Marie Josephine Diamond

The Revolutionary Rhetoric of Olympe de Gouges Abstract: This article analyzes the writings of Olympe de Gouges in the context of her inscription in Revolutionary discourse. It begins with her anti-slavery play The Slavery of Blaclcs, which appeals for the legitimation of both women and blacks; follows her early political pamphlets culminating in the extraordinary "Declaration of the Rights of Woman" (1791), an appeal for full civil and political rights for women (and disenfranchised men), and concludes with the desperate, accusatory letters to Robespierre and the pamphlet "The Three Urns," which led her to the guillotine. Through a reading of her rhetoric, the article shows the stages of her writing and how she was increasingly marginalized and silenced by a discourse that Finally excluded women from the public sphere. The year 1993 marked the bicentennial of the Terror. On 3 November 1793 Olympe de Gouges was executed, two weeks after the execution of Made Antoinette and five days before the execution of Mme Roland. On 30 October 1793 the Convention outlawed the radical Soci6t~ des Femmes R6publicaines R6volutionnaires and declared all women's clubs and associations illegal. The silencing of these women, who represented divergent class and political affiliations, effectivelysignaled the end of the extraordinary participation of women in the drama of the French Revolution. Nineteenth century and subsequent histories of the Revolution either comphtely ignored women or consigned them to marginalia, demonology or hagiography. 2 Only with the emergence of a generation of feminist historians with a focus on gender issues has it become possible to reconceptualize the participation of women in revolutionary events and ideology. Collections of documents and materiMarie Josephine Diamond is professor of French and director of the ComparativeLiterature Program at RutgersUniversity,New Brunswick,N.J. 08903. Her publicationsincludea book on Flaubert, The Problem of Aesthetic Discontinuity and a novel, Crossings. She is editor of a special double issue, "Womenand Revolution,"of DialecticalAnthropology.

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als relevant to the situation and claims of women during the revolutionary years have shown the extent of their political awareness, activity and desire for legitimation? The women of Paris, in particular, wrote and presented numerous petitions demanding changes in the conditions of their work and domestic arrangements; at a time when the public forum was politically dramatized, women formed their own clubs and associations and played prominent roles in revolutionary festivals .4At the same time, a focus on gender issues in the writing of history has inevitably transformed traditional frames of analysis and interpretation. For example, Olwen Hufton's research on the poor women of Paris has brought to light the specific dynamics of economics and gender; 5 Joan Scott has emphasized the importance of connecting the study of gender relations with that of politics and social hierarchies; ~ and Lynn Hunt has shown how an analysis of the representation of the female body in the context of the body politic subverts dominant revolutionary discourse based on class oppositions. In her "The Many Bodies of Marie Antoinette: Political Pornography and the Problem of the Feminine in the French Revolution,"7 she argues, for example, that the virulent, popular hatred of Marie Antoinette reflected not ordy a hatred of a representative of privilege and luxury but, more pertinently, a general anxiety about the corruption of the public sphere by women. In effect, as Joan Landes contends in her Women and the Public Sphere, what competing revolutionary ideologies finally had in common was that women should be confmed to the private sphere of hearth and home? Sanctioned and legaUy enforced by the Napoleonic Code of 1804, this ideal of the domestic, depoliticized woman determined nineteenth century (and most twentieth century) representations of women in the Revolution. Those who sacrificed themselves for God or family were venerated, those who defined themselves as revolutionaries were vilified and dismissed as hysterics or viragos. Of the latter, Thrroigne de Mrricourt and Olympe de Gouges, in particular, were held up as examples of the dangers of women's participation in politics. Thrroigne de Mericourt, portrayed in popular pamphlets as a cannibal of children, died in misery and madness in La Salp~trirre; 90lympe de Gouges, author of "The Declaration of the Rights of Woman," was guillotined for her opposition to Robespierre and remembered as a fury. Alfred Guillois's psychological study "Etude mrdico psychologique sur Olympe de Gouges, "1° published in 1904, reduced her political activity to a mental illness for which he coined the term "paranoia reformatoria," and provided a scientific imprimatur for a century of vilification. In this brief analysis of literary and political writings by Olympe de Gouges, I am interested in tracing the ways in which she attempted to enter the discourse of revolution and how its parameters, repressions and omissions defined her revolutionary consciousness and rhetoric.

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Throughout her life de Gouges was concerned with legitimizing women. What was to become revolutionary praxis began as a very personal preoccupation with her own illegitimacy and a desire to establish a legitimate relation to the aristocracy. As she reveals in her fictionalized autobiography, the Memoir of Mine de Valmont (published before the Revolution)) l she conceived herself as the daughter of a woman of the people and a local aristocrat and man of letters who had disowned her. She was born Marie Gouze and her legal father was a butcher, but she claimed that her biological father was the marquis de Pompignan, a dramatist primarily known for his opposition to Voltaire) 2 Married to an associate of her father, she was soon widowed. Ambitious but barely literate, she then left for Paris with her young son and, with the help of rich and influential protectors, eventually transformed herself into Olympe de Gouges. Her only access to the aristocratic and high bourgeois salons, the centers of intellectual debate to which she claimed a natural right, was as a courtesan. And, despite her social successes, her desire for social and cultural legitimation through reconciliation with an aristocratic father dominates her early writings. De Gouges invented herself as the true daughter of the dramatist de Pompignan by choosing the theatre as her first literary expression. However, not only her choice of genre but the subject of her first play, the horrors of slavery, exposed her to the contradictions in her utopian fantasy of legitimizing herself through a union with an ideal father. Of all genres, the theatre, the public sphere par excellence, was the least accessible to the woman writer, ~3and a play about the abolition of slavery was hardly likely to endear her to the status quo. Submitted anonymously to the Com6die Frangaise, The Slavery of Blacks (written in 1782) was accepted but not performed until 1789 when it received mixed reviews and closed after four performances.14 De Gouges had received an education in contemporary literary and political issues in the salons, particularly in the circle of Condorcet whose writings on slavery and women influenced her work) 5 She was an outspoken opponent of slavery and became a much vilified member of the Soci6t6 des Amis des Noirs. The Slavery of Blacks, which she claimed to be the first antislavery play written in France, ~ exposes the contradictions in her dream of reconciliation with a powerful and loving father. It interweaves two plots which dramatize the unjust treatment of an abandoned, illegitimate daughter and of a brutalized colonial slave, exposes the inequities of the social structure that posits such injustice, but contrives a happy ending where all is resolved by a benign paternalism. The play opens on an island where a runaway slave, condemned to death for killing an overseer who had tried to rape his female companion, 17has sought refuge from his master, the colonial governer. A shipwreck, in which the slave saves a young woman from drowning, initiates the drama. The child of a misalliance, this

