Charlotte Corday

Charlotte Corday

Charlotte Corday by Jean-Jacques Hauer
Born Marie-Anne Charlotte de Corday d'Armont
27 July 1768
Saint-Saturnin-des-Ligneries, Écorches (in present-day Orne), Normandy, France
Died 17 July 1793(1793-07-17) (aged 24)
Paris, France
Cause of death Execution by guillotine
Known for Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat
Religion Roman Catholic
Parent(s) Jacques François de Corday, seigneur d'Armont
Charlotte Marie Jacqueline Gaultier de Mesnival

Marie-Anne Charlotte de Corday d'Armont (27 July 1768 – 17 July 1793), known to history as Charlotte Corday (French: [kɔʁdɛ]), was a figure of the French Revolution. In 1793, she was executed by guillotine for the assassination of Jacobin leader Jean-Paul Marat, who was in part responsible for the more radical course the Revolution had taken through his role as a politician and journalist. More specifically, Marat played a substantial role in the political purge of the Girondins, with whom Corday sympathized. His murder was memorialized in the celebrated painting The Death of Marat by Jacques-Louis David, which shows Marat's dead body after Corday stabbed him in his medicinal bath. In 1847, writer Alphonse de Lamartine gave Corday the posthumous nickname l'ange de l'assassinat (the Angel of Assassination).

Biography

Corday's birth house in Normandy

Born in Saint-Saturnin-des-Ligneries, a hamlet in the commune of Écorches (Orne), in Normandy, Charlotte Corday was a member of a minor aristocratic family. She was a fifth-generation matrilineal descendant of the dramatist Pierre Corneille. Her parents were cousins.[1]

While Corday was a young girl, her older sister and their mother, Charlotte Marie Jacqueline Gaultier de Mesnival, died. Her father, Jacques François de Corday, Seigneur d'Armont (1737–1798), unable to cope with his grief over their death, sent Corday and her younger sister to the Abbaye aux Dames convent in Caen, where she had access to the abbey's library and first encountered the writings of Plutarch, Rousseau and Voltaire.[2]:154–5 After 1791, she lived in Caen with her cousin, Madame Le Coustellier de Bretteville-Gouville. The two developed a close relationship, and Corday was the sole heir to her cousin's estate.[2]:157

Political influence

After the revolution radicalized further and headed towards terror, Charlotte Corday began to sympathize 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.[3] The Gironde represented a more moderate approach to the revolution and they, like Corday, were skeptical 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 terrorizing and executing those opposed to it.[4] The opposition to this radical thinking, coupled with the influence of the Gironde, ultimately led Corday to carry out her plan to murder the most radical of them all, Jean-Paul Marat.

The influence of Girondin ideas on Corday is evident in her words at her trial: "I knew that he Marat was perverting France. 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 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.

Marat's assassination

The Death of Marat by Guillaume-Joseph Roques {1793}; note the knife lying on the floor at lower left in the Roques and David versions
Charlotte Corday by Paul Jacques Aimé Baudry, posthumous (1860). Under the Second Empire, Marat was seen as a revolutionary monster and Corday as a heroine of France, as indicated by her location in front of the map.

Jean-Paul Marat was a member of the radical Jacobin faction which 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").

Corday's decision to kill Marat was stimulated not only by her revulsion at the September Massacres, for which she held Marat responsible, but by her fear of an all-out civil war.[2]:161 She believed that Marat was threatening the Republic, and that his death would end violence throughout the nation. She also believed that King Louis XVI should not have been executed.[2]:160

The Death of Marat by David, (1793)

On 9 July 1793, Corday left her cousin, 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 six-inch blade. She then wrote her Addresse aux Français amis des lois et de la paix ("Address to the French people, friends of Law and Peace") to explain her motives for assassinating Marat.

Initially, she planned to assassinate Marat in front of the entire National Convention, intending to make an example out of him, but upon arriving in Paris she discovered that Marat no longer attended meetings because his health was deteriorating due to a skin disorder. 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 his wife, Simonne Evrard. On her return that evening, Marat admitted her. At the time, he conducted most of his affairs from a bathtub because of a debilitating skin condition. Marat wrote down the names of the Girondists that she gave to him, then she pulled out the knife and plunged it into his chest, piercing his lung, aorta and left ventricle. He called out, Aidez-moi, ma chère amie! ("Help me, my dear friend!") and died.

