Olympe de Gouges: ‘Si cette femme n’avoit pas de fusées dans la tête’

Abstract

Abstract This article shows how some androcentric representations affected Olympe de Gouges to the point that she was neither seen as the embodiment of the French Revolution, nor as one who ever embraced the revolutionary project. Through the work of Franco-Greek philosopher Cornélius Castoriadis on the imaginary institution of society, it will explore Gouges’s dissidence regarding the democratic project of the Revolution. Between her explicit demand for women’s autonomy and the desire to participate actively in the political institutions, the article shows how the Gouges’s radical imagination made her create her own version of what a revolutionary woman is, thereby allowing her to create both a political and social fantasy deeply rooted in imagination and counter-revolution. Her radical imagination reveals how she never embodied the revolutionary praxis since she refused to accept the implicit and instituted power of society, at an important time in French history.