Look who's the Doodle on the French Google homepage today...

[Surya Gayatri]

Olympe de Gouges, one of history's pioneer feminists, who was guillotined because of her advocacy for women's rights during the French Revolution.


"Today she is perhaps best known as an early feminist who demanded that French women be given the same rights as French men. In her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen (1791), she challenged the practice of male authority and the notion of male–female inequality. She was executed by guillotine during the Reign of Terror for attacking the regime of the Revolutionary government and for her close relation with the Girondists."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympe_de_Gouges

A central Paris intersection has been renamed in her honor. An amazing woman ahead of her time. To think it took another 150+ years for French women to get the vote!

"The 21 April 1944 ordinance of the French Committee of National Liberation, confirmed in October 1944 by the French provisional government, extended suffrage to French women."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_France#France

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. How cool that Google does different logos for different parts of the world.

They do pick some really interesting folks to highlight.

Thanks for informing us about this heroine.

She was truly amazing.

K&R

[Surya Gayatri]

8. I agree, CA Peggy, it's one of the coolest things about Google...

I love how they find relatively forgotten but interesting historical figures, and give them their day in the spotlight.

I detest Google's spying and data mining, but admire their world view.

Thanks for being the first to post in my thread. My responses are often time lagged, what with the 6 to 9 hour difference between Paris and the US.

I'm already in bed when everybody else is just getting into gear for their evening on DU. It's now early morning here in western Europe.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

9. Are you in France?

I love Europe, and France.

My husband and I have been traveling there in Europe for some years now, and we love being there.

I'm glad I was first in your thread!



It is about 20 minutes before 10 PM here in California!

I think it's amazing how the internet connects us over these long distances!

[Surya Gayatri]

15. Yes, I've been living in Paris for many years. In fact, I have dual Franco-American citizenship...

I'm not surpised that you love Europe. Democrats always have a much broader world view and greater appreciation of diverse cultures than their narrow, zenophobic Republican cousins.

I actually vote in Orange County, although I've never even lived in CA. My brother lives there and I use his address to register to vote. Blue state heaven!

You're in Huntington Beach, aren't you? My bro has a condo at the beach there! Gorgeous weather and fabulous vistas.

It's now 7:30 a.m. here. The 9-hour time lag between Paris and CA is always a problem for telephone calls with my bro.

He's either on his way to bed or already asleep when I'm ready to talk. There's only a 3 or 4 hour window when everybody's up and around.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

18. Oh, lucky you, living in Paris!

Paris and London are my favorite cities! I want to come back to Paris with my digital camera and shoot some more pictures. Maybe, someday!

I live in Manhattan Beach, which is up north (nearer to Los Angeles) from Huntington Beach. It is a pretty little beach town that has gentrified like mad.

Yeah, the 9 hour time difference can sure be a problem!

[Surya Gayatri]

21. You should be here now with your camera. "April in Paris" isn't just a song title...

The "chestnuts in blossom" are gorgeous, not to mention the linden trees and thousands of other fruit trees.

And the City of Paris Dept. of Parks and Green Spaces go all out during this season. Some spectaular gardens around the city right now.

I think Paris shows herself at her best in early spring. She really is one beautiful lady. Elegant, but a bit mischievous.

[Cha]

2. Mahalo, Surya~

[Surya Gayatri]

10. And Mahalo to you dear Cha!

As I explained to CaliforniaPeggy, my reaction to people's posts is often time lagged, especially between western Europe and Hawaii--at least a 12 hour delay.

Always love your posts, especially in the BO forum.

[Nye Bevan]

3. They should have had an animated Dominick Strauss-Kahn chasing her around the screen

just to add a contemporary touch.

[Surya Gayatri]

23. Most French women, who heartily hate his guts, would beg to differ! LOL!

[uppityperson]

4. here's the link

https://www.google.fr/

[Surya Gayatri]

11. Thanks uppity, but here in France it's already the 8th of May,

and the Google homepage has already gone back to its usual, boring tri-color self.

