The Streets of Paris

Olympe de Gouges: Conciergerie, the Seine, and Pont Neuf

LOCATION: 2, boulevard du Palais, Conciergerie

HOURS: Mar–Oct, 9:30–6:15; Nov–Feb, 9–5

MÉTRO: Cité; Saint-Michel; Pont Neuf

Olympe de Gouges (1748–1793) was one of the 2,800 death row inmates in the Conciergerie murdered by order of Maximilien Robespierre or one of his appointed judges. For many years after the Revolution, hers has remained an obscure story and a name belittled by male historians. Now, late in the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the memory of her heroic courage has been resurrected: her writings, dead to the world in the National Archives for almost two centuries, have now been reprinted and translated; a square in the northern Marais bears her name; a recent bust of her image now holds a place of honor in the National Assembly (the Palais Bourbon); a large assembly hall bearing her name stands in the square de la Roquette on the site of what was once a prison for “incorrigible” girls, women, and four thousand Résistantes. In 2015 she was one of the heroes of France nominated to have her remains transferred to the Panthéon.

In the beginning, Olympe de Gouges supported the Revolution. In 1770 she’d moved to Paris from her native Montaubon in the southwest as a twenty-two-year-old widowed mother of a young son. She’d changed her name from Marie Gouze to Olympe de Gouges. An aspiring writer and early feminist who expressed her bold antiestablishment opinions with verve and humor, she was befriended by politicians, journalists, intellectuals, and theater people. A free spirit with a mind of her own, she was invited to attend their salons which lived and breathed the ideas of the Enlightenment. The mathematician and philosopher Marquis de Condorcet and his wife Sophie, friends of Voltaire (see here), held a prestigious salon in Auteuil; they welcomed Olympe, an advocate like themselves for human rights. She was by then writing her own plays, some of which were produced. The Slavery of the Blacks had a successful run. Theater, she believed, could change the politics of audiences. Her essays and fiery pamphlets opposing the death penalty and advocating for the abolition of slavery, the equality of the sexes, women’s right to divorce (and to retain custody of her children) established her reputation as a voice of the Enlightenment.

She supported the Revolution as conceived by the leaders of the Girondists (or Girondins or the Gironde), a political group composed mostly of lawyers, intellectuals, journalists, and businessmen. More moderate than the fanatical Jacobins ruled by Robespierre, the Girondists favored a constitutional monarchy; they opposed the execution of the king and queen. Robespierre, the Jacobin dictator who designed the blood-soaked Reign of Terror, had the Girondist leaders arrested in June 1793 and guillotined in October. For her association with this moderate group—which the Jacobins attacked as “royalist”—he had Olympe de Gouges arrested in July and imprisoned in the Conciergerie.

Her writings were used against her: for opposing the death penalty for the imprisoned king and queen, she was accused of supporting the monarchy and sedition. She had also condemned Robespierre’s Reign of Terror. He despised Olympe’s most famous tract, Declaration of the Rights of Women and of the Female Citizen (1791), a protest against the omission of women’s rights in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), a copy, “almost word for word,” in the words of Eric Hazan, of America’s Declaration of Independence (1776). (Her essay inspired Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in London in 1792. French women were denied the right to vote until 1945.)

For its silence regarding women’s right to equality with male citizens as well as its omission of the issues of slavery and of women’s suffrage, Olympe denounced the Revolution: It was clear there would be no justice for women (or slaves) under the patriarchal version of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. She called the Revolution a fraud.

Locked up in the Conciergerie, she was denied a lawyer; she was quite capable, the judge sneered, of arguing her own case. Her polemical pamphlets, attached to lampposts all over Paris, were well known. More were published while she was in prison. Her last one, A Female Patriot Persecuted, was said to be the one that so infuriated Robespierre he condemned her to death after three months in jail, denying her right to appeal. (Perhaps, more than her writing, he detested her reputation for attracting and accepting the sexual attentions of a number of lovers.)