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woman has been searching the colonies for her long lost father, an aristocrat who, despite his good intentions, had been prevented by his family from marrying her socially inferior mother. By an extraordinary series of coincidences, she is finally reconciled with her father, who turns out to be the colonial governer and owner of the condemned slave. The slave is recaptured. A slave revolt breaks out but is brutally put down by the colonial soldiers. Through the mediation of his daughter, the governer pardons the slave. The play ends with an adoption and a marriage. The governer and his childless wife adopt his daughter, and the slave marries the companion whose honor he had defended. The marriage is celebrated by a heroic ballet, "miming the history of Africa," in which the slave and the soldiers dance together and their commander plays the part of defender of the peace and of the powerless. The utopian ending of the play is predicated on a complete idealization of the aristocratic colonial governer. The prejudice of his parents and a misunderstanding are blamed for his abandonment of his wife and daughter; the brutality of his overseer is blamed for the retaliation of the slave; and his duty to uphold the law is blamed for his persistence in pursuing the slave to whom he trmally offers his freedom. The slave rejects the offer, claiming that he could have no greater joy than to remain in the service of such a beloved master. The blatant incongruity of an ending in which soldiers dance with those they must oppress and coerce points to its absurd and phantasmatic nature. Indeed, throughout the play, the abandoned daughter and condemned slave indict the structure of an unequal society, based on class, gender and racial hierarchies, for their original predicament. And the slave clearly points out that the slave-owning structure per se is inherently cruel and unjust and cannot be mitigated by the very rare occurrence of a "humane" slave-owner. The fate from which they are both saved--her death by drowning, his execution--is the only one congruous with their social situation and victimization. Thus, The Slavery of Blacks both criticizes and upholds slavery. However, de Gouges discovered in the course of trying to have the play produced, that it was impossible to criticize slavery and be embraced by the official cultural establishment. Her difficulties with the Com6die Fran~aise and critics of her work introduced her to the realities of being a powerless woman writer and an opponent of slavery. There was no generous father or cultural patriarch to resolve her predicament. Impatient with the endless postponements of the performance of The Slavery of Blacks, de Gouges decided to publish the play, along with her acrimonious correspondence with the Com6die Franqaise and several other works, including essays, prefaces, and plays. Attacked and insulted by both directors and actors of the Com6die Franqaise, who were under pressure from the slave-owning interests not to produce a play about slavery, forced into changing the African slaves into more acceptable

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Indians, she thus turned to the reading public to support and exonerate her. In her preface to the play The Philosopher Corrected, she responds to the vitriolic criticism of Beaumarchais who, enraged that she had "appropriated" one of his characters in her The Unexpected Marriage of Cherubino, had sought to annihilate her as a potential rival in the theatre by thoroughly discrediting both her writing and character. He had spread the rumor that she was illiterate, had not written her plays herself and, for good measure, was involved in an incestuous relationship with her son. These accusations implicitly excluded her not only from French cultural tradition but from all symbolic expression. The accusation of incest in this context makes an explicit liaison between the transgressive act of her daring to write and a criminal violation of the basic social code. TM In her responses both to the Comddie Fran~aise and Beaumarchais, de Gouges veers between hyperbolic self justification and self deprecation and excuse. However, she reveals a growing self-consciousness of her position as a marginal woman writer and social critic with little expectation of legitimation from the status quo. In the prefaces to the published plays, the tension dramatized in the Slavery of Blacks between the marginalized daughter/slave and patriarchal authority, is explicitly expressed as the tension between the marginalized woman writer and cultural authority. In this context, instead of imagining herself an aristocrat, de Gouges subsumes her provinciality and lack of formal education into a guarantee of her authenticity. She appeals to feeling, imagination and nature as sources of truth in opposition to a cultural tradition which she associates with power and lies. She thus anticipates the aesthetics of a line of women writers, including Mme Roland and Mme de Sta61, affiliated with the pre-Romanticism of Rousseau. However, the hyperbole with which she defends her provincialism and originality reveals the fragility, the defensiveness, of her position. Thus, in the preface to The Philosopher Corrected, where she defends herself against Beaumarchais' scurrilous attacks, she writes: "I have said it before, and I say it again, I owe nothing to the knowledge of men: I am my own work, and when I compose there are only ink, paper and pens on my table... I know it would be easy for me to procure all kinds of works and make a resume of all those good books, not to compose with my imagination but with the ideas of others, to have every page eavesdrop and then arrange this fine mishmash to my advant a g e - i f I possessed the art of dissimulation."~9 Turning away accusations of plagiarism, she indicts writers within the established cultural tradition for borrowings, contrivance, dissimulation and inauthenticity, and contrasts knowledge acquired by men with her own female and original voice. However, the other side of her claim to authenticity and originality is a self-deprecation in which, paradoxically, she continues to judge herself according to the prevailing cultural standards. In the preface

