Marie-Anne Charlotte de Corday d’Armont

Charlotte was born in 1768 and was brought up in Normandy where her father was a member of the minor nobility.  She had studied at the Convent of Abbeye aux Dames in Caen where she had been sent after her mother died in 1782.

She was sympathetic to the Girondin cause and disliked the excesses of the revolution.  She met some of the Girondins who had escaped Paris after they had been evicted from the National Convention on the 2nd of June 1793.

Seeking to end what she saw as an escalation of violence she targeted Jean Paul Marat blaming him for the September Massacres of 1792.  In July 1793 she booked herself into a hotel and bought a five inch kitchen knife.   She wrote an Address to the French Who Are Friends of Law and Peace which sought to explain her subsequent actions.  She found where Marat lived and realised he no longer attended the Convention on account of his debilitating skin condition.  She gained access to him by claiming to have the names of Girondins in Caen.  After speaking to him for some minutes as he lay in his medicinal bath she plunged the knife into his chest killing him within seconds.  She was arrested at the scene having made no attempt to flee.

She insisted that she had acted on her own and had no accomplices merely stating “I killed one man to save a hundred thousand.”  She was forced to wear the red shirt of a parricide and was executed on 17th July 1793.  

Letters from Helen Maria Williams on murder of Marat by Charlotte Corday.  Taken from Letters Written in France, Broadview Literary Texts, Ormskirk (2002) p170-172

After this first preacher of blood had performed the part allotted to him in the plan of evil, he was confirmed to his chamber by a lingering disease to which he was subject, and of which he would probably soon have died.  But he was assassinated in his bath by a young woman who had travelled with this intention from Caen in Normandy.  Charlotte Anne Marie Corday was a native of St. Saturnin……

She was immediately apprehended, and conducted to the Abbaye prison, from which she was transferred to the Conciergerie, and brought before the revolutionary tribunal.

She acknowledged the deed, and justified it by asserting that it was a duty she owed her country and mankind to rid the world of a monster whose sanguinary doctrines were framed to involve the country in anarchy and civil war, and asserted her right to put Marat to death as a convict already condemned by the public opinion.  She trusted that her example would inspire the people with that energy which had been at all times the distinguished characteristic of republicans; and which she defined to be that devotedness to our country which renders life of little comparative estimation….

Her deportment during the trial was modest and dignified.  There was so engaging a softness in her countenance, that it was difficult to conceive how she could have armed herself with sufficient intrepidity to execute the deed.  Her answer to the interrogatories of the court were full of point and energy.  She sometimes surprised the audience by her wit, and excited their admiration by her eloquence………..

It is difficult to conceive the kind of heroism which she displayed in the way to execution.  The woman were called furies of the guillotine, and who had assembled to insult her on leaving the prison, were awed into silence by her demeanour, while some of the spectators uncovered their heads before her, and others gave loud tokens of applause.  There was such an air of chastened exultation thrown over her countenance, that she inspired sentiments of love rather than sensations of pity.  She ascended the scaffold with undaunted firmness, and, knowing that she only had to die, was resolved to die with dignity.