ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author chooses the very different writings of two women revolutionaries, Olympe de Gouges and Louise Michel as my main examples, but the model is much more widely applicable. The bourgeois women of the tiers-etat in the towns varied enormously in wealth and education. The revolutionary egalitarianism and self-evident justice of the famous declaration are shown, by a semiotic tour de force, to conceal another more deeply rooted ideology. If ‘man’, as women were assured, then as now, subsumed the category of woman, how was it possible that, in some clauses, the mere substitution of ‘women’ for ‘men’ and ‘citizeness’ for ‘citizen’ was enough to produce a ‘scandalous’ and ‘ridiculous’ text? An important feature of the ‘Declaration of the rights of woman and of the citizeness’ that follows the appeal to nature is that it copies exactly the structure of the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
