Robespierre is a particularly interesting figure of the French Revolution, since 'Maximilien Robespierre, lawyer and delegate from Arras' has become so conflated with the propagandistic reinterpretations of his work, his speeches and his person. Despite all this, Robespierre has always remained very popular with women. The Amateur Historian is not well-versed enough in Robespierrist academia to venture a guess as to why this is, but his female fanbase has a long and respectable legacy.

For example, the famous feminist and playwright Olympe de Gouges appears to have written Robespierre a fanletter around the time of Louis XVI's trial and execution. She suggested that they drown themselves together in the Seine as an act of extreme patriotism.

It is not unsurprising that Robespierre preferred to express his patriotism in a less damp and deadly fashion.

Oh those idealistic authors....

Percy Blysse Shelley was not the only author was a rather too-idealistic view of how his work would be received.

Olympe de Gouges was a prolific pamphleteer, playwright and novelist during the French Revolution, who took an unusually proactive role within French society. She was widowed at 18 and, with her husband's fortune, began publishing her work. In order to get her opinions heard in public (since women could not mount the tribunal and give speeches in the National Assembly except in extraordinarily rare cases), she published her own pamphlets and posted them on walls, houses, lamp posts, trees, buildings... during the French Revolution, one of the most effective methods of disseminating information was to post pamphlets on every available stationary surface.

However, Olympe de Gouges decided to post hundreds of copies of her pamphlet "Three governments' battle to the death", in which monarchy, federalism and republicanism duke it out for the Grand Prize of France and de Gouges takes care to point out the good points of each government, including the monarchy. She chose to do this in the middle of a civil war between monarchists and republicans, in Paris, no less, the seat of the republican government.

Olympe de Gouges expected to open debate and to insert her opinion into governmental procedures, as had happened when she published a pamphlet offering to act as Louis XVI's trial lawyer.

She got arrested instead.