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to The Unexpected Marriage of Cherubino, she begs her reader's indulgence for what she calls her deficiencies in construction, style, knowledge, genius, versification etc. 2° Thus she veers from hyperbolic self defense to hyperbolic self denunciation in her attempt to define her place vis fi vis the cultural establishment. The ambiguity of de Gouges' relation to this establishment assumes a complex aesthetic form in her fictionalized autobiography, the Memoir of Mme de Valmont. Unlike The Slavery of Blacks, which closes with the utopian reconciliation between abandoned daughter and culturally legitimate father, the Memoir of Mme of Valmont describes both the breakdown of the fairy tale ending to the family romance, and de Gouges constitution of herself as writer. The difficulties and complexities of this process are inscribed in the strategies of the text. The work consists of a series of letters between de Gouges and Mme de Valmont, a writer unjustly treated by her aristocratic father and brother and a transparent figure for de Gouges herself. De Gouges functions as the recipient of Mme de Valmont's letters describing her life. She receives the letters through an intermediary, a count, who functions as a screen between the two women. He thus enables de Gouges to create distance between herself and her fictional double, but he also serves as the voice of propriety: he represents the critical censor of women's writing. Fearing, for example, that if women address serious issues they will threaten the superiority of men, he writes: "Women will rule us, and the weaker sex will become the stronger. "2~ However, Mme de Valmont defends the seriousness of her style as natural to her. In her own words, she writes '+with petulance" and refuses to make revisions. As in de Gouges' own previously quoted defense of her style, she associates spontaneity and rapidity with sincerity, strong emotion and lack of artifice. In Mine de Valmont's version of the travails of an illegitimate daughter unacknowledged by her aristocratic father, her half brother and the legitimate heir to the patrimony, plays an important role. Most of the letters describe her efforts to protect this brother, the mediator between herself and her father, from the unscrupulous attentions of a parvenue. To save him, she disguises herself at a ball as a mysterious masked woman and attracts his attentions to herself. As sister, she becomes his confidante; as the mysterious stranger, she engages in a passionate correspondence with him. When he finally insists on a meeting with the unknown woman, she invents yet another persona who writes to him to declare her love and denounce her predecessor as someone who has been toying with him. While justified in the name of protecting the brother from a parvenue (yet another transparent persona of de Gouges herself), these disguises all lead to the impasse of an incestuous brother]sister relationship from which de Gouges extricates herself by changing the focus of the letters to the father's illness and imminent death. Mme de Vaimont writes to her father in the

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hope of recognition and a pension for her ailing and impecunious mother. There is no reunion here, and the small pension he promises to his former mistress is cancelled, on his death, by his legitimate widow. This fascinating text reveals a fragmented subjectivity which conceives of coherence and integrity in terms of integration with the father as symbol of cultural legitimacy, but which recognizes, through the mediating figure of the brother, that such a union constitutes a narcissistic impasse. The mirrors de Gouges uses in this text to seduce the legitimate and legitimizing father/brother reflect back only her own fragmented image. However, as impresario of Mme de Vaimont's correspondence, de Gouges contrives to extricate herself from the catastrophic biography of her surrogate self and the fantasy of a reconciliation with aristocratic authority as the answer to her social and cultural illegitimacy. As in The Slavery of Blacks, such a solution is shown to be absurdly unrealistic. Although anidealization of the father continues to haunt de Gouges' imagination, her concern with injustice, particularly with the illegitimacy of women, undergoes a transformation in the context of revolutionary discourse and events. Her plays written after the Revolution treat political issues, such as the question of divorce and the contrmement of women in convents, 22 and her pamphlets, essays and political letters express questions of legitimacy in terms of a public advocacy for the legitimate rights of the disenfranchized. The speed and spontaneity with which she wrote, which she had always defended against the criticism of her more cultured detractors, were particularly appropriate to the rush of events and to the need to create an immediate effect. She published her writings at her own expense, and often pasted political statements on the walls of city buildings. She wished to speak to the people as directly as possible. Her earliest political writings seek to reconcile the people to the cause of the king and state. Thus, in the spirit of a feudal and Christian sense of generosity and largesse, she published in the Journal G~n~ral de France (November 1788) an open letter to the people in which she proposes that they pay a voluntary tax in order to save the state from its financial crisis and the possible use of alms. 23 She appeals to them on two levels: by paying a voluntary tax they will be on an equal footing with the rich; and by defining themselves as the king's children, they will be reponsible for preserving the emotional integrity of the state[family and earn the king's gratitude and recognition. It is easy to see in this pattern a transformation of de Gouges' paradigmatic family romance in which, in this case, the people are acknowledged and legitimized by the father/king. Speaking here both for the people and the king, her own voice is curiously disembodied. Although she signs herself "a citizen" she assumes the perspective of a sybil in touch with divine truth, and refuses to give her

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name for fear of being accused of ambition or of becoming too proud and losing her natural simplicity. Similarly, assuming the voice of mediator between king and people, she wrote a pamphlet, "Patriotic Remarks" in the hard winter of 1788/89 in which, this time, she appeals to the king and queen to impose a luxury tax in compassion for the plight of the suffering people. Her notion of the wholeness of the nation is again modelled on that of the wholeness of the patriarchal family: "Let the people, the parliaments and the king form a single family and the nation will soon recover its former splendor. ''24 De Gouges' fantasy of a union with patriarchal authority, from the feudal fiction of reconciliation with an ideal aristocratic father to the bourgeois dream of a state modelled on the structure of the patriarchal family with the king as its head, structures her early political thinking. Both are predicated on the advocacy of female virtue and the need for protection. Thus, the pamphlet "Project for a Second Theatre and a Home for Women" proposes the creation of a second national theatre, the aim of which is to reform morals and criticize excesses not only of aristocrats and libertines but of actresses. In the same pamphlet she speaks for, and identifies with, indigent women in need of help from men: "Condemned from the cradle to an insipid ignorance, the little encouragment we have received since childhood, the ills without number that Nature has burdened us with make us too wretched, too unfortunate for us not to hope that one day men will come to our aid. This fortunate day has arrived. "25 Describing the travails of women from puberty to childbearing, she appeals for "'protectors" to set up a charitable institution for virtuous women reduced to indigence because of the death or absence of husbands. She makes a distinction between these women and those with whom they customarily find themselves in the poor house. Interceding on behalf of virtue, she upholds the principle of compassion within a hierarchical order based upon the protection of virtuous women by men. This same model of a chivalric code is explicit in her open letter, "The Cry of the Sage, by a Woman," to Poncet-Delpech, the deputy of her home town of Montauban, on the convocation of the Estates General in May 1789. She invokes the spirit of chivalry when men defended their country and their women and, in the new spirit of bourgeois puritanism, indicts women for the softening of morality. Echoing Rousseau's critique of women for the neglect of their domestic duties, she blames them for abandoning their homes, their maternal occupations and for effeminizing men: "Men have been instructed by you, by your errors, your tricks, your lack of consequence; and, finally, they have become, in turn, women themselves.-26 Having scolded women for their immorality and frivolity, she assumes the voice of sybilline moral authority and claims she can save France. Separated from "effeminizing"