[uppityperson]

32. that is too bad, it was there when I posted it. Happy VE day though

I got to see the other for a moment, must've just switched then.

[UtahLib]

5. K&R nt

[G_j]

6. amazing story

I had to look up the"Girondists". Fascinating history!

[Surya Gayatri]

12. One of the most intense and dramatic events in "recent"

human history, whose repercussions still resonate everyday, in every way in 21st century France.
"Liberté - Egalité - Fraternité" wasn't just a campaign slogan, but an aspiration to fight and die for.

[G_j]

16. truly,

and of course those events greatly influenced events in America.
I think I could do with more reading on the subject.

[Surya Gayatri]

19. Unhappily, too many Americans have little or no idea of our two countries'

intertwined history. We are inextricably linked.
Neither country would be what it is today without the other.

Our language and essential culture may have come from England, but the ideas enshrined in our beloved Constitution owe a great deal to French Enlightenment philosophers.

Then, there was that military and financial aid that helped win us our independence.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

7. Meanwhile there have been Republican WOMEN in OFFICE wanting to take away a woman's right to vote.

[Surya Gayatri]

13. Olympe puts them and their petty stupidity to shame.

She would destroy them with her mighty plume.
Love this woman!

[AverageJoe90]

14. Interesting stuff. Thanks for posting! =)

[Surya Gayatri]

17. Glad you enjoyed Olympe. What a "femme"! Truly a heroine of history...

[RainDog]

20. She was also a friend of Mary Wollstonecraft

A year after de Gouges published A Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen, Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792. Prior to this, Thomas Paine wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Man (responding to the anglo (Irish) father of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke, and his fear of the French Revolution. (He feared it would be exported to GB.) Wollstonecraft wrote a defense of Paine's work in 1790.

Wollstonecraft and Paine were both in France as the Revolution occurred. Wollstonecraft wrote a book about the experience, published in 1794. (Wordsworth was there too - his famous phrase, "Bliss was it that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven" was about witnessing the French overthrow the monarchy, aristocracy and church.

The French had constant pageants with tableaux to celebrate the revolution - esp. the fall of the hateful Bastille (before The Terror) and de Gouges was one of the females who was chosen to represent "the Goddess of Liberty" (which the Chinese students co-opted with the Tiananmen Square uprising) - who the French eventually called called "Marianne" - and that's the origin of the French gift of the statue to liberty to the U.S.

Both de Gouges and Wollstonecraft wrote non fiction and fiction that talked about the reality that women had no way to live in the western world as free people - society was structured to deny them human rights - and this was a subject Ellison took up in his own time with the amazing book, Invisible Man - his struggle was one these women also knew. (Both Wollstonecraft and de Gouges also supported the overthrow of slavery, as well.)

Paine was imprisoned when the Jacobins (led by Robespierre) went after the Girondins (led by Danton.) Wollstonecraft took up with an American, Gilbert Imlay, from KY, and the two of them smuggled confiscated goods from the French aristocracy and sold them in Sweden and Denmark to help the French finance the revolution (and the war to come when royals declared war on France in support of Louis.) De Gouges was put to the guillotine.

Sans culotte (poorer) French women who were in support of women's enfranchisement, btw, used to pull up their skirts and show their pudendum in rebellion against the men who did not include them in the legal revolution - tho these same women were fighting in the streets.

[Surya Gayatri]

22. You are a woman/man after my own heart, RainDog. History buff

extraordinaire. Where did you find all of these historical anecdotes and sidelights?

This paragraph is especially amazing--who knew?: "The French had constant pageants with tableaux to celebrate the revolution - esp. the fall of the hateful Bastille (before The Terror) and de Gouges was one of the females who was chosen to represent "the Goddess of Liberty" (which the Chinese students co-opted with the Tiananmen Square uprising) - who the French eventually called called "Marianne" - and that's the origin of the French gift of the statue to liberty to the U.S."

[RainDog]

24. I studied and wrote about this topic

oh so long ago - but it has stayed dear to my heart. (Je suis une femme, s'il te plait.)

