Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne

Edition

Olympe de Gouges, Les Droits de la femme. A la Reine, [Paris, 1791], 24 p., in-8, the copy of the BnF on Gallica (ark:/12148/bpt6k9629179b, views 14 to 30), pages 6 to 22. Kept: the declaration as printed, from its heading “Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne,” (the title of the poster) and its italic line “A décréter par l’Assemblée nationale dans ses dernières séances ou dans celle de la prochaine législature.” to the end of the “Postambule”, which runs to the rule of page 22: the preamble, the seventeen articles, and the whole postamble, with the “Forme du Contrat social de l’Homme et de la Femme” and the pages on the colonies that the print sets under it, and the three footnotes of these pages, set as notes. Left out: the letter to the Queen and the address “Homme, es-tu capable d’être juste ?” that precede the declaration (pp. 3-6), and what follows the rule of page 22 (the account of a morning in Paris and the postscript, pp. 22-24). The words were taken from the validated transcription of fr.wikisource (Index “De Gouges - Les Droits de la femme, 1791.djvu”, pages 8 to 24, a scan of the same Gallica copy), collated by script with the OCR of Gallica, and read word by word against the page images; the transcription was set back to the print in some twenty places where it modernizes or errs (for instance gouvernemens, talens, enfans, reconnoissant, viendroit, A and Etre without accents, “M. de Bernis” for “Berais”, “de tous mes ouvrages”, “partage sa fortune avec”, “proportionnée”), and its editorial corrections (sœurs, noces, reste-t-il, été, mœurs) are not applied: the print has “soeurs”, “nôces”, “restent-il”, “eté”, “moeurs”. Two misprints of the print are corrected: “vons” (p. 13) is set as “vous”, and “Là différence” (p. 15) as “La différence”. Normalizations: the long s is set as a round s; words divided at line ends are joined; the spaces the print sets before commas and inside “Craignez - vous” and “peut - être” are dropped, and those before ; : ? ! are no-break spaces; the article numbers “I I.” etc. are set without their letter spacing; footnote calls are numbered 1 to 3 (each “(1)” in the print). In article IX the print has a mark read as a semicolon after “coupable” (the transcription has a comma).

Rights

Olympe de Gouges died on 3 November 1793 (Wikidata Q206972), and the pamphlet was published in 1791: in the public domain in France (author died before 1 January 1956) and in the United States (published before 1931).

Gallica gives the scan the rights statement “domaine public”. Its conditions of use (https://gallica.bnf.fr/edit/und/conditions-dutilisation-des-contenus-de-gallica) make non-commercial reuse free with the credit “Source gallica.bnf.fr / BnF”, which the footer gives, and commercial reuse subject to a license; the poster reuses the text, not the images. The scan on Wikimedia Commons (File:De_Gouges_-_Les_Droits_de_la_femme,_1791.djvu, from Gallica) is marked PD-old-auto-expired.