​The revolutionary period, in particular the Terror, was hard on the Paris graveyards. Many people died in massacres and at the Guillotine who had to buried in the already full graveyards. 
 
When the body counts started to rise, the Parisians needed somewhere to pile up their dead. 
 
The site of the church of Sainte Madeleine, first opened in the 13thcentury was located roughly where 8 Boulevard Malherbes now stands. It had a very small cemetery and a slightly larger one was built in 1690, on land that was closer to the Faubourg Saint Honore, already a posh neighborhood. 

​In 1720, the cure of la Madeleine sold a large tract of land to be convereted to a graveyard. The graveyard was built on a large rectangle of 45  by 19 meters surrounded by a wall.
 
It filled up slowly at first, but in 1770 it received its first mass burial.  On the occasion of the celebrations of the wedding of Louis the Dauphin and Marie-Antoinette, a show of fireworks was given to the people of Paris. This was a novelty, and more scary than exciting for many. There was a crush in the crowded streets and several hundred people died. These were buried in the Madeleine. 
 
The next large scale burial happened in August 1792, when the Paris revolutionaries, assisted by the Marseillais massacred the King’s Swiss Guards. Their mutilated bodies were thrown into the Fosse Commune at the Madeleine. 
 
By then it was summer, and the smell in the neighborhood became unbearable – someone reported it at the assembly, but it was decided that the risk of false rumours of a plague epidemic was too great if a fuss was made, and the subject was dropped. The rich inhabitants of the quartier would just have to put up with it. 
The location of the Madeleine was also very convenient for transporting bodies from the Place du Carousel and Place de la Revolution – the guillotine’s first two locations. 

​Légende - Au recto, à gauche sur l'image, à l'encre, inscriptions correspondant à la numérotation de l'image : "1. Fosse au fond où sont 133 corps de ceux qui ont péri / Place Louis XV, rue Royale et Porte St. Honoré le 31 mai 1770, / soir du Mariage du Dauphin, depuis Louis XVI." ; "2. Fosse près du mur du jardin Descloseaux pour / quatre Ecclésisatiques et 500 Suisses morts le 10 août 1792." ; "3. 2e. Fosse pour 500 Suisses morts aussi le 10 août 1792" ; "4. Tombeau de Louis XVI. 21 janvier 1793. / -id- de la Reine 16 8bre 1793" ; "5. Fosse de Charlotte Corday seule, juillet 1793." ; "Fosse au fond, à droite, pour le Dc. d'Orléans / et beaucoup d'autres personnes frappées / du glaive de la loi ; comblée en Xbre. 1793." ; "7. Grande fosse au pied de la maison / Descloseaux contenant 1000. / victimes, en grande partie nobles, / distinguées par leur attachement / au Roi. / Nota. Mme. Elisabet / a été enterrée à Mousseaux.".
Date et signature - Au recto, en bas à droite, à l'encre brune : "copie conforme le 29 janvier 1878 LL". - From the Musée Carnavalet. 

​Eventually, in March 1794, the Madeleine was closed and the next victims of the Guillotine were buried elsewhere.  But before then, more famous bodies were entered there, including the King and the Queen, many of their supporters and family members, Charlotte Corday – who benefitted from a single occupancy plot, the twenty-two Girondins (including Brissot) who died on 31 October 1793, and of course Manon Roland and Olympe de Gouges. 
 
During the restoration, Louis XVIII built a chapel to the memory of his brother and sister in law. Small chapels were added later to commemorate the other victims of the Revolution. 

Olympe de Gouges died on 3 November 1793, Manon Roland 5 days later. Sophie de Grouchy survived them and died of illness in 1822 (she didn’t live to be much older than the other two, but she died a natural death). 

Her husband, Condorcet, because he’d died under an assumed name in the village of Bourg-La-Reine, had been thrown in a communal grave there. But in 1989, as part of the bicentennial celebrations, he was symbolically transferred to the Pantheon in Paris. 
 
Sophie de Grouchy had asked for her body to be disposed of in the ‘fosse commune’ and the money saved from an expansive burial to be distributed to the poor.

She was in fact buried in the Pere Lachaise, then a fairly recent cemetery in the North of Paris. The Père Lachaise was not popular then because its grounds were not consecrated. But the administrators held a public ceremony during which the purported remains of Heloise and Abelard were transferred to the Pere Lachaise. This marked the beginning of the cemetery’s literary history and is possibly one of the reasons why Sophie’s relatives decided to have her buried. 
​
Her grave is, however, very simple and probably some money was still saved for the poor. Her relatives respected her atheism and she was buried without a religious ceremony.
 
