dorcet,[52] as part of the great new programme of
social and political reform which was to some small degree realized in
the upheaval of the Revolution. The political emancipation of women
constituted no part of the Revolution. It has indeed been maintained,
and perhaps with reason, that the normal development of the
revolutionary spirit would probably have ended in vanquishing the claim
of masculine predominance if war had not diverted the movement of
revolution by transforming it into the Terror. Even as it was, the
rights of women were not without their champions even at this period. We
ought specially to remember Olympe de Gouges, whose name is sometimes
dismissed too contemptuously. With all her defects of character and
education and literary style, Olympe de Gouges, as is now becoming
recognized, was, in her biographer's words, "one of the loftiest and
most generous souls of the epoch," in some respects superior to Madame
Roland. She was the first woman to demand of the Revolution that it
should be logical by proclaiming the rights of woman side by side with
those of her equal, man, and in so doing she became the great pioneer of
the feminist movement of to-day.[53] She owes the position more
especially to her little pamphlet, issued in 1791, entitled _Declaration
des Droits de la Femme_. It is this _Declaration_ which contains the
oft-quoted (or misquoted) saying: "Women have the right to ascend the
scaffold; they must also have the right to ascend the tribune." Two
years later she had herself ascended the scaffold, but the other right
she claimed is only now beginning to be granted to women. At that time
there were too many more pressing matters to be dealt with, and the only
women who had been taught to demand the rights of their sex were
precisely those whom the Revolution was guillotining or exiling. Even
had it been otherwise, we may be quite sure that Napoleon, the heir of
the Revolution and the final arbiter of what was to be permanent in its
achievements, would have sternly repressed any political freedom
accorded to women. The only freedom he cared to grant to women was the
freedom to produce food for cannon, and so far as lay in his power he
sought to crush the political activities of women even in literature, as
we see in his treatment of Mme de Stael.[54]

An Englishwoman of genius was in Paris at the time of the Revolution,
with as broad a conception of the place of woman side by side with man
as Oly