Activist. Patriot. Condemned. From poverty to Parisian salons, real life proto-feminist Olympe de Gouges fights for equality - for women and the enslaved – during the French Revolution. And pays for it with her head.

SYNOPSIS:

Olympe de Gouges was a radical feminist in Revolutionary France, at a time when women had no civil, financial or personal rights in society.

A petite bourgeoise from the French countryside, Olympe reinvents herself in Paris, where she hobnobs with the aristocracy and political elite. There she becomes a prolific writer, political activist, playwright and social agitator so intent on breaking norms to bring equality to all men and women, that she makes powerful enemies at the forefront of the Revolution.

A passionate advocate, she fights for the civil rights we take for granted today, but which were unheard of in the 18th century: equal treatment for women under the law, rights for divorced women, abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage. She argues for ending capital punishment and for the civil rights of all classes, particularly women’s rights. "A woman has the right to mount the scaffold. She must possess equally the right to mount the speaker's platform,” she says, foreshadowing her own appearance before a bloodthirsty Revolutionary tribunal.

When the French National Assembly publishes Lafayette’s Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789 - the template for both the French and the American Constitution - she quickly publishes a Declaration of the Rights of the Woman and the Female Citizen.

But Robespierre and leaders of the French Revolution are threatened by her mouthy advocacy, and Olympe follows King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette to the guillotine. However, Olympe retains the last laugh, as her radical ideas become the laws of the land by the 20th century.