Si j’allais plus avant sur cette matiére, je pourrais m’étendre trop loin, et m’attirer l’inimitié des hommes parvenus, qui, sans réfléchir sur mes bonnes vues, ni approfondir mes bonnes intentions, me condamneraient impitoyablement comme une femme qui n’a que des paradoxes à offrir, et non des problemes faciles à résoudre.
Olympe de Gouges, 1789
For women, the legacy of the French Revolution was contradictory. On the one hand, the unit of national sovereignty was declared to be a universal, abstract, rights-bearing individual; on the other hand, this human subject was almost immediately given particularized embodiment as a man. The abstraction of a genderless individual endowed with natural rights made it possible for women to claim the political rights of active citizens and, when denied them in practice, to protest against exclusion as unjust, a violation of the founding principles of the republic. There is no question, from this perspective, of the powerful impetus such universal theory gave (and continues to give) to democratic movements. But there is also no question that the equally abstract gesture of embodiment—the attribution of citizenship to (white) male subjects—complicated enormously the project of claiming equal rights, for it suggested either that rights themselves, or at least how and where they were exercised, depended on the physical characteristics of human bodies. This particularization of the human in the name of universality introduced into discussions of equality the problem of difference: How could those who were not white men—blacks, mulattoes, and women—claim for themselves the rights of ‘Man’?
The general answer is: with difficulty. There was no simple way either to expand the category of Man to take in all his Others or to disembody the abstract individual so that literally anyone could represent him. Specific contests about the rights of excluded groups did not resolve this paradox, but exposed it; the terms of debate and the strategies of the contenders show equality to be a more elusive ideal in both its formulation and achievement than was ever acknowledged by the revolution’s most visionary architects or, for that matter, by many of its historians.
There is no denying the presence of differently marked bodies—of the physical traits of sex and skin color—in the political debates of the French Revolution. Whether we take the conflicting opinions expressed during the writing of constitutions; the arguments about slave, mulatto, or women’s civic rights propounded by Barnave, Brissot, Condorcet, or Robespierre; the contrasting reflections of Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft; or the minutes of section meetings in Paris, we find interpretations that assume that bodies and rights alike could be thought of as “natural” and that this “naturalness” provided a connection between them. Rights were often referred to as being inscribed on bodies, inalienably attached to them, indelibly imprinted on human minds or hearts.1 But the connection between “natural” bodies and “natural” rights was neither transparent nor straightforward. The meanings of nature, rights, and bodies, as well as the relationships among them, were at issue in the revolutionary debates and these contests about meanings were contests about power. One sees this clearly in the debates occasioned by femininsts demands for rights in the course of the revolution.
I
From the outset of the Revolution, there were scattered demands for women’s rights. These were most often rejected by revolutionary legislators, the vast majority of whom insisted firmly that women were by nature unfit to exercise political rights. During discussion of the Constitution of 1793, for example, the deputy for ile-et-Vilaine, Jean Denis Lanjuinais, reported to the Convention that though it had received several protests against the exclusion of women from active citizenship, his committee would uphold the exclusion. Even in the future under the best circumstances, he argued, when institutions were more just and more in conformity with nature, “it is difficult to believe that women ought to be called to exercise political rights. It is beyond me to think that, taking all into account, men and women would gain anything good from it.”2
Attention to women seems to have increased in 1793 in association first with the drafting of the new constitution and then with the execution of Marie Antoinette on October 16.3 Several days after the queen’s execution, the question of citizenship was rephrased as a more general question of women’s political role. Using the occasion of a street disturbance between market women and members of the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women, the Convention outlawed all women’s clubs and popular societies, invoking Rousseauist themes to deny women the exercise of political rights and to end, some hoped definitively, persistent feminist agitation.4 “Should women exercise political rights and meddle in the affairs of government?” asked André Amar, the representative of the Committee of General Security. “In general, we can answer, no.” He went on to consider whether women could even meet in political associations and again answered negatively:
because they would be obliged to sacrifice the more important cares to which nature calls them. The private functions for which women are destined by their very nature are related to the general order of society; this social order results from the differences between man and woman. Each sex is called to the kind of occupation which is fitting for it; its action is circumscribed within this circle which it cannot break through, because nature, which has imposed these limits on man, commands imperiously and receives no law.5