She knew she had never stood a chance in a judicial system controlled by Robespierre, the director of the infamous Committee of Public Safety. As described by André Maurois in A History of France, Robespierre “hated women with the mad fury of some chaster men, angered by femininity itself.… There dwelt within him something of Mohammed and of Cromwell, and this Mohammed was ambitious to be Allah.”

On November 3, 1793, perhaps in silence, Olympe de Gouges climbed into the tumbril that would carry her across the Pont au Change, up Quai de la Mégisserie, right at the Pont Neuf into rue de la Monnaie, left into rue Saint-Honoré, and up beyond the Louvre and the Tuileries into the Place de la Revolution (now the Place de la Concorde), its air thick with the stench of severed heads and the blood of innocents.

As she mounted the scaffold, Olympe de Gouges’s face was described by an anonymous bystander as calm, serene, and beautiful. But the only hard evidence about this brave woman lives in the writings she left behind, now for sale in Paris bookstores and online. Her sculptured image rests in the National Assembly across the bridge from the place where she died.

The nineteenth-century historian Jules Michelet, a hard-line republican who never forgave her for urging clemency for the king and queen and opposed all participation in politics by women, for a time set the tone for other male historians of the Revolution:

She allowed herself to act and write about more than one affair that her weak head did not understand.

For the Traveler

From the Sainte-Chapelle, walk one block north toward the Seine and Pont au Change; or from the Pont Neuf, walk up Quai de l’Horloge, passing the huge Palais de Justice on your right, which stretches from one side of the Île to the other. Turn right at the clock: the entrance to the Conciergerie is on the right, two minutes from the corner. Inside, you’re on the site of the palace of Roman governors and French kings. Formerly part of the palace and to this day an impressive monument of medieval architecture, the Conciergerie became part of the ancient “seat of royal justice,” the Palais de Justice, just south at 8, boulevard du Palais (Charles V moved the royal residence to the Louvre at the end of the fourteenth century).

This hulking fortress, however, is most significant as a major seat of historical injustice. Its most notorious function was to serve as the prison for political dissidents during the French Revolution. These days, as you walk its creepy passages, you’re seeing the site of a massive death row, the antechamber to the beheading of innocents on any number of Paris scaffolds with guillotines.

The Conciergerie, a closed dark abyss of stone and iron locks, stands as de Gouges’s most appropriate commemorative space: She opposed everything this place represented in the life of Paris and the Revolution.

To see her final residence, either take the guided tour or explore on your own. Once through the vaulted Gothic La Salle des Gens d’Armes just inside the entrance (the oldest medieval hall in Europe), you move to the western end—to your right is the Salle des Gardes where Robespierre’s Revolutionary Tribunal heard and sentenced plaintiffs, who, in 1794, included the Carmelites of Compiegne (see here).

The small stairway at the end of the massive hall leads left into what was called in 1793 the rue de Paris (named for the executioner, Monsieur de Paris); prisoners (pailleux) too poor to pay for a cell slept here on straw. (This is now the gift shop where Olympe de Gouges’s Declaration of the Rights of Women [in French] is on sale.)

To the left, as you leave the rue de Paris and ascend a short stairway, you’ll find a room with marble walls incised with the names of the 2,800 prisoners held in this prison and guillotined during the Revolution, including those of Olympe de Gouges, André Chénier, Charlotte Corday, and Georges Danton. Farther on, you’ll see Marie Antoinette’s cell and chapel, near the death row chapel where the Girondists were held (and possibly Olympe de Gouges, who bore their taint). Also on display is the gigantic blade of a guillotine, “that shameful machine of human butchery,” in the words of feminist and 1871 communard Louise Michel.

