Mother and Son: loyalty and the Terror

​Pierre Aubry was the son of Olympe de Gouges and the man she was forced to marry as a teenager. He was born in 1766, a year after his parents were married. In 1767, his father either died or disappeared, and Olympe became solely responsible for his upbringing. 
 
As a single mother, Olympe de Gouges did everything she could to ensure that her son received the good education she did not have, paying for tutors to make up for the fact that she could not teach him herself. She also included him in her own life, and as a child he became part of her theatrical group. When he was old enough, she bought him a place in the army. 
 
Given this, what happened after her death seems like the lowest possible treason. Five days after his mother's death, Aubry published an 'Address to the public' in which he recused his mother and all her work. Yes, this was not the end of the story. In a letter written on 11 April 1795, a year and a half after his mother's death, Pierre Aubry wrote to the National Convention to ask that Olympe de Gouges's name be rehabilitated. 

I am writing to ask you to rehabilitate an illustrious victim. 
The person I am asking you to recall is Olympe de Gouges, my mother. It is this woman whose only default was to push everything to excess and whose love of her country led to the scaffold. 
 
[…] my mother's shadow hangs over your head and is waiting for you to grant her the justice she gave you in her writings. 
I do not mean to offer an apology of her work nor of the services she rendered to her country. I attach the former to this petition so that you may examine them, if the Convention sees fit to do so. As to the latter, I direct you to the records of the Constitutional Legislative Assembly, and even of the Convention where you can see all the sacrifices she made for our country. 
 
Perhaps some ill wishers will find it extraordinary that I should ask for my mother's rehabilitation, when I produced a contradictory piece under the reign of Robespierre. I will reply that this piece was not by me, that I signed it without reading it, that I was in the bottom of a dungeon, waiting for my death and that a wife and two children were all that kept me from it. But given that the Convention was oppressed and influenced, am I not to be excused for this? I could not save my mother then, and I had a family I would abandon in misery and despair. 
 
I believe, Citizens representatives, that the justice and humanity will impel you to render onto a victim of tyranny, the honour she lost for having supported a cause you share with her.