An even more explicit articulation of these so-called natural facts came from Pierre-Gaspard Chaumette, a radical hébertist and member of the Paris Commune. On behalf of the Commune he indignantly rejected an appeal for support from female petitioners protesting the Convention’s decree:
Since when is it permitted to give up one’s sex? Since when is it decent to see women abandoning the pious cares of their households, the cribs of their children, to come to public places, to harangues in the galleries, at the bar of the senate? Is it to men that nature confided domestic cares? Has she given us breasts to feed our children?6
Less brilliantly than Rousseau, but no less clearly, the Jacobin politicians set forth the terms of their new social order. Their invocation of nature as the origin of both liberty and sexual difference drew on certain prominent (but by no means uncontested) views of political theory and medicine. These views treated nature and the body as synonymous; in the body one could discern the truths upon which social and political organization ought to rest. Constantin Volney, representative for the Third Estate of Anjou at the meetings of the Estates General from 1788 to 1789, argued firmly in his catechism of 1793 that virtue and vice “are always ultimately referable to … the destruction or preservation of the body.”7 For Volney, questions of health were questions of state; “civic responsibility [was] health-seeking behavior.”8 Individual illness signified social deterioration; the failure of a mother to breast-feed her infant constituted a refusal of nature’s corporeal design, hence a profoundly antisocial act.9 The misuse of the body incurred not only individual costs, but social consequences since the body politic was, for Volney, not a metaphor but a literal description.
The body, of course, was not considered in these writings a single phenomenon; sexual difference was taken as a founding principle of the natural, hence the social and political order. Tom Laqueur has shown that ideas of sexual difference are not fixed; their long and variable history demonstrates that sexual meanings are not transparently attached to or immanent in sexed bodies. Laqueur argues that by the eighteenth century biological theory emphasized incommensurable differences between the bodies of women and men.10 Indeed, genital difference made all the difference; masculinity or femininity constituted the entire identity of biological males or females. One of the differences between them, in fact, had to do with how completely sex defined their beings. A Dr. Moreau offered as his own Rousseau’s explanation for the commonly accepted notion that women were (in Denise Riley’s words) “thoroughly saturated with their sex.”11 He maintained that the location of the genital organs, inside in women, outside in men, determined the extent of their influence: “the internal influence continually recalls women to their sex… the male is male only at certain moments, but the female is female throughout her life.”12
In the intersecting discourses of biology and politics, theories of complementarity resolved the potentially disruptive effects of sexual difference. Species reproduction and social order were said to depend on the union of the opposite elements, male and female, on a functional division of labor that granted nature her due. Although it was logically possible to present complementarity as an egalitarian doctrine, in fact it served in the predominant political rhetoric of this period to justify an asymmetrical relationship between men and women. The goals of the revolution, after all, were liberty, sovereignty, moral choice informed by reason, and active involvement in the formation of just laws. All of these were firmly designated male prerogatives, defined in contrast to the female. The contrasting elements were:
| active | passive |
| liberty | duty |
| individual sovereignty | dependency |
| public | private |
| political | domestic |
| reason | modesty |
| speech | silence |
| education | maternal nurture |
| universal | particular |
| male | female13 |
The second column served not only to define the first, but provided the possibility for its existence. “Natural” sexual difference permitted a resolution of some of the knotty and persistent problems of inequalities of power in political theory by locating individual freedom in male subjects and associating social cohesion with females. Maternal nurture awakened or instilled human empathy (pity) and love of virtue, the qualities that tempered selfish individualism; modesty at once equipped women to perform their roles and served as a corrective to their inability otherwise to restrain (sexual) desire. Women’s modesty was, furthermore, a precondition for the successful exercise of male reason in restraint of desire.14 The containment of voracious female sexuality was, in this Enlightenment theory, a prerequisite for the achievement of public virtue. And it required the restriction of women to the domestic realm, their exclusion from politics.15 The dependency of the domestic sphere elicited from men the fulfillment of their social duty; indeed duty denoted here not women’s obligations but their position as the objects of male obligation.
