00:00:57.560hello and welcome to vulgar history of feminist women's history comedy podcast this is season
00:01:06.540seven which is the season that i'm doing in chunks the overall theme is how do you solve
00:01:12.060a problem like marie antoinette and it's all leading up to a discussion of marie antoinette
00:01:16.460herself and she lived in a very what people then might have called unprecedented times
00:01:23.560And so the season seven, part one, we looked at what was happening in the Western Hemisphere in what is now America and Canada.
00:01:31.880And namely the American Revolution and how that interacted with people in France and how that sort of led to, contributed to, shall we say, to the French Revolution of it all.
00:01:42.940Season seven, part two was meanwhile back in France where we were talking about some people who were in France and the revolution happened and how it kind of affected them.
00:01:50.920The people we talked about were not specifically revolutionaries.
00:01:54.620This, we are now in season seven, part three, and now you're starting to see my master plan
00:01:59.560and how it's all coming together because now we're looking at the revolution itself.
00:02:03.900We're going to be looking at women who were literal revolutionaries, people who were in
00:02:09.900the revolution, on the revolution side.
00:02:12.680And, you know, people like to listen to this podcast for like an escape from the everyday.0.66
00:02:17.900And I'm here to tell you, that's what we're going to be doing for the next, I think it's seven weeks, but I keep finding more revolutionary women. So, but I'll say like seven weeks, but we'll pencil it in. But you know, like right now, um, international affairs in the year 2025, April, 2025 news, like there's breaking news, like 12,000 times a day.
00:09:36.480So she's coming at this differently than perhaps someone who was born and raised in Paris.
00:09:41.200And finally, Olympe is not either a royalist, meaning that she does not fully support the monarchy,
00:09:50.540and she is not a rabid revolutionary either.
00:09:53.720she's somewhere a little bit more in the middle which is what a lot of French people were at the
00:10:00.560time so I think that looking at her is quite interesting not only because she was an incredible
00:10:06.620woman and as we tell her story I think people will come to understand just how incredible and
00:10:12.400brave just incredibly courageous she was but but also that in some ways she represents you know a
00:10:19.420good swath of the population, certainly in Paris at the time. Yes, exactly. So if we start at her
00:10:26.300beginnings, so she's born 1748 in, I don't know where any of this is, but not Paris,
00:10:35.160near Montauban. Montauban in the south. She is from the south in France, so far from Paris.
00:10:45.520She doesn't even speak French, technically.
00:10:48.000She speaks a dialect of French called Occitan, which is actually quite important because it is something that people will make fun of her for later.
00:10:58.900They will make fun of her accent, the way she speaks, how she writes, and that is very much related to her origins in the South.
00:11:10.260it's something that she has to fight about and it's something that later um she will be diligent
00:11:16.020sort of delegitimized for but uh but yes that isn't something that's important to know that
00:11:21.740she does not start life as a parisian and i think also this i find this interesting and i don't know
00:11:27.400how much you know about this actually i do just want to say so my information like you were coming
00:11:31.980on as an expert so i just wanted to kind of familiarize myself so my beloved women in world
00:11:36.800history encyclopedia that we have at my public library. I just, I'm always excited when someone
00:11:41.400I'm researching has an entry because it's their essays by like academics and scholars. And so it
00:11:45.600kind of helps. So that's my main reference. It is from the 1990s. And so there's probably some
00:11:51.000information here that's changed. But what this says is that, so she was the daughter of Pierre
00:11:56.360Guz, a butcher and a limp Moissette, but later she claimed that her father was somebody else.
00:12:01.420Yes. Okay. So that, first of all, gives you a sense of the class that Olam de Gouges is born into. You know, middle class, sort of a merchant class, but someone who is not necessarily, you know, extremely wealthy. This is not the wealthy bourgeoisie.0.97
00:12:20.440As you've said, her official father is a butcher, but Olam de Gouche later would claim that her father was actually the local Marquis.
00:12:34.440And there is some potentially some truth to that.
00:12:37.500a number of historians, I think most historians actually at this point accept that that very well
00:12:42.660may have been the case, because her mother's family and the family of the Marquis, and this
00:12:51.220was the Marquis de Ponquignon, that family had been related or kind of intertwined for quite a
00:12:58.040long period of time. The Marquis was actually, he was about five years older than Olam de Gouger's
00:13:04.800mother, and he was technically her godfather. But because the families were actually close in
00:13:13.100proximity, they grew close, the future Marquis de Pompignan and Anne Olympe, we say Olympe de
00:13:21.240Gouges' mother, such that for a little while, the Marquis de Pompignan was actually sent away from
00:13:27.180his home because they were worried that they were getting too close. And while he was away,
00:13:32.420Olympe's mother is married to this butcher.
00:14:20.620And this is something that eventually Olympe de Gouges would become too.
00:14:25.360So, you know, there definitely is some evidence that there is substance behind her claim.
00:14:33.560One thing to note is that Olympe de Gouges, that is not her real name.
00:14:40.180She was baptized Marie-Marie Gouges, and she adopts Olympe de Gouges, the name Olympe de Gouges, later.
00:14:50.280but perhaps we should go on with sort of other other points in in her life before we get to that
00:14:57.620point where she adopts that name for sure and I do just want to say I'm glad she adopted that name
00:15:02.240because there's far too many people called Marie in France at this time almost every girl every
00:15:09.180woman yeah every woman yes that's it's that's just you just don't name a daughter it's just
00:15:13.780like it's a daughter Marie like exactly the default exactly and you know at some point I was
00:15:18.740working on something on French women in the revolution right now. And I'm realizing that
00:15:23.660they're all named Marie and they all end up going by different names. I think partially to avoid
00:15:29.700that confusion. I mean, everyone, even then in the late 18th century must've been confused
00:15:34.060because everyone was technically named Marie. Well, yeah, I have like this whole segment of
00:15:39.140my podcast, we're talking about women like Olym, people who are involved in the revolution.
00:15:43.320The next segment, spoiler, is going to be Marie Antoinette and her family, which like speaking
00:15:47.360of people called Marie is all of them. Yes, exactly. Exactly. So, so I appreciate, I appreciate
00:15:54.800anyone from this era who changes their name because it makes our research a lot less confusing.
00:16:00.260So I want to talk at this point, like she gets married at age 17. And I think this is a place
00:16:05.160where we can talk about the role of women in French society at this time. And I've talked,
00:16:10.560I mean, I've done so many episodes where people get married at 17, but it's not, this is similar
00:16:15.960to most of those situations. Like she didn't, I'm presuming, you're going to tell me, most people
00:16:21.780didn't choose this. It's just like your father is in charge of your life and you're handed from a
00:16:26.480father to a husband. And it's that sort of culture, right? I think so. At this point in time,
00:16:32.720certainly women of Olam de Gouges' class, so middle class, upper middle class, aristocratic,0.91
00:16:42.180certainly, you know, well, you know, aristocratic, I would say, there are two options. You can go to
00:16:50.560a convent or you can get married. And for the most part, yes, you are married in a way that is going
00:16:58.060to benefit your family. And that also hopefully responds or corresponds to something about your
00:17:06.040own class status. So Olam de Gouges certainly expected that she would marry someone of her0.55
00:17:12.720class status or possibly even a little higher, because remember, she thinks she's the illegitimate
00:17:17.420daughter of a marquis. And according to Olam de Gouges, this was a little bit of an open secret.
00:17:22.740You know, people kind of knew this. So she expected to make something of an advantageous
00:17:29.260marriage. But instead, at the age of 17, she is married to a man named Louis-Yves Aubry, who
00:17:37.740he's like a caterer or a restaurateur or something incredibly middle class. His family is actually
00:17:46.640of a lower station than hers and less wealthy. So Olympe is really offended by this idea that
00:17:56.480she's marrying him. It's really not clear why this arrangement was made. And she hates it.
00:18:03.420She actually despises her husband. We really don't know much about what went on with that marriage,
00:18:12.020but it's clear from some of her later writing that she hated it so much that you start to
00:18:17.960wonder if it was abusive on some level. And what you have to understand is that there's no way for
00:18:23.460a woman to get out of these marriages. Women did not have the right to initiate divorce1.00
00:18:29.700at the time. So if a woman is in a marriage like this, she just has to endure it.0.84
00:18:38.800Olympe has a son by this marriage. His name is Pierre. He's the only child that she has
00:18:44.280of this marriage. She may have gone on to have other children, but they did not survive. So this
00:18:50.180is the only child that she raises to adulthood, and she's quite close to the son. But after about
00:18:56.980two years of marriage, this husband, Louis-Yves, he dies. It's a little bit unclear. It looks like
00:19:04.960perhaps there was a flood in the town of Montauban, and somehow he was drowned, or somehow
00:19:11.420his death ensues from this flood. And so then, by then, she's widowed. But at least one scholar
00:19:18.780I have read has suggested that it's also possible that even before he died, Olam de Gouges had run
00:19:26.620away from that marriage. Because again, it was clearly something that she found utterly repugnant
00:19:33.940and was very happy to. I have some quotes here. Yes, go ahead. So this is from her later novel,
00:19:42.320her book. She wrote, I was married to a man I did not love and who was neither rich nor well-born.
00:19:47.280I was sacrificed for no reason that could make up for the repugnance I felt for this man.
00:19:53.340And she later called the institution of marriage the tomb of trust and love.
00:19:58.320So, yeah, she hated the idea of marriage.
00:20:03.920You know, she and it's very interesting because if you if you read Olam de Gouge's writings later in life,
00:20:11.280you can tell how much she detests the institution of marriage.
00:20:17.280But I think that comes from two different things.
00:20:20.020One is her experience in marriage herself as a young woman.
00:20:24.540And the other one is the experience of her mother.
00:20:28.080Because if you follow the logic of Olympe de Gouges' claim that she was an illegitimate daughter of a Marquis,
00:20:37.400you realize that marriage also trapped her mother.
00:20:40.940You know, she might have, this mother might have been in love with the Marquis de Pompignan, but there was no way to kind of make that love official. And because the Marquis wasn't married to her mother, he didn't have to treat her well.
00:20:57.120There was nothing obliging him to acknowledge that perhaps they had had this child out of wedlock or anything to kind of compel him to treat her well.
