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.
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[edit] Biography
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 remained there until 1791 when the convent was closed. She approved of the French Revolution in its early stages, and remained an enthusiastic supporter of the Girondists.
Marat, her future victim, was a member of the radical Jacobin faction which would later initiate 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.
[edit] Marat's assassination
Corday's decision to kill Marat was stimulated by her repugnance for the September Massacres, for which she held Marat responsible.
After 1791, Charlotte lived quietly with her cousin, Mme Le Coustellier de Bretteville-Gouville in Caen. On 9 July 1793, Charlotte left her cousin, carrying a copy of Plutarch's Parallel Lives under her arm, and took the diligence for Paris, where she took a room at the Hôtel de Providence. She bought a dinner knife at the Palais-Royal, and wrote her Adresse aux Français amis des lois et de la paix ("Speech to the French who are Friends of Law and Peace") which explained the act she was about to commit. She went to Marat before noon on 13 July, offering to inform him about a planned Girondist uprising in Caen. She was turned away, but on a second attempt that evening, 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.[citations needed] He called out, À moi, ma chère amie! ("Help me, my dear friend!") and died.
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.
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, one of the executioner's assistants — a man hired for the day named Legros — lifted her head from the basket and slapped it on the cheek. Witnesses report an expression of "unequivocal indignation" on her face when her cheek was slapped. This slap was considered an unacceptable breach of guillotine etiquette, and Legros was imprisoned for 3 months because of his outburst[1].
She was promptly autopsied, and announced to have been found a virgin. The body was disposed of in a trench along with other victims of the guillotine; it is uncertain whether the head was interred with her, or retained as a curiosity. It has been suggested[citation needed] that the skull of Corday remained in the possession of the Bonaparte family and their descendents (via the royal marriage of Marie Bonaparte) throughout the twentieth century.
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.
[edit] Cultural References
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.
"Charlotte Corday" is a song on folk singer Al Stewart's 1993 album Famous Last Words. Co-written by Tori Amos, it is about Corday's ghost returning to seek forgiveness. Because the real Corday showed no remorse for the assassination of Marat, the piece is ambiguous, and might be interpreted as illustrating Corday's sorrow for the brutal persecution of the Girondists that resulted from Marat's death.
[edit] Notes
- ^ François Mignet, History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814, (1824).
[edit] External links
[edit] Further reading
- Charlotte Corday, L’Adresse aux Français amis des lois et de la paix ("Address to French lovers of the laws and of peace").
- Stanley Loomis, Paris in the Terror. 1964: J. B. Lippincott.