The active/passive distinction, in fact, resting as it did on contrasting theories of natural rights, summed up the differences: those who enjoyed active rights were individual agents, making moral choices, exercising liberty, acting (speaking) on their own behalf. They were, by definition, political subjects. Those who enjoyed passive rights had the “right to be given or allowed something by someone else.”16 Their status as political subjects was ambiguous, if not wholly in doubt. This was the view of women’s rights expressed by the exasperated Chaumette in October 1793: “Impudent women who want to become men,” (I imagine) he shouted, “aren’t you well enough provided for? What else do you need?”17
II
The logical answer to Chaumette involved a reassertion of the demand for rights and a rejection of the so-called natural grounds on which they had been denied. But, as the work of Olympe de Gouges will show us, the answer did not come easily. Confronting the paradox of an embodied equality created paradoxes for feminist thought and these were not “problems easy to resolve.”18
By looking at how feminists articulated their demands we can explore the effects of the paradox of embodied equality and perhaps answer some of the thoughtful and provocative questions raised by the British historian Barbara Taylor. She asks:
What does it mean when [feminists] engage with a theory of the subject in which the reasoning speaker—that is the person who displays possession of natural rights and a place in the civic sphere through . . . speech—is actually constituted on the male side of the sexual axis? And where does that take us with egalitarianism?19
Taylor’s questions assume that asymmetrical representations of rights are not easily corrected by universalist or pluralist arguments and that such arguments can never be formulated entirely outside the discourses they challenge. Cora Kaplan puts it this way: “There is no feminism that can stand wholly outside femininity as it is posed in a given historical moment. All feminisms give some ideological hostage to femininities and are constructed through the gender sexuality of their day as well as standing in opposition to them.”20
This means that feminism’s inherently political aspect comes from its critical engagement with prevailing theories and practices; it does not stand as an independent philosophical movement with an autonomous content and a independent legacy of its own.21 It must be read, therefore, in its concrete manifestations, and then not only for its programmatic recommendations.
Tests of logical consistency of philosophical purity, like categorizations of feminist “schools” of equality or difference, entirely miss the point. The historical and theoretical interest of modern feminism (which I take to date from the seventeenth century) lies in its exposure of the ambiguities and repressions, the contradictions and silences in liberal political systems that present themselves as coherent, comprehensive, rational, or just because they rest on “natural”, “scientific,” or “universal” principles. This suggests that feminism must not only be read in its historical contexts, but also that it cannot be detached from those contexts as evidence either for some transcendent Woman’s identity or for the teleology of women’s emancipation. The meaning of any feminism instead lies in the historical specificity of a recurring critical operation.
My interest in this essay is in the ways feminists addressed the issue of equality during the French Revolution. How did they formulate their claims for political rights? How did they create the political subject they claimed already to represent? How did they demand citizenship when such public status for women was taken as a contradiction of nature’s functional design for social order? How did they attempt to refute or confound what was assumed to be the indisputable evidence of the body? How did they understand the influence of nature on the definition of their rights?
A full-scale study of all the manifestations of feminism in the French Revolution is beyond the scope of this chapter. I will instead concentrate on one figure—Olympe de Gouges (1748–93). I take de Gouges neither as a typical feminist nor an exemplary heroine, but because she provides a site where cultural contests and political contradictions can be examined in some detail. Her writings (the most famous of which is the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen, written in 1791 as the first constitution was being debated) are full of ambiguities and paradoxes that expose the operations of particularity and exclusion in the abstract concept of universal Man.