00:21:09.040So in that sense, marriage is this form of prison for many women, particularly women of the middle class.
00:21:15.940so i think this is i just want to highlight for the listeners like this is the 17 it's like late
00:21:22.7001770s when this is all happening when her her marriage ends because he dies um she has this
00:21:29.040child this is well before the french revolution and she's having these ideas yes it's in the 1760s
00:21:35.460and i'm actually i haven't a 1760s yes 1760s but let me if i can quote something else about you
00:21:43.220You know, the culture and the fact that the culture isn't necessarily looking at women, certainly, again, middle class women as anything other than an appendage to the men in their lives.
00:21:55.800I want to quote from probably the most popular author of the 18th century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, right?
00:23:03.220Those have been women's duties throughout time and should be taught from childhood.
00:23:09.580Ola Abdelgouj really just didn't like this idea at all.0.98
00:23:14.960So, you know, after her husband dies, she's liberated from this marriage and she never marries again by choice.
00:23:26.700She decides to go off and, to the extent that is possible, establish an autonomous life as an unmarried woman, which is really an extraordinary move at the time, particularly for a 19-year-old, which is how old she was when she was widowed.
00:23:49.380Here's what Olympe has going for her.0.52
00:23:53.060By all accounts, she's actually quite beautiful.0.98
00:23:55.720she's incredibly witty the extent of her education is a little bit unknown
00:24:04.080it looks like she was probably like most girls of her station at the time educated at least for
00:24:11.640a little while in a convent by nuns so she has some education she's a very sharp mind and so
00:24:19.880So it's quite possible that, you know, at the age of 19, she knew that she could probably get one man or many men to kind of help her out financially using sort of the assets that she had physically.
00:24:44.180We don't actually know a lot about Olympe de Gouges in the 60s and 70s, but by 1767, she has met a man from Lyon whose name is Jacques Beatrix, and he will become her lover.
00:25:00.880And he's quite well off, and they make an arrangement where he supports her financially, but she refuses to marry again.
00:25:11.620So he's willing to kind of keep her as a kept woman. I hate that phrase, but, you know, that is sort of what's going on. And what is unclear, I think, to most scholars is whether or not there were many men who did this for Olympe or if it was mostly this Beatrix guy.0.83
00:25:30.740Some scholars, I mean, certainly in the 19th century, but well into the 20th and 21st century,
00:25:35.840some scholars call her a courtesan.0.95
00:25:38.420And a courtesan is a kind of high class prostitute, if you will, or, you know, that's one way to define it.0.79
00:25:48.200But I don't know if that's exactly the right word.
00:25:50.800We don't really know the nature of these relationships.
00:25:54.340I've had some other, like this series, talking about women in France.
00:25:58.280this is we've spoken with some other women who had kind of this sort of thing where it's not
00:26:04.320they're not sex workers but they're kind of like they a man supports them and then they go to
00:26:10.580another man who also supports them and kind of that's what they were doing and this is to me
00:26:15.440that this fits into that same sort of mode because what she wanted to be doing was going to salons
00:26:19.880and like learning and engaging and writing and she and how's she gonna do it yeah yeah she she
00:26:26.880needs to live somewhere she needs somebody to support her lifestyle of just kind of um unofficial
00:26:32.060university learning like she just wants to learn stuff she just is she seems to me like in reading
00:26:37.020about her just like so hungry to to learn and to engage with other academics absolutely it's clear
00:26:44.140that you know in her early in her early life you know she felt extremely stifled so she follows
00:26:49.860Beatrix to Paris in the late 60s. She's there by 73. Again, we keep losing sight of Ollant
00:26:56.760Gouges in the archives. We don't know where she was at certain times. But by the early 70s,
00:27:01.140she's in Paris. She's followed him there. And yes, she kind of spends the rest of the 70s
00:27:05.640just giving herself an education, sort of financed by this guy, Beatrix, and whatever
00:27:13.040lover she has, because that is the way she's going to do it. I mean, there are so few options.
00:27:17.080So she takes advantage of what she has. She is going to the salons. She's going to the theater. It's just it's actually a very liberal time in Paris. Not only like pre-revolution.0.99
00:27:31.100Yeah, it's an incredibly liberal time, not only among the wealthy middle class, the wealthy bourgeoisie, but also among liberal aristocrats, you know, who are themselves actually quite educated, very interested in the changing nature of society, very engaged with the thinking and writing of the French philosophic, you know, enlightenment thinkers.
00:27:56.260and they they're willing to socially mix. So here comes this young woman from the South
00:28:03.600with her with her accent and her funny way of speaking official French, because remember,
00:28:10.900it's not her first language. And I think that she's she kind of makes a splash in these in
00:28:16.860these salons because she's unusual. She's gorgeous and she's unusual. And Paris of the time likes1.00
00:28:25.080quirky characters. They're interested in them. And she is definitely one. She's, as I mentioned
00:28:32.800before, she's very witty. She's impulsive. She's quick on her feet. And she's very open to new0.89
00:28:39.820ideas. And so this is what attracts many people who were quite active in the salons to Olam de
00:28:48.460Gouche. So she seems to integrate herself quite easily into this world. And that's what she's
00:28:54.660doing in the 70s. She's kind of acquiring this education. And she's also starting to write.0.91
00:29:02.180Particularly, she writes, well, first of all, let me just say, Olympe de Bourges is a prolific
00:29:08.560writer. She writes novels. Eventually, she writes political pamphlets. But what she really starts
00:29:14.940to write in the 70s and the 80s are plays. Should we back up and talk about the name change
00:29:20.900a little bit? Yes. Because that happened around the same time she moved to Paris, I presume.
00:29:26.320I think it's when her husband dies or around that time. So she goes from being Marie Gouze
00:29:34.160to being Olympe de Gouges. And Olympe is her mother's middle name. So Olympe was very close
00:29:42.380to her mother. This is clear. Until her mother's death, she's very close to her mother. She adopts
00:29:47.320her mother's middle name. She changes the last name a bit. Gouz and Gouz. Gouz seems to be a play
00:29:56.440on Gouz. She adds this little de, right, which is an affectation, kind of makes her sound like0.55
00:30:06.320she's from the nobility, because that's what noble names sound like. It's so-and-so de something.
00:30:13.000but a lot of people in the middle class at the time were doing this so again it's not really
00:30:19.780clear that she changed the name to be socially ambitious or if she's just kind of giving herself
00:30:26.680this new identity as she breaks away from her southern roots and her marriage and aspires to
00:30:32.960this independent parisian lifestyle no it just it reminds me of in contemporary times you know
00:30:40.580people i'm picturing her like you know 19 years old like i a lot of people myself was in you know
00:30:46.340university at that time and it's like you grow up and your name is ann and then you go to university
00:30:50.700and you're like you know what i'm anastasia like you're just kind of like this is a time where you
00:30:54.720can just be like guess who i am you know like not like this is a time where so many people reinvent
00:31:00.060themselves and of course you did especially if she's moving to this new sphere it's kind of like
00:31:04.540you know the old me is in the past this is the new me i'm gonna go by my middle name now like
00:31:08.600yeah, relatable, I think, especially when you consider her age, that she rebrands herself.
00:31:15.380Totally relatable and successful because, you know, she clearly succeeds to some degree in
00:31:22.880this new Parisian environment, which again, just sort of affirms her choice to reinvent herself.
00:31:27.860It's working. And so she's there. And again, like she's in kind of a university type thing,
00:31:34.640like during her twenties, like she's just learning. And I think when you're around,
00:31:38.140it makes sense to me that you wound up writing too because if you're around all these writers
00:31:41.360and thinkers i've seen this with other people who've talked about on the podcast like of course
00:31:45.040eventually you start writing too because everyone around you is so why wouldn't you that's just kind
00:31:49.940of what everyone's doing exactly but and i mean i just want to say just sort of like this is what
00:31:56.060she's doing and you're saying it's kind of this i don't know i'm thinking of this like weimar
00:32:00.100republic type era where it's just kind of like creative people having a nice time just before
00:32:05.240something really horrible and world changing is about to happen. So she didn't know that this is
00:32:11.080what was about to happen, but that's hanging over her to us when we're thinking about this.
00:32:17.200Yeah. And I think that's the hard thing about being a historian, right? Is that you sort of
00:32:20.880see these patterns as you just said, you kind of see the Paris pre-revolution is almost like a
00:32:25.820Weimar Republic. But of course, if you're in her shoes, you don't see it that way. And no one,
00:32:35.240really saw it that way in the 70s and the early 80s. It's an incredibly liberal time.
00:32:44.420They've had this problematic king, Louis XV, who is a very, that court is pretty corrupt.0.68
00:32:55.680Louis XV himself is kind of a philanderer. People know this about him. They don't love it.
00:33:01.600But then the new king, Louis XVI, and his very young queen, Marie Antoinette, take the throne.
00:38:46.000She kind of gets it into her mind to do something and then she carries it through, perhaps not necessarily thinking about the consequences.
00:38:55.680But on the other hand, that is perhaps an element of bravery.
00:38:59.400And I think that where her courage comes in is that even when she does meet up with those consequences, she doesn't stop.
00:39:08.260You know, she doesn't decide, OK, that was a bad idea.
00:39:10.380now I'm going to retreat and hide. She keeps on going being brave. She just continues on this
00:39:17.200very courageous path until the end. So even though sometimes you kind of wish you would
00:39:22.280have thought things through a little bit more before she acted, she doesn't seem to want to
00:39:27.280pull back. And so I don't know if you have anything else from the 1780s to talk about,
00:39:32.780but the next point I have to bring up is the women's march. This is the time where we just
00:39:36.600don't know very much about her. Exactly. She's there. She's writing plays. She's trying to get
00:39:40.600them produced. She's that's what's up. And then suddenly, I mean, I don't, and you can explain0.94
00:39:45.560this probably, but the French revolution didn't just happen. There was a bunch of events that
00:39:50.400sort of a bunch of things happened. And now in retrospect, we look back and say, this was the
00:39:55.620French revolution. But one of these things was October 5th, 1789, the women's March. And this
00:40:01.840is something else that I've seen. I mean, part of this episode's thesis is just to kind of myth
00:40:06.020bus, people being like, Hey, I saw somebody being like, Oh, there was this women's March.
