Her plays and pamphlets spanned a wide variety of issues including divorce and marriage, children's rights, unemployment and social security.

Her increasingly vehement writings, which attacked Maximilien Robespierre's radical Montagnards and the Revolutionary government during the Reign of Terror, led to her eventual arrest and execution by guillotine in 1793.

[13] She socialized in fashionable society, at one point being called "one of Paris' prettiest women," and formed friendships with Madame de Montesson and Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans.

[16] De Gouges attended the artistic and philosophical salons of Paris, where she met many writers, including La Harpe, Mercier, and Chamfort, as well as future politicians such as Brissot and Condorcet.

The influential Abraham-Joseph Bénard remarked "Mme de Gouges is one of those women to whom one feels like giving razor blades as a present, who through their pretensions lose the charming qualities of their sex... Every woman author is in a false position, regardless of her talent."

The slave trade lobby mounted a press campaign against her play and she eventually took legal action, forcing Comédie-Française to stage L'Esclavage des Noirs.

[22] In 1790 and 1791, in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), free people of colour and African slaves revolted in response to the ideals expressed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

[23] De Gouges did not approve of violent revolution, and published L'Esclavage des Noirs with a preface in 1792, arguing that the slaves and the free people who responded to the horrors of slavery with "barbaric and atrocious torture" in turn justified the behavior of the tyrants.

This earned her the ire of many hard-line republicans, even into the next generation—such as the 19th-century historian Jules Michelet, a fierce apologist for the Revolution, who wrote, "She allowed herself to act and write about more than one affair that her weak head did not understand.

[27] In December 1792, when Louis XVI was about to be put on trial, she wrote to the National Assembly offering to defend him, causing outrage among many deputies.

Revolutionary rule during the Terror was accompanied by emphasis on masculine public political authority that resulted, for example, in the expulsion of women from Jacobin clubs.

"[30] She also called for an end to the bloodshed of the Revolution saying "It is time to put a stop to this cruel war that has only swallowed up your treasure and harvested the most brilliant of your young.

and warned that "The divided French... are fighting for three opposing governments; like warring brothers they rush to their downfall and, if I do not halt them, they will soon imitate the Thebans, ending up by slitting each others throats to the last man standing".

[34] She spent three months in jail without an attorney as the presiding judge had denied de Gouges her legal right to a lawyer on the grounds that she was more than capable of representing herself.

[34] De Gouges had acquired for her son, Pierre Aubry, a position as a vice-general and head of battalion in exchange for a payment of 1,500 livres, and he was suspended from this office after her arrest.

[38] Olympe's last moments were depicted by an anonymous Parisian who kept a chronicle of events: Yesterday, at seven o'clock in the evening, a most extraordinary person called Olympe de Gouges who held the imposing title of woman of letters, was taken to the scaffold, while all of Paris, while admiring her beauty, knew that she didn't even know her alphabet... She approached the scaffold with a calm and serene expression on her face, and forced the guillotine's furies, which had driven her to this place of torture, to admit that such courage and beauty had never been seen before... That woman... had thrown herself in the Revolution, body and soul.

At the 15 November 1793 meeting of the Commune, Pierre Gaspard Chaumette cautioned a group of women wearing Phrygian bonnets, reminding them of "the impudent Olympe de Gouges, who was the first woman to start up women's political clubs, who abandoned the cares of her home, to meddle in the affairs of the Republic, and whose head fell under avenging blade of the law".

[44] De Gouges's Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen had been widely reproduced and influenced the writings of women's advocates in the Atlantic world.

"[48] Revolutionary novels were published that put women at the centre of violent struggle, such as the narratives written by Helen Maria Williams and Leonora Sansay.

Drawing both praise from abolitionists and attacks from pro-slavery traders, it is the first French play to focus not only on the inhumanity of slavery but also the first to feature the first-person perspective of an enslaved individual.

[57] In her 1788 "Réflexions sur les Hommes Nègres" she brought to attention the horrible plight of slaves in the French colonies and condemned the injustice of the institution declaring “I clearly realized that it was force and prejudice that had condemned them to that horrible slavery, in which Nature plays no role, and for which the unjust and powerful interests of Whites are alone responsible” likewise declaring that "Men everywhere are equal... Kings who are just do not want slaves; they know that they have submissive subjects.

The slave protagonist comments on the situation in France "The power of one Master alone is in the hands of a thousand Tyrants who trample the People under foot.

In early 1789 she published Remarques Patriotiques setting out her proposals for social security, care for the elderly, institutions for homeless children, hostels for the unemployed, and the introduction of a jury system.

There is no consensus on electing these assemblies...The Third Estate, with reason, claims a voice equal to that of the Clergy and Nobility...for the problems that get worse every day” and declared to the king that “Your People are unhappy.

[56] De Gouges wrote her famous Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen shortly after the French Constitution of 1791 was ratified by King Louis XVI, and dedicated it to his wife, Queen Marie Antoinette.

Like men who could not pay the poll tax, children, domestic servants, rural day-laborers and slaves, Jews, actors and hangmen, women had no political rights.

At the end of the 18th century influential political actors such as Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, and Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès were not convinced of the case for equality.

[64] In her open letter to Marie-Antoinette, de Gouges declared: I could never convince myself that a princess, raised in the midst of grandeur, had all the vices of baseness... Madame, may a nobler function characterize you, excite your ambition, and fix your attention.

Only one whom chance had elevated to an eminent position can assume the task of lending weight to the progress of the Rights of Woman and of hastening its success.

[citation needed] The 2018 play The Revolutionists by Lauren Gunderson centers on de Gouges and a dramatized version of her life as a playwright and activist during the Reign of Terror.