Olympe de Gouges! This name always calls forth smiles from those who hear it for the first time, bemused recognition from veterans of women’s history courses. Its pretention and inauthenticity seem to produce a comic effect, comic because satirical or transgressive. The name Olympe de Gouges was not, indeed, the one recognized in law for this woman; rather it was one she crafted for herself. Born Marie Gouzes, daughter of a butcher and former servant in Montauban, she was married at age 16 to a man much older than herself. Shortly after the birth of their son, her husband, Louis Yves Aubry died, but Marie refused to use the customary designation, Veuve Aubry. Instead she took her mother’s middle name, Olympe, added a “de” and changed her father’s surname to Gouges. She vowed never again to marry, although she had at least one long-standing heterosexual liaison. At the same time, she suggested that the butcher hadn’t been her father at all, but that she was the illegitimate offspring of a romance between her mother and a local notable, the marquis Le Franc de Pompignan.22 This lineage added intrigue and status to her life and (since the marquis had won a reputation as a man of letters) provided a genealogy for her own literary aspirations. It also, of course, made a mockery of the rules of patrilineal origin and naming. (The theme of naming and renaming the father reappears, albeit with inconsistent and varied usage, throughout de Gouges’s life and work.)23 De Gouges never managed to prove the story of her birth, but that is less important than her repeated assertions of its veracity. These assertions, like her self-renaming, constituted her identity: tentative, ambiguous, and never fully secured.24
De Gouges was always involved in a process of self-construction. She fought valiantly, for example, for recognition as a playwright and exaggerated her standing when she did succeed in having several of her plays accepted (and even performed) by the Comédie Française. Writing was an important, indeed primary, aspect of her self-representation, although she apparently wrote with great difficulty, dictating most of her texts. Speaking came more easily; she was apparently eloquent and inspired in her verbal displays; but these she considered an insufficient measure of her talents.25 When the revolution came, she demonstrated her capacities as an active citizen by rushing into the fray, writing and speaking on behalf of a number of causes: freedom from bondage for slaves, the creation of a national theater and also of a theater for women playwrights, clean streets, provision of maternity hospitals, divorce, and the recognition of the rights of illegitimate children and unmarried mothers. In order more fully to follow the deliberations of the various political assemblies, de Gouges rented lodgings adjacent to their headquarters, in this way literally attaching herself to these august bodies. She was a familiar figure in the galleries and at the podium and her proclamations often covered the walls of the city of Paris. It was as if only her continuing physical presence could assert her status as a political subject; and even then, of course, this was a tentative, contested identity at best, one whose terms she could never fully control.
Along with her proposals usually came a sometimes playful, sometimes disturbing reminder of the fact that a woman was speaking. De Gouges at once stressed her identity with the universal human individual and her difference. Indeed, her formulations demonstrate the difficulty for a woman in unambivalently securing status as an abstract individual in the face of its masculine embodiment. In order to claim the general status of “human” for women, she insisted on their particular qualifications; in the process of insisting on equality, she constantly pointed out and acknowledged difference. “It is a woman who dares to show herself so strong and so courageous for her King and her country.…”26 “They can exclude women from all National Assemblies, but my beneficient genius brings me to the center of this assembly.”27 “Oh people, unhappy citizens, listen to the voice of a just and feeling woman.”28 The title of one of her brochures was “Le Cri du Sage: par une femme.”29 When she put herself forward to defend Louis XVI during his trial she suggested both that sex ought not to be a consideration (“leave aside my sex") and that it should be (“heroism and generosity are also women’s portion and the revolution offers more than one example of it,”)30
De Gouges never escaped the ambiguity of feminine identity, the simultaneous appeal to and critique of established notions of femininity, and she often exploited it. On the one hand, she attacked women as they were—indulgent, frivolous, seductive, intriguing, and duplicitous31—insisting they could choose to act otherwise (like men); on the other hand, she appealed to women to unite to defend their special interests, and to the legislature to recognize its duty to protect mothers. If she asserted that their worst characteristics had been constructed for women by unjust social organization, she nonetheless appealed to her sex to unite (around her leadership) regardless of rank, in order to exert political power in the common interest.32 And, while she maintained that equality, and not special privilege, was the only ground on which woman could stand, she nonetheless (unsuccessfully) sought special advantage by claiming that she was pregnant in order to avoid, or at least postpone, the death sentence conferred on her by the Jacobins in 1793.
The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen contains these ambiguous invocations of stereotypes of femininity and of claims to equality that deny those stereotypes. For the most part, its articles parallel those of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789, extending to women the rights of ‘Man.’ Woman and Man are usually both invoked, for in her effort to produce the complete declaration de Gouges most often simply pluralized the concept of citizenship. But she also addressed her declaration to Marie Antoinette, first woman of the realm, with the coy remark that if the queen were “less educated … I would fear that your special interests would prevail over those of your sex.”33 And her preamble to the document, after echoing phrases about how ignorance, forgetfulness, or contempt of (women’s) rights had been “the sole causes of public unhappiness and the corruption of governments,” concluded with the stunning assertion that “the sex superior in beauty as in courage during childbirth, recognizes and declares, in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being, the following rights of woman and citizen.”34 The very difference of women, this formulation suggests, as well as their exclusion, requires a separate discussion of their rights.35
Article XI of the Declaration on the right of free speech stands out for the attention it draws to the distinctive needs of women:
The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious rights of woman, since this liberty guarantees that fathers will recognize their children. Any citizen (citoyenne) can thus say freely: I am the mother of your child, without being forced by barbarous prejudice to hide the truth.…36
What is striking about this statement is the particularity of its interpretation—a particularity that rests on physical difference. De Gouges could not stay with the abstract universal language she used in most of the other articles of her proclamation; simply adding Woman to the Declaration of the Rights of Man did not suffice at this point. Why? Clearly the right to speech was, for her, the expression of liberty and so most important to discuss at length. In article X, in fact, (which dealt with freedom of opinion) de Gouges added a phrase that belonged more properly in article XI: “woman has the right to mount the scaffold, she ought equally to have the right to mount to the rostrum.”37 (De Gouges here plays with the notion of “right.” She turns being subject to the coercive power of the state into a recognition of individual rights, insisting on the literal terms of the social contract.) In this phrase and in article XI, the right to speech is at issue. But in both places, representing women as speaking subjects seems to have required more than expanding or pluralizing the category of citizen. It called for refuting sexuality and maternity as grounds for silencing women in the public/political realm.