This is the moment memorialised by Jacques-Louis David's painting (illustration, right). The iconic pose of Marat dead in his bath has been reviewed from a different angle in Baudry's posthumous painting of 1860, both literally and interpretatively: Corday, rather than Marat, has been made the hero of the action. Following immediately on her trial Corday asked the court if her portrait could be painted, selecting as the artist a National Guard officer Jean-Jacques Hauer who had begun sketching her. Hauer's likeness (see above) was completed shortly before Corday was summoned to the tumbril, after she had viewed it and suggested a few changes.[5]

Trial and execution

Caricature of Corday's trial by James Gillray, 1793.

Corday underwent three separate cross-examinations by senior revolutionary judicial officials, including the President of the Revolutionary Tribunal and the chief prosecutor. She stressed that she was a republican and had been so even before the Revolution, citing the values of ancient Rome as an ideal model.[6]

The focus of the questioning was to establish whether she had been part of a wider Girondist conspiracy. Corday remained constant in insisting that "I alone conceived the plan and executed it". She referred to Marat as a "hoarder" and a "monster" who was only respected in Paris. She credited her fatal knifing of Marat with one blow not to practicing in advance but to luck.[7]

On 17 July 1793, four days after Marat was killed, Corday was executed by guillotine, wearing the red overblouse denoting a condemned traitor who had assassinated a representative of the people. Standing alone in the tumbril amid a large and curious crowd she remained calm, although drenched by a sudden summer rainfall.[8] Her corpse was disposed of in the Madeleine Cemetery.

Aftermath

After Corday's decapitation, a man named Legros lifted her head from the basket and slapped it on the cheek. Charles-Henri Sanson, the executioner, indignantly rejected published reports that Legros was one of his assistants. Sanson stated in his diary that Legros was in fact a carpenter who had been hired to make repairs to the guillotine.[9] Witnesses report an expression of "unequivocal indignation" on her face when her cheek was slapped. The oft-repeated anecdote has served to suggest that victims of the guillotine may in fact retain consciousness for a short while, including by Albert Camus in his Reflections on the Guillotine ("Charlotte Corday's severed head blushed, it is said, under the executioner's slap.").[10] This offense against a woman executed moments before was considered unacceptable and Legros was imprisoned for three months because of his outburst.[11]

Charlotte Corday being conducted to her execution. By Arturo Michelena, 1889

Jacobin leaders had her body autopsied immediately after her death to see if she was a virgin. They believed there was a man sharing her bed and the assassination plans. To their dismay, she was found to be virgo intacta (a virgin).[12]

The assassination did not stop the Jacobins or the Terror: Marat became a martyr, a bust of him replaced a religious statue on the rue aux Ours and a number of place-names were changed to incorporate his.[13]

Cultural references

Charlotte Corday by François-Séraphin Delpech

Notes

  1. ↑ "Charlotte Corday", Encyclopedie (in French), FR: Larousse
  2. 1 2 3 4 Whitham, John Mills (1968), Men and Women of the French Revolution, Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press
  3. ↑ Cher, Marie (1929). Charlotte Corday and Certain Men Of The Revolutionary Torment. New York: D. Appleton and Company. p. 70. ISBN 1-4366-8354-8.
  4. ↑ Andress, David (2005). The Terror. Great Britain: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-0-374-53073-0.
  5. ↑ Schama, Simon. Citizens. pp. 740–741. ISBN 0-670-81012-6.
  6. ↑ Richard Cobb, pages=192-193 "The French Revolution. Voices from a momentous epoch: 1789-1795", Guild Publishing 1988
  7. ↑ Schama, Simon. Citizens. pp. 736–737. ISBN 0-670-81012-6.
  8. ↑ Schama, Simon. Citizens. p. 741. ISBN 0-670-81012-6.
  9. ↑ La Révolution française vue par son bourreau : Journal de Charles-Henri Sanson, Documents (in French), Monique Lebailly, preface, Le Cherche Midi, 2007, p. 65, ISBN 978-2-7491-0930-5; idem, Griffures, Paris: Éditions de l'Instant, 1988, ISBN 978-2-86929-128-7
  10. ↑ Reflexions sur la peine Capitale, a symposium by Arthur Koestler and Albert Camus, Calmann-Levy, page 139.
  11. ↑ Mignet, François (1824), History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814
  12. ↑ Corazzo, Nina; Montfort, Catherine R (1994), "Charlotte Corday: femme-homme", in Montfort, Catherine R, Literate Women and the French Revolution of 1789 (47), Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications, p. 45
  13. ↑ Schama, Simon. Citizens. p. 745. ISBN 0-670-81012-6.
  14. ↑ Hugo, Victor (1987). Les Miserables. Translated by Lee Fahnestock & Norman MacAfee. Signet Classics. p. 1175. ISBN 978-0-451-41943-9.

Further reading

External links

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