classes. So, the lower classes wear pants that go all the way down to their ankles, and the people at court are wearing knee britches. We see this among paintings of French revolutionaries or French people in the 18th century, and Americans of the 18th century. They’re wearing those pants that stop at the knee, and those are called culottes. So, the sans-culottes, without britches, are the ones who are wearing the long pants. And it’s just a name that designates this particular class of people. 

So, Ann, what you’re saying that, you know, there are multiple different factions and sort of grassroots, you know, groups that are organizing, and that is absolutely true. What you will see later in the Revolution is a kind of alliance among certain groups in order to forward the Revolution. But it is true that there is always a tension between the desires of one group and the desires of another. Olympe definitely belongs to a much more kind of literate group who’s interested in the ideas, passionately interested in the ideas. I don’t want to give the sense that somehow, they were secret aristocrats who liked the ideas but wanted to keep their aristocratic lives. I actually don’t believe that. I think that they really did, you know, really believe in a new France, but they are thinking about it, at least initially, in terms of reform and in terms of law. Initially, 1789 through, you know, 1792, they’re thinking about it in terms of a constitutional monarchy; they are not thinking about it in terms of a republic, that comes later. 

I think that’s another thing that people don’t realize is that many, many people in France in the early years of the Revolution were thinking about something a little bit closer to a constitutional monarchy.

Ann: So, having, like, a monarch, having a king, and also having a parliament or something like that, where it’s just like there’s a king, but there’s also we also have some say. We’ve talked before in this podcast about, like, Versailles and the Sun King and the absolute power. So, it’s like, “Let’s not have that, but we’ll still have a king. It’s just, like, we’ll kind of work with him,” sort of thing. 

Leah: Absolutely. They were really invested in having Louis go along with this. In the beginning, he did seem to be kind of going along with this, you know, sort of acquiescing to the will of the people. Many people were quite optimistic about it. 

So, I do want to say, you know, the Revolution, despite the fact that there are these violent episodes, there is this kind of thread, undercurrent of violence that is there from the beginning, it starts off relatively well. [laughs] You know, Louis does seem to be going along with the idea of doing some sort of constitution. The Declaration of the Rights of Man gets published early on; he doesn’t love it, but he doesn’t necessarily seem to reject it, you know, wholesale. But then things get difficult. 

Ann: I want to talk about the women’s political clubs, because what Olympe is up to at this time is she joins, (or helps found, I’m not sure) she became part of the Society of the Friends of Truth, which was an association whose goals included “establishing equal political and legal rights for women.” Do you know anything about that or just sort of like what…? It just seems like there’s people who are… There’s mob violence and that’s one tactic, and then there’s people like Olympe who are like, “Let’s talk about philosophy with other thinkers in a social club,” and that’s kind of where she’s headed. 

Leah: Yeah. So, there are clubs that are started all over the place. They start to show up in 1789. They kind of take off in the very early 1790s to 1790, 1791. Before, there are clubs that are specific to women, a number of these clubs are, you know, fraternal clubs, meaning they accept both men and women. So, for instance, you get the Fraternal Society of Patriots of Both Sexes, [laughs]  you know, with this incredibly… This title that kind of makes it clear that they are accepting both men and women, and that was on purpose, right? Because part of revolutionary thinking is saying, “Okay, women should be in this as well.” Not everyone agrees with this, but a lot of people think about this. 

The clubs start mostly outside of Paris, but then they start to, you know, show up in Paris as well. That particular club that you’re talking about, the Society of the Friends of Truth, Etta Palm starts that. She’s a Dutch woman living in France, she is a radical feminist. Olympe de Gouges is also a radical feminist. Etta Palm believes in, you know, voting rights for women, women’s suffrage, equal civic rights, and she starts a female version of the Society of the Friends of Truth. There had also been a male counterpart, but Etta Palm starts this female one. I think Olympe de Gouges— It’s not clear to me, Ann, if we can just take a little side note here, it’s not clear to me whether she belonged to this club, actually. Some people think that she did, but her relationship to the clubs is a little bit unclear. 

Ann: Okay. No, and that’s good to know and that’s good to clarify. This is also, like, just everything that we’ve been talking about, kind of, the chaos of what was happening. It’s like, we don’t know what everybody was doing at the time. 

Leah: Right, we’re just kind of guessing. But you know, the thing about these clubs is you have to think about it in the moment. So, women are coming to these clubs, they’re hashing out ideas. You know, I think of the French Revolution as being a very loud place. You know, right now, we live in a time where, weirdly, the world is kind of quiet because of social media. A lot of, you know, when we speak or when we put ideas out there, it’s online. So, we connect to people online, but we’re kind of by ourselves doing it. The era of the French Revolution, it’s actually quite loud. You know, people are in the streets, people are in the clubs. They’re talking to each other, they’re shouting at each other, they’re getting incredibly energized. So, when women go to these clubs, someone will be reading, you know, the latest decree or the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and people are reacting, they’re reacting to this. 

So, there’s tremendous energy and excitement that’s being fostered and nurtured in these clubs and a lot of different ideas that are being thrown around, including should women have the right to vote? What is women’s proper place in society? Are women citizens? So, by this time, the word ‘citizen’ is already in use for men. The word in French is citoyen; the female counterpart is cityoyenne. We don’t really have an equivalent in English, I wish we did. Right? Like a female citizen. But that word hasn’t been codified, it’s not necessarily sort of recognized that women—well, it’s not recognized at all—that women are equal citizens to men, but women are using it. They’re calling themselves citoyenne, citizen, because they want to be equal citizens in this new country that the French are building. 

Ann: And this is where Olympe is, she was writing novels, she’s writing plays, and she really gets into writing political pamphlets at this time. 

Leah: Yeah, I think what happens is that, first of all, she’s not a hugely successful playwright. [laughs] She writes a lot of plays, but she doesn’t have a lot of success, you know, getting them on the stage, which we already talked about. She’s also, as I mentioned, she’s an incredibly impetuous person, and it’s an exciting time, and she has a lot of thoughts. She has a lot of things to say. So, she turns her pen away from the theatre; she doesn’t abandon it entirely, but she turns it more towards political pamphlets. 

This is another way in which the French Revolution is a really loud time; a lot of people are writing. They are writing and writing and writing, and they are writing to be read by other people. So, you know, they might be publishing articles and newspapers, but what a lot of people are doing are writing political pamphlets that then get distributed or placards, which are like posters where you would write actually a fair amount of text and you would post it up in places in Paris, marketplaces, et cetera, where people would see them. And again, this is the kind of thing where you could imagine one person standing there with a crowd around them and that one person reading out loud the placard and everybody else listening and commenting. This is how ideas spread during the time of the French Revolution. And Olympe, she just throws herself into writing these pamphlets and these posters. 

Ann: And her most famous work, if it’s appropriate to get to that now…

Leah: Yes.

Ann: Is the… So, you mentioned before that there was the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, and then she wrote her response to that. 

Leah: She wrote her response. If I can just give a little bit of context first, it will be important to eventually what happens to her. So, I mentioned that the king (let’s leave the queen aside for a second), but I mentioned that the king had been relatively popular early in his reign. And, you know, at the beginning, it did seem like maybe he was going to go along with a constitutional monarchy. And then, unfortunately, Louis and the royal family make a decision that completely ruins it for them, and that is that they decide to leave Paris under cover of night. They just decide to try to flee, and they head for the border, and they are caught. They’re recognized and caught, and they are brought back to Paris. 

Once that happens, the people start to really think of Louis as the enemy. You know, at first, they thought, “Okay, he’s a good French king, he cares about his people.” And now, they start to think, “Actually, he might be on the side of the enemy.” Because the foreign powers, I should say, led by Austria, have already started to make noises about, you know, what’s happening in France and that they don’t like it. Marie Antoinette is Austrian, and it seems pretty clear that the royal family, when they were trying to flee France, was headed for Austria. So now, Louis has lost the trust of the French people. That happens in the summer of 1791, just before Olympe de Gouges writes her most famous pamphlet, which is the Declaration of the Rights of Women. 