In de Gouges’s article XI, the unstated grounds of exclusion became the explicit reasons for inclusion. The sexual contract that established the social contract was here (and in the appendix to the Declaration) made visible.38 De Gouges contradicted, with a concrete example, the revolutionaries’ endorsement of oppositions between active and passive, liberty and duty, individual and social. Naming the father acknowledged the power of law and exposed the transgressions of the powerful. Without the right to speak, she insisted, women were powerless to enforce paternal duty, to call men back to their obligations, the obligations on which social cohesion and individual liberty depended. Naming the father was both a claim on paternal obligation and an exposure of the abuses of patriarchal power; it also arrogated to women a masculine prerogative.
From one perspective de Gouges’s article XI was an argument for equality that gained force and persuasive power from its use of specific detail. At the same time, however, its very specificity weakened its objective. The abstract clauses of the Declaration of the Rights of Man never indulge in this level of specific and particularized detail, and so de Gouges’s declaration seems by contrast to lack seriousness and generalizability. At the most crucial point in the argument—the demand for liberty to speak—the specificity of Woman marks her difference from the universality of Man. But the addition of Woman is also disruptive because it implies the need to think differently about the whole question of rights.39
There is another even more troubling ambiguity in de Gouges’s argument. For it is precisely in the area of pregnancy that a woman’s speech is simultaneously most authoritative and most open to doubt. Only a woman is in a position to know the truth and so designate paternity (only she can say, “I am the mother of your child’’ or “you are the father of my child”). But precisely because that is the case—because a man can’t know the truth—he must take the woman’s word and she may be lying. The terms by which de Gouges claims the rights of speech for women, then, raise the spectre of the unreliable feminine, the devious and calculating opponent of rational, truth-speaking man, and so they are literally fraught with uncertainty.40
If de Gouges unwittingly evoked prevailing views of women, she also sought explicitly to counter them. Her analysis of women’s artifice and unreliability stressed their lack of education and power. She particularly attacked marriage, “the tomb of trust and love,” for its institutionalization of inequality. Through it men imposed “perpetual tyranny” on women, in contradistinction to the harmonious cooperation evident, she insisted, in nature.41 The prevailing inequality had important personal effects for it forced women to resort to manipulative ploys in their dealings with men and it had negative political effects as well, since a just social order depended on granting all parties to the social contract the same interest in its preservation. For this reason de Gouges recommended replacing the marriage contract with a social contract. She appended to the Declaration of the Rights of Woman a “social contract for Man and Woman” and she defined the Nation as “the union of Woman and Man.” By this she meant to equate marriage and society, both voluntary unions, entered either for life or “for the duration of our mutual inclinations” by rights-bearing individuals. These were unions, moreover, in which neither partner had any legal advantage. Property was to be held in common and divided according to parental discretion among children “from whatever bed they come.” Moreover, the children “have the right to bear the name of the fathers and mothers who have acknowledged them;” the father’s name having no special status in the family.42
De Gouges used examples about marriage to counter notions of fixed social hierarchies, pointing out, as the Estates General debated the question of how to represent the three orders of the nation, that fixed divisions between these groups did not exist and hence were absurd to maintain since marriage had already mingled the blood of members of the nobility and the Third Estate.43 The very last line of her Declaration of the Rights of Woman improbably took up the question of the separation of powers under the new constitution. There de Gouges argued for a reconciliation of the executive and legislative powers (aligning herself with the supporters of constitutional monarchy): “I consider these two powers to be like a man and a woman, who ought to be united, but equal in power and virtue, in order to establish a good household.”44 In these discussions, many of which read like non sequitors, women’s rights were not separable from, but integral to all considerations of politics. The union of man and woman replaced the single figure of the universal individual, in an attempt at resolving the difficulty of arguing about rights in univocal terms. But de Gouges’s notion of this union was ambiguous. It could be read as an endorsement of functional complementarity based on sex, but also as an attempt to dissolve or transcend the categories of sexual difference. De Gouges tried to deny the possibility of any meaningful opposition between public and private, political and domestic, while at the same time working with a notion of marital or sexual union conceived in terms of those very oppositions.
