Olympe de Gouges (7 May 1748 – 3 November 1793) was a French abolitionist and feminist playwright during the French Revolution. In 1793, she was executed during the Reign of Terror.
Biography[]
Olympe de Gouges was born in Montauban, Gascony, France on 7 May 1748, born into a petty bourgeois family. She used to frequent salons, and she was educated with Enlightenment ideals while talking with philosophers and politicians. During the 1780s, she began to write plays and other works concerning the subject of abolitionism and women's rights, and she wrote about injustice during the French Revolution; she opposed King Louis XVI of France's execution in 1793. She allied herself with the Girondins during the revolution, leading to her arrest by the Jacobin Club in 1793. Gouges was guillotined on 3 November 1793 during the Reign of Terror.