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women, she trmds herself alone in an imaginary political forum without a real audience. As she recognizes, women are not allowed in the national assemblies, but she fantasizes that her good fairy will somehow represent her there to convince men of the saving truth of her words. The reality of her political impotence, expressed in her sense of disembodiment, of not being heard, is more compelling than her message. Conceiving herself, for want of a place to stand, as a kind of beneficent spirit, she eerily anticipates the alienation that will mark her last writings. A year later, in December 1789, she again proposes a voluntary tax to alleviate the desperate economic situation and addresses the reception of her first proposal. Far from being thanked, she writes, for her oracular wisdom, she was mocked and satirized. Rejecting the male reader to whom her letter had been explicitly addressed and who had responded with contempt for both her words and style, she now speaks to women and invokes their solidarity in the cause of the fatherland. The model she invokes is that of the Roman patrician women who, when Rome was in crisis and under siege, sacrificed their jewels to save the state. She exhorts the women of Paris to imitate this gesture of generosity and self-sacrifice, which she contrasts with the prevailing egoism of "the calculating capitalists who refuse to open their treasure chests." Thus, rather than accusing aristocratic women of effeminizing men, she now envisions women as the saviors of Paris, as the conservators of humanity. And she evokes the name of Rousseau, whose condescension towards women she neverthless acknowledges, to the effect that, without women, men would tear each other apart like wolves: "It is women alone who maintain in Paris the little humanity that still reigns there, a n d , without them, we would see greedy and insatiable men devour each other like wolves. ,,27 This image of the humanizing effect of women in a city in which men are tearing each other apart is the very opposite of the image of the revolutionary virago that dominates post-Revolutionary ideological representations of women, especially of Olympe de Gouges. These early political writings incorporate de Gouges' ambivalent relation to authority, class, and gender that inform her fictionalized autobiography. She conceives the state on the model of the family, and mediates between the aristocracy and the disenfranchized in the name of unity and reconciliation. Her dominant ideology is that of a reprise of classical and feudal aristocratic virtues of generosity, sacrifice and compassion and a rejection of decadent luxury and a disgust for egoism and capitalism. At times, taking the role of mediator between established authority and the poor, she disembodies herself as sybil or prophet. When she identifies concretely with women on the basis of common suffering, she neverthless appeals to men for their protection. At times, as when she accuses women of corrupting and effeminizing men, she distances herself from her sex; at other times, as when she

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appeals to their generosity, she defines women in terms of their opposition to male brutality. Without an established public sphere, however, she became increasingly aware that to be a woman meant not being heard or being reviled for speaking. An early sign of her frustration with the lack of reponse to her political proposals was her intention (never acted upon) to go into exile, and take her play against slavery to England. In the pamphlet, "Departure of M. Necker and Mme de Gouges,'2s she compares herself to Necker about to make his final departure from Paris, and contrasts his luxury and security with her own status as a wandering artist who, like the "divine Homer," must wander from town to town and whose writings, had they not been disdained and slandered, would have perhaps saved the country As elsewhere, this pamphlet brings out the tensions between de Gouges' explicit political proposals, which advocate a utopic monarchy and a patriarchal society that would be compassionate and transparent, and her definition of her writing. While her political agenda reinforces authority and hierarchy, her aesthetics are disruptive. Thus, she justifies the irregularities and excentricities of her writing and rhetoric as imitating nature which she conceives as the embodiment of difference and multiplicity. The pamphlet, however, graphically reveals the impasse between her political position and her position as a woman writer of dubious class. Whatever she might advocate, she feels herself an outcast on account of her gender and defends herself by elevating her marginality into the space of divine prophecy or an authenticity based on closeness to nature De Gouges' frustration at her sense of isolation from public discourse, at not being heard, is clear in all of her writings, and is particularly intense because her written texts most approximate the forms and rhetoric of living speech. Indeed, the fervor and democratization of public debate in the early years of the Revolution, recalling the public forums of the Greek city state, revived public oratory and declamation. De Gouges' writings are directed to a living audience which is conspicuously absent. For a while, however, she found an audience for her rhetoric in clubs congenial to the concerns of women, such as the Amis de la Constitution, the Cercle Social, the Association F6d6rale des Amis de la V6rit6, which was to become the Soci4t6 Patriotique et de Bienfaisance des Amis de la V6rit6 presided over by the prominent "feminist," Etta P a l l d'Aelders. Contemporaries commented upon her oratorical flair. Charles Nodier, for example, remarked upon "the energy of her improvisations and the fertility of her thought;" and Prudhomme, editor of the R~volutions de Paris, claimed that she rivalled the most famous orators of the Constituent Assembly. 29 When her oratory was turned into written words, however, it was criticized for poor spelling and irregular grammar--for a gendered lack of culture. As she herself writes: "I have presented a hundred useful projects; they have been received; but I am a woman, and they are ignored. "3°

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De Gouges' recognition of her female identity through her marginalization as writer, that is, as an outcast having no real access to the process of social change, is visible in her representation of her text not only as "natural" but as metaphorically female. In her "The Portrait of Women" (1791), the preface to the play Mirabeau on the Champs Elysees, she appeals to women for indulgence for "all the faults that swarm through my writings. "31 Addressing this preface to "my very dear sisters," she appeals for solidarity, for an end to divisiveness among women and to the viciousness they customarily display towards each other--to the delectation of men. Again recalling the attacks by men upon her work and their claim that the only role of women is to please them and run a household, she both laments a lost chivalrous age in which men supported and respected women, and maintains that women can combine their "female" roles with a life of the mind. Blaming women for their rivalry with each other, she finds that the women of the court provide a model for women of other classes not only for fashion but for backbiting. Although she includes herself in the imperfections she criticizes, in identifying her own model as nature she implicitly sets herself outside of the circle of inauthenticity that structures the errors of other women. Revealing herself as she is, she writes, she might one day be accorded the respect afforded to works made by the hands of nature. She elevates her imperfections into the imperfections of nature itself, and answers critics who suggest she might be more channing if she had more social graces by calling upon nature rather than society as her only standard. Thus, exhorting women to end their warfare with each other, explaining her critique of female vices, she places herself on the margins of society and actually anticipates that the "very dear sisters" she invokes will one day turn upon her like furies and make her pay dearly for her advice. The text that irmally breaks through the rhetoric of ambivalence and self isolation is the extraordinary "Declaration of the Rights of Woman" which was largely responsible for her condemnation by nineteenth-century male historians and has been recuperated by modern feminists. 32This is her most radical work in that, as she asserts to the queen to whom she dedicates it: "There will be no revolution until women have been freed from the tyranny of men." Thus, de Gouges finds her most revolutionary voice in her rewriting of the canonical revolutionary text, "The Declaration of the Rights of Man." An important influence was Condorcet's "On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship" which criticizes the patriarchal structure of the family and proposes equal education and complete legal and political equality for (bourgeois) women. De Gouges pursues many of Condorcet's proposals, but, as a woman assuming the authorship of women's rights and using the form of "The Declaration of the Rights of Man," she actively subverts this document and exposes the fraudulence of its claims