The reason why she does this is because a new constitution is in the works, and, you know, it’s clear that a fair number of rights are going to be codified in law, but that those rights are specific to men. [chuckles] You know, they’re not necessarily including the women. And Olympe de Gouges is basically saying, “Wait, what about the women?” You know, we’ve heard this before with the American Revolution, right? Where Abigail Adams says, “Don’t forget the ladies.” It’s the same idea. You know, what about the women? So, she writes this pamphlet. And the irony is that, you know, now it’s her most famous work, but actually, at the time, it kind of got ignored. No one really paid attention to it. But this declaration is mind-blowing in its, sort of, foresight, in its feminism and in its foresight of who women are, why women are equal to men, and what a modern society owes them as citizens who, as human beings, are equal to men. I have it here. Do you want to read some of the articles? I mean, some of the things that she says are just really so moving. 

Ann: So, we’re talking about the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, and you have some notable quotes. 

Leah: Notable quotes. So, she writes this Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, and that’s important. Female citizen; she’s trying to create this idea of the place that woman has in society. She’s not just defined by gender, she’s defined by her active role in, you know, the new nation as a citizen. 

So, the first article is “Woman is born free and remains equal to man in her rights. Social distinction should be based only on the common good.” So, she’s sort of erasing difference in class and a difference in gender. Another one is Article Two: 

The purpose of any political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of woman and man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and above all, resistance to oppression. 

She’s thinking about oppression as it relates to women in particular. And though she doesn’t say it, I think that she is also thinking about marriage in particular. A lot of thinkers at this time, including Mary Wollstonecraft in England, who is Olympe’s contemporary, writing a lot about marriage and how it keeps women down. 

Article Seven, this is where Olympe really wants to show that, you know, women are held to the same account as men, so why aren’t they treated as equal citizens? And this is what she says. “No woman is exempt. She’s accused, arrested, and detained in cases determined by law. Women like men obey this rigorous law.” So, if the law in terms of punishment sees them as equal as men, why do they not have the same rights to, say, public office, or voting, or the same privileges as the men in society? Something similar, Article Nine. “Once any woman is found guilty, the full rigour of the law applies.” 

This is all headed towards her most famous quote, which is Article Ten, and it’s this: 

No one should be hounded for their opinions, however radical. Woman has the right to mount the scaffold. She should equally have the right to mount the rostrum or the speaker’s tribune in government, provided that her actions do not disturb public order as established by law.

So, the quote that often you hear quoted from Olympe de Gouges is, “Woman has the right to mount the scaffold. She should equally have the right to mount the speaker’s tribune.” 

Ann: And so, what she’s saying, so this scaffold, that’s to be hanged. Like, you can be executed for your crimes, and so if a woman breaks the law, she’s treated under the law as a person. So, she should be treated as a person and be allowed to, you know, get up on the box and as a speaker as well. This is what she’s saying. 

Leah: Yes, yes. And a leader, right? As someone who can be a representative of the people, because when it comes to punishment or the law, she’s treated like one of those people, so she should be able to have the same rights as men to be a leader of those people. 

Ann: This reminds me of, in a way, just how you said that this is what she’s best known for now, and all these iconic quotes. At the time, I guess, you know, so many people have so many pamphlets, there’s so many, so many things happening; it didn’t get a lot of attention at the time. But it reminds me of like, you know, Vincent van Gogh or something, where it’s like, “Wow, look at this beautiful art,” but at the time, everyone’s just going, “Uh, whatever.” Things that we see as important now, at the time, she didn’t emerge as this like, “Wow, look at this new voice for women’s rights,” because I guess just there’s so many people shouting. 

Leah: There’s so many people shouting, and also, there are many other people shouting for women’s rights as well. There are some people who are shouting for women’s rights in a satirical way. 

So, one way… The late 18th century is definitely a place that loves satire [laughs] and one way people were making fun of the idea of the new constitution was to pretend, you know, “Oh, slippery slope. What are we going to do now? Give women the right to vote?” You know, so they were sort of using it to satirize and to criticize the new constitution. So, it’s not clear whether people understood Olympe de Gouges’s declaration as an authentic and earnest publication, which I believe it was, or if they saw it as just yet another voice in this, you know, sea of voices that’s either calling for women’s rights or pillaring the idea of women’s rights through satire and mockery. 

So, yeah, it just didn’t gain a lot of traction, but I think that the reason why people are so moved by it now is the clarity, you know? The clarity of what she says and the modernity of it. What she is saying resonates with us now. This is what women today believe in. She kind of articulated the underpinnings of women’s emancipation or, sort of, the realization of women as full and equal citizens of a modern republic. 

Ann: And that’s interesting, too, you mentioned the clarity of it, because at the time, I don’t know about this one specifically, but she was looked down upon because of her grammar and her speaking, because French wasn’t her first language. So, what I read is that her writing was sometimes dismissed because people like, the way that people do now, you know, if somebody writes an essay and there’s a typo in it or somebody posts on, you know, Threads or Substack and it’s like, “Oh, actually, you used the semicolon wrong.” [Leah laughs] Where it’s like, well, look at the look at look at the content! Don’t look at the grammar. 

Leah: Yeah. And the thing is, is that I often think that, you know, those attacks are kind of a red herring, right? It becomes a way to criticize someone when, in fact, the whole reason for the criticism is that the person doing the criticizing doesn’t like the substance of the idea. 

Ann: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It’s when people… I mean, if I may be personal for a second, [Leah laughs] when people criticize this podcast and say, I swear too much or something. Where it’s like, okay, but what you don’t like is that it’s a woman talking like, and they’re just going to be like, “Oh, you use this vocal fry,” or something. It’s like you just don’t like the sound of a woman’s voice, like, that’s what it is. And you’re just trying to find a way to not say that, but that’s what you actually mean. 

Leah: Right. And maybe you don’t even recognize that that’s what’s going on. Maybe you don’t even recognize it. So, you’re finding the thing that you think bugs you, but that’s not what’s really bugging you. 

Ann: Exactly, exactly. It’s the same— And this is a different sphere, but Meghan Markle or something, people who are being like, “Oh, I just don’t like her show. She just rubs me the wrong way.” It’s like, okay, you don’t like to see a Black woman having a nice time. It’s like, “Oh, no, no, I just think that…” Right, it’s just like, no, this is what actually your heart doesn’t like, but you’re trying to find a different thing to say about it. 

Leah: Yes. And I think that Olympe de Gouges suffered from that, starting when the Revolution takes off all the way through the 20th century, you know, where she was really criticized and made fun of. She was mocked for who she was. 

But she also did some things that I think were confusing to people. So, one thing that she does with this Declaration of the Rights of Women is that she dedicates it to the queen, which is a very confusing choice. 

Ann: Yes. She dedicates it to Marie Antoinette, which is very interesting. Yeah. 

Leah: You know, you have to ask kind of what was that about and what was she thinking? Because Marie Antoinette’s reputation has now sunk to a low point. Once the royal family tried to escape in what’s called the Flight to Varennes, and then is brought back, you know, the royal family is deeply unpopular. And Marie Antoinette always takes the brunt of that. So, what is Olympe…? 

Ann: Well, for similar reasons, like the woman… Again, she’s…. 

Leah: Yes. And queens are foreign, almost by definition; queen consorts in France are foreign. They come from another kingdom. You know, Austria had traditionally been an enemy of France, so people just don’t like the Austrians, and almost from the very beginning, they’re suspicious of Marie Antoinette. But certainly now, when war is being fomented or there’s talk now, increasingly, of a possible war between France and Austria because of Austria’s hostility to what’s going on in France, she’s seen as potentially an enemy. And then Olympe de Gouges does this crazy thing and dedicates the Declaration of Rights of Women to the queen. And, you know, what is she thinking? 

Well, the thing about Olympe de Gouges is she does have a little bit of this royalist strain in her. So, you know, I said earlier that most people kind of envisioned something like a constitutional monarchy. So, there’s still this reverence on some level for the idea of the king, because they have not known anything else. You know, it’s important to kind of remember that people tend to operate in the paradigms that they were raised in, and France is the oldest kingdom in Europe. [laughs] I really want to point that out. So, you know, the idea of suddenly the king just going away was very difficult for people to wrap their minds around. 