00:40:10.160Why don't we do that? It's just like, stop looking to the French revolution0.73
00:40:13.380for inspiration, but this is the women's March. So can you explain what that situation was?
00:40:22.180Yes. Okay. So the women's March of 1789 was not at all like the women's marches of,
00:40:28.280you know, 2016 were the women's marches that get put on today. So the first thing I want to say
00:40:34.120about the French Revolution is that it was an incredibly violent revolution. It's violent from0.78
00:40:41.060the beginning. It reaches an apex of violence that is difficult to wrap your mind around. But you can
00:40:47.500see hints of this violence from the very beginning, including in the Women's March. So what happens
00:40:55.120is, you know, first of all, before the fall of the Bastille, which is what everyone kind of knows
00:40:59.520about in 1789, there is already a lot of sort of burbling and dissatisfaction. The country
00:41:07.180is hungry. There have been a lot of bad harvests. Like literally, literally hungry. Hungry, hungry.
00:41:14.080People are starving. They're starving. There's been grain shortages. There is no money in the
00:41:19.180treasury in part because the French really helped the Americans with their revolution. And so they0.92
00:41:26.860are now short of funds. So things are basically just not going well. The Bastille Falls, which
00:41:33.320is, you know, also has elements of violence. It's not probably quite as violent as you think,
00:41:41.180but people are killed. And then in October, the market women ring the toxin. This starts in Paris.
00:41:51.440They ring the toxin, which is like the bell that alerts people to something that is going on.
00:41:57.660You know, they start ringing the bells and they converge on the Hôtel de Ville, which is the town hall.
00:42:02.500And they convince the National Guard, which has already shown itself to be favorable to the people, more so than to the monarchy, to join them and protect them.
00:42:15.280And they go on a march on foot from Paris to Versailles, which is outside of Paris.0.99
00:42:24.240And as they do this, again, these are market women.0.93
00:43:17.180They get to Versailles where they threaten the royal family.
00:43:21.280So the reason why they're in Versailles is because that's where the royal family is.
00:43:24.880And they want to compel the king and queen and the rest of the royal family to come back to Paris,
00:43:33.760to live in a much more supervised state where essentially the people will oversee what the
00:43:42.220king is doing and the kinds of decisions that he is making. So they managed to do this. They kill
00:43:49.740a number of guards in order to compel the royal family. They also threatened the queen.
00:43:57.340And on the way back, they surround the king's carriage, having beheaded these guards that they've killed. So they surround the carriage with the heads of the guards on these pikes that they're carrying.
00:44:12.480So this is a very threatening march. This is not a peaceful march at all. This is a very threatening march. And the reason why this march in particular is so important is that it's the first time that women have been very, very visibly engaged in the kind of revolutionary thinking and actions that have already been taking place since the summer.
00:44:35.660They might have been aware or involved in the Bastille, but that was seen to be something that was mostly a male action.
00:44:46.820But the women's march, you see that women have been radicalized, that they're very engaged in these revolutionary actions.
00:44:53.740And the other thing that is very important about the march is that it's clear that the king has, in the people's eyes, lost any kind of almost sacred stature.
00:45:07.380it used to be that the king was was seen as an almost like quasi divine figure and the market
00:45:18.560women and the king in particular had an almost had almost a special relationship there was there
00:45:24.660was sort of a like an understanding of of you know the market women as kind of a emblematic of
00:45:32.640the people's reverence for their king. But now this march is showing that that is completely
00:45:38.300gone. It's completely evaporated. Now the king is really at the people's mercy. And that is
00:45:45.200thoroughly represented by the fact that it's the women who are now bringing him back to Paris.
00:45:50.740And so this, what you talked about earlier, the whole, the Russo of it all, the kind of like1.00
00:45:55.740women, their whole role is to be subservient and to like raise boys to become men and then marry0.99
00:46:01.600those men, like, so this is upending the, this is challenging the concept of what women should1.00
00:46:08.200be doing in society, which I think in parallel to what Olymp is kind of wanting and hoping
00:46:13.400to, to see for herself, at least just like the women's role in society could change.0.96
00:46:18.620So this is sort of a pivot point where it's like, oh, maybe things will get better for women. Maybe0.95
00:46:22.760women's issues will be part of this revolution. Well, yes. Although we have to be a little bit1.00
00:46:27.800careful because, again, this is mostly seen as a lower class women's march. Even though there
00:46:34.560were other women involved in this, this is really seen as the work of the mob. And so when Rousseau
00:46:40.580is writing, he is really writing about a certain class of women, of women, you know, middle class
00:46:45.560to upper middle class or upper class. He's not necessarily thinking about these lower class
00:46:53.020women. And the thing about Olympe de Gouges' relationship to the women's march is that she
00:46:59.520actually was disturbed by it, which is interesting. So Olympe de Gouges was in Versailles at the time.
00:47:05.580She was actually living nearby. Yes. And so she probably witnessed something of this and it
00:47:10.360disturbed her because Olympe de Gouges is a pacifist. She hates violence. She hates it.
00:47:16.360And over and over again in her writing over the coming years, you see this pacifist strain in her writing.
00:47:24.620So what disturbed her about the Women's March was, first of all, the kind of mob rule feeling to it, and also that it was violent.
00:47:35.420But to your point, it is also showing, and at least it has shown to historians, that women can take an active role in the revolution.
00:47:49.780So there are a number of different things, you know, like any political movement, from the long view of history, you kind of see patterns.
00:47:58.320But in the moment, there's a lot of chaos and a lot of tensions.
00:48:03.820And I think that one of those tensions is between class and gender, particularly in the Women's March.
00:48:09.680thank you this is part of where i'm just kind of like because i'm like a lot of historians i think
00:48:16.100trying to look back and trying to like put everything in a box and be like okay this was
00:48:19.240this and this is what feminists were thinking it's like no everyone the class of it all is such a0.63
00:48:25.220crucial component of this too it's not just like yay support women it's just kind of like well no0.99
00:48:29.740like the fishwives are in a completely different situation from what a limp is up to absolutely
00:48:34.680And we haven't really talked about, you know, sort of what becomes what comes before this or before the fall of the Bastille, which is when without going into too much detail, because it is just so complicated and hard to follow.
00:48:47.800But, you know, one of the sort of initial triggers for the French Revolution is that Louis XVI, the king, has called for the first time in well over 100 years, he's called the estates general, which is really a kind of convening of the different classes of France, the first estate, the second estate, and the third estate, to kind of talk about the situation in France.
00:49:11.860The first estate is the clergy. The second estate is the nobility. And the third estate is, you know, everybody else, the commoners.
00:49:22.220And at that convening, there was a push that ended up being successful to double the size of the third estate.
00:49:29.520And the third estate starts to conceive of itself as representative of the people of France.
00:49:35.420So this is where you're starting to see a total change in even the conception of, you know, who should be dictating the legal decisions and the financial decisions that are happening in France.
00:49:49.560You know, this is where you start to see a real shift in understanding that the will of the people needs to be respected.
00:49:59.300But inherently, France has always been this incredibly classed society, right?
00:50:05.420So even the fact that the third estate could say, no, it's our turn, is a recognition of, you know, a kind of class hierarchy in France.
00:50:12.960And so those things don't just evaporate, you know, once the revolution starts.
00:50:18.000So people are very aware of who is engaging in what kinds of activities.
00:50:23.620And Olam de Gouges would have been very aware that market women were the ones who seemed to be initiating this women's march and the ones who seemed to be engaged in the violence of the women's march.
00:50:37.500and again just when I saw somebody it was when I was getting ready to do this episode with you
00:50:42.400and I saw someone posting like an artistic rendering and then they said like yeah did
00:50:46.640you know like on 1789 this women's march like why don't we do stuff like that and I think
00:50:51.220the what people are focusing on today um in 2025 when they're kind of looking what they0.95
00:50:58.140like the sounds of is cutting the heads off of the one percent that's the one thing that people
00:51:06.060are like let's also do that where it's like but that's not what was happening at this march what
00:51:10.840they were doing is kind of the heads of the national guard actually yeah exactly and and
00:51:15.140going on rampages acting on feelings acting on feelings and defying the rule of law that's
00:51:22.020happening yeah so there's people like olymp and her social circle i would think like the philosophers
00:51:27.000the writers who are just kind of like oh let's like think about this philosophically what what0.90
00:51:31.740what are people's rights or whatever and then there's kind of the fishwives and the poor people
00:51:36.360who are just like we're goddamn hungry like it's not it's not the same battle like everyone's
00:51:42.000it's it's different thing and this is part of where i think i get so confused because it's not0.74
00:51:47.200just one grassroots thing where everyone is on board with the revolution together it's just kind
00:51:52.160of all these things are happening at once exactly and so the the the common people you know sort of
00:51:57.520the people in the streets there's there's a french name at the time for the for these for
00:52:01.800these people and they're called the sans-culottes and the sans-culottes means without breeches or
00:52:07.900britches um we don't really have a good name in in english um it they were not they were not people
00:52:15.040running around i just want to be clear they're not wearing they're wearing pants they're just
00:52:18.600not wearing a certain kind of pants oh yeah it's only they were just wearing around without pants
00:52:21.340sounds like that's what i that's what i always think and i have to be like no they're wearing
00:52:27.840pants they're not just running around and they're wearing pants but they're wearing long pants and
00:52:31.080that's a that's a you know a physical uh sartorial clothing marker between the upper classes and the0.98
00:52:37.540lower classes so the lower classes wear pants that go all the way down to their ankles and the the
00:52:43.380people at court are wearing knee bridges you know that we see this among paintings of french
00:52:50.220revolutionaries or you know french people in the 18th century and americans of the 18th century
00:52:53.580they're wearing those pants that stop at the knee so the the the and those are called culottes so
00:52:59.740the the sans culottes without britches are the ones who are wearing the long pants and it's it's
00:53:05.260just a it's a name that designates this particular class of people so and what you're saying that you
00:53:11.900know there are multiple different factions and sort of grassroots you know groups that are that
00:53:16.640organizing. And that is absolutely true. And what you will see later in the revolution is a kind of
00:53:22.080alliance among certain groups in order to forward the revolution. But it is true that there is
00:53:30.280always a tension between the desires of one group and the desires of another. Olympe definitely
00:53:37.960belongs to a much more kind of literate group who's interested in the ideas, passionately
00:53:45.540interested in the ideas. I don't want to give the sense that somehow they were secret aristocrats
00:53:50.980who liked the ideas, but wanted to keep their aristocratic lives. I actually don't believe
00:53:54.240that. I think that they really did, you know, really believe in a new France, but they are
00:54:03.420thinking about it, at least initially, in terms of reform and in terms of law. And initially,
00:54:09.900um 1789 through you know 1792 they're thinking about it in terms of a constitutional monarchy
00:54:19.060they are not thinking about it in terms of a republic that comes later and i think that's
00:54:23.820another thing that people don't realize is that many many people in france um in the early years
00:54:30.360of the revolution were thinking about something a little bit closer to a constant constitutional
00:54:35.600a monarchy so having like a monarch having a king and also having a parliament or something like
00:54:41.880that exactly like there's a king but there's also we also have some say so it's not the app like
00:54:46.460we've talked before in this podcast about like versailles and the sun king and the absolute power
00:54:50.880so it's like let's not have that but we'll still have a king it's just like we'll kind of work with
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00:58:28.520I wanted to talk about the women's political clubs, because what Olymp is up to at this time is she joins or helps found, I'm not sure.