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to universal freedom and equality. She reveals that, far from connoting humanity, the "Man" referred to in the title is literally man--moreover, propertied white man, and that women, and many men, are exluded from the enjoyment of liberty, equality and fraternity. The radical force of this document is somewhat obscured by de Gouges" expressed loyalty to the king and her wish to strengthen the monarchy, and by the dedication of the document to the unpopular queen whom she urges to work for the return of the princes and the consolidation of the crown in the name of France. A constitutional monarchy was the prevailing political ideal among revolutionary thinkers but, as evident in her early political writings, de Gouges had also idealized the king as the embodiment of the good father--generous, paternal, concerned with the sufferings of the marginal and the poor. In the context of her own psychobiography, her vision of a completely emancipated and legitimized woman under the aegis of a loving father/king can be seen as a version of an old, and paradoxical, dream. However, the fights she demands for women in her "Declaration of the Rights of Woman," and her subversion of the traditional patriarchal family, are incompatible with the model of a king as patriarch to a nation of children. In dedicating "The Rights of Woman" to the queen, she asserts her loyalty to the throne but, as she writes, she wants the support of the queen for a "nobler cause," that of a revolution which will assure women's rights, a revolution "which will happen only when all women are aware of their deplorable fate, and of the rights they have lost in society." No matter her deference to the monarchy, her political project articulates a complete social transformation. Thus, in her preamble, she attributes public misfortunes and the corruption of governments to the fact that women's rights have been ignored or forgotten. In displacing the question of human rights to the rights of women, she brings into view the implicit bourgeois ideology of "The Declaration of the Rights of Man," that is, the assumption that the patriarchal family is a natural (rather than social) entity, a private sphere to which woman is naturally confined. From the perspective of the "Declaration of the Rights of Man," nature is defined as that which establishes a foundation for the universality of the bourgeois family model and rights of the father over his family (in which women and minors are equal in their absence of rights). Rhetorically asking men by what right they oppress women, de Gouges, as in many of her writings, defines nature in such a way that it does not guarantee oppression based upon difference of gender. Nature she asserts, intermingles the sexes in harmonious cooperation; it is man who has raised exceptional social circumstances to a principle. Thus, claims to equality, the battle cry of the Revolution, are meaningless since they take no account of the continued subordination of women.

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Beginning with the statement, "Woman is born free and remains equal to man in rights..." "The Declaration of the Rights of Woman" consists of seventeen articles which, from a woman's perspective, rewrite those of the "Declaration of the Rights of Man." Thus, de Gouges declares that woman has the right to liberty, property, security and, especially, resistance to oppression. Being equal in the eyes of the Law, she must be admitted to all honors, positions and public employment. And, since she has the right to the "scaffold," she must equally have the right to the tribune. She should be liable to taxation only if she is granted an equal share in wealth and in the general administration of taxation, including the determination of its proportion, base, mode of collection and duration. She has the right to free communication of thought and opinions, including the right of an unmarried mother to reveal publicly the name of the father of her child. In the postscript to the "Declaration of the Rights of Woman," de Gouges proposes ways of improving the plight of natural children and abandoned women-an elaboration of her lifelong concern with the marginal status of the illegitimate daughter, paradigmatic of the general social illegitimacy of women as women. She opposes the patriarchal power over the family and suggests in its place a marriage contract which would recognize the commonality of property and children, and the complete rights of children no matter who the father. Nor should natural children be deprived of legal rights, including, in some cases, the rights of inheritance. She proposes laws to aid poor and abandoned women, including prostitutes (whom she considers less deleterious to mortals than society women), pregnant women and their offspring. Finally, she chastises women of the old regime--who were "contemptible and respected"--for the use of ruse and dissimulation in the pursuit of power, but laments the situation of indigent, beautiful women who sell themselves to rich men. Associating this kind of commerce to that of blacks on the slave market, she closes the "Declaration of the Rights of Woman" with an invective against the horrors and injustices of slavery and the cruelty and greed of the colonists. In terms of its rhetorical power, "The Declaration of the Rights of Woman" is radically effective. By assuming the same form as the "Declaration of the Rights of Man" and simply replacing "man" with "woman" de Gouges interrupts the dominant enlightenment discourse and, as it were, deconstructs it. In effect, through a rhetoric of parodic mimetism it names the feminine as that which has been omitted from revolutionary discourse. 33Moreover, in mimicking the content, as well as the form, of the "Declaration of the Rights of Man," de Gouges breaks through the confines of revolutionary discourse that, using Rousseau's Emile as ideological support, casts woman into the sphere of the bourgeois home. Thus her "Declaration of the Rights of Woman" seems more modem than the 14ndication of the Rights of

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Woman by her contemporary Mary Wollstonecraft. Whereas Wollstonecraft is bound by interests of propriety and class. De Gouges universalizes the claim to equality by exposing the false universalism of "The Declaration of the Rights of Man." Moreover, by pointing to the parallel status of women and blacks as commodities on the market, she returns to the connection between gender and race oppression that characterizes her work from its very beginning, and unveils the limited application of the canonical expression of universal human rights which ignores non-property owning and colonized men as well as all women. Like her other writings, "The Declaration of the Rights of Woman" was largely ignored. Given entrenched patriarchal prejudices--and more immediate economic and political crises--the force of the document was lost. However, following the establishment of the Republic, specific proposals of de Gouges were echoed by feminist pressure groups, and legislation was passed at the end of 1792 which gave limited civil rights to illegitimate children and women, including the right of divorce. During the upheavals of the Republic culminating in the struggle for power between the Girondins and the Jacobins, women's activity in public life increased, and their voices seemed to gain in solidarity and strength. Etta Palm d'Alders successfully campagined for the right to divorce; Th6roigne de M6ricourt called upon women to fight in the army; women were centrally involved in organizing the patriotic festivals, and were vocal in the local democratic sections. When, despite the scarcity of food and increased prices occasioned by the war economy, the Girondins maintained their laissez-faire economic policies, women became active in their traditional concern with issues of basic subsistence, and engaged in the practice of taxation populaire, that is, they took over warehouses where traditional supplies were being hoarded, and bought what they needed at fair prices they themselves fixed. Claire Lacombe and Pauline L~on formed the powerful Soci~t6 des Femmes R6publicaines R6volutionnaires which was especially concerned with the plight of destitute women and formed an alliance with the "enrag6s," Roux, Leclerc and H6bert as a pressure group representing the interests of the sans-culottes. However, when Robespierre had assured his hegemony over the Girondin opposition, he began to dissociate himself from his radical wing and, in particular, from the vocal demands of the activist women. As early as the storming of the Bastille, in which women played a significant role, de Gouges had remarked that women were tolerated in such public events only as long as their help and activity were necessary. The staunchest supporters of Robespierre and the Terror as a method for maintaining the purity of revolutionary aims, the members of the Soci6t6 des Femmes R6publicaines R6volutionnaires found themselves left behind by Robespierre's political opportunism. Economic programs they had fought for, such as the establish-