The other thing is that remember that Olympe de Gouges thinks that she is the illegitimate daughter of a marquis, so she does have this attachment on some level to the aristocracy. So, one explanation for her dedication to Marie Antoinette is that she’s trying to carve out a different role for Marie Antoinette in this revolution. She says, you know, “Look, you’ve kind of reached this low point, people don’t really like you. Here’s an opportunity for you to remake yourself into a champion of women. And maybe that’s one way to get your popularity back.” She reminds Marie Antoinette that when the queen was a young woman, she actually was a little bit of a radical. She certainly resisted the sort of stuffy, pompous nature of the French court, and this is absolutely true. I don’t know if you’ve done an episode of Marie Antoinette yet, but… 

Ann: This is all leading to an episode about Marie Antoinette. 

Leah: This is leading to it, okay. Well, when Marie Antoinette was young, when she came from Austria, she really disliked the incredibly staid rituals and conservative rituals of the French court. She really wanted everyone to relax. [laughs] So, she resisted this for a while until she was sort of told that that was unseemly for a queen, and she had to behave a certain way. This was well known. So, Olympe de Gouges evokes that again in her dedication. She says, “Okay, remember when you were that kind of woman? Let’s do that again. Let’s do that again.” And I always see it, like, as if she’s trying to carve out this little opening for Marie Antoinette as a way to save the monarchy, because it’s clear that it’s going downhill pretty fast. 

Ann: Well, and this is one of the other questions I asked you, which is tricky. So, how did things go from, like, “Yeah! Let’s do a limited monarchy,” to, like, the king is on trial? This pivot. Well, actually, no. I think to clarify that, too, it’s kind of like, who’s in charge of the Revolution at this point? Is anyone? Is this where Robespierre comes in? 

Leah: Okay. So, now we’re getting seriously complicated. [both laugh] Oh my gosh. Wow. What a complete mess, right? Which makes perfect sense, right? Because no one really knew what they were doing, and at some point, you know, it does become a question of power. Who’s going to be in charge? Who’s going to grab power? Whose vision of the Revolution is going to start to lead? 

Ann: Yeah. So, just in contrast or comparison to the Haitian Revolution, it’s like Toussaint Louverture, like, he’s there, he’s the guy, “I’m going to lead this.” The American Revolution, it’s like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson. There’s people that we can point to, and in the time, everyone kind of knew, like, these are the guys. These are the people who are in charge. The French Revolution is just kind of like, I don’t know. I don’t think there is that guy. It’s all different guys. 

Leah: You know, I’m probably simplifying here. But if you think about what happens with the American Revolution…

Ann: Please simplify!

Leah: Okay, well, if you think about what happens with the American Revolution, you know, first of all, they’re separated from their king by an ocean. 

Ann: Yes, which helps.

Leah: So, geographically and even sort of chronologically, they kind of have time to get together, in Congress, essentially, right? That is what Congress… How it starts, to sort of talk about this and to kind of decide who’s going to be the leader and possibly where it’s going to go. And again, that is still disorganized. I mean, one thing when you read about the American Revolution is that they are kind of making it up as it goes. Same thing with the French Revolution, except for the fact that the king is right there. You know, this is all happening within the same proximity, so it’s harder to act when the king is right there. And when they still are starting to think, “Okay, maybe the king can be involved in some way.” 

The other thing that is important to know about the French Revolution, and I think this happens with the American Revolution in a different sort of way, is that there is a lot of tension between what is going on in Paris and the rest of the country and this is actually a very, very old tension. You see it as far back as the 16th century, which is the century that I know quite well. What goes on in Paris is not necessarily reflective of what the rest of the people want. 

So, when you think about the revolutionaries in this period of time, about 1791, they’re operating for all intents and purposes, kind of like a constitutional monarchy. The revolutionary government is made up of a faction (largely, not entirely) of men that come to be known as, in English, the Girondists, in French it’s the Girondins. These are sort of the counsellors to King Louis under this new revolutionary model. The reason why they’re called the Girondists is that their leaders come from the region of the Gironde. Now, I do want to make clear that these guys are friends. They are Jacobins, they are revolutionaries, okay? They don’t want a monarchy in the traditional sense, they want something new. They are friends, initially, with the more radical Jacobins like Robespierre and Marat, who was a radical journalist. Initially, they are kind of friends with these guys, but increasingly, there starts to be divisions. 

Ann: And the division is kind of like the more radical, like, “Let’s get rid of the monarchy entirely,” and the, ”Let’s have a constitutional monarchy.“

Leah: Yes. So, one of the initial divisions is on the question of war with the foreign powers. And the reason why you said this is a ball of yarn, because people keep changing positions. But the initial division is that a number of the revolutionaries led by the Girondins were really excited by the revolutionary ideals and democratic principles, and they kind of want to export this throughout Europe. And they see this war as an opportunity to do this. Like, “Let’s just go and export revolution throughout Europe by fighting these foreign powers.” The more radical wing, which comes to be led by Robespierre, says no. They don’t want this. But eventually, war does get declared with Louis XV, he sanctions it, he approves it. 

So, once the monarchy gets abolished officially in August 1792, Louis is already a little bit under house arrest, but now he’s really under house arrest, and the more moderate revolutionaries, the Girondists, want to kind of keep him in prison because they think that they have leverage against the foreign powers if they keep him alive and in prison. The more radical wing of the revolutionaries kind of wants to execute him right away, but the more moderate wing says, “No, no. We should keep him as leverage.” But then a few things happen. For reasons that I won’t go into the details, but there is there are a couple of crucial battles where the French actually win, and so, it becomes clear that maybe they don’t need a hostage in the king as leverage anymore. 

And then there was another scandal where a number of very compromising documents authored by Louis get discovered, and it seems once again that he’s actually working much more for France’s enemies than he’s working for the French people. And at that point, the moderate wing of the revolutionaries can’t really justify keeping him alive anymore. They at least ask that he be given a trial. So, he does go to trial; he’s ultimately condemned, and then he is executed. 

Where Olympe de Gouges comes into the story is that she writes, you know, when he’s about to go to trial, she actually writes a pamphlet offering to defend the king. And I think it’s the most moving pamphlet that she writes. You know, she’s most famous for this Declaration of the Rights of Woman, but there is something about this pamphlet that I just find incredibly moving. You know, she basically says something equivalent to, “Are we going to buy freedom at the price of violence like this?” 

Ann: Right, because she’s been a pacifist. You mentioned that before. 

Leah: She’s been a pacifist. And also, is this truly the right way to defeat the concept of monarchy? Because the king is just a man, and if you execute him as a king, you kind of keep him a king. You convey the sense that somehow, intrinsically, he is a king. Whereas if you destroy the monarchy, if you successfully topple it and you keep him alive, he’s just a man, and all of the sort of illusion of divine right and sacredness and that he’s somehow above everyone else is just going to evaporate. So, it’s actually a quite humane way to understand what was happening here. And also, the way she frames it is very much about, what is the right direction that we want to steer this revolution? Because if we execute our king, we are endorsing a certain level of violence that is going to be very, very difficult to walk back. 

Ann: It just reminds me of so many things. Not necessarily the current political situation, but just like, in workplaces or whatever, where it’s just, like, someone makes such a good, logical, reasonable argument, but it’s like, “Yes, but the people who are in charge don’t respond to logic and reason. That’s not going to change their mind. Even though everything you said just made sense, and yet, we’re still not going to do it because that’s not…” 

Leah: And it’s very high level. It’s very high level. It’s on the level of ideas. And we’re at a point in the revolution fueled by the sans-culottes, you know, the commoners. And by the way, the hunger situation isn’t getting much better. [laughs] You know, even under this new revolutionary government. And so, you know, people want more reform, or they think they want more reform. But people are really acting on feelings, you know, on anger, hunger, and sort of these visceral feelings. Olympe de Gouges is operating on the level of ideas. So, you know, that’s a problem. 

Ann: Right. So, this is where… Like, I’m just kind of picturing this crowd of people on the street, and they’re sort of… The vibe is just getting more, I don’t know, not out of control, but just angry, more violent. More angry, more violent. It’s less like the big “Oh, look, a pamphlet. Let’s read it.” It’s more just like, “Let’s just start killing people.” And is this we’re getting into, like, the Terror? Is this where this is kind of happening? 