00:58:36.540She became part of the Society of the Friends of Truth, which was an association whose goals included establishing equal political and legal rights for women.
00:58:44.500And so can you, do you know anything about that? Or just sort of like what, it just seems like there's people who are like, there's mob violence, and that's one tactic. And then there's people like Olymp who are like, let's talk about philosophy with other thinkers in a social club. And that's kind of where she's headed.
00:59:02.360Yeah. So there are clubs that are started all over the place. They start to show up in 1789. They kind of take off in the very early 1790s to 1790, 1791. Before there are clubs that are specific to women, a number of these clubs are, you know, fraternal clubs, meaning they accept both men and women.0.95
00:59:24.560um so for for instance you get the fraternal society of patriots of both sexes you know but
00:59:30.800this you know incredibly this title that kind of makes it clear that they are accepting both men
00:59:36.980and women and that was on purpose right because part of revolutionary thinking is saying okay
00:59:41.740women you know should be in this as well not everyone agrees with this but a lot of people
00:59:48.000think about this. The clubs start mostly outside of Paris, but then they start to, you know, show
00:59:54.820up in Paris as well. And that particular club that you're talking about, the Society of the
00:59:59.120Friends of Truth, Edda Palm starts that. She's a Dutch woman living in France. She is a radical
01:00:06.300feminist. Hollande de Gouges is also a radical feminist. Edda Palm believes in, you know, voting
01:00:11.520rights for women, women's suffrage, equal civic rights. And she starts a female version of the1.00
01:00:16.480Society of the Friends of Truth. Olympe, there had also been a male counterpart, but Etta Palm
01:00:22.780starts this female one. I think Olympe de Gouges, it's not clear to me. And if we can just take a
01:00:28.760little side note here, it's not clear to me whether she belonged to this club, actually.
01:00:34.160Some people think that she did, but her relationship to the clubs is a little bit unclear.
01:00:40.720Okay. No, and that's good to know. And that's good to clarify. And this is also like,
01:00:44.040just everything that we've been talking about like kind of the chaos of what was happening it's like
01:00:49.300we don't know what everybody was doing at the time right we're just kind of guessing but um
01:00:55.120you know the thing about these clubs is you have to think about it in the moment so women are coming
01:01:00.680to these clubs they're hashing out ideas you know i think of the french revolution as being a very1.00
01:01:08.780loud place. You know, right now we live in a time where weirdly the world is, is kind of quiet
01:01:15.600because of social media. A lot of, you know, when we speak or when we put ideas out there,
01:01:22.080it's online. So we connect to people. We connect to people online, but we're kind of by ourselves
01:01:31.560doing it. The era of the French revolution, it's actually quite loud. You know, people are in the
01:01:37.900streets. People are in the clubs. They're talking to each other. They're shouting at each other.
01:01:42.400They're getting incredibly energized. So when women go to these clubs, someone will be reading1.00
01:01:48.320the latest decree or the Declaration of the Rights of Men and people are reacting. They're
01:01:55.260reacting to this. So there's tremendous energy and excitement that's being fostered and nurtured
01:02:03.820in these clubs and a lot of different ideas that are being thrown around, including should women
01:02:10.240have the right to vote? What is women's proper place in society? Are women citizens? So by this
01:02:17.600time, the word citizen is already in use for men. The word in French is citoyen. The female
01:02:27.020counterpart is citoyen. We don't really have an equivalent in English. I wish we did, right? Like
01:02:34.200a female citizen. But that word hasn't been codified, right? It's not necessarily sort of
01:02:41.180recognized that women, well, it's not recognized at all that women are equal citizens to men,
01:02:47.660but women are using it because they're calling themselves citoyen, a citizen, because they want
01:02:55.260to be equal citizens in this new country that the French are building. And this is where Olympe is,0.99
01:03:03.160she's, she was writing novels, she's writing plays, and she really gets into writing political
01:03:07.800pamphlets at this time. Yeah, I think what happens is that, first of all, she's not a hugely
01:03:12.540successful playwright. She writes a lot of plays, but she doesn't have a lot of success, you know,
01:03:19.220getting them on the stage, which we already talked about. She's also, as I mentioned,
01:03:23.840just an incredibly impetuous person. And it's an exciting time. And she has a lot of thought.
01:03:28.460She has a lot of things to say. And so she turns her pen away from the theater. She doesn't
01:03:34.560abandon it entirely, but she turns it more towards political pamphlets. And this is another way in
01:03:40.560which the French Revolution is a really loud time. A lot of people are writing. They are writing and
01:03:47.620writing and writing, and they are writing to be read by other people. So they might be publishing
01:03:53.300articles in newspapers, but what a lot of people are doing are writing political pamphlets that
01:03:58.060then get distributed or placards, which are, they're like posters where you would write
01:04:04.320actually a fair amount of text and you would post it up in places in Paris, marketplaces,
01:04:12.160et cetera, where people would see them. And again, this is the kind of thing where you could imagine
01:04:17.520one person standing there with a crowd around them and that one person reading out loud
01:04:23.640the placard and everybody else listening and commenting. This is how ideas spread
01:04:31.360during the time of the French Revolution. And Olape is, she just throws herself into writing0.65
01:04:38.020these pamphlets and these posters. And her most famous work, if it's appropriate to get to that
01:04:44.860now is that, so you mentioned before that there was the declaration of the rights of man and the
01:04:49.820citizen, and then she wrote her response to that. She wrote her response. And if I can just give a
01:04:54.260little bit of context first, it will be important to eventually what happens to her. So I mentioned
01:05:00.720that the king, let's leave the queen aside for a second, but I mentioned that the king had been
01:05:07.360relatively popular early in his reign. And, you know, at the beginning, it did seem like maybe
01:05:12.580he was going to go along with a constitutional monarchy. And then, unfortunately, Louis and the
01:05:19.800royal family make a decision that completely ruins it for them. And that is that they decide to leave
01:05:25.660Paris undercover at night. They just decide to try to flee and they head for the border. And they are
01:05:32.380caught, they're recognized and caught, and they are brought back to Paris. Once that happens,
01:05:39.900the people start to really think of louis as the enemy um you know at first they thought okay he's
01:05:47.300a good he's a good french king you know he cares about his people and now they start to think
01:05:52.380actually he might be on the side of the enemy because the foreign powers i should say led by
01:05:58.440austria have already started to make noises about you know what's happening in france and that they
01:06:04.260don't like it. Marie Antoinette is Austrian, and it seems pretty clear that the royal family,
01:06:10.880when they were trying to flee France, was headed for Austria. So now Louis has lost the trust of
01:06:16.800the French people. That happens in the summer of 1791, just before Olam de Gouges writes her most
01:06:26.860famous pamphlet, which is the Declaration of the Rights of Women. The reason why she does this is
01:06:34.180because a new constitution is in the works. And, you know, it's clear that a fair number of rights0.97
01:06:41.740are going to be codified in law, but that those rights are specific to men. You know, they're not
01:06:48.080necessarily including the women. And Olam de Gouges is basically saying, wait, what about the
01:06:54.000women? You know, we've heard this before with the American Revolution, right? Where Abigail Adams
01:06:58.580says, don't forget the ladies. It's the same idea. You know, what about, what about the women?
01:07:04.180So she writes this pamphlet. And the irony is that, you know, now it's her most famous work, but actually at the time it kind of got ignored. No one really paid attention to it.
01:07:16.300But this declaration is mind blowing in its sort of foresight, in its feminism and in its foresight of who women are, why women are equal to men and what a modern society owes them as citizens who as human beings are are equal to men.
01:07:46.300I have it here. Do you want to read some of the articles? I mean, some of the things that she says
01:07:52.800are just really so moving. So we're talking about Declaration of the Rights of Women and
01:07:59.880the Female Citizen, and you have some notable quotes. Notable quotes. So she writes this
01:08:05.360Declaration of the Rights of Women and Female Citizen, and that's important. Female Citizen.1.00
01:08:10.340This is she's trying to create this idea of the place that woman has in society.1.00
01:14:28.100It's when people, I mean, if I may be personal for a second, when people criticize this podcast
01:14:33.540and say, I swear too much or something where it's like, okay, but I don't think, what you don't like0.99
01:14:39.360is that it's a woman talking. Like, and they're just going to be like, oh, you use this like1.00
01:14:43.560vocal fry or something. It's like, you just don't like the sound of a woman's voice. Like that's1.00
01:14:47.360what it is. And you're just trying to find a way to not say that, but that's what you actually mean.
