Reinstating Olympe de Gouges? A Graphic Odyssey

Abstract

Since the mid-2010s, interest in Olympe de Gouges as a pioneer of feminism has consistently grown in the wake of fourth-wave feminism and international social movements such as #MeToo. After almost two centuries of oversight or representations of de Gouges as illiterate and a victim of her time, a number of historians and authors have been working to reinstate her legacy as a writer and actor of the French Revolution. In conjunction with this newfound interest in feminist figures like Olympe de Gouges, the literary field experienced a metamorphosis with the growing popularity of graphic novels, from both popular/mainstream and scholarly perspectives. This article proposes to analyze how the depiction of Olympe de Gouges in the eponymous graphic novel by Catel and José-Louis Bocquet in 2012 contributed to the mainstream recognition of de Gouges as well as subsequent feminist figures, and enabled the development of graphic biographies as a literary sub-genre.