 
 

​Olympe de Gouges was very vocal in her attacks on slavery. What about Manon Roland and Sophie de Grouchy? There is, unfortunately, very little to say.
 
Manon Roland, when she first began to work out her republican views in writing adopted a similar view:in an essay written in 1777 for the Academy of Besançon, Roland writes that no republic is perfect if it allows slavery, whether Helots in Sparta, or anywhere in the world where women are in (metaphorical) chains, ‘the rust of barbarity covers their proud masters and ruins them together. The poisoned breath of despotism destroys virtue in the bud’ [Roland 1864: 337]. But in her case, she does not even touch on the question of the men and women working as slaves in the French colonies. What makes France despotic, she says, is the existence of a king, and for France to become a republic all that needs happen is for the king to be removed from a position where he dominate the people of France. As a close friend and correspondent of Brissot, it is unlikely that she was unaware of the abolitionist movement, and it seems strange that she chose not to write about it, even in correspondence with Brissot. Perhaps her close involvement with her husband’s political career, and in particular his work at the ministry of the interior meant that her focus had to be elsewhere. 
 
In Sophie de Grouchy’s case the absence of any writings of hers on slavery is probably just a function of the very small numbers of her writings we know of and have access to. We have strong reasons to believe, however, that she often worked with her husband, and Condorcet did write on slavery, twice. The first text was written before he knew Grouchy, in 1781, and published in Neufchatel under the pseudonym Joachim Schwartz. However, the text was reprinted in 1822 in an edition by Sophie de Grouchy, preceeded by Condorcet’s last work, the Sketch of Human Progress. It’s very likely that Grouchy had worked on the Sketch with Condorcet, and that she edited it, and made significant changes to the manuscript after his death. Indeed, a later editor, Arago, decided to discard her edition because it was not close enough to the manuscript Condorcet had left. So the fact that Sophie decided to print the work on slavery in the same edition as the work she’d helped write is significant: this is something she could stand by.

​When Julien Raymond explains how racial prejudice grew in Saint Domingue, he says that ‘this prejudice is caused entirely by the jealousy of white women.” But what does he have to say about black women?
 
 
Before white women arrived, white men, who were sick from their travels, finding it hard to settle in the new climate, and lonely because they had not brought women with them, found comfort in black women. Sometimes they lived with them as if they were married, sometimes they freed them and married them, and sometimes they waited till they bore children to free them, or even simply freed the children, but not their mothers. Black women, Raymond said, made good, attentive companions, because they expected to receive freedom in exchange. 
When the first wave of white women arrived, they were not the beautiful young women of good family the men had hoped for, and Raymond suggests that women who had travelled alone that far may not be very virtuous. When these women arrived, men continued to prefer black women, who were certainly more compliant, as they still expected to be freed. 

Throughout the text, blame is piled on white women, but black women are not given a voice. They are described simply as the reward of white men, and the cause of dissensions between families, or a tool for building friendship between them. Their virtue is a function of the law – whether they can be married to white men or not – and they have no self-determination. Raymond does not consider whether a freed black woman could choose to live a life one way or another. And of course – chances are that she could not. Being married to one’s master is still being a relationship of domination, and it is not a marriage that a slave can choose to go into freely. But there is an interesting contrast in Raymond’s text between his treatment of white women (who were probably not given a great choice about abandoning their homes in France to marry a colonist) and of the black women, naturally caring, but unable to choose virtue unless the law makes it their only option. Nonetheless, nowhere does Raymond consider the role white men play, as dominators of black and white women, in the ensuing behaviour and attitudes of these women. 

​Suzanne Sanité Belair was a young free woman of colour (or possibly an emancipated slave) from Verrette in Haiti. In 1796, at the age of 15 she married Charles Belair, nephew and lieutenant, then general under the leader of the Haitian revolution Toussaint Louverture. 

The Belair couple worked together and Sanité became a lieutenant in Louverture’s army. The couple was captured together in 1802. 
The commandant Faustin Répussard of the French army wrote the following account to his General :

​Sanité and Charles were executed on 5 October 1802. He was condemned to the firing squad, but she, as a woman, was to be decapitated. She was 21.
 
The following account was published in an issue of La Fraternité, a Haitian weekly journal, some ninety years later : 

This week marked the 215th anniversary of Olympe de Gouge's execution. The French Ministry of Culture thought this was noteworthy enough to make it onto their Twitter feed.