Leah: Yes. So, this is already… I mean, this level of violence has already shown itself. 

Ann: I guess once you execute the king… 

Leah: Yeah, it’s already happened. And we’ve had to skip over this part because the French Revolution is so confusing, and everything happens so fast that it’s so easy to jump over episodes, but one of the most violent episodes happens a few months before the king is executed. It’s called the September Massacres. This is introducing a whole new dimension. 

France is a Christian nation at this point. And remember how I talked about the three estates? The clergy, the nobility, the Third Estate. Well, the clergy and the nobility were often seen to be tied together. So, one way that the new revolutionary government decides that it’s going to control the clergy is by making all of the clergy, men and women (women, I mean, nuns) swear to an oath, an oath of allegiance. Some priests do for self-preservation, and some priests don’t, and they kind of go into hiding. But those who don’t successfully go into hiding are arrested. So, the prisons are getting more and more full of these non-swearing priests. 

So, in September, soon after the fall of the monarchy, there is a massacre. No one knows for sure who instigates it. I think there is kind of the feeling that one of the more radical revolutionaries, like Marat or perhaps Danton, did something to kind of instigate this, but there is a huge massacre in the prisons of Paris where a number of… Well, you know, they went after the priests and slaughtered them brutally in the courtyards or even in prison cells. I mean, later, when prisoners go into some of these prison cells, they say they can still see the blood on the walls from the September Massacres. So, violence has already reached a fever pitch. Even aside from the September Massacres, there are people who are being lynched all over the place. And, you know, I’m going to emphasize the priests here, but a lot of different people are being lynched. Before the guillotine was really active politically, the phrase was “to the lamppost.” The idea is like, you know, you’ve gotten hold of this guy and you’re going to hang him from the lamppost. 

Ann: And it’s not… I just want to clarify for myself. This isn’t, like, they’re going for the priests, but the people who they’re going after, it’s not just like, “Let’s kill all the one percent, let’s kill all the rich people.” It’s like, “Let’s kill my political enemies. Let’s kill people who don’t support the revolution.” It’s people of all different classes are being killed. 

Leah: Yes. And you know, any time you get this kind of chaos, people will also settle personal vendettas under the cover of, you know, sort of a new political order. You know, that happens. You see that happen in France in the 16th century—again, the century I really know— and then again here, where, you know, someone will be identified as an enemy of the Revolution. And you have to wonder, was this person really an enemy of the Revolution, or was there some sort of personal vendetta that is being sown? 

But again, there is this kind of mob anger, mob violence and the more radical wing of the revolutionaries, of the Jacobins, is starting to consolidate power. They have the support of the sans-culottes, of the common people, particularly in Paris. And so, that is kind of like this sort of unholy alliance [laughs] between this more radical arm of the revolutionaries, spearheaded by lawyers, you know, these were people of ideas, but also fueled by the rage and the feelings of the common people. 

Ann: So, in April 1793, the convention set up a Committee of Public Safety, which was eventually controlled by Robespierre. So, this is… What do you know about the Committee? It sounds so nefarious. It sounds very, like, Nineteen Eighty-Four adjacent, just kind of like, public safety, but it’s actually terrorizing the public. 

Leah: Exactly. Well, what’s happening is power is being consolidated, you know, into the hands of a few, essentially. I already spoke about the tension between, sort of, the provinces and Paris… Power is being consolidated within Paris; it is partially a response to the unrest that’s happening all over France. 

By the time that the Committee of Public Safety gets set up in April, there are a number of different things going on. France is at war with foreign powers, but there has also been a very significant rebellion that has erupted to the west in a region called the Vendée. So, they’re basically at civil war, too. The Vendée is a very Catholic region. The reason why this rebellion happens is in part to resist the elimination of the clergy, and it is also a resistance to the control of Paris. You know, many, many regions are now seeing this as, like, Paris’s revolution, not the French Revolution, Paris’s revolution. The Girondins, that more moderate party, was much more interested in a kind of federal government, you know, where the different regions would be represented. But the Republic—and by the time you get, you know, to April, a republic has been set up—is seen as something that’s going to be coming out of Paris, controlled by whatever is going on in Paris. 

Ann: So, I think that’s such good context to think about this is the climate into which Olympe is publishing things, being like, “Actually, the king is an okay person.” This is setting her up as an enemy of the new power. 

Leah: And she’s done this before, right? I mean, she dedicated the Declaration of the Rights of Woman to Marie Antoinette. I mean, she keeps kind of showing these slightly royalist strains or at least using language that could be manipulated without a lot of difficulty into suggesting that, in fact, she supports the monarchy. 

This is where her impetuousness and maybe stubbornness starts to become a problem. You would think that maybe she would think about this. But Olympe also has a way of kind of saying, you know, “I know my death is at hand, [laughs] I know I might get punished for this.” But at the time, even as these trials are now going forward in thanks to the Committee of Public Safety and what eventually becomes the Revolutionary Tribunal, where people who are accused of anti-revolutionary thinking come up for trial, even though that’s starting to happen, you know, kind of in mid 1793, a lot of people are actually exonerated. Like, they might go to trial, but they don’t actually get condemned. So, I think on some level, Olympe de Gouges thinks that she can protest what’s going on and that that’s okay. That somehow, she’s going to get away with it. 

Ann: What I’m just reading here from the Encyclopedia of Women’s History, it says that she wanted to publish a new pamphlet but the person who she went to to print her pamphlets was just like, “This is too much. I’m not I can’t print this. It’s too extreme,” and it said inform the authorities. 

Leah: That happens towards the end. So, let’s jump to maybe the summer of 1793. That’s when things go really wrong, and she ends up landing herself in prison. 

So, a couple of things happen. I’ve talked about the Girondists and the radical arm of the revolutionaries led by Robespierre. That radical arm is known as The Mountain, which might be an easier way to kind of remember them. So, they’re called The Mountain because of where they sit in the national convention, it’s up in the risers, so they’re high above everybody else. So, there’s a purge in late May, early June, and The Mountain gets rid of the more moderate wing of the revolutionary government. When I say “gets rid,” they arrest them all. They arrest them all and they put them in jail. And if they don’t get arrested, they have to flee. And they are fleeing for their lives. I mean, they are really afraid, rightly so, that they are going to be executed. That happens. 

Charlotte Corday, who is a young woman from Caen, from Normandy, executes one of The Mountain’s chief leaders, the journalist Marat, that throws everything into chaos. So, now the government is actually quite panicked and definitely out to come after anybody who seems to be espousing anti-revolutionary thinking. So, I think it’s quite common in this day and age, in the 21st century, to think that the French revolutionaries only killed aristocrats because that’s what they said; they accused these people of being royalists and aristocrats. But what’s important to know is that the word ‘aristocrat’ started to be used almost like a slur; it was used for anyone who seemed to be espousing anti-revolutionary thinking and ideas. The republican government is now passing laws that say that the Republic is one and indivisible, and anyone who suggests otherwise is a traitor. They also start, starting in the fall of 1793, to pass laws that open up what’s called the Law of Suspects, meaning that if you’re even suspected of harbouring anti-revolutionary thinking, you can be arrested and go to trial. 

Ann: And how does this… I think I read something about part of what this, The Mountain-based government, there had been these movements of, like, the women’s political clubs and people like Olympe who were like, “Hey, what if women get more rights?” Like, this is all being cut back to be like, “No. No place for women. Get out of here.” 

Leah: Yes. And you really start to see that after Charlotte Corday kills, assassinates the journalist Marat, this kind of suspicion about women and about, sort of, mob thinking. Right? Like, who is going to be the anti-revolutionary thinking? The ambiance that we’re starting to kind of dive into is definitely one of hyper control. Hyper control by a committee, the Committee of Public Safety, and, you know, the sort of weaponized court, which is the Revolutionary Tribunal, to control what counts as revolutionary thinking and what doesn’t count. 

Ann: So, this is… I really want to just sort of like, sit in this moment for a second, because this is where I think today people who vaguely know kind of what the French Revolution was are like, “Yeah, it was a time when the everyday people got rid of the king and wasn’t that a good thing?” It’s like, well, that was part of what happened, sort of, at the beginning. But a couple… What is this? Like, 1793? A few years later, it’s just this Mountain, like Robespierre. When I was sort of researching this, my friend Allison was like, “Think of him as sort of like if he’d been around in the Salem witch trials, he would have really enjoyed that.” Robespierre is just a person who is not a cool revolutionary. He’s a very conservative, controlling person. 