Here's another little tidbit along that line - in Jane Austen's "Sense and Sensibility," the sister who is all about the heart is named Marianne. Oui! The one with "good sense" was Elinor - i.e. the Tory British model of good female behavior, while Marianne was swayed by the "sublime" (a sort of terror and awe toward the natural world - which Burke also wrote about, fwiw) and emotional "excess."

Austen wrote the book in 1811 - and it was meant to teach her female readers to be good conservatives, not revolutionaries. In Austen's time, Wollstonecraft was the British Tory version of "Hanoi" Jane Fonda from the 60s here.

I wrote about this on a MS mag comment long ago, btw, and just recently found an email from someone telling me she was quoting me - I don't know if she cited me or not... lol. - but my work on this subject as a ugrad ooooh so long ago was cited by someone in academia b/c she told me - because I demonstrated that women writers were politically involved in GB - but were reactionaries - counter revolutionaries, after the French Revolutionary Terror created disgust - and this reaction even showed up in Wordsworth and Wollstonecraft's works - when they saw blood running in the streets from all the aristocrats who were murdered in such a short time period.

I think, iirc, Marilyn Butler did some really interesting work with Burke, Paine, Wollstonecraft and the Revolution Controvery - don't know if that's the exact title. Another one was... Representations of Revolution by... brb... Ronald Paulson.

One of the BIG thrills in my life was holding a letter written by a French general who talked about the commotion in the street after Charlotte Corday had killed Marat. ...And that's where David's Death of Marat comes from... which makes a French revolutionary martyr into a pieta figure...

yeah, I like this stuff too.

[Surya Gayatri]

27. Oh, to have been alive during that epoch and been an eyewitness

to those earthshaking and Europe-shaping events. Could've done without the "Terreur" part of it--but it's all part of the package.

Love the idea of Wollstonecraft as an historical "Hanoi Jane", LOL! Boy howdy, those British aristocrats were shitting their "culottes" at the prospect of the Revolution outre-manche spilling over into their "green and pleasant land".

Great tagline you've got there! Not only did they not see it coming, they were completely blindsided in their arrogance and stupidity.

[RainDog]

28. Wollstonecraft is one of my favorite figures in history

I also did work on Joseph Johnson's publishing circle. He published Paine, Wollstonecraft, Godwin (the first anarchist), the first Wordsworth and Coleridge, William Blake (who illustrated the frontispiece for Wollstonecraft's first book - on conduct for girls... LOL... and many more.

He got sent to prison for publishing radicals (also called Jacobins in Eng.)

I've had the good fortune to turn the pages on original editions of every one of those authors/illustrators mentioned...while doing work in a rare book library. I wanted to cry with happiness to see these artifacts. weird, but true.



oh, I should do two of those... the French way.

[Surya Gayatri]

29. It's no surprise that the Romantic poets are my favorites

(after Shakespeare, of course). You lucky "Dog", to have touched those treasures!

"Bisou, Bisou", as Parisians say, while making kissing noises in the air and trying to avoid crashing into each others' noses. LOL!

[RainDog]

30. William Blake was a wild man

Many of his poems are simple - but his illustrations are like... hallucinations - and his longer works create an entire mythology.

I always thought that, if I could time travel - I would want to meet those people who were in England and France during that time. It's an amazing moment in history.

If you've never seen Dead Man, by Jim Jarmusch, I highly recommend it. Not about the French Revolution, at all - but about an accountant named William Blake who moves west as the buffalo are being destroyed - along with Native American lives. This Native American guy named "Nobody" becomes William Blake's guide because, when "Nobody" was kidnapped and taken to Europe and put on display like an animal, he discovered the work of William Blake.

"Some are born to endless night. Some are born to sweet delight."

It also has a killer guitar soundtrack by Neil Young.

by former in-laws in Belgium (Flammands, not Walloons) always did the three kiss thing and I often forget that last one too often... AWKWARD. LOL.

[Surya Gayatri]

31. Ah, Blake...a finely honed soul from a higher dimension. How true--his words

are deceptively simple, but cosmic in their reach. The images he paints are indelible.