The writer notes that Gouges was more than simply a pioneer of feminism. Not that being a pioneer of feminism isn't a good thing in itself, but we know that women philosophers who do only that will get dismissed as lacking in 'universality. But in Gouges' case, it is important to note, as the writer of the Tweet does, the was a prolific writer of political philosophy, openly criticizing first, the King, and then the Jacobins. And she was one of the earliest French philosophers to argue against slavery. 

The following is translated from the description of an exhibition of Korean artist Nam June Paik (1932-2006) at the Grand Palais in Paris, in June-July 2018. 

​In August 1791, the slaves of Saint-Domingue revolted. They were joined by free people of colour, and together they set plantations on fire. The whites fought back and the violence escalated on both sides. 
 
Either because she was actually blamed, or because she felt she would be blamed, or again because she thought that her work was relevant to what was happening and needed to be defended, Gouges brought out a new edition of her play, Zamore and Mirza in March 1792. 
 
In the preface of that edition Gouges attempted to defend her work against its detractors: she repeated what she had said in her open letter in 1790, that did not incite revolt, and that her motives were philanthropic and had justice on their side. She acknowledges that she prophesized the revolution, but claims that it was ‘an invisible hand’ that started it, and that she herself is blameless. 
 
But rather than spending time defending herself, or even reminding the colonists that ‘she told them so’ and that they are responsible for what happened to them to a large extent – she thinks they have suffered enough – Gouges decided to lecture those she had previously defended: the slaves and free men of colour. 
 
Her admonition is in two parts. First, she blames the Haitian revolutionaries outright for their ‘ferocity’ and ‘cruelty’ telling them that by their actions they demonstrate that they belong in chains, that they are more brute than human. She acknowledges that her evidence is hearsay – she has read reports from white men of crimes committed by black men. Yet, perhaps because she has witnessed similar crimes being committed in Paris, she is inclined to believe these reports.
 
One cannot help sensing that Gouges had placed great trust in these people she had not met, that she had seen in them something close to her own ideal of human nature – unsophisticated nature of the sort she felt was most suited to happiness. Even now she claims that slaves and people of colour live ‘closer to nature’ than their tyrants, the white colons, do. This makes little sense even if she is only addressing slaves. What does she mean by living closer to nature? It cannot be to live as nature intended, as they are slaves and she does not believe slavery is natural. Is it simply wearing fewer layers of protective clothing and spending more time outside in the heat? If so, how can she regard this as a good thing? The climate of Haiti was ill-suited for field work, and the black slaves suffered from it as much a white workers would have, the only difference being that they had no choice but to work until they dropped. 
 
Her claim is even more puzzling in the case of free people of colour, whom Gouges addresses in that same sentence, and who lived lives very much like those of the white colonists. They owned property, or worked in the city, and had their own slaves. They received the same education as their white peers did, and some, who had been sent to France to learn, were indeed better educated (which created some resentment amongst the poorer white colonists). Her close acquaintance, Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier de Saint-George, was an aristocrat, a colonel in the army, and an influential musician whose name was put forward for the direction of the Paris Opera. Saint-George was probably living as far from nature as it was possible to do in the late 18thcentury! In the colonies themselves, many free men and women of colour were better off than the whites. Their ancestors had inherited lands at a time when it was plentiful, and the family wealth had had time to grow, so that they were better off than newly arrived white families – which created a certain amount of resentment. 
 
The colonies were also full of white paupers, the ‘pacotilleurs’ who made a living selling poor quality merchandise. These were the real lower class of the free Haitian society. So it is a mystery what Gouges is trying to say when she claims that those people lived ‘closer to nature’ than their tyrants. 
 
In the second part of her admonition Gouges asks that the slaves, instead of revolting, should wait for the ‘wise laws’ to see to it that they receive just treatment. And the free men of colour, she says, should count their blessings. The French Nation has given them more freedom than they ever had, she says. And both slaves and free men of colour are better off, she says, in the colonies than they were in their own countries, where their own parents sold them into slavery, where human beings are being hunted like animals, and in some cases eaten too. 
 
There is something very strange with hindsight, in Olympe’s atttitude to the revolutionary Haitians. She seems very willing to take seriously the reports of those she still calls the ‘Odious colonists’, and shows no effort to find out how much truth there is in them. The very idea, it seems, that her beloved victims have turned violent against their tyrants shocks her. Yet, even Zamore et Mirzashows a hero who murdered his master, and who is at the end of the play, pardoned. 