Leah: Well, it gets more conservative. But at the same time, there are I think Robespierre is a really confusing guy. And, you know, I personally am looking forward to, like, learning more about him, because at the same time, I think there’s some evidence that he wasn’t the most violent of the Committee of Public Safety and that, in fact, he wanted to walk some of the violence back. But he might have been sort of a conflicted guy. And, you know, here’s the problem. It’s like, when you feel threatened from all sides, you know, you’ve got this war going on in the provinces and you’ve got the foreign powers, you start to make these choices because you don’t really see another way out. And if you are also trying to preserve your own power within your select group, you might let certain things go because you don’t really know how to stop it, and you’re also interested in preserving your own power. 

Basically, we’re in this time of, you know, just complete chaos with the guillotine, which had really begun as, you know, the guillotine was invented as a humane form of execution, one that did not discriminate on the basis of class. But it really does get weaponized to eliminate anyone who seems to be resisting the revolutionary thinking as it is defined by a select group of people within Paris. 

So, in some ways, [chuckles] I mean, to put it in simple terms, I think that the Revolution by this point, you know, the summer and into the fall of 1793, has reached a level of tyranny but, you know, following a different ideological path than the tyranny that they were supposedly opposing with the elimination of the king. I also want to point to how little time actually elapsed between the execution of the king, which was in January 1793 and the summer of 1793, which is when we kind of see the beginning of what would eventually be called the Terror. 

Ann: Right. And this is not the part of the French Revolution that people are posting memes about being like, “Hey, let’s bring back the French Revolution.” It’s like, no. The part that people are excited about is their interpretation of what the very beginning of it was like, which is just like the women’s march. It’s just like, “Yeah, let’s just show the people in power that we’re mad.” Very quickly, it turned into this. Like, it’s not… This is not, like you were saying and you’ve been saying on the Substack, it’s like, “Is this the role model we want to follow?” 

Leah: Definitely not, like, all the steps. I think, you know, every revolutionary moment has its context and, you know, it’s good to be smart about it. I think that there are models that we can find in every single revolutionary moment, and Olympe de Gouges would be one of them. Maybe not necessarily her impetuousness, but certainly her bravery, you know? And her kind of radical thinking. I would also say her pacifism, you know? Because yes, the Terror is incredibly violent. It is very Thought Police-y, extremely Thought Police-y, and no one is safe. No one is safe. One wrong move and you could be thrown in jail. And pretty soon, it gets to be clear that if you were thrown in jail and, you know, you go up before the Revolutionary Tribunal, chances are it’s going to be a death sentence. 

Ann: And she continues voicing her opinions and her thoughts. 

Leah: Yes. So, this is what happens. In July 1793, soon after Charlotte Corday kills Marat, Olympe de Gouges comes back to Paris. She had been away; she had actually considered withdrawing from Paris. I think she was scared. I think she was scared by what was happening. She has a little place in Auteuil, which is in the outskirts of Paris, and that is where her daughter-in-law (her son has gotten married), so that is where her daughter-in-law and her grandson are, and she considers staying there, which probably would have been a smart move. But soon after Charlotte Corday kills Marat, Olympe de Gouges comes back to Paris and she tries to publish a pamphlet that she had written. 

Now, first of all, let me just, like, let’s stop and think about that for a second. The fact that she comes back. You know, you see this over and over. People who are at a point where they could escape danger, and then they turn around and they come back. 

Ann: This is the Madame du Barry story also, where it’s just like “Stay in England. What are you doing?” Yeah. 

Leah: Yeah. Or I don’t know, you know, a totally different political context and historical context. But if you’ve read Rebecca Donner’s All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days about Mildred Harnack, who was the American woman involved in the German resistance in World War II, at some point, she comes back to the States to visit her family. It’s a moment in the narrative, as Rebecca Donner tells it, where you kind of want to say, “Oh my gosh, Mildred, stay there. Stay there!” 

Ann: Yeah, exactly. 

Leah: But she turns around and she goes back to Germany. And you have to wonder, like, why? Why? You know, she clearly felt that she needed to go back because she needed to be working in this resistance. And I feel the same way about Olympe de Gouges. Why did she go back to Paris? Why did she try to publish this pamphlet? Because the pamphlet she tries to publish is called “The Three Urns.” 

Ann: Oh, this is the one that 25 minutes ago I said, “She tried to publish a pamphlet!” Okay, thank you. 

Leah: Yes, yes. “The Three Urns.” But, you know, maybe a better title for us right now might be “The Three Ballot Boxes.” And it is a challenge. She’s calling for free elections in the Republic. She’s saying, “You know what? We should let the people decide. What do we want? Do we want a Republic? Do we want more of a federal government, you know, with a number of different states in France kind of work together? Or do we want a monarchy?” You know, you do have to ask what she was thinking. You do have to ask what she was thinking because the Law of Suspects has already been passed. The concept of the Republic, one and indivisible, is already there in the new constitution. You can’t say things like this and not be seen as somehow embracing anti-revolutionary thinking, anti-Republican thinking. But she’s trying to publish this pamphlet. 

Ann: And this is why the guy, like, the publisher is like, “No, thanks. I don’t want to be killed. I’m not going to publish this.” 

Leah: Right. He says no, and I believe it is his wife, I think there’s a little bit of uncertainty about what happened here, but it is his wife who denounces Olympe de Gouges. 

Ann: Who is like, “Olympe de Gouges tried to publish this thing. Like, you should arrest her, The Mountain.” 

Leah: Yeah. And here’s the thing: It never got published. That is the point. It never actually got published. So, she’s not being arrested because she published this. She’s being arrested for thinking it and for writing it. I think that’s an important difference. 

Ann: Yeah, absolutely. It’s thought crime. 

Leah: Yeah, thought crime. 

Ann: Yeah. And she is, she’s arrested. She’s arrested and put on trial. 

Leah: She’s arrested and put on trial. First of all, they go, and she goes with them, with the police, to retrieve papers from her home. And they were always doing this, they were always raiding, you know, people’s homes, they were raiding monasteries, convents, et cetera, for, you know, evidence of royalist thinking or anti-revolutionary thinking. And they seize her writings, and she claims that they didn’t seize anything that provided them with any evidence. I think that she thought that for quite a while. But it turns out they had, which we’ll get to in a second. 

So, first, she’s thrown into prison. She is actually moved around quite a bit. I have to tell you that the prisons in revolutionary France were horrible. The conditions were horrible. People have to pay for their own food. If they don’t have a lot of money or any money, you know, the question is, how are they going to eat? They’re not really given changes of clothing. Olympe de Gouges was sort of known as a fastidious person, she was kind of a neatnik. So, this is horrifying to her. I mean, there’s like a lot of vermin, there’s a lot of filth. She has no change of clothings. I think she was ill. So, she talks about sweating through her clothes, like, more than 20 times, you know, and she has nothing to change into. She has an injury to her knee, and this also caused a lot of health problems. She’s given no medical care. She is eventually transferred to a kind of nursing home where she is given some care. And oddly, that was a moment where she probably could have escaped, but she doesn’t do it because she still thinks that she can prove her patriotism. 

Ann: Now, this reminds me of when we were talking about, like, she was writing the Declaration of the Rights of Women, where she’s just like, “Hey, here’s some logical, well-thought out arguments,” where it’s like, the people in the streets are not going to listen to that. She’s the sort of person who’s like, “Oh no, I’m going to do what makes sense and then a sensible thing will happen to me,” not realizing that she’s not living in a place where that is how the world works. 

