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Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the French playwright who, in 1791, wrote The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen. This was Olympe de Gouges (1748-93) and she was responding to The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen from 1789, the start of the French Revolution which, by excluding women from these rights, had fallen far short of its apparent goals. Where the latter declared \\u2018men are born equal\\u2019, she asserted \\u2018women are born equal to men,\\u2019 adding, \\u2018since women are allowed to mount the scaffold, they should also be allowed to stand in parliament and defend their rights\\u2019. Two years later this playwright, novelist, activist and woman of letters did herself mount the scaffold, two weeks after Marie Antoinette, for the crime of being open to the idea of a constitutional monarchy and, for two hundred years, her reputation died with her, only to be revived with great vigour in the last 40 years.

With

Catriona Seth\\nMarshal Foch Professor of French Literature at the University of Oxford

Katherine Astbury\\nProfessor of French Studies at the University of Warwick

And

Sanja Perovic\\nReader in 18th century French studies at King\\u2019s College London

Producer: Simon Tillotson