​In 1792, upon hearing reports of plantations being set on fire by rebelling slaves in Saint Domingue, and white colonists being tortured and murdered, Olympe decided to reprint her abolitionist play, Zamore and Mirza, with a new preface justifying what she still saw as a philanthropic work. 

​But she was clearly rattled by the violence she heard of. Yet the reports were one-sided: the white colonists wrote home asking for help, slaves and free men of colour were busy acting and planning their revolution. But there were some reports of mindless violence on the part of white colonists too, and those had started before the revolution. One such act was the mobbing and murder of a respected and well loved seventy year old mulatto plantation owner, Guillaume Labadie, whose home in Aquin was invaded under false pretenses – rumours that he was holding a meeting of men of colour – by twenty five white men who shot him and tied him to the tail of a horse, dragging the wounded man around town until he was dead. An account of this was published by Julien Raymond, in a letter to Brissot, at the end of his book on colonial prejudices. It is possible that Gouges would have heard of it. But one report from those who are habitually abused does not have the same effect as panicked letters coming in from the colonies by those who thought themselves safe. Pictures of plantations in flames were published, and no doubt the events themselves were exaggerated – for after all, who would check? Travel to Haiti was difficult and took enough time that by the time someone from France would get there the dead would have been long buried. 

Gouges’ reaction was twofold. First, she decided to admonish the slaves and men of colour she had previously defended, telling them that they were worse than their tyrants, and the if no man was born to live in chains, they showed them to be necessary. 
 
Secondly, she decides that no good can come from trying to apply philosophical ideas to the real world. Writings such as her own Le Bonheur Primitif, Rousseau’s On Social Contract, and unnamed but ‘august’ writings by Brissot, she says, although they are admirable, can never be truly useful as the establishment of new doctrines will always cause more evil along the way than good. 
 
“It is easy even for the most ignorant man to start a revolution with a few exercise books.” 
 
Revolutionary France has drawn plenty evil from Rousseau’s writings, defacing them by turning them into calls for violence. What chance, she asks would Brissot’s and her own writings on slavery stand in such a climate? 

One is led to ask why it was so easy for Gouges to turn her back on those she had previously defended - if indeed that is what she was doing. But more on this later. 

In 1783 Olympe wrote her first play, Zamore et Mirza, ou l’heureux naufrage, and submitted to the Comédie Française. The actors liked it and accepted it. Unfortunately, her later dispute with Beaumarchais over Le Marriage Innatendu de Chérubin, meant that the Comédie just sat on her play and refused to put it on. The contract she had signed with them meant that it could not be played elsewhere in Paris. So Olympe took the play elsewhere, with her own theatrical troup, which included her son, and performed it in private theatres and in the provinces. In  1786, she had the play printed for the fist time. Two years later, she printed it again, with a postface, her “Réflections sur les hommes nègres” in which she explained what the philosophy behind the play was. Why are black people treated like animals, she asked? 
​

​In 1788, Olympe was already sensing a change for the better in politics, and felt it her duties to show the world that if they wanted to redress injustice, slavery was the place to start: 
 

​As she pointed out in January 1790, in an open letter to an (anonymous) American colonist attacking her play, at the time she wrote Zamore and Mirza, there was no organised French abolitionist movement. The Societé des Amis des Noirs did not yet exist.  She ponders in that letter, whether it was her play that caused Brissot and the others to create that society, or whether it was just a happy coincidence: 

In fact, Brissot did take note of the play, and in the winter 1789, he made use of his growing influence to persuade the actors of the Comédie Française, finally to put it on. Unfortunately, the actors bore a grudge, so they arranged for the play to be put on on the last day of the year, after which Parisians would be returning to their family homes to celebrate the New Year. The contract required that a play make a certain amount of money in the first three days if it was to stay on the program. The first night was a success – but a political rather than an artistic one. People came to support it and to protest against it, and they were so loud about it, that few could hear the actors. Fortunately the text was in print, and reviewers at the time noted that they’d had to refer to the printed version to know how the play ended. 
 
Those who protested against the play most vociferously were the colonists, who had strong financial interest in the laws regarding slavery staying as they were. One such colonist wrote to Gouges, imputing that she was but the tool of Brissot’s society, and that her play was a call for the slaves of America to revolt. Gouges responded in an open letter, (1790) arguing, as we saw, that it was she, not Brissot, who’d first given voice to the abolitionist in France, and that her play did not incite revolution, but that it enjoined the French people and the colonists to see that all men were equal and abolish slavery, and the slaves to trust in the new laws and wait for a better future. 
 
Two years later, these accusations came back when the slaves and the free people of colour of Saint-Domingue revolted. 

​