In the past, de Gouges reminded her readers, the exclusion of women from politics had led to the corruption associated with “the nocturnal administration of women,” when seduction displaced reason and crime prevailed over virtue.45 These ruses of the weak would disappear in the future, when women were granted full political rights, equal access to property and public employment. Here de Gouges seemed to acknowledge implicitly an often expressed fear of female sexuality, but she attributed it to faulty institutions. Inherently, desire was polyvalent; social usage gave it its meaning and value. For this reason de Gouges urged, in another context, that women be mobilized to “incit[e] young men to fly to the defense of the Fatherland,” promising the “hand of your mistress” for those who were brave, rejection for cowards. “The art we possess to move the souls of men would produce the salutary effect of enflaming all spirits. Nothing can resist our seductive organ.”46 Deployed in defense of the nation, as an exercise in active citizenship, female sexuality might secure, not destabilize, the social order. Yet the appeal to this kind of femininity also carried the risk of unleashing a desire already defined as antithetical to rational politics. The ambiguity of woman seems always to haunt de Gouges’s most creative arguments.
De Gouges’s statements about sexuality, rights, and the possibilities for men and women referred for legitimation, like the arguments she criticized, to “Nature.” This reference was at once ingenious and limiting; it allowed her to reinterpret the meaning of the ground for arguments about rights, but not ultimately to contest the usefulness of “natural” justifications for human political arrangements.
De Gouges refused the differentiation of bodies into fixed binary categories, insisting instead on multiplicity, variety, ranges of difference, spectra of colors and functions, confusion of roles—the ultimate undecidability and indeterminacy of the social significance of physical bodies. Running through many of her writings are examples and observations meant to elucidate (what was for her) a primary truth: (she didn’t put it this way, but she might have) Nature abhors binary categorization. Appealing to the prevailing rules of science, de Gouges reported her observations and what she saw, she said, confirmed her own experience, her perception of the distance between her “self” and the social category of woman. “In my writings, I am a student of nature; I might be (je dois être), like her, irregular, bizarre even, yet also always true, always simple.”47 In one of her autobiographical pieces, de Gouges explained that the sexes were differentiated only for the purposes of reproduction; otherwise “nature” had endowed all members of a species with similar, but not necessarily identical, faculties.48 Physical difference, however, was not the key to other differences; for there was no system to nature’s variations. De Gouges accepted the prevailing belief in the originary status of nature, and then she redescribed it, drawing new implications for human social organization. Systems, she argued, were man-made, and she implied that all systems interfered with natural anarchic confusions. The Declaration of the Rights of Woman began by contrasting men’s tyrannical oppression of women with the harmonious confusions of the natural world:
look, search, and then distinguish if you can, the sexes in the administration of nature. Everywhere you will find them mixed up (confondus), everywhere they cooperate harmoniously together in this immortal masterpiece.49
Like distinctions of sex, distinctions of color defied clear categorization. Only the cupidity and greed of white men could explain for de Gouges the enslavement of blacks; only blind prejudice could lead to commerce in human beings and to the denial of a common humanity between black and white. This was the theme of a brochure she issued (as well as a play she wrote) that contained her “Reflections on Black Men.” In it she insisted that “nature had no part” in the “commerce d’hommes.” “The unjust and powerful interests of the whites did it all,” she maintained, suggesting that here particular interests, masquerading as universal, had usurped human rights. She then pondered the question of color, asking where the lines could be drawn absolutely to differentiate whites, mulattoes, blacks, and whether any hierarchy could be established on the basis of these differences:
Man’s color is nuanced, like all the animals that nature has produced, as well as the plants and minerals. Why doesn’t the night rival the day, the sun the moon, and the stars the firmament? All is varied and that is the beauty of nature. Why then destroy her work?50
Underneath the visible variety of nature, de Gouges detected a fundamental physical identity. Distinctions of color were not only interdeterminate, but superficial, she insisted, for the same blood flowed in the veins of masters and slaves. They were, in fact, “fathers and brothers,” but “deaf to the cries of blood, they stifle all its charms.”51 This comment, placed as it was near the end of the Declaration of Rights of Woman, raises the issue of how de Gouges understood the relationship between the situation of women and blacks. There was more than an analogy between two groups deprived of liberty. Rather they partook of the same question: the status in nature, and so in politics, of observable physical difference. If undecidability was the answer in nature, decisions became human actions for which people could be held accountable; they were necessarily relative and open to reasonable debate and interpretation. The legitimation for laws could