Olympe de Gouges, "Les trois urnes, ou le salut de la patrie" (1793)

Abstract

With authentic revolutionary spirit, Olympe de Gouges, who became an essayist and a playwright at the time of the French Revolution, writes a manifest, Les Trois Urnes, in which she exhorts the exponents of the newly established power to call for free French elections and let the people take up political responsibility in terms of deciding the form of government that better fits the principles of the Declaration of Rights. The three urns are designed to receive the voting preferences of the French citizens so that they may freely opt among republic, federalism, and monarchy. Yet France is not ready for this, and considers the proposal an attack on freedom and the republic. Olympe will be the second woman to be guillotined after Queen Marie-Antoinette.