In the summer of 1793, the French Revolution had reached a crisis point. The moderate Girondin faction had been purged from the National Convention, leaving the radical Jacobins, led by Maximilien Robespierre and Jean-Paul Marat, in control. The infamous Reign of Terror was underway, with hundreds executed by guillotine as the revolution devoured its own.
It was against this bloody backdrop that the 24-year-old Girondin sympathizer Charlotte Corday took matters into her own hands. On July 13, 1793, she assassinated Marat in his bathtub, plunging a kitchen knife into his chest. In one stroke, Corday had altered the course of the revolution. She also sealed her own fate, going to the guillotine as an unrepentant martyr just days later.
Over two centuries later, Corday remains a polarizing figure – a heroine to some, a deluded fanatic to others. But her story offers a fascinating window into one of history‘s great upheavals, and the complex political and personal motivations behind an act of revolutionary violence.
The Revolution‘s Rival Factions
To understand Corday‘s actions, one must first understand the fractious political landscape of the French Revolution‘s early years. Although united in their desire to overthrow the monarchy and aristocracy, the revolutionaries were bitterly divided over how far the social and political transformation should go.
The Girondins, centered around deputies from the Gironde region, favored a more moderate approach. They wanted to establish a constitutional monarchy or republic and spread the revolution‘s ideals gradually beyond France‘s borders. Prominent Girondins like Jacques Pierre Brissot and Madame Roland envisioned a society based on reason, education and the Enlightenment values of liberty, equality and fraternity.
In contrast, the Jacobins, so named for their political club which met in a former Jacobin monastery in Paris, were zealous radicals bent on completely eradicating the old order. Led by the brilliant and ruthless Robespierre, the Jacobins saw the revolution as a life-or-death struggle requiring total commitment and uncompromising action. For them, anyone who stood in the way was a traitor to be eliminated.
The two factions clashed repeatedly in the National Convention and in the streets. But by the spring of 1793, the Jacobins had gained the upper hand. Brissot and other Girondin leaders were expelled from the Convention and later arrested. Many would eventually face the guillotine themselves during the Terror.
It was a grim outcome for the Girondins, but at least one of their sympathizers was not ready to admit defeat. For Charlotte Corday, Marat and his Jacobin allies were "criminals" who had to be stopped before they destroyed France. She would choose a different kind of battlefield to confront them.
Marat: The Revolution‘s Radical Pen
If Robespierre was the cold, calculating face of the Jacobin movement, Jean-Paul Marat was its fiery, uncompromising voice. Born in 1743, Marat was a physician, scientist and journalist who rose to prominence through his inflammatory writings in his newspaper, L‘Ami du Peuple (The Friend of the People).
From his Spartan living quarters, Marat churned out venomous attacks on rivals and counter-revolutionaries, real and imagined. He called for harsh measures against hoarders, speculators and other "enemies of the people," and played a key role in inciting the September Massacres of 1792, in which over 1,000 prisoners were murdered by angry mobs.
To Corday and other critics, Marat was a "monster" consumed by paranoia and blood lust. His physical appearance, ravaged by a debilitating skin condition, only added to the sinister aura. But to his fervent working class readers, "The Friend of the People" was a hero – the revolution‘s truest defender and champion of the downtrodden.
By 1793, Marat‘s influence had reached its apex. From his seat in the Convention and the Jacobin Club, he continued to agitate for more radical measures. Even as he grew sicker, retreating to his medicinal baths for relief, Marat‘s pen remained as sharp as ever. It would be in this vulnerable state that his nemesis would find him.
Corday: An Unlikely Assassin
On the surface, Charlotte Corday seemed an improbable candidate for political violence. Born Marie-Anne Charlotte de Corday d‘Armont in 1768, she was a member of the minor Norman aristocracy. Orphaned as a child, Corday was sent to live in a Caen convent.
It was there that Corday first developed her passion for Enlightenment thought, devouring works by Plutarch, Rousseau and Voltaire in the convent library. But it wasn‘t until the revolution broke out that she became actively engaged in politics.
In 1791, Corday moved to Caen to live with a cousin. The city was a hotbed of Girondin sympathy, and Corday soon fell in with like-minded salon-goers. She was particularly taken with the romantic revolutionary rhetoric of the Girondin deputies staying in Caen as they fled the Jacobins‘ wrath.
Corday was no wide-eyed naïf, however. Highly intelligent and fiercely independent, she corresponded with Girondin leaders and wrote her own political treatises. In her "Address to the French, Friends of Law and Peace," penned just before her fateful mission, she railed against the "anarchy" engulfing France and the "monsters" leading it astray.
For Corday, Marat was the chief monster who had to be eliminated. She would later explain her motives succinctly: "I killed one man to save 100,000." With that conviction, she set out for Paris – and a bloody rendezvous with history.