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ment of the maximum, a fixed price for foodstuffs, were rejected and the special interests of a free market economy won the day--reinforcing political and class differences among the women. In effect, it was the market women who provided an occasion for the downfall of the Soci6td des Femmes R6publicaines R6volutionnaires. Objecting to a law, supported by the Soci6t~, that they should always wear the revolutionary cockade, angered over the possibility of price controls, they petitioned for its abolition. That very day, 30 October 1793, the Convention acted on the petition and declared that all women's clubs and associations were thenceforth illegal. Appeals were ignored, and the democratic Commune of Paris took advantage of the situation to remind women, who had so effectively suppported its cause, that they belonged not in public places but in the home. Four days after the women's clubs were closed, Olympe de Gouges was guillotined. Almost lost in the endless proliferation of petitions and documents that characterized the first three years of the Revolution, Olympe de Gouges' "Declaration of the Rights of Women" did not transform gender into an effective revolutionary category. Political and economic interests prevailed. Female supporters of Robespierre, for example, attacked Thdroigne de M6ricourt and almost killed her for being an ally of the Girondist Brissot, just as they themselves were lrmally brought down by the demands of the market women. When expedient, issues of gender were given token respect but, as all the revolutionary women were to discover, the exclusion of their gender from the "Declaration of the Rights of Man" was not an oversight but a structural necessity of the detrmition and empowerment of the bourgeois order. 34 Most characterizations of de Gouges' political affiliations place her on the side of the moderate Girondins. 35In terms of her initial support of the monarchy, her friendship with moderates such as Condorcet, her opposition to the execution of the king and, in particular, her violent hatred of Marat and Robespierre, this political affiliation seems clear. However, she resisted identification with any particular party, and remarked, in an early political letter (20 September 1789) to the National Representatives that the aristocrats called her a democrat and the democrats called her an aristocrat. 3~Although she perceived herself as a moderate and mediator, she had no political place to stand and her political views reflected the inconsistencies and incoherence of her class and gender situation. Indeed, it is simplistic to situate her writings within the political opposition Girondist/Jacobin. Rather, she demonstrates a general difficulty in defining herself within public revolutionary discourse and gives voice to many paradoxical and sometimes contradictory positions: her rejection of legitimate order; her interiorization of its values; her nostalgia for chivalrous relations between men and women; her experience of the most cruel misogyny; her

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proposals for reform; her revolutionary declaration of women's rights. To label de Gouges a political moderate, a representative of the forces of emergent bourgeois political power, does not take into account her profound antipathy to the spirit of capitalism, of which her hatred of the slave market is the clearest expression, or her advocacy of complete civil and legal equality for women. Indeed, she was represented by the bourgeois nineteenth century as a demonic fury and the embodiment of excess, a negative example of what women were supposed to represent. More significant than her specific political proposals is her articulation of the female voice as subject, rather than object of political discourse. As soon as she began to speak, she was met with verbal abuse and calumny from both sides of the political spectrum. The fact that she dared enter the public arena at all was perceived as transgressive, and her rhetorical excesses are in direct proportion to the abuse or silence that greeted her writings. Her desperation at not being heard is also evident in her frequent recourse to the most direct means of written communication such as the poster, and to political statements which she pasted on buildings and even on the corridor walls of the Convention. Sometimes excessive or incoherent, the rhetoric of de Gouges' political writings exposes the obstacles, the cultural conventions, the archeology of illegitimacy of her attempt to articulate a revolutionary discourse from the perspective of gender. Her writings during the last year of her life, her letters to Robespierre and the political pamphlet, "The Three Urns," that brought about her execution, testify to the stifling of that attempt. De Gouges' last works are remarkable for their forthright attacks on the person and the policies of Robespierre at a time when lies and disguise were the order of the day and a careless word could lead to the guillotine. Of all de Gouges' rhetorical excesses, the language of her public letters to Robespierre and "The Three Urns," is most remarkable and most indicative of her desire and failure to be heard. Her first attack on Robespierre was prompted by a rumor, spread by Bourdon, a member of the Convention, to discredit her, which claimed she was the natural daughter of Louis XV1 and was working for the restoration of the monarchy. She wrote a letter to the Convention in November 1792 in which she defended herself by referring to her biography, pre-revolutionary writings and patriotic credentials. However, she also went on the attack and contrasted her own energetic work on behalf of France with the destructive policies of Bourdon, Marat and Robespierre whom she calls insects crawling in the filth of corruption. ~ At about the same time (5 November 1792), just before Robespierre was called upon to justify himself before the Convention,she wrote an open letter to him, posted in a public place, titled "The Prognostication of Maximilian de Robespierre, by an Amphibious Animal" and signed with the rather transparent anagram, Polyme. 37