Leah: The old rules no longer apply, essentially. You know? And she hasn’t moved out of that. And the proof of that is that she is still, even in prison, writing pamphlets. [laughs] This is sort of incredible. I don’t know how she got the paper because it’s not like they had stacks of paper lying around, quite the opposite. You know, they wanted to kind of keep people from doing it, but somehow, she gets a hold of paper, maybe it was smuggled into her (which did happen with prisoners), and she manages to write these pamphlets and smuggle them out, which is proof of a couple of things. We talked about very early on that Olympe de Gouges was often accused of, you know, being a bad writer. There were accusations that she actually didn’t even know how to write because her spelling was so atrocious, but here she is. I mean, she’s writing these pamphlets and she’s, you know, signing her name. So, it’s proof. She wants to bear witness to her experience in prison, and then she’s still defending herself, you know, as a patriot, against Robespierre. 

So, eventually, she does go to trial. She’s transferred to the Conciergerie, which is, you know, it’s sort of the place you go when you’re about to go up for trial before the Revolutionary Tribunal, where you will likely, you know, end up being sent to the scaffold. In the meantime, the Girondins, the Girondists, the moderate wing, have all been tried, found guilty, and are all sentenced to death. I wouldn’t be surprised if Olympe de Gouges even heard them, because she was in the same prison as them, the night before they were executed. 

She goes to trial. She is told that the defence lawyer didn’t want to defend her. I don’t think that was true. I think that was a deliberate miscommunication or a mis-delivery of her letter to him, and he was prevented from defending her. So, she is forced to defend herself. And one of the things that you hear about by witnesses is that she was sort of smirking and smiling through the whole trial. And of course, this was held against her, but you can also kind of, you can kind of imagine yourself in her shoes, that she’s mounting this sort of face of defiance, you know? She can’t believe the incredible things that they are saying, so she’s almost blithely laughing at what they are saying because it’s just… It defies comprehension. 

Ann: Sorry, the facial expressions, I’m just thinking, I’m just imagining like, Kamala Harris during that debate, when she was just making like, it’s like, “Look at these things this guy’s saying.” It’s just kind of like, “Come on!” Like, I would imagine those sorts of facial expressions. 

Leah: Exactly. But instead, this is being framed as “Look what a lunatic she is. She’s crazy,” which is not the first time that people have levelled this accusation against Olympe de Gouges, that she’s just absolutely nuts. So, that is, you know, deliberately how that’s being interpreted. 

So, here’s the evidence that they had against her. They had that pamphlet, “The Three Urns,” but they also have a play that she had started back in August 1792 that she never finished. She started it right after the fall of the monarchy, when the royal family gets placed under house arrest. And it has Marie Antoinette as a main, major character in the play. Olympe de Gouges does not really endorse Marie Antoinette, but she does make certain sides of Marie Antoinette sympathetic. You know, she kind of paints her as a woman who cared about her children, who cared about her husband. But this was just easy for the revolutionary tribunal to hold up and say, “Look! She is writing about Marie Antoinette. She’s putting her as a sympathetic character on the stage. She’s clearly a royalist.” So, you know, it was just very easy to kind of frame her as someone who is actually against the Revolution. 

So, during her trial, after she’s sentenced, Olympe de Gouges does the one thing that maybe seems a little bit less brave than normally how we think of her. She stands up and says, “Okay. Well, you’ve sentenced me to death, but it turns out I’m pregnant.” Now, this was sort of an interesting claim. At the time, well, Olympe de Gouges claimed to be about 38 years old, but she was actually 45. She had been claiming that she was younger than she was for quite a while. But, you know, so to make this claim, no one knows if she was actually pregnant or not. There are definitely some… 

Ann: And is that a thing, like, if someone was sentenced to death and they were found pregnant, like, you would be allowed to wait until the baby is born before they killed you? 

Leah: Yes, or you were given a little bit of time, exactly. So, there were a lot of women who claimed pregnancy after being found guilty. And they did this, you know, in an effort to buy time, thinking that, you know, at any moment something is going to happen. 

Ann: Right, this government is going to fall, someone is going to… yeah. 

Leah: Exactly. So, they’re just trying to buy time. She also might have been trying to buy time, or perhaps she was pregnant. You know, who knows? She had that time in that one prison that was a little bit more lax, the nursing home. Perhaps she had had a relationship. I mean, we just don’t know. I suspect that she was trying to buy time. 

Anyway, the Revolutionary Tribunal calls in two midwives and a doctor who more or less say, “We can’t tell. We can’t tell if she’s pregnant.” But the Revolutionary Tribunal decides that that means she’s not pregnant, and so she’s going to be sentenced to the guillotine. These trials and these death sentences all happen very, very quickly. You know, once someone goes up for trial and is sentenced to death, it is not unusual for that death to happen just hours later or the next day. That is what happens to Olympe de Gouges. Just a couple of weeks earlier, Marie Antoinette had been executed. And then I think it’s three weeks later, Olympe de Gouges comes to the scaffold. 

She’s a known figure, people know who she is. She climbs up onto that scaffold and she says something like, “People of France, you will avenge my death.” There were a lot of these sort of, you know, last-minute gallows kinds of last words that people said, and they often can seem a little bit melodramatic. But I often think of that last sentence of Olympe de Gouges as being a kind of expression, again, of her patriotism. That she had always been on the side of France and of its people, and wanting the best for them and that she didn’t believe that this current iteration, this particular Republic that was sentencing that, you know, was putting her to death was the iteration that was eventually going to succeed, that the people on some level would vanquish them too. That’s what I see in those last words. 

Ann: I’m going to have so many more episodes coming up about, kind of like, more about the French Revolution, but this is an Olympe episode, so we’ll stop there because that is the end of her life. But we are going to get into a discussion of kind of her legacy as part of this scoring portion of the episode. 

I sent you, beforehand, the categories so you’d be prepared. So, everything is on a scale of 0 to 10. This is a really interesting one to score because the first category is the Scandaliciousness, which is how scandalous was this person seen by the culture and time she lived in? And the culture she lived in changed, and she was seen as more or less scandalous depending… I mean, I guess being an unmarried woman, you know, thinker, writer was probably scandalous to some extent, but then Robespierre would have said like, “Well, she was so scandalous! She was a monarchist.” So, I don’t know how we would… which culture. I guess we have to average. 

Leah: I think she’s sort of scandalous in both of them. Do you know what I mean? She’s really a forward thinker. Certainly, you know, until the Revolution, and then in many ways, she does embrace the Revolution, she really does. She might want the constitutional monarchy, but she does embrace the Revolution. So, I’m just going to give her a 10. [laughs]

Ann: Okay. I think when you’re killed for your thoughts, that just kind of speaks to…

Leah: Yes, exactly. 

Ann: But also, I think like being a young woman coming to Paris, like, being supported by these men, writing these pamphlets, she was very different from the expectations of women at the time, like, we talked about Rousseau and all those sorts of things. So, she’s in a pre-revolutionary way, she was scandalous and then in the Revolution… Yeah, I could not agree more. [Leah laughs] I think she’s not and that’s where people are like, “Oh, she’s insane. Her grammar was bad,” because it’s just she was so different from what the expectations or understanding of what a woman should be like were that people just didn’t know what to do with her and that’s what killed her.

Leah: Exactly. She just defied categories. 

Ann: So, the next category is the Schemieness, which is like someone— Now, I mean, we talked, you’ve mentioned several times, like her impetuousness, like she had schemes, she had plans. Were they good? Not always. But she was always kind of coming up with a thing, with a strategy of what to do or what to say. 

Leah: I don’t think that it was a strategy. You can even read it in her pamphlets, it sounds like she’s shouting at the paper. Everything that’s coming out of her head is just on that page. There isn’t a lot of thought, and then she races out the door to get it published. So, I would almost say she’s not a schemer. She’s a reactor who, at the same time, had a lot of really good thoughts that were very forward-thinking. 

Ann: Yeah, I see that. Like, it really reminds me… She feels like such a contemporary figure because I can picture her just going on social media. I can picture her going on, she’s just going live on TikTok, and it’s like, “What are you even talking about? You’ve been on TikTok Live for two hours just saying things.” Like, that’s her energy. 

Leah: I think Olympe de Gouges wanted to be an influencer. I mean, she would have thrived in our social media culture. She loved it. You know, she loved being very much, like, in the moment and kind of on the cutting edge. 

Ann: And just, like, sharing her thoughts and being, “Here’s what I just thought, and I need to tell everybody I just thought this thought.” Like, that’s such a 21st-century… But you’re right. She wasn’t coming up with schemes, as evidenced by returning to Paris in the height of the Terror. So, I don’t know. 