01:14:51.520Right. And maybe you don't even recognize that that's what's going on. Maybe you don't even
01:14:55.240recognize it. But so you're finding the thing that you think bugs you, but that's not what's
01:14:59.040really bugging you. Exactly, exactly. It's the same. And this is a different sphere, but Meghan
01:15:04.940Markle or something, people who are being like, oh, I just don't like her show. She just rubs me
01:15:08.100the wrong way. It's like, okay, you don't like to see a black woman having a nice time. It's like,1.00
01:15:12.840oh, no, no. I just think that, right? It's just like, no, this is what you're actually, your heart
01:15:17.020doesn't like, but you're trying to find a different thing to say about it. Yes. Yeah. And I think that
01:15:22.180Olam de Gouge suffered from that, you know, starting when the revolution takes off all the
01:15:26.980way through the 20th century you know where she was she was really criticized and made fun of she
01:15:32.420was mocked uh for who she was but she also did some things that i think were confusing to people
01:15:40.760so one thing that she does with this declaration of the rights of women is that she dedicates it
01:15:47.020to the queen which is a very confusing choice yes she dedicates it to marie antoinette which
01:15:55.260is very interesting yeah you know you have to ask kind of what was that about and what was she
01:16:01.260thinking because Marie Antoinette has now sunk Marie Antoinette's reputation has now sunk to a
01:16:07.660low point once the family the royal family tried to escape um in what's called the flights um to
01:16:14.300Varennes and then is brought back you know the the royal family is deeply unpopular and Marie
01:16:21.540Antoinette always takes the brunt of that. So what is... Well, for similar reasons, like the
01:16:27.320woman, like again, she's... And queens are foreign, almost by definition. Queen consorts in France are0.80
01:16:34.860foreign. They come from another kingdom. Austria had traditionally been an enemy of France. So0.96
01:16:42.900people just don't like the Austrians. And almost from the very beginning, they're suspicious of
01:16:47.120Marie Antoinette. But certainly now when, you know, war is being fomented or there's talk now
01:16:53.220increasingly of a possible war between France and Austria because of Austria's hostility to what's
01:17:00.440going on in France that, you know, she's seen as potentially an enemy. And then Olam de Gouge
01:17:08.180does this crazy thing and dedicates the Declaration of Rights of Women to the Queen.
01:17:13.360And, you know, what is she thinking? Well, the thing about Olam de Gouge is she does have a little bit of this royalist strain in her. So, you know, I said earlier that most people kind of envision something like a constitutional monarchy.
01:17:30.360So there's still this reverence on some level for the idea of the king because they have not known anything else.
01:17:37.680You know, it's important to kind of remember that people tend to operate in the paradigms that they were raised in.
01:17:43.440And France is the oldest kingdom in Europe.
01:17:49.280So, you know, the idea of suddenly the king just going away was very difficult for people to wrap their minds around.
01:17:57.060The other thing is that, remember that Olam de Gouche thinks that she is the illegitimate daughter of a marquis.
01:18:03.820So she does have this attachment on some level to the aristocracy.
01:18:11.620So one explanation for her dedication to Marie Antoinette is that she's trying to carve out a different role for Marie Antoinette in this revolution.
01:18:25.760She says, you know, look, you've kind of reached a slow point.
01:18:59.240I don't know if you've done an episode of Marie Antoinette yet, but this is all leading to an episode of Marie Antoinette.
01:19:05.020Marie Antoinette was young when she came from Austria.
01:19:08.800She really disliked the kind of incredibly staid rituals and conservative rituals of the French court.
01:19:19.100She really wanted everyone to relax. So she resisted this for a while until she was sort of told that that was unseemly for a queen and she had to, she had to behave a certain way. So Olam de Gouges, this was well known. So Olam de Gouges evokes that again in her dedication. She says, okay, remember when you were that kind of woman? Let's do that again. Let's do that again.
01:19:38.080And I always see it as like as if she's trying to carve out this this little opening for Marie Antoinette as a way to save the monarchy, because it's clear that it's going downhill pretty fast.
01:19:51.920Well, and this is one of the other questions I asked you, which is tricky.
01:19:57.180So how how did things go from like, yeah, let's do a limited monarchy to like kings on trial, like this pivot?
01:20:05.240Well, actually, no. And I think to clarify that, too, it's kind of like, who's in charge of the revolution at this point? Is anyone? Is this where Robespierre comes in?
01:20:17.800Okay. So now we're getting seriously complicated.
01:20:22.880Oh my gosh. Wow. What a complete mess, right? Which it makes perfect sense, right? Because no
01:20:30.660one really knew what they were doing. And at some point, you know, it does become a question of
01:20:35.060power. Who's going to be in charge? Who's going to grab power? Whose vision of the revolution
01:20:39.780is going to start to lead? Yeah. No. So just in contrast or comparison to,
01:20:45.560so the Haitian Revolution it's like Toussaint Louverture like he's there he's like he's the guy
01:20:50.560I'm gonna lead this the American Revolution it's like George Washington Thomas Jefferson like
01:20:54.780there's people that we can point to and in the time everyone kind of knew like these are the
01:20:59.360guys these are the people who are in charge the French Revolution is just kind of like I don't
01:21:03.760know I don't think there is that guy well I yeah all different guys you know I'm probably simplifying
01:21:10.920here but if you think about what happens with the American Revolution okay well if you think about
01:21:15.160what happens with the American Revolution, you know, first of all, they're separated from their
01:21:18.860king by an ocean. And so geographically, and even sort of chronologically, they kind of have time to
01:21:25.200get together, right, like in Congress, essentially, right, that that is what Congress how it starts
01:21:30.580to sort of talk about this, and to kind of decide who's going to be the leader, and possibly where
01:21:36.620it's going to go. And again, that is still disorganized. I mean, one thing that you when
01:21:40.540you read about the revolution uh the american revolution is is that they are kind of making it
01:21:46.560up as it goes same thing with the french revolution except for the fact that the king is right there
01:21:51.980you know this is all happening this is all happening within you know the same proximity
01:21:58.080so it's harder to act um you know when the king is right there and when they still are starting
01:22:06.120to think, okay, you know, maybe the king can be involved in some way. The other thing that is
01:22:13.060important to know about the French Revolution, and I think this happens with the American
01:22:16.740Revolution in a different sort of way, is that there is a lot of tension between what is going
01:22:22.400on in Paris and the rest of the country. And this is actually a very, very old tension. You see it
01:22:30.180as far back as the 16th century, which is the century that I know quite well, what goes on in
01:22:38.100Paris is not necessarily reflective of what the rest of the people want. So when you think about
01:22:46.380the revolutionaries in this period of time, about like 1791, they're operating for all intents and
01:22:53.160purposes, kind of like a constitutional monarchy. The revolutionary government is made up of a
01:23:00.840faction, largely, not entirely, but made up of a faction of men that come to be known as,
01:23:09.120in English, the Girondists. In French, it's the Girondins. And these are sort of the counselors
01:23:15.820to King Louis under this new revolutionary model. The reason why they're called the Girondists0.99
01:23:23.080is that their leaders come from the region of Girondes, of the Girondes. Now, I do want to
01:23:28.860make clear that these guys are friends. They are Jacobins. They are revolutionaries, okay?
01:23:36.100They don't want a monarchy in the traditional sense. They want something new. They are friends
01:23:42.980initially with the more radical Jacobins like Robespierre and Murat, who is a radical journalist,
01:23:53.340Initially, they are kind of friends with these guys, but increasingly there starts to be divisions.
01:23:59.820And the division is kind of like the more radical, like, let's get rid of the monarchy entirely and the let's have a constitutional monarchy.
01:24:06.840Yes. So one of the initial divisions is on the question of war with the foreign powers.
01:24:15.660And the reason why you said this is a ball of yarn, because people keep changing positions.
01:24:19.220But the initial division is that a number of the revolutionaries led by the Girondins were really excited by the, you know, revolutionary ideals and democratic principles.
01:24:32.360And they kind of want to export this throughout Europe.
01:24:35.720And they see this, you know, war as an opportunity to do this.
01:24:39.920Like, let's just go and export, you know, revolution throughout Europe by fighting these foreign powers.
01:24:45.700And the more radical wing, which comes to be led by Robespierre, says, no, they don't want this. But eventually, war does get declared. With Louis XV, he sanctions it. He approves it.
01:25:06.400So once the monarchy gets abolished officially in August 1792, Louis is, he's already a little bit under house arrest, but now he's really under house arrest.
01:25:23.660And the more moderate revolutionaries, the Girondists, want to kind of keep him in prison because they think that they have leverage against the foreign powers if they keep him alive and in prison.
01:25:43.980The more radical wing of the revolutionaries kind of wants to execute him right away,
01:25:48.940but the more moderate wing says, no, no, we should keep him as leverage.
01:25:55.300But then a few things happen for reasons that I won't go into the details, but there are a couple
01:26:03.440of crucial battles where the French actually win. And so it becomes clear that maybe they don't need
01:26:09.360a hostage in the king as leverage anymore. And then there was another scandal where a number
01:26:15.980of very compromising documents authored by Louis get discovered. And it seems once again that he's
01:26:23.820actually working much more for France's enemies than he's working for the French people. And at
01:26:31.340that point, the moderate wing of the revolutionaries can't really justify keeping him alive
01:26:38.460anymore. They at least ask that he be given a trial. So he does go to trial. He's ultimately
01:26:46.020condemned and then he is executed. And where Olympe de Gouges comes into this story is that
01:26:53.680she writes, you know, when he's about to go to trial, she actually writes a pamphlet offering
01:26:59.920to defend the king. And I think it's the most moving pamphlet that she writes. So, you know,
01:27:08.380she's most famous for this declaration of the rights of woman, but there is something about
01:27:14.200this pamphlet that I just find incredibly moving. You know, she says, she basically says something
01:27:21.960equivalent to, are we going to buy freedom at the price of violence like this?
01:27:30.480Right. Cause she's been a pacifist. You mentioned that before, like,0.99
01:27:45.780And if you execute him as a king, you kind of keep him a king.
01:27:50.720You convey the sense that somehow intrinsically he is a king.
01:27:55.660Whereas if you destroy the monarchy, if you successfully topple it and you keep him alive, he's just a man.
01:28:07.260And all of the sort of illusion of, you know, divine right and sacredness and that he's somehow above everyone else is just going to evaporate.
01:28:17.400So it's actually a quite humane way to understand what was happening here.
01:28:24.000And also the way she frames it is very much about what is the right direction that we want to steer this revolution?