[G_j]

25. de Gouges

So if I understand correctly, she is the model/inspiration for the Statue of Liberty?

One of the world's great feminists.
That is wonderful!

[RainDog]

26. not exactly

the goddess of liberty was the model - but women revolutionaries portrayed her in these things like... living statues (tableux) - this was a popular form of "entertainment" around that time anyway - recreating famous scenes, etc.

But, when the Revolutionaries overthrew the church (which was also part of the aristocracy at the level of leadership) they replaced the Christian symbols with revolutionary ones - so, rather than Mary, they had "the goddess of liberty" and later Greek goddesses like Minerva.

The French renamed their calendar, adopted the decimal system - this was a direct response to overthrowing the monarchy and the "king's foot" as a measurement. Underground Paris still has these French Revolutionary months, etc. painted on stones beneath the modern city.

They intended to entirely remove any trace of the previous power structure's presence in their lives - but this didn't last, of course - and this was the model for horrors in Cambodia too, fwiw - it wasn't all lovely.

But the French, like the Americans, were HUGELY influenced by Greek and Roman models - they wanted to do away with the caste systems of church and state (tho the Americans had an incomplete revolution because they maintained slavery.)

[G_j]

33. thank you!

so interesting!

[RainDog]

34. here's some more fun trivia

When John Adams was ambassador to England, after the American Revolution, he attended the nonconformist church in Newington Green led by Richard Price, who was a radical/liberal and supporter of revolution. This was all before the French Revolution.

Price helped Wollstonecraft to establish herself - she supported herself and her sister by creating a school for girls - and helped her sister escape from an abusive marriage (which was a scandalous thing to do at the time). Wollstonecraft defended her mother against her abusive father when she was younger, too.

Wollstonecraft's ideas were highly influenced by Price's views - and while Adams was in England, his wife, Abigail, was there too. She met Wollstonecraft and later read/owned a copy of Wollstonecraft's early feminist work defending rights for women. Abigail is famous for the statement to her husband to "remember the women." Wollstonecraft, and by extension, de Gouges, was very influential in American women's lives at the time regarding their own struggle for human rights (tho not realized at the time.)

Price wrote pamphlets, and was published by Joseph Johnson, too. In addition, Price helped Joseph Priestly, also published by Johnson, who discovered oxygen. I always loved the metaphorical idea of revolutionaries discovering "how we breathe" around the time when people were also breathing in the exhilarating ideas of "liberty, fraternity, and equality."

Priestly and others at the time who were involved in scientific discoveries were all shut out of Oxford and Cambridge because they were not members of the church of England. If you didn't adhere to the status quo, iow, you were kept from the sources of power via education. However, these dissenters, rather than those who were favored by the status quo, were the ones who began the scientific revolution - this is OFTEN the case - that those, in history, who are marginalized become the forefront of a new era because they are not afforded the comforts of privilege and power - in various arts (b/c science at that time was also an art of a sort.)

So, Franklin was also a curious sort in this same way - and also met Priestly and Price and others - including Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles. Erasmus also knew Wollstonecraft.

Eramus Darwin wrote poetry that described the process of evolution in the 1700s within the plant world - and his poetry was scandalous because it talked about the sex life of plants!!!!!!

Young women were discouraged from learning anything of use because they might learn about things like plant sexuality... and THIS reality - that women were kept in a state of ignorance - was the foundation of Wollstonecraft's work - while men then (just as now, if you can believe this shite is still repeated) said women's minds were not capable of rational thought - and therefore participation in democracy/voting - while Wollstonecraft said society made women so - not any natural mode of being. Her education of young girls set out to prove her point.

AND, William Blake was friends with these scientists, as well. The scientists formed a group and called themselves "The Lunar Men" because they would travel to visit one another by the light of the full moon to discuss their discoveries and tests. Franklin also visited with "the lunar men" and, with them, experimented with laughing gas (because they had discovered nitrous oxide.)

So the founders experimented with drugs... LOL.

[G_j]

35. --

fascinating

[GreatCaesarsGhost]

36. Kicked and recommended