Leah: So, she gets like a 2? I don’t know, a 2 on Schemieness. 

Ann: Yeah, let’s put her there. Like, that’s just not a quality she had. That’s why I measure these things. You know, every woman I talk about in the podcast has pros and cons in different categories. 

I want to do Significance last. So, I’m going to skip ahead to the Sexism category, which is where we give points for, how much did being a woman hold her back? I’m interested in what you’ll say, because I think a lot of male thinkers of this, Girondists, were also put on trial and executed. Like, you know, she had to get married at 17; she had this child; she had to be in these relationships to get money, and she did kind of live the life she wanted to in a sense of like she was able to write, and she was able to share her thoughts. So, certainly it held her back, but I don’t think… 

Leah: Well, yeah. And the question I think that continues to be debated is whether or not she was put to death in part because she was a woman. It’s clear that you can point to these other male, you know, revolutionaries who were also put to death like the Girondists and say, no, you know, it wasn’t because she was a woman. However, I do think—and this is starting to bleed a little bit into the question of legacy—the fact that she was a woman made those anti-revolutionary crimes even worse, if that makes any sense, you know? 

In fact, after her death, after the execution of Marie Antoinette and Olympe de Gouges and then Manon Roland, who is a revolutionary and a wife of one of the leaders of the Girondists party, there was an attempt to kind of slander all of them together, to kind of group them together in a newspaper article and to really slander them on the basis of gender, that these women have forgotten their place as women. So, those executions are used as a warning to other women, like “Don’t be like Marie Antoinette, Olympe de Gouges, and Manon Roland.” So, in some ways, it made them worse, right? So, even though, yeah, all these people were, you know, put to death, the question of what those deaths were about, you know, for Olympe, the fact that she was a woman adds to the severity of the crime. 

Ann: Well, and I think too, like we were talking about before, where it’s like, yeah, if a man had been found writing this, trying to publish the same things, if he’d written the same play, like, they might have been put on trial. But I think they wanted to arrest her, and this gave them an excuse is kind of the sense I got, because they wanted to quiet her, and they were just looking for any reason to do so because she was a woman in the political sphere. 

Leah: I think they kind of, they were starting to get incredibly suspicious of women’s activities. 

Ann: Right, because that was one of the things that I read, is that shortly… Like, those three executions and then shortly after that, the rules were really… It’s like, it was illegal for women to gather in groups, it was illegal for women to join political clubs. This happened. So, she was kind of part of that, like, “Look how dangerous it is when women have political thoughts. Let’s just like keep them in the home sphere. Let’s just not let them think anymore.” 

Leah: Right, and let’s disenfranchise them. So, I believe it was in the previous April that it is decided legally that women can’t be citizens. They have the same rights as children, essentially. They’re considered to be in their minority permanently. So, there is this effort to kind of disenfranchise them and to some degree, the revolutionaries after Olympe’s death, leap upon her as a symbol of why women can’t be trusted as political operators. 

Ann: Yeah, so it does bleed into the legacy a bit, but I would say that the sexism certainly affected her life, not to the extent of somebody who maybe was, like, trapped in a tower and not allowed to leave, but it really got in her way and ultimately kind of expedited her death. So, I would put her maybe at a 6 or a 7, maybe. 

Leah: Yeah, I think so. I also think that she’s an important model to look at in terms of sexism because sexism rarely operates in these, sort of, easy ways, you know, where she’s sort of put into a tower, the woman is put into a tower. It’s rarely obvious, at least I think. I think it’s often quite insidious. And I think the insidiousness of the ways in which it got in her way or the ways in which being a woman made her more vulnerable is something to pay attention to. 

Ann: Well, and that just makes me think too, but the whole thing about like, “Oh, she has bad grammar. Let’s just discount everything she’s saying.” For that to be the reaction. Or the fact that she couldn’t get her plays produced, like, she was… That’s kind of what this category is for. My scoring is just kind of like, if that hadn’t been there, what more could she have accomplished? And I think she could have, at least she would have been taken much more seriously as a writer, which would have helped her career. 

Leah: And maybe the Declaration of the Rights of Women, if it had been authored by a man, might have actually gotten more traction. 

Ann: Yeah, yeah. I’m going to bump. I’m going to give her 7.5. 

Leah: Okay, fair. 

Ann: That’s where I feel she’ll go. 

And then the final category is Significance. So, how do you see her legacy and her significance? Not even as a number, but just like, how do you see it? 

Leah: I think Olympe has become more significant in the late 20th century, in the early 21st century. For a long time, she was sort of made fun of by scholars or really degraded. You know, she was called a courtesan, and so that was an excuse for a lot of people to dismiss her. You know, it’s that sort of moral judgment that’s passed on women who, you know, aren’t married and sleep with men. [laughs] You know, that she slept her way to the top. That was often used against her. She was dismissed as a lunatic. I mean, this starts soon after her death, and it continues on until, you know, into the 21st century. 

But it was in the 21st century that people started paying a lot more attention to the Declaration of the Rights of Women and thinking a lot more about what it is that she called for and the way that she had been dismissed as a thinker, as a philosopher by these generations of historians and philosophers who just weren’t going to take her seriously, again, because she was a woman. Olympe de Gouges today, because of the sheer prolificness and the fact that she is operating in this sphere of ideas, is mostly considered a philosopher now, that’s how she studied. She shows up in philosophy books. So, that’s pretty interesting, actually. You know, the woman who really wanted to be taken seriously for her ideas is now being taken seriously for her ideas. But it took a really long time. 

Ann: That’s true. I appreciate that. You know, it came too late and after she died. But how you talked about her potential actual, like, her biological father was this kind of writer thinker. And then when she was 1920 and she came to Paris and she’s in all these salons, like that’s what she was. Like, that’s who she was. So, I’m glad that people are coming around to see her for what she actually was and for how she wanted to be seen. 

Leah: Exactly. So legacy, I don’t know how you normally would rate that. 

Ann: Well, I mean, I think that she’s being she’s being taught in university classes. So, that’s certainly significant. I think she was significant in the time in the sense that they wanted they had to kill her, they had to quiet her down because she was seen as too dangerous to still be there, which speaks to her significance at the time. She’s got significance now. I know you feel strongly about her. So, I will let you choose the numerical value of what that means. 

Leah: I’m going to say a… a 10. [laughs] 

Ann: Yeah, I knew you would!

Leah: Yeah, I’m giving her a 10. Yeah, you know, I think she wanted to be part of the conversation. She wanted to be part of the conversation, and she was. And, you know, whether or not she was being made an example of or if the revolutionaries, the radical Jacobins, really thought that her ideas were dangerous and carried weight, either way, she was part of the conversation in a threatening way. 

Ann: Yeah, like, the fact that they wouldn’t have put her on trial and executed her for her thoughts if she hadn’t, like, challenged the status quo in a way that they found threatening. 

I’m just putting her officially here on my scale. I want to find some other people, so you know, just kind of who else is in that neighbourhood. So, 29.5 is her score. Other people… Let’s see. So, you know, Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges?

Leah: Who she was friends with. 

Ann: From this era… Were they? Oh, good! He has a third. He has a 31. So, like, she’s pretty close to him. Adélaīde Labille-Guiard, the artist, she has a 32. Like, they’re all kind of in the same neighbourhood. This neighbourhood is kind of, like, cool people who deserve better than they got because they were living during the French Revolution. 

Leah: And it says something that the Chevalier de Saint-Georges were friends. They were friends. They knew each other from the theatre scene.  

Ann: I guess, yeah! Because he was someone else who was, like, always trying to get jobs in the theatre and to move up, and he was being held back because of his race and for other things, too. So, I guess they could commiserate being not taken seriously. 

Leah: Yeah. And I think that he probably helped fuel her ideas about abolition. 

Ann: Fair. Yeah. Oh, you’re so right! Yeah. I love knowing that, that they were friends because when you’re reading, just sort of like, a general biography of a person, it’s kind of like “Here’s their life.” But yeah, of course, they were in the same scene. They would have known each other. How could they not have? 

