Six women are honored at the Pantheon. What if Olympe de Gouges was the seventh, after Joséphine Baker? This is what women, historians and feminists for the most part will be asking this Saturday, November 5 at 3 p.m. opposite the Pantheon.
An event on the initiative of Catherine Marand-Fouquet, who has carried this wish since 1989, the year she asked François Mitterrand. Since then, she has written tirelessly to each president and organized rallies around the date of the beheading of the famous French revolutionary, arrested by the Montagnards and guillotined on November 3, 1793.
Emmanuel Macron would wait for an “opportunity”
“She is a monument to women’s rights, an anti-racist and a fervent defender of non-violence” defends Catherine Marand-Fouquet. Olympe de Gouges is famous for having written the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Citizen of 1791, but also for her unfailing commitment against slavery. It was translated into a play, The Slavery of the Negroes or the Happy Shipwreckwhich denounced the economic system of slavery, and almost earned him the Bastille.
Why is Olympe de Gouges still not in the Pantheon? “She was the victim for years of a very wicked historiography which sought to demolish her,” explains the historian. Since then, the tide has turned. And Emmanuel Macron promised Catherine Marand-Fouquet that he was waiting for “an opportunity”…