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.
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This is where I live blog about my new book project, an intellectual biography of three French Revolutionary women philosophers. Categories
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