The Deed and the Reckoning
Corday arrived in Paris on July 11, 1793, and checked into the Hôtel de Providence under a pseudonym. The next day, she bought a kitchen knife with a six-inch blade and wrote a manifesto justifying her planned act as tyrannicide in the tradition of Brutus.
Initially, Corday planned to kill Marat at the Convention in front of the deputies for maximum impact. But she discovered he was too ill to attend, so she changed course. On July 13, Corday went to Marat‘s lodgings on the Rue des Cordeliers, claiming to have a list of Girondin traitors in Caen.
Admitted to Marat‘s bathroom, where he was soaking in a medicinal bath to relieve his condition, Corday began to read off a list of names. As Marat eagerly wrote them down, Corday pulled out the knife and plunged it into his chest, puncturing his lung and aorta.
Marat cried out, "Aidez-moi, ma chère amie!" ("Help me, my dear friend!") and died within seconds. Corday made no attempt to flee, and was quickly arrested by Marat‘s associates. She would maintain her composure throughout the ensuing ordeal, expressing no remorse for her deed.
At her trial on July 17, Corday calmly reiterated that she had "killed one man to save 100,000." She denied any accomplices, stating she had told no one of her plans. Donning a red dress as a symbol of her martyrdom, Corday went to the guillotine that same evening.
Her last request was for a portrait by the National Guard officer Jean-Jacques Hauer. With her hair powdered and neck bared, Corday sat for three hours with a steady gaze. The resulting sketch would help enshrine her legend as the revolution‘s self-sacrificing "angel of assassination."
Aftermath and Legacy
The political impact of Marat‘s assassination was immediate and far-reaching. The Jacobins moved swiftly to elevate their fallen hero as a revolutionary martyr, staging elaborate funerals and immortalizing his death scene in Jacques-Louis David‘s famous painting.
Conversely, the Girondins were further demonized as traitors and conspirators. Corday‘s act was seen as proof of their treachery, and the calls for their heads only grew louder. Within months, the Girondin leaders had been guillotined, effectively eradicating the revolution‘s moderate faction.
Women revolutionaries were also dealt a blow by the assassination. Already viewed with suspicion by the male-dominated Jacobins, Corday‘s transgressive violence was used to justify a crackdown on women‘s political activities. Within a year, women‘s revolutionary clubs were banned entirely.
But Corday‘s defiant stand also galvanized opponents of the Jacobins. Her story was told and retold in the salons, casting her as a virtuous Girondine avenging the revolution‘s betrayal. Later generations would further romanticize her as a tragic heroine, a "saintly assassin" driven by idealism.
This mythologizing has only continued in the centuries since. Corday has been depicted in countless paintings, plays, novels and films, from Alphonse de Lamartine‘s poetic hagiography to Peter Weiss‘s avant-garde drama and even anime reimaginings.
So who was the real Charlotte Corday? A deluded fanatic, as the Jacobins charged, or a principled tyrannicide, as her admirers insisted? The truth, as always, is more complex. Corday was undoubtedly a committed revolutionary who believed fervently in the Girondin cause. But she was also a product of her tumultuous times, driven to an act of shocking violence in the face of what she saw as a greater evil.
In the end, perhaps the most enduring legacy of Corday‘s brief but extraordinary life is the questions it raises about the nature of political violence and the limits of revolutionary idealism. In a revolution that so often pitted competing visions of liberation against each other, Corday‘s story reminds us that one person‘s heroic stand can be another‘s unforgivable crime.
Over two hundred years later, Charlotte Corday still fascinates and divides us – a testament to the enduring power of her revolutionary moment. As long as we grapple with the meaning and legacy of the French Revolution, the "angel of assassination" will remain an indelible part of its story.
References
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Corday, C. (1793). Address to the French, Friends of Law and Peace. In A. Amic & E. Mouttet (Eds.), Mémoires de Charlotte Corday (pp. 5-8). Paris: Librairie Académique Didier et Cie.
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Cheetham, A. (2001). Charlotte Corday: Femme Fatale or Feminist Heroine? The Historian, 63(2), 269-288.
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Gullickson, G. L. (1993). Charlotte Corday and the Politics of Murder. The French Review, 66(6), 982-991.
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Kindleberger, E. (1994). Charlotte Corday in Text and Image: A Case Study in the French Revolution and Women‘s History. French Historical Studies, 18(4), 969-999.
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Linton, M. (2013). Choosing Terror: Virtue, Friendship, and Authenticity in the French Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Schama, S. (1989). Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
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Shusterman, N. C. (2014). The French Revolution: Faith, Desire and Politics. London: Routledge.
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Tackett, T. (2015). The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