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This public letter begins with an extraordinary self portrait in which she describes herself as an animal, neither male nor female, with the courage of the former and the weaknesses of the latter. Thus rejecting her gender and attempting even to flee the human race, she claims that she loves her neighbor and hates only herself. This annihilation of self, however, is counterbalanced by an allegorical description of her speech, face and name which represent, respectively, equality, freedom and the celestial. While such self-abasement and self-praise continue a pattern of ambivalence which typically characterize de Gouges' self-definition, they take the form, here, of dehumanization both through the animal imagery and the allegorization. While the animal imagery clearly evokes a collapse into the "amphibian" order of the unconscious, the allegorical figurations--the preferred rhetorical device of revolutionary rhetoric, equally erase her individual and social specificity. She thus splits herself into sensation and moral abstraction. Indeed, the tone of her letter--execration and cursing of Robespierre, prediction of dire catastrophe if he is justified by the Convention, appeal to the people to reject him--evokes the combination of instinctual immediacy and divine authority which characterizes the words of the sybil or, perhaps more pertinently, in this context, of the fury. While this was the epithet used by her male detractors to invalidate her work, the persona of the fury, which she subsumes in this text has a specific rhetorical function. It enables her to transcend her particular persona as a woman who, by def'mition cannot find an audience, and to assume the power and authority to attack head on the most redoubtable and powerful figure of the Revolution. Just as she subsumes her individuality in a dehumanized animal/divine voice, so she casts Robespierre in the role of dehumanized monster. Whereas her own physiological characterization emblematizes abstract revolutionary ideals, his expresses a diabolical baseness: "Your breath poisons the pure air which we are now breathing, your twitching eyelid expresses despite yourself all the turpitude of your soul, and every hair on your head contains a crime." After the description of what awaits Paris if Robespierre is not defeated, de Gouges calls upon its citizens to reject "this scourge," for "Pandora's box is open." A reference to evils unleashed by Robespierre, Pandora's box is also an effective image for de Gouges' own rhetoric in this public letter as she unleashes her rage on the man she calls the execration of the Revolution. However, Robespierre was vindicated, and de Gouges wrote another letter addressed to P6tion, president of the Convention. 38After describing the force of her accusations against Robespierre as a surge ("un jet") of language that she is unable to contain when the well-being of the state is in question, she speaks directly to Robespierre. Her tone is heavily ironic as she mocks his "metamorphosis," his claim that he wants peace, freedom and an end to vindictiveness. She predicts his over-

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throw of the government and political anarchy. Denounced for her fiery excesses, she evokes Marat, "Robespierre's puppet," as the real fury, emerging from his cavern and brandishing his "pestilential" papers like torches. The intensity of de Gouges' engagement with Robespierre is in proportion to her impotence. Whereas, in her early works, she fantasized a loving reconciliation with a socially and culturally legitimate father, these violent letters fantasize a union in death, a negative ritual through which she will destroy Robespierre and legitimize herself. Thus, in a suicidal gesture, she names herself as the author of the infamous "Prognostication," and invites Robespierre to join her in a suicidal leap into the Seine. Evoking the model of a Roman hero who sacrificed himself to reestablish peace, she offers herself as an example to Robespierre. His death will rid the state of a scourge, she writes, and her death will disarm the heavens. A rhetorical gesture that reflects her own desperation, this suicidal fantasy anticipates her defeat at the hands of Robespierre. She closes the letter with an appeal to history to assign him an appropriately ignominious place. Of course, he ignored de Gouges' invitation, but the political pamphlet, "The Three Urns, "39 published in July 1793, finally provided him with an occasion to arrest her and sentence her to death. In "The Three Urns" de Gouges proposes a referendum in which the people would be given the opportunity to choose between three forms of government, a monarchy, a republic or a federation. In the repressive political climate, such a proposal was sufficient to condemn her as an enemy of the republic with Girondist loyalties. Her self description in the pamphlet, which contrasts with the measured tone of her political suggestions, is very disturbing. She describes herself as Toxicodendron from Manitopa, the land of the mad. This self allegorization continues the depersonalization evident in the "Prognostication." However, in that document she positively represented herself as the figure of freedom. In "The Three Urns" she embodies the toxicity and madness assigned to her by her detractors, and assumes the role of illegitimacy which she had so long fought. Just as chillingly, she signs the pamphlet "the aerial voyager," as if already detached from the world of the living, as if already anticipating the blade of the guillotine. De Gouges' arrest, imprisonment and trial were as dramatic as her life, and a horrible parody of the public role and the public forum she had demanded for herself and women in general. The hearing was a mockery, the sentence preordained. 4° She was accused of spewing out bile and circulating poison in her writi n g s - - a n a c c u s a t i o n she had already i n c o r p o r a t e d in the p s e u d o n y m "Toxicodendron." This reduction of her words to bile or poison was the ultimate denial of her voice, the negation of all her efforts to enter public discourse. During the resume of the charges against her, she acted out a dumb play of emotions--

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smirking, shrugging her shoulders, clasping her hands, raising her eyes to heaven, gazing in astonishment at the court, smiling at the spectators--as if mimicking the impotence to which she had been reduced. Although she spoke in her own defense, her words were powerless. She made a last effort to evade the guillotine by claiming that (in her mid-forties) she was pregnant, only to have to submit to the indignity of physical probings by court-appointed doctors. This desperate recourse to the traditionally valued role of woman only postponed the inevitable. Given the constant frustrations of her efforts to make herself heard in the public arena, the dramatic staging of her decapitation, of her final silencing, was brutally ironic and effective. Her death was to become a warning to women who might think of entering public discourse. Thus, Chaumette, a sympathizer with the Jacobin cause, recalled the fate of Olympe de Gouges to women who might think of following her example: "Recall that virago, that man-woman, the shameless Olympe de Gouges who was the first to establish women's clubs, who abandoned the care of her household, wished to play politics and committed crimes. All those immoral beings have been annihilated under the avenging sword of the laws. You would like to imitate them? No, you will realize that you will be truly worthy of interest and respect only when you are what nature wished you to be. We want women to be respected; that is why we will force them to respect themselves. "4~ Chaumette's speech graphically illustrates the violence implicit in the idealization of woman confined to the domestic sphere. The blade of the guillotine that silenced Olympe de Gouges was prefigurative of the silencing of women in the new bourgeois and imperial order. Moreover, her efforts to enter revolutionary discourse reveal to what extent its claims to universality masked, and, indeed, were constituted by, strategies of domination and exclusion.