So, Leah, thank you so much. You taught me so much. Looking at all this information. I’m just like, “Wait, what? Wait, now they’re killing the king. Wait, who is Robespierre? Wait, now she like…?” So, thank you. You explained it to me in a way that has set me up for the subsequent episodes, where we’re going to be looking at people like Charlotte Corday and some other people who were in the Revolution. And so, I understand who the Girondins were. That’s huge, because I didn’t know that before. 

Leah: Yes. It’s so confusing. It took me forever. And still sometimes like whose relationships are with whom, you know, not quite sure. But I’m so glad. 

Ann: Especially when they’re moving back and forth like this. 

Leah: Yeah. 

Ann: And tell everybody… Where I mostly see you posting is on the Substack. So, do you want to tell people there are other places where they can follow you and keep up with your work? 

Leah: Yeah. So, these days I am mostly on Substack. So, my Substack is called “The Only Woman in the Room,” which is… Well, I’m doing a couple of things on it. I’m talking about my adventures in feminist and woman-centred history, what it’s like to be a historian doing that kind of work. Also, now and again, talking about the, you know, connection between the political scene of the past and the political scene of the present. So, you can find me on LeahRedmondChang.Substack.com or through my website, which is just LeahRedmondChang.com, and you can get to my Substack from my website. 

Ann: That’s perfect, thank you. I was so much looking forward to this conversation, and it’s exceeded my expectations. I love being able to talk to you. Thank you so much for joining me. 

Leah: Thank you so much for having me on. 

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So again, you can keep up with Leah and what she’s doing, and she’s writing. She’s on the ground, she’s in America, and she’s talking about what’s happening in America these days. And she shares her thoughts in her Substack and also just in the notes in the Substack app, so you can follow her there. Her Substack newsletter is called “The Only Woman in the Room,” and you can follow her there at LeahRedmondChang.Substack.com. 

You can keep up with me and this podcast, well, frankly, also on Substack, where I’m at VulgarHistory.Substack.com where I post essays about women in history. If you want to just, like this episode, think about people in previous times and how they were different but similar to us, but also kind of how things went bananas, and what did they do? How did they get through it? That’s, you know, not that anyone’s asking me, “Ann, what’s your advice to, like, get through unprecedented times?” But I will say doing this podcast and reading these stories of women and other people who are living in these bananas situations does help me feel like people have been through shit before, and here we all are now. Anyway, you can keep up with me again, as I said on Substack. 

Also, I really recommend, I have a Patreon, which is like if you want to keep up with my thoughts, I share posts there, articles. Sometimes there are some special bonus episodes of the not Vulgar History, but other spin-off podcasts on the Patreon. Anyway, basically that’s where you can follow me because social media is one of the ten thousand things that’s going bananas right now and everyone’s kind of in all kinds of different places. But if you want to keep up with me, my updates, go to Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter. You can follow me there for free, or you can follow me there for money. If you follow me there for free, you can get lots of shit. 

If you follow me there for $1 a month or more, then you get some more shit. Basically, you get some ad-free access to all episodes of this podcast, early access to all the episodes of this podcast for $1 or more a month. And if you pledge $5 or more a month, you get also access to a whole archive of bonus episodes of Vulgarpiece Theatre where I talk about costume dramas with Allison Epstein and Lana Wood Johnson, new episodes coming soon. I also talk about So This Asshole is one of the spin-off series there for the $5 or more a month people and that’s where I talk about shitty men from history. And let me tell you, as I’ve been reading about the French Revolution and learning about it, there’s at least two new episodes of So This Asshole that will be coming up in the next month or so. Anyway, again, but you know, like the “I need six eggs. It’s too expensive.” Everything’s bananas right now financially, so if you want to just follow me for free, there’s lots of stuff that you can get at that level or just keep listening to this podcast, because that that’s the main thing I do. I also want to mention if you do choose to join the Patreon at the $5 a month or more level, you can join our Discord, which is just like a group chat where we’re all just, like, getting through each day. Like, we can’t join one of the literary salons like Olympe de Gouges was having, but it is called a salon. It’s the Vulgar History Salon. Anyway, that’s what’s going on there. Substack, Patreon. 

I also have a newsletter if you’re just like, “Ann, I don’t want to keep up with you that much. What I would prefer is just, like, one email, perhaps once a month.” I have that too! So, you can join my email newsletter. That’s where you get updates on what I’ve been writing, what the podcast episodes are, the latest updates on my book, which is coming out next February, Rebel of the Regency. Anyway, if you just want to get the once monthly Ann update, you can sign up for my newsletter by going to VulgarHistory.com/News. 

Also, Common Era Jewelry is our brand partner. I always like to mention them because I really appreciate working with them. And also, throughout all of history, not throughout all of history, but in many historical time periods where women have not been allowed to have bank accounts, they’ve not been allowed to own property, things like that, which could you imagine someone wanting to bring stuff like that back in our modern era? That would be bananas. But jewelry has been a feminine-coded thing for a really long time, and that’s because that was the way that women were able to have things of value for themselves. And then as we move into eras where women are able to have bank accounts and buy houses and have jobs, like, jewelry has continued to be a precious heirloom that people pass down through the generations, and that’s what Common Era is all about. 

So, this is a small business, it’s a woman-owned business that makes beautiful heirloom jewelry inspired by women and mythology of the classic era, of the Common Era. These pieces are made in New York City; everybody involved has health care and good wages, if you’re being very mindful about what companies you’re supporting right now. Even the packaging is made by a lovely little family-owned business in Chicago. So, they have got beautiful jewelry inspired by women from history as well as by women from mythology. And then also, recently, they have their Zodiac jewelry line. This is inspired by an obscure 17th-century alchemical manuscript because what Common Era is about is making jewelry that is unlike what other people are offering. Torie, who’s the designer and owner, had said people wanted her to do a Zodiac collection for a long time, but she’s like, there are so many. She didn’t want to just put another collection similar to what other people are doing. And then she found, I don’t know how, this obscure 17th-century alchemical manuscript and then this beautiful new collection was designed. So, the pieces from Common Era are available in solid gold as well as in more affordable gold vermeil. And you, yes you, Vulgar History listener, can always get 15 percent off everything from Common Era by going to CommonEra.com/Vulgar or using code ‘VULGAR’ at checkout. 

You can also support this show in a visual way by putting a sticker on your phone case, or wearing a T-shirt, or you know, using a mug at work that’s got some, like, feminist rage baked into it. You can find Vulgar History merchandise at VulgarHistory.com/Store. That’s best for people who are in the U.S., you know, shipping… One might say tariff issues are impacting where people are buying from. So, if you’re in the U.S., shipping and everything is best if you go to VulgarHistory.com/Store, which takes you to our Dashery store. If you’re outside the U.S., including in Canada, which is where I am, the shipping and everything is better if you go to VulgarHistory.Redbubble.com. The same designs are in both places, and there will be new merch dropping sometime over the next seven weeks as part of this Women of the Revolution vibe. But there’s also the classic designs there as well. 

If you want to get in touch with me, you can by using the form at VulgarHistory.com. Just go there, there’s a button that says, like, “Contact me,” and that’s what you can do. Or you can email me at VulgarHistoryPod@gmail.com. And so, I was saying, you know, the best way to keep in touch with me or just to keep up with what I’m up to is by following me on Patreon. I am bopping in and out of some other social media. I’m lurking on, like, Bluesky on Threads. I do post on Instagram semi-regularly. All those places, I’m @VulgarHistoryPod. 

Next week, we’re going to be getting into more Women of the Revolution. Next week is going to be… You know, like on this podcast, I started it, and it’s women’s history. I talk about women’s history, but we’re talking about, like, also queer history as well as what we’ve expanded into. And next week, we’re going to be talking about some queer trans history from women of the Revolution. So, stay tuned for that next week. Until then, elbows up, pants on, tits out. Actually, no, you know, with the sans-culottes, I feel like I want to say like “Pants off.” Pants off, tits out, and I’ll talk to you all next time. 

Vulgar History is hosted, written, and researched by Ann Foster, that’s me! The editor is Cristina Lumague. Theme music is by the Severn Duo. The Vulgar History show image is by Deborah Wong. Transcripts are written by Aveline Malek. Find transcripts of recent episodes at VulgarHistory.com.

References:

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