01:28:32.040Because if we execute our king, we are endorsing, you know, this, you know, a certain level of violence that is going to be very, very difficult to walk back.
01:28:42.100it just reminds me of so many things not necessarily the current political situation
01:28:46.220but just like in in workplaces or whatever where it's just like someone makes such a good logical
01:28:51.660reasonable argument but it's like yes but the people who are in charge don't respond to logic
01:28:56.740and reason that's not going to change their mind even though you have a perfect like everything
01:29:01.020you said just made sense and yet we're still not going to do it because that's not and it's very
01:29:06.300high level. It's very high level. It's on the level of ideas. And we're at a point in the
01:29:12.440revolution fueled by the sans-culottes, you know, the commoners. And by the way, the hunger situation
01:29:18.860isn't getting much better, you know, even under this new revolutionary government. And so, you
01:29:25.620know, people want more reform or they think they want more reform, but people are really acting on
01:29:30.960feelings, you know, on anger, hunger, you know, sort of these visceral feelings. Olympe is,
01:29:37.900Olympe de Gouges is operating on the level of ideas. So, you know, that, that, that's a problem.
01:29:44.100Right. And this is, so this is where, like, I'm just kind of picturing this
01:29:47.160crowd of people on the street and they're, they're sort of, um, the vibe is just getting more,
01:29:54.740I don't know, not out of control, but just angry, more violent, more angry, more violent. Like
01:29:59.360there's it's less like to be like oh look a pamphlet let's read it it's more just like let's
01:30:02.880just start killing people and this is is this we're getting to like the terror is this where
01:30:07.720this is kind of happening yes so this is already this is already i mean this level of violence0.92
01:30:12.520has already shown itself we haven't i guess once you once you execute the king yeah it's already
01:30:18.280happened and and you know we've had to skip over this part because french revolution is so confusing
01:30:22.640and everything happens so fast that it's so easy to jump over um episodes but one of the most
01:30:27.880violent episodes happens a few months before the king is executed. It's called the September
01:30:33.360Massacres. This is introducing a whole new dimension. France is a Christian nation at this
01:30:40.340point. And remember how I talked about the three estates, the clergy, the nobility, and the third
01:30:45.920estate? Well, the clergy and the nobility were often seen to be tied together. So one way that
01:30:52.620the new revolutionary government decides that is going to control the clergy is by making all of
01:30:58.760the clergy, men and women, women, I mean nuns, swear to an oath, an oath of allegiance. And,
01:31:07.940you know, some priests do for self-preservation and some priests don't, and they kind of go into
01:31:15.680hiding. But those who don't successfully go into hiding are arrested. So the prisons are getting
01:31:22.040more and more full of these non-swearing priests. So in September, soon after the fall of the1.00
01:31:29.280monarchy, there is a massacre and no one knows for sure who instigates it. I think there is kind
01:31:36.300of the feeling that one of the more radical revolutionaries like Murat or perhaps Dental
01:31:41.780did something to kind of instigate this. But there is a huge massacre in the prisons of Paris
01:31:49.760where a number of, well, you know, that went after the priests and slaughtered them brutally
01:31:55.180in the courtyards or even in prison cells. I mean, later when prisoners go into some of
01:32:02.560these prison cells, they say they can still see the blood on the walls from these September
01:32:06.720massacres. So violence has already reached a fever pitch. And even aside from the September
01:32:15.580massacres there are people who are being lynched all over the place uh and you know i'm going to
01:32:21.860emphasize you know the priests here but a lot of different people are being lynched before the
01:32:27.020guillotine was really active politically the phrase was to the lantern or to the lamppost
01:32:33.180and the idea is like you know you've gotten a hold of this guy and you're going to hang him
01:32:38.260from the lamppost and it's not um i was just gonna i want to clarify for myself and this isn't
01:32:44.880like they're going for the priests and, but the people who they're going after, it's not just0.91
01:32:48.560like, let's kill all the 1%. Let's kill all the rich people. It's like, it's, let's kill my1.00
01:32:52.620political enemies. Let's kill people who don't support the revolution. It's, it's people of all1.00
01:32:56.460different classes are being killed. Yes. And, and, and, you know, like in every, any time you get
01:33:00.740this kind of chaos, people will also settle personal vendettas under the cover of, you know,
01:33:07.240of sort of a new political order. You know, that, that happens, you see that happen in France in
01:33:13.140the 16th century, again, the century I really know. And then, you know, again, here where,
01:33:18.580you know, someone will be identified as an enemy of the revolution. And you have to wonder,
01:33:23.560was this person really an enemy of the revolution? Or was there some sort of personal vendetta
01:33:27.240that is being sown? But again, there is this kind of mob, anger, mob, violence, and the more radical
01:33:34.880wing of the revolutionaries of the jacobins is starting to consolidate power they have
01:33:42.220the support of of the sans-culottes of you know of the common people particularly in paris and so
01:33:50.800that is kind of like this sort of unholy alliance you know between this more radical arm of the
01:33:59.540revolutionaries, spearheaded by lawyers. You know, these were people of ideas, but also fueled by
01:34:07.460the rage and the feelings of the common people. So in April 1793, the convention set up a committee
01:34:18.120of public safety, which was eventually controlled by Robespierre. And so this is, what do you know
01:34:24.900about the committee. It sounds so nefarious. It sounds very like 1984 adjacent, just kind of like
01:34:32.040public safety, but it's like this actually terrorizing the public.
01:34:35.960Exactly. Well, what's happening is power is being consolidated, you know, into the hands of a few,
01:34:41.240essentially. I already spoke about the tension between sort of the provinces and Paris.
01:34:47.480powers being consolidated within Paris, it is partially a response to the unrest that's
01:34:56.280happening all over France. So now, by the time that the Committee of Public Safety gets set up
01:35:01.620in April, there are a number of different things going on. They are at war, France is at war with
01:35:08.460foreign powers, but there has also been a very significant rebellion that has erupted to the
01:35:14.360West in a region called the Vendée. So they're basically at civil war too. The Vendée is a very
01:35:20.780Catholic region. The reason why this rebellion happens is in part to resist the elimination
01:35:28.740of the clergy. And it is also a resistance to the control of Paris. You know, many, many regions are
01:35:35.400now seeing this as like Paris's revolution, not the French revolution, Paris's revolution.
01:35:40.500uh the the girondin that more moderate party was much more interested in in a kind of federal
01:35:48.300government you know where the different regions would be represented but the republic and by the
01:35:54.440time you get to you know to april a republic has been set up but it is it is seen as something
01:36:00.280that's going to be coming out of paris controlled by whatever is going on in paris so i think that's
01:36:07.620such good context to think about. This is the climate into which Olymp is publishing things
01:36:11.600being like, actually, the king is an okay person. This is setting her up as an enemy of the new
01:36:19.220power. And she's done this before, right? I mean, she dedicated the Declaration of the Rights of
01:36:24.300Woman to Marie Antoinette. I mean, she keeps kind of showing these slightly royalist strains,
01:36:32.280or at least using language that could be manipulated
01:36:36.580or, you know, without a lot of difficulty0.86
01:36:38.760into suggesting that in fact, she supports the monarchy.
01:36:43.300And this is where her impetuousness0.99
01:36:46.340and maybe stubbornness starts to become a problem0.99
01:36:50.260because you would think that maybe she would think about this.
01:36:55.420But Elim also has a way of kind of saying,
01:37:00.120I know I might get punished for this. But at the time, you know, even as these trials
01:37:07.780are now going forward, and, you know, thanks to the Committee of Public Safety, and what eventually
01:37:14.880becomes the Revolutionary Tribunal, where people who are accused of anti-revolutionary thinking
01:37:21.500come up for trial, even though that's starting to happen, you know, kind of in mid-1793,
01:37:27.700a lot of people are actually exonerated. Like they might go to trial, but they don't actually
01:37:33.140get condemned. So I think on some level, Olympe de Gouges thinks that she can protest what's going
01:37:38.500on and that that's okay, that somehow she's going to get away with it. What I'm just reading here
01:37:43.220from the Encyclopedia of Women's History, it says that she wanted to publish a new pamphlet,
01:37:49.540but the person who she went to to like print her pamphlets was just like, this is too much. I'm,
01:37:54.260I'm not, I'm can't print this. It's too extreme. And it said, inform the authorities.
01:37:59.960So that happens towards the end. So let's jump to maybe the summer of 1793.
01:38:06.580That's when things go really wrong and she ends up landing herself in prison.
01:38:12.420So a couple of things happen. I've talked about the gerundists and the radical arm of the
01:38:20.180revolutionaries led by Robespierre that radical arm is known as the mountain which might be an
01:38:26.520easier way to kind of remember them so the they're called the mountain because of where they sit
01:38:32.160in um the national convention it's like up in the risers so they're high above everybody else
01:38:37.000so there's a purge in late may early june and the mountain gets rid of the um the more moderate
01:38:45.260wing of the revolutionary government. And by, when I say gets rid, they arrest them all.
01:38:51.160They arrest them all and they put them in jail. And if they don't get arrested, they have to flee.
01:38:55.220And they are fleeing for their lives. I mean, they are really afraid, rightly so,
01:38:59.520that they are going to be executed. That happens. Charlotte Corday, who is a young woman from
01:39:07.100Cal, from Normandy, executes one of the mountain's chief leaders, the journalist Marat,
01:39:15.320that throws everything into chaos. And so now the government is actually quite panicked
01:39:21.760and definitely out to come after anybody who seems to be espousing anti-revolutionary thinking.
01:39:33.320So I think it's quite common in this day and age, in the 21st century, to think that the French revolutionaries only killed aristocrats because that's what they said.
01:39:46.640They accused these people of being royalists and aristocrats.
01:39:50.360But what's important to know is that the word aristocrat started to be used almost like a slur.
01:39:57.060It was used for anyone who seemed to be espousing anti-revolutionary thinking and ideas.
01:40:07.800The Republican government is now passing laws that say that the republic is one and indivisible,
01:40:18.440and anyone who suggests otherwise is a traitor.
01:40:21.660They also start starting in the fall of 1793 to pass laws that open up what's called the law of suspects, meaning that if you're even suspected of harboring anti-revolutionary thinking, you can be arrested and go to trial.
