Charlotte Corday
Charlotte Corday was a notable figure in the tumultuous period of the French Revolution, recognized for her controversial assassination of the radical revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat on July 13, 1793. Born into minor nobility in Normandy, Corday was educated in a conservative environment, developing a political stance aligned with the moderate Girondins, who opposed the more radical Montagnards led by Marat. Disillusioned by the violent rhetoric of Marat, Corday believed her actions were necessary to protect the republic from further bloodshed.
After traveling to Paris and gaining access to Marat under the pretense of providing information about Girondin activities, she fatally stabbed him while he was in his bathtub. Corday was arrested and went to trial, where she calmly justified her actions, claiming she had killed one man to save thousands. Executed by guillotine just days later, she was viewed through varying lenses; some considered her a villain, while others hailed her as a heroic figure akin to the biblical Judith. Her legacy remains complex, with strong opinions rooted in individual political beliefs reflecting the divisive nature of the revolutionary era.
Subject Terms
Charlotte Corday
French assassin
- Born: July 27, 1768
- Birthplace: Normandy, France
- Died: July 17, 1793
- Place of death: Paris, France
Major offense: Murder of French revolutionist Jean-Paul Marat
Active: July 13, 1793
Locale: Paris, France
Sentence: Execution by guillotine
Early Life
Charlotte Corday (SHARH-laht kohr-DAY) was born into minor Norman nobility, the second of four children of Jacques François de Corday and Charlotte-Marie Gaultier des Authieux. Corday’s father was a descendant of the dramatist Pierre Corneille: He was the great-grandson of Marie Corneille, the sister of Corneille. The day after Corday’s birth, she was baptized in the nearby Church of Saint-Saturnin de Lignerits.
The family lived in several places in Normandy when Corday was a child. At age eight, she moved in with her uncle, Charles Adrien de Corday, a parish priest and later, an abbot. In 1782, she entered the girls’ boarding school of l’Abbaye aux Dames in Caen. There, she became interested in politics. She was naturally conservative and religious but believed that the power of the king should be limited. When revolutionary pressures closed l’Abbaye aux Dames in 1791, Corday moved in with a cousin at 148 rue St.-Jean in Caen.
Criminal Career
Before the French Revolution (1789-1799), Jean-Paul Marat was a physician, scientist, philosopher, and friend of Benjamin Franklin. In September, 1789, he began publishing an underground revolutionary journal called L’Ami du Peuple (friend of the people); he soon was also known as the Friend of the People. A hateful, spiteful man, his writings were full of vitriol toward anyone connected with the monarchy. The oppressed lower classes, the sansculottes, loved him.
The Girondins were moderate republicans who supported a constitutional monarchy. Their implacable enemies were the Montagnards—the radical left faction consisting mainly of the Cordeliers, led by Marat and Georges Danton—and the Jacobins, led by Robespierre. Marat especially detested the Girondins, seeing them as royalist appeasers and counterrevolutionaries, all deserving the guillotine.
By 1792, Corday was an avowed Girondin. When the sansculottes and Montagnards succeeded in overthrowing the Girondins on June 2, 1793, she decided to act. She blamed all that had gone wrong during the revolution on Marat’s exhortations to violence. On July 9, she took the mail coach from Caen to Paris and got a room at the Hôtel de Providence, where she wrote her manifesto Adresse aux Français amis des lois et de la paix (address to the French people, friends of law and peace), explaining what she was about to do and why. On July 13, after buying a knife at a kiosk in the Palais-Royal, Corday gained admission to Marat’s home at 30 rue des Cordeliers by a ruse, promising to betray Girondins from Caen. Since Caen was known as a hotbed of Girondist sentiment, Marat was eager for this information. He suffered from seborrheic dermatitis, a painful skin condition that drove him to spend most of his time in the bathtub. She found him there and stabbed him once in the heart. Marat’s death cries brought help. She was instantly arrested without resistance.
Legal Action and Outcome
On the morning of July 17, Corday was brought to the Palais de Justice for trial. Referring to July 13 as the Day of the Preparation of Peace, she calmly admitted the murder, insisting that she had acted alone, that she had killed one man to save one hundred thousand, that she had been a republican before the revolution, and that she never lacked the will or energy to do what was morally correct and honorable. She went to the guillotine that evening, believing that she had righted a great wrong and that history would judge her favorably.
Impact
How one regards Charlotte Corday is a function of one’s own political views. Sympathizers with Marat see her as a reactionary villain; those who consider Marat a monster admire her as a courageous tyrannicide. Monarchists in general and the British in particular glorified her immediately after her death. They compared her with the biblical Judith of Bethulia, who used her beauty to gain audience with the invading Assyrian general Holofernes, then got him drunk and killed him, becoming a heroine to the oppressed Hebrews. Corday herself was inspired by the story of Judith.
Corday’s admirers called her the Angel of Anger, the Angel of Justice, the Angel of Assassination, and other names. German revoltionary Adam Lux deemed her more gallant than Brutus, the murderer of Julius Caesar. Lux died on the guillotine in November, 1793, for writing a pamphlet praising Corday. Throughout the nineteenth century, the English-speaking world saw her as essentially heroic. Thomas Carlyle wrote in his monumental The French Revolution (1837) that Marat was “squalid” but that Corday apparently did not foresee that killing him would make him a martyr, in turn having the undesired effect of emboldening his allies and making the Reign of Terror even worse.
Bibliography
Debriffe, Martial, ed. Charlotte Corday. Paris: France-Empire, 2005. One of a stream of French tributes to Corday that includes works by such notables as Alphonse de Lamartine, Jules Michelet, and André Chénier.
Gelbart, Nina Rattner. “The Blonding of Charlotte Corday.” Eighteenth-Century Studies. 38, no. 1 (Fall, 2004): 201-221. Interesting speculation on why Corday’s admirers persist in describing her as blond, even though her hair was brown.
‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Death in the Bathtub: Charlotte Corday and Jean-Paul Marat.” In The Human Tradition in Modern France, edited by K. Steven Vincent and Alison Klairmont-Lingo. Wilmington, Del.: SR Books, 2000. Pages 17-32 provide a study of contemporary attitudes toward Corday, especially in view of her gender.
Gottschalk, Louis R. Jean Paul Marat: A Study in Radicalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967. An authoritative analysis of Corday’s victim, which provides a deeper understanding of why she chose Marat as a target.
Montfort, Catherine R. “For the Defense: Charlotte Corday’s Letters from Prison.” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteeneth Century 329 (1995): 235-247. A sympathetic view of Corday’s last hours.
Scherr, Marie. Charlotte Corday and Certain Men of the Revolutionary Torment. New York: AMS Press, 1970. Classic study of the Girondist faction and its enemies, with focus on Corday, Marat, Danton, and Robespierre.
Shearing, Joseph. The Angel of the Assassination: Marie-Charlotte de Corday d’Armont, Jean-Paul Marat, Jean-Adam Lux: A Study of Three Disciples of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. New York: H. Smith and R. Haas, 1935. Written by Marjorie Bowen under the pseudonym Joseph Shearing, this book remains a standard about Corday.