Charlotte Corday
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Charlotte Corday (July 27, 1768 – July 17, 1793), more fully Marie Anne Charlotte de Corday d'Armont, was the assassin of Jean-Paul Marat.
Born in Saint-Saturnin-des-Ligneries, part of today's commune of Écorches in the Orne département, Normandy, France, Corday was a member of an aristocratic but poor family. She was a descendant of the French dramatist Pierre Corneille on her mother's side. She was educated at the Abbaye aux Dames, a convent in Caen, Normandy. She approved of the French revolution in its early stages, and was an enthusiastic supporter of the Girondists.
Marat was a member of the radical Jacobin faction that initiated the mass atrocities and beheadings known as the Reign of Terror, which followed the early stages of the Revolution. He was a journalist, exerting power through his newspaper, The Friend of the People, L'Ami du peuple.
In 1789,([Disputed statementdisputed]—see [Louis XVI, January 21 1793, and the denunciation of Marat by Jacques Pierre Brissot, a leading Girondist, helped her finally decide to do so.
Carrying a copy of Plutarch's Parallel Lives under her arm, she travelled from Caen to Paris on July 9, and stayed at the Hotel de Providence. She bought a dinner knife at the Palais-Royal, and wrote her Speech to the French who are Friends of Law and Peace, explaining her actions. She went to Marat offering to inform him about a planned Girondist uprising in Caen. She was initially turned away, but on a second attempt on July 13, Marat admitted her into his presence. He conducted most of his affairs from a bathtub because of a debilitating skin condition.
Marat copied down the names of the Girondists as Corday dictated them to him. She pulled the knife from her scarf and plunged it into his chest, piercing his lung, aorta and left ventricle.
A political cover-up was attempted prior to the trial; Claude François Chauveau-Lagarde, who previously had represented Marie Antoinette, was appointed as defence for Charlotte Corday. The president of the Tribunal ordered him to enter a plea of insanity on his client's behalf, in order to remove any notion of patriotic idealism from the act. Chauveau-Lagarde, who more than understood Corday's actions, although unable to disobey the Tribunal made a mockery of it with a well-honed piece of equivocal verbiage.
At trial, Corday testified that she had carried out the assassination alone, saying "I killed one man to save 100,000." It was likely a reference to Maximilien Robespierre's words before the execution of King Louis XVI. Four days after Marat was killed, on July 17, 1793, Corday was executed under the guillotine. Immediately upon decapitation, the executionner lifted her head from the basket and smacked it on the cheeks, a gesture which received a lukewarm reaction from the crowd. http://www.gmarchal.net/marat.htm
The assassination did not stop the Jacobins or the Terror: Marat became a martyr, and busts of Marat replaced crucifixes and religious statues that were no longer welcome under the new regime. The anti-female stance of many revolutionary leaders was increased by Corday's actions. The Revolution now turned with full force on Marie Antoinette, the king's imprisoned widow.
In Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade, the assassination of Marat is presented as a play, written by the Marquis de Sade, to be performed by inmates of the asylum at Charenton, for the public.
American dramatist Sarah Pogson Smith (1774-1870) also memorialized Corday in her verse drama The Female Enthusiast: A Tragedy in Five Acts (1807). A minor character in P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves series is named after Charlotte Corday.
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This is the moment memorialized by Jacques-Louis David's painting (illustration, left). The iconic pose of Marat dead in his bath has been reviewed from a different angle in Baudry's painting of 1860, both literally and interpretively: Corday, rather than Marat, has been made the hero of the action. References
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