VSFamous throughout the world for having drawn up the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen in 1791, the writer Olympe de Gouges was guillotined in Paris in November 1793 for having denounced the excesses of the Terror. She was born, as we know less, in Montauban, in 1748. On the pediment of the municipal theater of the prefecture of Tarn-et-Garonne, this filiation has been displayed since 2006 in capital letters: “Théâtre Olympe-de-Gouges”.
Montauban let more than two centuries pass before paying homage to the woman of letters, born under the name of Marie Gouze. Admittedly, she had left her native city in her twenties, and had never mentioned it later in her works or in her correspondence. However, the city did not hesitate to honor two of its children, who also left for other places: the painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) and the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle (1861-1929), who share a museum. Finally, there are countless bars, statues, confectioneries or seminar rooms exhilarating The Tontons gunslingersthe comedy released in 1963. The cult replica of Lino Ventura “We should never leave Montauban” does not however owe much to the prefecture: the director Georges Lautner, according to the tourist office, “wanted to highlight a provincial town, in three syllables”.
In this context of selective disinterest, “Olympe de Gouges makes her way”assure Nadège Loublier and Aude Samarut, booksellers at La Femme Renard, in the city center, who observe the growing popularity of the Declaration of the Rights of Women and Citizens among Montalban high school students preparing for the French baccalaureate.
In the middle of the XVIIIe century, when Marie Gouze was born in rue Fraîche, Montauban was a dynamic shopping centre, founded six centuries earlier on a rocky outcrop overlooking the Tarn. The “new town”, built according to a checkerboard plan, was already articulated around the Place Royale, today Place Nationale. The harmony of this rectangular space can be read in the uniformity of the pink brick facades, the homogeneity of the terraces and parasols, or even the water mirror which refreshes the mineral atmosphere.
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But there is something else. “Each building, respecting the medieval plot, has a different width”, explains Corinne Mercedre, guide-lecturer for the city. It is obvious: some arcades are wide, others narrow, reflecting the respective wealth of the first owners. The buildings are also supported by a double row of brick columns, a feature that makes the place unique.
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