Marie-Anne Charlotte de Corday d'Armont (27 July 1768 – 17 July 1793), known as Charlotte Corday (French: [kɔʁdɛ]), was a reactionary figure of the French Revolution who assassinated revolutionary and Jacobin leader Jean-Paul Marat on 13 July 1793. Corday was an aristocratic sympathiser of the Girondins, a moderate faction of French revolutionaries in opposition to the Jacobins. She held Marat responsible for the September Massacres of 1792 and, believing that the Revolution was in jeopardy from the more radical course the Jacobins had taken, she decided to assassinate Marat.
On 13 July 1793, having travelled to Paris and obtained an audience with Marat, Corday fatally stabbed him with a knife while he was taking a medicinal bath. Marat's assassination was memorialised in the painting The Death of Marat by Jacques-Louis David. Corday was immediately arrested, found guilty by the Revolutionary Tribunal and on 17 July, four days after Marat's death, executed by the guillotine on the Place de Grève.
The direct consequences of the assassination were the opposite of what she expected: the assassination did not stop the Jacobins or the Reign of Terror, which intensified after the murder. Marat became a martyr, a bust of him replaced a religious statue on the rue aux Ours, and several place-names were changed to honour Marat. In 1847, writer Alphonse de Lamartine gave Corday the posthumous nickname l'ange de l'assassinat (the Angel of Assassination).
Born in Saint-Saturnin-des-Ligneries, a hamlet in the commune of Écorches (Orne), in Normandy, Corday was a member of a minor aristocratic family. Her father was Jacques François de Corday, Seigneur d'Armont, and her mother was Charlotte Marie Jacqueline Gaultier de Mesnival. Her parents were cousins, and she was a fifth-generation descendant of the dramatist Pierre Corneille.
While a young girl, her older sister and her mother died. Her father, unable to cope with his grief over their deaths, sent Corday and her younger sister to the Abbaye aux Dames convent in Caen, where Corday had access to the abbey's library and first encountered the writings of Plutarch, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Voltaire. After 1791, she lived in Caen with her aunt, Madame le Coustellier de Bretteville-Gouville. The two developed a close relationship, and Corday was the sole heir to her aunt's estate.
Corday's physical appearance is described on her passport as "five feet and one inch ... hair and eyebrows auburn, eyes gray, forehead high, mouth medium size, chin dimpled, and an oval face".
After the National Convention radicalised further and headed towards terror, Corday began to sympathise with the Girondins. She admired their speeches and grew fond of many of the Girondist groups whom she met while living in Caen. She respected the political principles of the Girondins and came to align herself with their thinking. She regarded them as a movement that would ultimately save France. The Girondins represented a more moderate approach to the revolution and they, like Corday, were sceptical about the direction the revolution was taking. They opposed the Montagnards, who advocated a more radical approach to the revolution, which included the extreme idea that the only way the revolution would survive invasion and civil war was through terrorising and executing those opposed to it.
The influence of Girondin ideas on Corday is evident in her words at her trial: "I have killed one man to save a hundred thousand." As the revolution progressed, the Girondins had become progressively more opposed to the radical, violent propositions of the Montagnards such as Marat and Maximilien Robespierre. Corday's notion that she was saving a hundred thousand lives echoes this Girondin sentiment as they attempted to slow the revolution and reverse the violence that had escalated since the September Massacres of 1792.
Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat
Jean-Paul Marat was a member of the radical Jacobin faction that had a leading role during the Reign of Terror. As a journalist, he exerted power and influence through his newspaper, L'Ami du peuple ("The Friend of the People"). She believed that Marat was threatening the republic and that his death would end violence throughout the country.
On 9 July 1793 Corday left her aunt, carrying a copy of Plutarch's Parallel Lives, and went to Paris where she took a room at the Hôtel de Providence. She bought a kitchen knife with a 5-inch (13 cm) blade. During the next few days, she wrote her Adresse aux Français amis des lois et de la paix ("Address to the French, friends of Law and Peace") to explain her motives for assassinating Marat.
Corday initially planned to assassinate Marat in front of the entire National Convention. She intended to make an example of him, but upon arriving in Paris she discovered that Marat no longer attended meetings because his health was deteriorating from a skin disorder (perhaps dermatitis herpetiformis). She was then forced to change her plan. She went to Marat's home before noon on 13 July, claiming to have knowledge of a planned Girondist uprising in Caen; she was turned away by Catherine Evrard, the sister of Marat's fiancée Simonne.
On her return that evening, Marat admitted her. At the time, he conducted most of his affairs from a bathtub because of his skin condition. Marat wrote down the names of the Girondins that she gave to him; she then pulled out the knife and plunged it into his chest. He called out: Aidez-moi, ma chère amie! ("Help me, my dear friend!"), and then died.
In response to Marat's dying shout, Evrard rushed into the room. She was joined by a distributor of Marat's newspaper, who seized Corday. Two neighbours (a military surgeon and a dentist) attempted to revive Marat. Republican officials arrived to interrogate Corday and to calm an angry crowd that appeared ready to lynch her.
Corday sent the following farewell letter to her father which was intercepted and read during the trial, the letter helping to establish that Marat's murder was premeditated:
Forgive me, my dear papa, for having disposed of my existence without your permission. I have avenged many innocent victims, I have prevented many other disasters. The people, one day disillusioned, will rejoice in being delivered from a tyrant. If I tried to persuade you that I was passing through England, it was because I hoped to keep it incognito, but I recognized the impossibility. I hope you will not be tormented. In any case, I believe that you would have defenders in Caen. I took Gustave Doulcet as a defender: such an attack allows no defense, it's for the form. Goodbye, my dear papa, please forget me, or rather rejoice in my fate, the cause is good. I kiss my sister whom I love with all my heart, as well as all my parents. Do not forget this verse by [Pierre] Corneille:
Crime is shame, not the scaffold!
It is tomorrow at eight o'clock that I am judged. This 16 July.