In the 1788 version, she writes reflections. There she claims that she has always supported abolitionism. And she appended... Did they... because they didn't like the subject, or they didn't think it was good enough? It's not clear. They even read it, actually. That's one way to reject something. Yeah. She wasn't an insider in the sense that she had the privilege of the censor, but she wasn't ... didn't have an in into the Comedy Final says. Some of her other theatre plays were much more successful. Okay. But the one that was performed in 1789 actually had a different title. The Happy Shipwreck or Black Slavery.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the French playwright who, in 1791, wrote The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen. This was Olympe de Gouges (1748-93) and she was responding to The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen from 1789, the start of the French Revolution which, by excluding women from these rights, had fallen far short of its apparent goals. Where the latter declared ‘men are born equal’, she asserted ‘women are born equal to men,’ adding, ‘since women are allowed to mount the scaffold, they should also be allowed to stand in parliament and defend their rights’. Two years later this playwright, novelist, activist and woman of letters did herself mount the scaffold, two weeks after Marie Antoinette, for the crime of being open to the idea of a constitutional monarchy and, for two hundred years, her reputation died with her, only to be revived with great vigour in the last 40 years.
With
Catriona Seth
Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature at the University of Oxford
Katherine Astbury
Professor of French Studies at the University of Warwick
And
Sanja Perovic
Reader in 18th century French studies at King’s College London
Producer: Simon Tillotson