454 Ch. 12 • The French Revolution

The Three Estates hammering out the next constitution.

would fight against Britain. Half of Hispaniola—modern-day Haiti—became

the first free black state.

In 1791, the call for equal rights for women was first made explicit in

France when Olympe de Gouges (1755-1793), the daughter of a butcher,

published The Rights of Women. “The law,” she wrote, “must be the expres­

sion of the general will; all female and male citizens must contribute either

personally or through their representatives to its formation.” Encouraging

women to demand their natural rights—and thereby evidencing the influ­

ence of the Enlightenment—she called on the Assembly to acknowledge

womens rights as mothers of citizens of the nation. She insisted on women’s

right to education and to control property within marriage and to initiate

divorce proceedings. Olympe de Gouges defined the nation as “the union of

Woman and Man,” and suggested that men would remain unfree unless

women were granted similar rights, stopping short of demanding full politi­

cal rights for women.

Resistance and Revolution

On July 14, 1790, the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, an imposing

Festival of General Federation took place on the Champ-de-Mars, a royal

parade ground in Paris. But there was no revolutionary consensus in France.

In the south, nobles had already begun to organize resistance against the

Revolution, and militant Catholics attacked Protestants, who tended to sup­

port the Revolution. By the summer of 1791, as the Assembly promulgated

its constitution, open resistance to the Revolution had broken out in parts of

the south and west, and in Alsace.