Outside, you can walk the Cour des Femmes where women prisoners, under the shadows of the fortress’s high walls, did their laundry, washed themselves, and walked. That a special space was made available to the female victims of the Terror carries a bitter irony: It was women, numbering in the thousands, who marched all day on October 5, 1789, from Paris to Versailles, to bring the king back to Paris and bread home to their families. Paris was bankrupt, the harvests had failed, the poor quartiers—especially Saint-Antoine where the Bastille had been—were hungry.1

The king finally agreed to return to his capital on October 6, his procession protected by the National Guard who skewered loaves of bread on their bayonets; they were followed by carts with sacks of flour. The victorious women followed on foot. Many regard this action, organized and led by anonymous and poor women who risked their lives as they screamed for the king’s attention and broke into the Versailles palace as a far more significant revolt than the razing of the Bastille.

Who knows what conversation passed among the women crowded around the stone washtubs in the Cour des Femmes, a sad place which—even now, more than two hundred years later—the rays of the sun do not touch. Did the women know the fate of their sister prisoners, a few of whom would enter the history books? The much demonized Marie Antoinette, judged guilty on all counts by the all-male historian jurors of the next three centuries, executed on October 16? Charlotte Corday who murdered the fanatic Jean-Paul Marat? Manon Roland who grew up on the Quai de l’Horloge just under the walls and high dark towers of the Conciergerie, a Girondist like Olympe de Gouges? Olympe’s reputation as a witty conversationalist and playwright used to writing comic and irreverent dialogue—(her plays are available at www.olympedegouze.eu)—she would probably have had a lot to say inside the shadows darkening the fountain in the Cour des Femmes. Perhaps among those inmates, a few days before Olympe was murdered (and two weeks after Marie Antoinette) there were disobedient members of the Club of Revolutionary Republican Women Citizens, about two hundred radical democrats opposed to the Girondists, who had organized their club in May 1793, but in October had seen it outlawed for their excesses: “women have little capacity for high conceptions and serious meditations…” went the decree. “They are disposed … to an exaltation that would be harmful in public affairs,… the interests of the state would soon be sacrificed to whatever the vivacity of passion might produce in the way of distraction and disorder.” One can only imagine how Olympe de Gouges might have answered the decree that silenced her sister revolutionaries.

Weekends, when the embankment beside the Quai de la Mégisserie is closed to traffic, you can follow Olympe de Gouges’s route to the guillotine. The light of the sun on a warm Sunday in February can seem to have the power to bleach the horrors of history to nothingness. Paris, the world’s shining pride, luminous ground of the world’s beauty, surely its bloody savage history is just a phantom.

Except that in our time there is nothing ghostly or even dated about the mad mind of Robespierre. In his book Virtue and Terror he declared the moral foundation of his Reign of Terror. His abstractions have all too contemporary a ring:

Terror is nothing but prompt, severe, inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation of virtue … a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to the homeland’s most pressing needs.

Nearby

CAFÉ BORDS DE SEINE Metro: Cité. 1, Place du Châtelet. 7–12:30. At the north end of boulevard du Palais, cross Pont au Change (or Pont au Changeurs where the moneylenders did business in Louis IX’s time), originally called the Grand Pont. The brasserie is at the end of the bridge, on the corner. The terrace is heated in winter and you can sit as long as you like. Excellent service. The upstairs dining room has a view of the Seine, the three round towers of the Conciergerie, and the Gothic towers of Notre-Dame.

QUAI DE LA MÉGISSERIE The buildings are nineteenth century, but the quay is of fourteenth-century origin. Animal lovers are happy here, crowding the quay’s pet shops on weekends, visiting live animals, stuffed animals, plants, and flowers. The mégissiers (leather dressers) worked here before the pet merchants moved in.

THÉÂTRE DU CHÂTELET www.theatre-chatelet.com. On Place du Châtelet, a large busy square with the Châtelet fountain in the center, named after the Grand Châtelet, a twelfth-century fortress and fortified gate to the Cité, razed in the nineteenth century. The large theater highlights musical programs, some suitable for children. The New York City Ballet performed a twenty ballet tour at a summer festival here in 2016. Tickets online or at the box office.