01:40:41.400And how does this, I think I read something about part of what this, the mountain based government, there had been these movements of like the women's political clubs and like people like Olymp who are like, hey, what if women get more rights? Like this is all being cut back to be like, no, no place for women. Like, get out of here.0.95
01:40:59.240Yes. And you really start to see that after Charlotte Corday kills, assassinates the journalist Murat, this kind of suspicion about women and about sort of mob thinking, right? Like who is going to be the anti-revolutionary, you know, thinking?
01:41:17.380So the ambience that we're starting to kind of dive into is definitely one of hyper control, hyper control by a committee, the Committee of Public Safety and, you know, the sort of weaponized court, which is the Revolutionary Tribunal to control what counts as revolutionary thinking and what doesn't count.
01:41:38.440so this is i really want to i want to just sort of like sit in this moment for a second because
01:41:43.080this is where i think today um people who vaguely know kind of what the french revolution was it's
01:41:49.420like yeah it was a time when like the everyday people got rid of the king and wasn't that a good
01:41:54.960thing it's like well that was part of what happened sort of at the beginning but a couple
01:42:01.080what is this like 1793 like a few years later it's just this mountain like robespierre when i
01:42:06.720was sort of researching this, my friend Allison was like, think of him as sort of like, if he'd
01:42:11.740been around in the Salem witch trials, he would have really enjoyed that. Like Robespierre is just
01:42:15.860a person who, he's not a cool revolutionary. He's like a very conservative, controlling person.
01:42:22.380Well, it gets more conservative, but at the same time, I think Robespierre is a really confusing
01:42:27.140guy. And, you know, I personally am looking forward to like learning more about him because
01:42:31.200at the same time, I think there's some evidence that he wasn't the most violent of the Committee
01:42:36.360of public safety. And that in fact, he wanted to walk some of the violence back. But he might have
01:42:42.900been sort of a conflicted guy. And, you know, here's the problem. It's like, when you feel
01:42:47.440threatened from all sides, you know, you've got this war going on in the provinces, and you've
01:42:52.000got the foreign powers, you start to like make these choices, because you don't really see
01:42:57.600another way out. And if you're also trying to preserve your own power, you know, within your
01:43:03.960select group you might let certain things go because you don't really know how to stop it and
01:43:11.580you're also interested in preserving your own power basically we're in this time of you know
01:43:17.080just complete chaos for the guillotine which had really begun as you know the guillotine was
01:43:23.640invented as a humane form of execution one that did not discriminate on the basis of class
01:43:28.720But it really does get weaponized to eliminate anyone who seems to be resisting the revolutionary thinking as it is defined by a select group of people within Paris.
01:43:47.320So in some ways, I mean, to put it in simple terms, I think that the revolution by this point, you know, the summer and into the fall of 1793 has reached a level of tyranny.
01:44:04.460But, you know, following a different ideological path than the tyranny that they were supposedly opposing with the elimination of the king.
01:44:12.800And I also want to point to how little time actually elapsed between the execution of the king, which was in January 1793, and, you know, the summer of 1793, which is when we kind of see the beginning of what would eventually be called the terror.
01:44:31.140right and this is this is not the part of the french revolution that people are
01:44:36.320posting memes about being like hey let's let's bring back the french revolution it's like no
01:44:40.300the part that people are excited about is is their interpretation of what the very beginning of it
01:44:45.620was like which is just like the women's march it's just like yeah let's just show the people
01:44:49.600in power that were mad it's like very quickly it turned into this like it's not this this is not
01:44:55.180like you you were saying and you've been saying on the sub stack it's like is this the role model
01:44:58.920we want to follow? Like, I don't like, it's definitely not like all the steps. I mean,
01:45:03.420I think, you know, every, every revolutionary moment has its context. And, you know, it's good
01:45:09.620to be smart about it. And I think that there are models that we can find in every single
01:45:14.060revolutionary moment. And Olam de Gouge would be one of them. Maybe not necessarily her
01:45:18.480impetuousness, but certainly her bravery, you know, and her kind of radical thinking. I would
01:45:23.980also say her pacifism, you know, uh, because yes, the revolution, the terror is incredibly
01:45:30.720violent. It is very thought policy, extremely thought policy and, um, no one is safe. No one
01:45:39.380is safe. One wrong move and you could be thrown in jail. And pretty soon it gets to be clear that
01:45:48.080if you were thrown in jail and you get, you know, you go up before the revolutionary tribunal,
01:45:52.580Chances are it's going to be a death sentence.
01:45:55.400And she continues voicing her opinions and her thoughts.
01:46:19.380I think she was scared by what was happening.
01:46:22.580She has a little place in Hauteuil, which is in the outskirts of Paris, and that is where her daughter-in-law, so her son has gotten married.
01:46:31.880So that is where her daughter-in-law and her grandson are, and she considers staying there, which probably would have been a smart move.
01:46:40.200But soon after Charlotte Corday kills Murat, Olam de Gouges comes back to Paris, and she tries to publish a pamphlet that she had written.
01:46:50.740Now, first of all, let me just, like, let's stop and think about that for a second.
01:47:13.260Yeah, or I don't know, you know, a totally different political context and historical context.
01:47:18.680But if you've read Rebecca Donner's All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days about Mildred Harnick, who was the American woman involved in the German resistance in World War II, at some point she comes back to the States to visit her family.
01:47:35.080And it's a moment in the narrative, as Rebecca Donner tells it, where you kind of want to say, oh, my gosh, Mildred, stay there.
01:53:19.440She's transferred to the Conciergerie, which is, you know, sort of the place you go when you're about to go up for trial before the Revolutionary Tribunal, where you will likely, you know, end up being sent to the scaffold.0.60
01:53:32.020In the meantime, the Girondins, the Girondists, the moderate wing, have all been tried, found guilty, and are all sentenced to death.0.87
01:53:41.200I wouldn't be surprised if Olam de Gouges even heard them, because she was in the same prison as them.
01:53:48.580The night before they're executed, she goes to trial. She is told that the defense lawyer didn't want to defend her. I don't think that was true. I think that was a deliberate miscommunication or misdelivery of her letter to him, and he was prevented from defending her.0.88
01:54:10.200So she is forced to defend herself. And one of the things that you hear about by my witnesses is that she was sort of smirking and smiling through the whole trial.
01:54:22.440And of course, this was held against her. But you can also kind of you can kind of imagine yourself in her in her shoes that she's mounting this sort of face of defiance.
01:54:32.960you know she can't believe the incredible things that they are saying so she's almost
01:54:38.800you know blithely laughing at what they are saying because it's just it's it defies comprehension
01:54:44.660the sorry the the facial expressions i'm just thinking i'm just imagining like like kamala
01:54:49.900harris during that debate when she was just making like it's like look at those things
01:54:53.700this guy's saying it's just like come on like that sort of yeah i would imagine those sorts1.00
01:54:58.280of facial expressions exactly but instead this is being framed as look what a lunatic she is0.99
01:55:02.500She's crazy, which is not the first time that people have leveled this accusation against Olam de Gurus, that she's just absolutely nuts.0.98
01:55:09.400So that is, you know, deliberately how that's being interpreted.0.98
01:55:13.780So here's the evidence that they had against her.
01:55:15.600They had that pamphlet, the three urns, but they also have a play that she had started back in August 1792 that she never finished.
01:55:27.060she started it right after the fall of the monarchy when the royal family gets put placed
01:55:34.760under house arrest and it has marie antoinette as a main a major character in the play and and
01:55:42.980olemme de gauche does not really endorse marie antoinette but she does make certain sides of
01:55:51.680Marie Antoinette sympathetic. You know, she kind of paints her as a woman who cared about her
01:55:58.380children, who cared about her husband. But this was just easy for the Revolutionary Tribunal to
01:56:07.520hold up and say, look, you know, she's writing about Marie Antoinette. She's putting her as a
01:56:13.180sympathetic character on the stage. She's clearly a royalist. So, you know, it was just very easy
01:56:22.220to kind of frame her as someone who is actually against the revolution. So during her trial,
01:56:30.240after she sentenced Olympe de Gustis, the one thing that maybe seems a little bit less brave
01:57:06.320And is that a thing, like if someone was sentenced to death and they were found pregnant, like you would be allowed to wait until the baby is born before they killed you?
01:57:14.020Yes. Or you were given a little bit of time.
02:04:23.900The fact that she was a woman made those anti-revolutionary crimes even worse, if that makes any sense, you know.
02:04:31.800And in fact, after her death, after the execution of Marie Antoinette and Olam de Gouges and then Manon Rolland, who was a revolutionary and a wife of one of the leaders of the Jorandes party, there was an attempt to kind of slander all of them together, to kind of group them together in a newspaper article and to really slander them on the basis of gender, that these women have forgotten their place as women.0.73
02:04:58.540And so those executions are used as a warning to other women, like, don't do, don't be like Marie Antoinette, Olympe de Gouges, and Manon Olam. So in some ways, it made them worse, right? So even though, yeah, all these people were, you know, put to death.