lie only in “common utility” (article I of both declarations stated that “social distinctions could only be based on common utility”), and that was inevitably decided through political processes. Justice, not nature, required the participation in these processes by everyone affected. The body—or more precisely, structural physical difference—was an irrelevant factor in one sense, for the meaning of these differences were the products not the prerequisites of politics. In another sense, bodies provided the universal ground of human identity, in the identical blood that animated them all and as the site of natural rights. For de Gouges, at least, rights were embodied and universal at the same time, and this conception required not denying the existence of physical differences, but recognizing them as at once essential and irrelevant to the meaning of equality.
De Gouges’s invocations of nature were always ambiguous. On the one hand, she insisted (in opposition to her Jacobin adversaries) on undecidability and thus on human responsibility for the imposition of categories; on the other, she accepted the originary “truth” of nature and so left in place the notion that social arrangements could be referred to natural truths. This, in turn, could focus the argument on what was in nature rather than on what should be in politics. And de Gouges could always be open to the charge that, untutored in scientific observation, she had simply misread the facts of the physical world. Nonetheless, the destabilizing implications of her redefinition of nature were undeniable; if nature was “irregular, bizarre even,” it could not provide, in her terms (it might in ours), a reliable guide for politics. Rather than being a matter of science, justice had to be understood as a mediation of power.
III
It is possible to read Olympe de Gouges and other feminists, male and female, during the French Revolution, in the context solely of established categories of political debate. Implicit in her critique was an interpretation of liberal political theory that countered the authoritarianism of Rousseauian doctrines of the general will with more conflictual notions of politics. Her alliances with the Gironde faction in the Convention bear this out; indeed she was finally sent to the guillotine in 1793 not for her feminism, but for plastering the walls of Paris with posters urging that a federalist system replace Jacobin centralized rule. Indeed, the moment of Jacobin centralization was accompanied by ruthlessly masculine political assertions and by the expulsion of prominent women from the Jacobin club. The association between bourgeois democracy and feminism in France goes beyond de Gouges; it is Condorcet, after all, also a Girondist, who is usually cited as the preeminent feminist of the revolution.52
This kind of reading, while acceptable, would be insufficient, I think, on both empirical and philosophical grounds. First, Girondist politicians were not unanimous on the issue of women’s rights; most accepted the “natural” version of the sexual division of labor, and these included prominent women such as Madame Roland.53 Long after the revolution, the antiauthoritarian current of French liberalism shared with other political tendencies an aversion to feminism; sexual difference, as explained by science and medicine, seemed to offer a nonpolitical (hence natural) justification for the assignment to women of passive, not active rights. Moreover, in succeeding generations, feminism was as often associated with socialism as with liberalism; indeed it is frequently argued that the real start of a feminist tradition in France began not with the revolution, but with the Utopians—the St. Simonian and Fourierist movements of the 1830s and 1840s.54
Second, to treat feminism within the received categories of revolutionary politics ignores the most powerful aspects of its critique and leaves apart many questions, among them the question of how references to the “natural” legitimated political theory and practice and complicated any critique of them. It forsakes the opportunity to examine the interconnections among discourses as well as the contradictions within any one of them; it accepts at face value the terms within which most revolutionaries viewed politics rather than subjecting those terms (as well as the specific programs advocated) to critical scrutiny. The dichotomies that defined those politics are then perpetuated in our histories as so many natural or functional “realities,” thus obscuring not only their relative meanings but all contests about them. Indeed the most fundamental contests, those about first premises, become most marginal for these histories because they are categorized as concerning nonpolitical matters. The protests of feminists are heard as cries from the sidelines about the exclusion of particular interests, as superfluous utterances rather than as fundamental (and central) critiques of the notion of different categories of rights based on physical difference. The existence of particularized critiques of universality then becomes a way of confirming rather than questioning the very notion of the universal. Its embodiment as a white male is explained as a temporary historical contingency with no overtones of power, for to associate the concept of the universal with relationships of power—of domination, subordination, and exclusion—would be to contradict the meaning of the universal, at least as it was offered in liberal theories of political rights. It is precisely that contradiction that the feminine already embodied in those theories and that feminists pointed out again and again, though with different arguments and in different terms.
