Charlotte Corday

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).

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