Notes 1. Although many women of the people continued to support the policies of Robespierre, bureaucratic centralization, the Terror, and the difficulty of assembly undermined organization and solidarity. With Thermidor women were also excluded from the democratic clubs and galleries. The new economic and social policies turned poverty into destitution, and women and children, whose bodies were daily fished out of the Seine, were the first to suffer. It is scarcely surprising that desperate and disenfranchised women returned to the Church for charity and solace, and became, throughout the nineteenth century, its most faithful support. 2. For a summary of historical perspectives on revolutionary women, and of Olympe de Gouges in particular, see Olivier Blanc, Olympe de Gouges (Paris: Syros, 1981), oh. 9. See also Jules Michelet, Les Femmes de la R~volution (Paris, 1854). 3. See Darline Gay Levy, Harriet Branson Applewhite and Mary Durham Johnson, eds., Women in Revolutionary Paris 1789-1795 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979); and Paule Marie Duhet, ed., Cahiers de dol~ances des femmes en 1789 et autres textes (Paris: Des Femmes, 1981).

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4. See Marie Cerati, Le club des citoyennes r~publicaines r~volutionnaires (Paris: Editions sociales, 1976); and Mona Ozouf, Laf~te rdvolutionnaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). 5. Olwen Hufton, "Women in Revolution 1789-1796," in Douglas Johnson, ed., French Society and the Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). 6. Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). See also "A Woman Who Has Only Paradoxes to Offer: Olympe de Gouges Claims Rights for Women," in Sara E. Melzer and Leslie W. Rabine, eds,. Rebel Daughters (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 102-121. 7. In Lynn Hunt, ed., Eroticism and the Body Politic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991) See also Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of The French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). g. Joan Landes, Women in the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). 9. For a study of Th6roigne de M6ricourt, see Elisabeth Roudinesco, Thdroigne de M~ricourt: une femme mdlancolique sous la Revolution (Paris: Seuil, 1989). 10. Alfred Guillois, Etude m~dico-psychologique sur Olympe de Gouges (Lyon: A.Rey, 1904). See the concluding chapter for a general analysis of revolutionary women. 11. The Memoir of Mme de Valmont can be found in Olympe de Gouges" Oeuvres, vol. I (Paris: Cailleau, 1788) Except for the "Declaration of the Rights of Woman," all translations of Olympe de Gouges are my own. 12. For details of Olympe de Gouges' background and life, see Olivier Blanc, Olympe de Gouges. 13. For an account of the situation of the woman playwright in the eighteenth century, see Barbara G. Mittman, "Women and the Theater Arts," in Samia I. Spenser, ed., French Women and the Age of Enlightenment (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). Playwriting was not uncommon among upper class women who wrote for their private theatres and friends. Mine de Stall, for example, belongs in this category. Writing for the public theatre was a different matter. 14. See, for example, the review in the Journal de Paris, no. 364, 30 December 1789, 1710: "This play was not successful. The style was too simple and the plot not simple enough. The public seemed dissatisfied right from the first scenes, which doubtless hardly predisposed it to find anything interesting in the rest of the play. ~ Needless to say, the reasons for the play's closing were as much political as aesthetic. 15. Condorcet, "R6flexions sur l'esealavage des nbgres" (1781), and "Sur l'admission des femmes aux droits de citd" (1790). 16. There have, however, been plays on domestic slavery. Two plays by Marivaux, L'lle des esclaves (1725) which temporarily reverses the roles of master and slave, and La colonie (I750) which questions man's domination of woman, are particularly relevant to a reading of de Gouges' play. They also use the romanesque topos of the shipwreck to create a new perspective on old institutions. 17. The second printing of the play (1792), possibly in reaction to the anti-abolitionist sentiment provoked by the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue in 1791, muted the anti-colonialist perspective of the first edition. In fact, in the 1792 version of the play, the attempted rape is not mentioned, and the murder explained as a consequence of the slave's refusal to punish the woman for rejecting the overseer's advances. 18. Interestingly, the accusation of incest was commonly directed against women who seemed to transgress their defined social and cultural roles. See Chantal Thomas, on this issue, in Marie Antoinette (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1990) 19. Oeuvres, vol. I, 5. 20. Oeuvres, vol. II, 158. 21. Oeuvres, vol. II, 21. 22. In his Olympe de Gouges, (224-229), Olivier Blanc lists the known plays of de Gouges. Several have not been found, among which are an anti-divorce play, Necessit~ du divorce, and an anticonvent play, Le couvent or les Voeuxforc~s.

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23. Published in Benoite Groult, ed., Olympe de Gouges: Oeuvres (Paris: Mercure de France, 1988), 69-73. 24. Ibid., 73. 25. Ibid., 78. 26. Ibid., 88. 27. See Margarete Wolters and Clara Suter, eds., Olympe de Gouges 1784-1793, Politische Schrifien in Auswahl (Hamburg: Helmut Breslie Verlag, 1979), 81-86. 28. BenoRe Groult, ed., Olympe de Gouges: Oeuvres, 93-99. 29. See the introduction by Benoite Gronlt in Olympe de Gouges: Oeuvres, 36-38. 30. Benoi'te G-roult, Olympe de Gouges: Oeuvres, 85. 31. Ibid., 150. 32. This can be found in English translation in Levy, Applewhite and Johnson, eds., Women in Revolutionary Paris, 87-96. 33. One might interpret this text in the light of the mimetism Luee Irigaray proposes as a strategy for the deconstruetion of dominant discourse in her This Sex Which is Not One (Ithaca: Comell University Press, 1977), tr. Catherine Porter, ch. 4. 34. For an analysis of this process, refer to Joan Landes, Women in the Public Sphere. See note 8. 35. Typical is the article, ~Women's Travails," The Economist (December 24, 1988), which expresses the notion that de Gouges was interested in the future only of middle class women and was terrified of the mass of poor women. This emphasis on the divisions among women goes against the general thrust of de Gouges' work which aims for gender solidarity. 36. Margarete Wolters and Clara Surer, eds., Politische Schrifien in Auswahl, 163-169. Thus, de Gouges, laments," I fred myself forced into a comer like the poor dying man who, at his last breath, was asked by a rigorous priest,"Are you a Molinist or a Jansenist?" "Alas," the poor moribund replied "I am a cabinet maker." (My translation) 37. Ibid., 181-184. 38. Ibid., 178-180 39. For a general discussion of this text, see Olivier Blanc, Olympe de Gouges, ch. 9. 40. For a transcription of the court proceedings, see Alexandre Tuetey, Rdpertoire g~ngral des sources manuscrites de l "histoire de Paris pendant la Revolution Francaise, vol. X (1912): 150-163. 41. Published in the Courier Republicain, November 19, 1793.