Charlotte Corday was born into a minor aristocratic family and educated in a convent. Like many other young idealists, she became a supporter of the French Revolution in its early stages, seeing it as a benevolent process for social change. She belonged to the moderate Girondin faction of the Revolution, and would have agreed with Wordsworth’s friend Beaupuy, whom Wordsworth describes in The Prelude as pointing to a hungry girl, saying ‘Tis against that/ Which we are fighting.’
However, the ‘September Massacres’, an indiscriminate slaughter of royalists ordered by Danton in 1792, in which thousands of men, women and children were butchered, transformed the views of moderates such as Corday. To quote Wordsworth again: ‘I thought of those September massacres. . ./And felt and touched them, a substantial dread’. The Revolution had become monstrous.
Corday resolved to kill Jean-Paul Marat, one of the leading lights of the Terror. Like most advocates of terror, Marat liked compiling lists of his enemies, and Corday requested a meeting offering to inform on disaffected Girondins. Corday purchased a knife and wrote a justification for her plan to kill Marat, addressed to the people of France, for her action. On the evening of 13 July, Marat, as had become customary due to a bad skin condition, received Corday in his bathtub, and began writing down the names of the supposed traitors as she recited them. Then Corday brought out her knife and stabbed him in the chest. He called out, À moi, ma chère amie!’ – ‘Help me, my dear friend!’ – before dying. Jacques-Louis David’s painting of this moment, The Death of Marat, became, and remains one of the iconic depictions of revolutionary terror: the saint-like Marat hangs over the side of the bath with the list in his hand; he has died while working for the people, murdered by an enemy of the people. Corday is excluded from the painting. In a much later painting by a lesser talent, Paul Baudry, Corday is portrayed as a dignified, virginal tyrannicide, standing over the slumped, scabrous corpse of Marat.
What Happened Next
Corday’s trial was problematic for the regime: she was young, attractive, articulate, and many French people were cheering her (quietly). The Tribunal tried to solve the problem by ordering her defence counsel to enter a plea of insanity which reduced the proceedings to a farce. Corday defiantly declared she had killed not a man but a wild beast, and that she had killed him that others might live – a sharp and provocative jibe at the rhetoric of revolutionary martyrdom. Corday was guillotined and the executioner’s assistant stunned the watching, and by now pretty hardened crowd, by slapping Corday’s detached head. Thousands more Girondins, and other moderates and royalists, were to die in further Jacobin purges. See also 1774: Edmund Burke is enraptured by Marie-Antoinette; 1774: Joseph Priestley discusses dephlogisticated air with Antoine Lavoisier