Things in History You Should Know: Charlotte Corday

As originally published in the Meliorist.

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Assassins are largely either assholes or not on speaking terms with reality. Often both. When we think of John Wilkes Booth nowadays, we do not think of his famed skill as a Shakespearean actor. Nay, we think, “Man, he was an almighty asshole for assassinating Lincoln.” So allow me to express my admiration of and wish to high five Charlotte Corday, slayer of Jean-Paul Marat!

Once upon a time, there was a revolution. A French one. They saw what the Americans did with theirs and were like, “Dude. We want some of that. Only more hardcore.” The country was bankrupt, the peasantry (the Third Estate, if you will) was sick of being oppressed by the nobility and the clergy, so why the hell not? The kick-off in 1789 went pretty well considering, but in 1793, it had all gone to hell.

The Legislative Assembly had fallen the previous year, with massacres occurring fast on its heels. Louis XIV, now known as Citizen Capet, was executed in January, and his wife and children were still imprisoned. The Committee of Public Safety formed in April, signifying the victory of the radical Jacobins over the republican Girondists. And who was egging on all this? You guessed it: Marat!

Here is where Corday enters the picture. Born of a minor aristocratic family, educated in a convent, and a big fan of Rousseau and Plutarch with an extra helping of Voltaire, she knew what she was about. Things she was for: the Girondists. Things she was against: executing deposed monarchs, violent and bloody civil war, and assholes like Marat who thought that item number two was fantastic so long as it ensured the survival of his version of what the revolution should look like. Corday’s thought processes thus went that if she took down Marat, with all his lovely rhetoric in his lovely little newspaper (called The Friend of the People, because it sounds more cuddly that way), further violence could be prevented.

Well, she was wrong on that front, but you can’t blame a woman for trying. She skedaddled off to Paris on July 9th and bought herself a kitchen knife with a six-inch blade as soon as she got there. And man, if you’ve ever sliced your finger open whilst chopping vegetables, you know what those suckers can do. Also, it could fit snugly into Corday’s corset – you know that’s what all the fashionable revolutionaries were doing anyway. She wrote a nice letter explaining why she was going to knife some punk and on the 13th, and went out in the fresh afternoon air to do it.

She called on Marat at his home at noon, asking for an audience on grounds that she knew of some fiendish Girondist hijinks and oh, did she mention that she had some names to give him? Enemies of the state and what have you? Scintillating stuff. But she was turned away by his wife, Simonne Everard, because her husband was busy having a bath. So she came back several hours later. Marat was still in the bath, Everard still didn’t want to let her in, but he decided that the business of revolutionizing could not wait and had her brought in.

Corday spilled the artificial beans while Marat wrote it all down. (He was still in the bathtub, but had a plank placed across it as a writing desk.) They had a good, long chat, finishing with his pleasant statement that everyone she named was totally going to have their heads chopped off. Then Corday had to ruin their burgeoning friendship by taking out that kitchen knife and going all stabby on him. Marat called out for Everard, but it was too late and he was made holey by Corday’s attentions.

Needless to say, she didn’t get away and she was put on trial. And, well, they didn’t really believe in long, drawn-out trials in that day and age. Not being overly impressed with her statement that “I killed one man to save 100,000,” they quickly decided that hey, the guillotine might be a fine place for her! So they shoved her neck under the blade on July 17th, a mere eight days since she left for Paris and a mere four since she went all Brutus on Marat’s ass. She was ten days shy of twenty-five.

Alas for Corday, Marat achieved martyr status and the Reign of Terror got into full swing. A whole motherlode of people got guillotined over the course of two years – estimates run as high as 40,000. Oops.

So, do we congratulate Corday for her courage in taking out someone who really was doing his level best to decrease the peace and effectively willing to go to her death for it as such a young age? Or do we condemn her for the violence that her actions sparked, even if it was unintentional? Do we have a glass of wine and marvel at how f*cked up that entire revolution was?

The answer is: yes.