02:05:17.740the question of what those deaths were about you know for olymp it definitely the fact that she was
02:05:27.420a woman adds to the severity of the crime well and i think too like we were talking about before
02:05:32.760where it's like yeah she was if a man had been found writing this trying to publish the same
02:05:37.280things if he'd written the same play like they might have been put on trial but i think
02:05:40.360i think they wanted to arrest her and this gave them an excuse is kind of the sense i got because
02:05:45.940they wanted to quiet her and they were just looking for any reason to do so because she was
02:05:52.640a woman in the political sphere yeah i think kind of they were starting to get incredibly suspicious0.85
02:05:57.060of women's activities right because that was one of the things that i read is that shortly like
02:06:01.660those three executions and then shortly after that like the rules were really it's like it was1.00
02:06:05.740illegal for women to gather in groups it was illegal for women to join political clubs like1.00
02:06:09.600this happened so she was kind of part of that like look how dangerous it is when women have1.00
02:06:15.320political thoughts. Let's just like keep them in the home sphere. Let's just like not let them1.00
02:06:19.080think anymore. Right. And let's disenfranchise them. So I believe it was in the previous April
02:06:25.480that it is decided legally that women can't be citizens. They have the same rights as children,0.65
02:06:32.580essentially. They're considered to be in their minority permanently. So there is this effort to
02:06:38.340to kind of um disenfranchise them and to some degree the revolutionaries after olam's death1.00
02:06:48.140leap upon her as a symbol of why women can't be trusted as political operators yeah so it does0.94
02:06:57.980bleed into the legacy a bit but i would say that the sexism certainly affected her life not to the1.00
02:07:05.260extent of somebody who maybe was like trapped in a tower and not allowed to leave. But it really
02:07:11.420got in her way and ultimately kind of expedited her death. So I would put her maybe at like a six
02:07:16.840or a seven, maybe. Yeah, I think so. And I also think that she's an important model to look at
02:07:23.800in terms of sexism, because sexism rarely operates in these sort of easy ways, you know, where she's
02:07:29.680sort of put into a tower, the woman is put into a tower. It's rarely, you know, obvious, at least
02:07:35.660I think. I think it's often quite insidious. And I think the insidiousness of the ways in which it
02:07:42.160got in her way or the ways in which being a woman made her more vulnerable is something to pay
02:07:47.460attention to. Well, and that just makes me think too about the whole thing about like, oh, she has0.96
02:07:51.280bad grammar. Let's just discount everything she's saying. Yes. And for that to be the react or like0.98
02:07:56.280the fact she couldn't get her plays produced like she was and that's kind of what this category is
02:08:00.680for and my scoring is just kind of like if that hadn't been there what more could she have
02:08:03.580accomplished and i think she could have at least it would have been taken much more seriously as0.94
02:08:07.000a writer well which would have helped her career maybe the declaration of the rights of women if
02:08:11.520it had been authored by a man might have actually gotten more traction yeah yeah i'm gonna bump i'm
02:08:18.980gonna give her 7.5 okay that's where i feel here she'll go and then the final category is
02:08:24.940significance. So what, how do you see her legacy and her significance? Not, not even as a number,
02:08:32.560but just like, how do you see it? Yeah. I think when that has become more significant in the late
02:08:36.84020th century and the early 21st century, for a long time, she was sort of made fun of by scholars
02:08:42.600or really degraded. You know, she was called a courtesan. And so that was an excuse for a lot
02:08:49.520of people to dismiss her. You know, it's that sort of moral judgment that's passed on women who,0.58
02:08:54.940you know, aren't married and sleep with men, you know, that she slept her way to the top.1.00
02:08:59.880That was, that was often used against her. She was dismissed as a lunatic. I mean, this, this1.00
02:09:06.720starts soon after her death and it continues on until, you know, into the 21st century.
02:09:14.080But it was in the 21st century that people started paying a lot more attention to the
02:09:18.500Declaration of the Rights of Women and thinking a lot more about what it is that she called for
02:09:24.440And then the way that she had been dismissed as a thinker, as a philosopher, by these generations of historians and philosophers who just weren't going to take her seriously, again, because she was a woman.
02:09:36.060Olympe de Gouges today, because of the sheer prolificness and the fact that she is operating in this sphere of ideas, is mostly considered a philosopher now.
02:10:36.160I think she was significant in the time in the sense of that they had to kill her.
02:10:42.540They had to quiet her down because she was seen as too dangerous to still be there.
02:10:46.540So which speaks very significance at the time.
02:10:48.180she's got significance now I know you feel strongly about her so I will let you choose
02:10:53.360the numerical value of what what that means I'm gonna say a 10 yeah I'm giving her a 10
02:11:02.180yeah you know I think she wanted to be part of the conversation she wanted to be part of the
02:11:08.600conversation and she was and you know whether or not she was being made an example of or if
02:11:15.820the revolutionaries the radical jacobins really thought that her ideas were dangerous and carried
02:11:21.620weight either way she was part of the conversation in a threatening way yeah like the fact that they
02:11:28.820they wouldn't have put her on trial and executed her for her thoughts if she hadn't like challenged
02:11:34.180the status quo in a way that they found um threatening i'm just putting her officially
02:11:41.880here in my scale i want to find some other people so you know just kind of who else is in that
02:11:46.480neighborhood so she's 29.5 wow is her score um other people let's see so do you know um joseph
02:11:55.480boulogne the chevalier to saint george who she was friends from this era he has a were they oh good
02:12:01.120he has a third he has a 31 so like she's pretty close to him yeah yeah um adelaide labie goyard
02:12:08.940the artist she has a 32 like they're all they're all kind of in the same neighborhood this
02:12:13.220neighborhood of just kind of like cool people who deserved better than they got because they
02:12:17.020were living yeah during the french and it says something that olam de gouge and um the chevalier
02:12:22.300de saint george were were friends they were friends they knew each other from the theater
02:12:25.840scene that i guess yeah because he was someone else who was like always trying to to get jobs
02:12:31.860in the theater and to to move up and he was being held back because of his race and for other things
02:12:36.060too. So I guess they could commiserate being not taken seriously. Yeah. And I think that he
02:12:40.720probably helped fuel her ideas about abolition. Fair. Yeah. Oh, you're so right. Yeah. I love
02:12:47.060knowing that, that they were friends. Because when you're reading just sort of like a general
02:12:52.420biography of a person, it's kind of like, here's their life. But yeah, of course they were in the
02:12:55.820same scene. They would have known each other. How could they not have? So Leia, thank you so much.
02:13:01.760i you you taught me so much like looking at all this information i'm just like wait what
02:13:07.440wait now they're killing the king wait who's rose pierre wait now she like it's just like what is
02:13:12.880like there's so thank you you explain it to me in a way that has set me up for the subsequent
02:13:17.160episodes where we're going to be looking at people like um charlotte corday and some other people who
02:13:22.160are in in the revolution and so i understand what who the giron downs were yes that's huge
02:13:28.440because I didn't know. It's so confusing. It took me forever. And still sometimes like
02:13:33.280whose relationships are with whom, you know, I'm not quite sure, but I'm so glad, especially when
02:13:39.320they're moving back and forth like this. Yeah. Yeah. And tell everybody where I mostly see
02:13:45.260posting is on the sub stack. So do you want to tell people there are other places where they
02:13:48.860can follow you and keep up with your work? Yeah. So these days I am mostly on sub stack. So
02:13:53.880So my sub stack is called The Only Woman in the Room, which is, well, I'm doing a couple of things on it.
02:14:01.360I'm talking about sort of my adventures in feminist and woman-centered history, what it's like to be a historian doing that kind of work.
02:14:10.620Also, now and again, talking about the, you know, connection between the political scene of the past and the political scene of the present.
02:14:19.580so you can find me on leahredmanchang.substack.com or through my website which is just leahredmanchang.com
02:14:28.920and you can get to my sub stack from my website that's perfect thank you I was I was so much
02:14:35.180looking forward to this conversation and it's exceeded my expectations and so I love being
02:14:39.420able to talk to you so thank you so much for joining me thank you so much for having me on
02:14:49.580so again you can keep up with leah and what she's doing and she's writing she's she's on the ground
02:14:55.320she's talking about she's in america and she's talking about what's happening in america these
02:14:58.820days and she shares her thoughts in on her sub stack and also just in the notes in the sub stack
02:15:03.100app so you can follow her there her sub stack newsletter is called the only woman in the room
02:15:07.340and you can follow her there at leah redmond chang.substack.com and you can keep up with me
02:15:13.400and this podcast will frankly also on sub stack where i'm at vulgarhistory.substack.com where i
02:15:18.220post essays about women in history if you want to just like this episode just think about people in
02:15:23.840previous times and how how they were different but similar to us but also kind of how things
02:15:29.680went bananas and how what did they do how did they get through it that's you know not that anyone's
02:15:35.560asking me and how what's your advice to like get through unprecedented times but i will say
02:15:40.160doing this podcast and reading these stories of women and other people who were living in these0.94
02:15:45.340banana situations does help me feel like people have been through shit before. And here we all0.97
02:15:52.700are now. Anyway, you can keep up with me again, as I said, on Substack. Also, I really recommend
02:15:58.120I have a Patreon, which is like if you want to keep up with my thoughts. I share posts there,
02:16:06.820articles, like sometimes there's some special bonus episodes of the, not Vulgar History,
02:16:12.580but other spin-off podcasts on the patreon anyway basically that's where you can follow me because
02:16:16.340social media is one of the 10 000 things that's going bananas right now and everyone's kind of
02:16:22.660in all kinds of different places but if you want to keep up with me my updates um go to patreon.com
02:16:27.900slash ann foster writer you can follow me there for free or you can follow me there for money0.55
02:16:32.740um if you follow me there for free you can get lots of shit if you follow me there for a dollar0.97
02:16:37.680a month or more then you get um some more shit basically you get some um ad free access to all0.97
02:16:44.820episodes of this podcast early access to all the episodes of this podcast for a dollar or more a0.79
02:16:49.560month and if you pledge five dollars or more a month you get also access to your whole archive
02:16:53.760of bonus episodes of vulgar peace theater where i talk about costume dramas with elson epstein0.95
02:16:57.780and lenna with johnson new episodes coming soon i also talk about so this asshole is one of the
02:17:04.280spin-off series there for the five dollars or more a month people and that's where tech puts0.90
02:17:08.100shitty men from history and let me tell you as i've been reading about the french revolution
02:17:11.920and learning about it i've there's there's there's at least two new episodes of this0.98
02:17:17.020asshole that will be coming up in the next month or so anyway again but you know like the i need
02:17:22.640six eggs it's too expensive everything's bananas right now financially so if you want to just0.81
02:17:28.780follow me for free there's lots of stuff there you can get at that level or just keep listening
02:17:32.780to this podcast because that that's the main thing i do i also want to mention if you do choose to
02:17:39.020join the patreon at the five dollars a month or more level you can join our discord which is just
02:17:43.240like a group chat where we're all just like getting through each day like we can't join one of the
02:17:48.360literary salons like olympic gouge was having but it's it is called a salon it's the vulgar history
02:17:54.300salon anyway that's what's going on there substack patreon i also have a newsletter if you're just
02:18:01.200It's like, Ann, I don't want to keep up with you that much.
02:18:04.100What I would prefer is just like one email, perhaps once a month.