The recurrence of feminist critiques raises the question of their success or failure, and thus of their depth and significance for political movements. If feminism cannot be subsumed into politics as we have known it (as the conflict of parties and interests in the public realm: Gironde versus Jacobin, republican versus socialist), can it be given a political status of its own?
Certainly Olympe de Gouges (like her feminist contemporaries) cannot be considered successful in the usual terms of political evaluation. She did not win acceptance of her proposals for women’s rights; her refiguration of marriage, women, and nature was generally dismissed by those in power (in the government and in various political groupings) as outrageous rather than taken seriously. Within a few days of her death (in November 1793) Chaumette set the terms of her historical reputation. He warned republican women who dared to question their roles of the fate of others who had broken the rules: “Remember that virago, that woman-man [cette femme-homme], the impudent Olympe de Gouges, who abandoned all the cares of her household because she wanted to engage in politics and commit crimes.… This forgetfulness of the virtues of her sex led her to the scaffold.”55
Although her Declaration of the Rights of Woman inspired feminist challenges to successive governments throughout the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, formal histories either excluded her entirely or classed her with the “furies” of the revolution, those women who caused and expressed the excesses of unrestrained passion.56 In 1904, a Dr. Guillois analyzed de Gouges as a case of revolutionary hysteria. Her abnormal sexuality (caused by excessive menstrual flow), her narcissism (evinced by a predeliction for daily baths), and her entire lack of moral sense (proven by her repeated refusal to remarry) constituted the definitive signs of her mental pathology. A defective femininity, in short, had led to her unfortunate interest in politics.57 The implications of this diagnosis for Guillois’s contemporaries was unmistakable: demands for women’s rights (as well as all reforming zeal) could not be taken seriously as politics, but must be treated as illness.
These references to de Gouges are misleading, however, for they exaggerate the attention paid to her by historians. The most characteristic treatment of her (as of feminists generally) has been silence. I do not in any way want to argue for her rehabilitation as a heroine, although there are some historians who would insist that that is the only way to grant her agency, the only justification for attending to her. Rather, I want to suggest that de Gouges’s practice—her writings and speeches—offers a useful perspective for reading the history of politics and political theory in the French Revolution and for considering questions about contemporary feminist politics. What was the legacy of the French Revolution for women? What did feminism reveal about that legacy? What was/is the status of feminism as a politics?
In a way I’ve already answered most of these questions but I will restate what I’ve said: If by political we mean a contest about power, feminism was a political movement poised in critical opposition to liberal political theory, constructed within and yet subsumed or repressed by the terms of that theory. By those terms, political was synonymous with rational, public, and universal, with the free agency of autonomous subjects. Woman, by a set of definitions attributed to nature, was construed as having antithetical traits, hence being outside politics. In order to formulate a critique of this theory, feminists like de Gouges contested its definitions, and sometimes also its legitimating premises. But this produced an ambiguous discourse, which both confirmed and challenged prevailing views, and which exposes to us a fundamental paradox of the political theory of the revolution: the relative and highly particularized aspect, the undeniable embodiment, of its claim to universality.
The ambiguity of de Gouges’s feminism is not a measure of its inadequacy as philosophy and politics; rather it is an effect of the exclusions and contradictions of the political theory within and against which it was articulated. The same can be said of subsequent feminisms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Indeed, the recurrence since the revolution of feminist critiques reminds us not only that the democratic promise of liberal (or republican or socialist) political theory is as yet unfulfilled, but also that it may be impossible of fulfillment in the terms in which it has so far been conceived.