|
|
|
|
Charlotte Corday
|
| |
|
| |
Marie-Anne Charlotte de Corday d'Armont (27 July 1768 – 17 July 1793), known to history as Charlotte Corday, was a figure of the French Revolution. In 1793, she was executed under the guillotine for the assassination of Jacobin leader Jean-Paul Marat, who was responsible for the Reign of Terror.
Discussion
Ask a question about 'Charlotte Corday' Start a new discussion about 'Charlotte Corday' Answer questions from other users |
Encyclopedia
Marie-Anne Charlotte de Corday d'Armont (27 July 1768 – 17 July 1793), known to history as Charlotte Corday, was a figure of the French Revolution. In 1793, she was executed under the guillotine for the assassination of Jacobin leader Jean-Paul Marat, who was responsible for the Reign of Terror. His murder was memoralised in a celebrated painting by Jacques-Louis David which shows Marat after Corday had stabbed him to death in his bathtub. In 1847, writer Alphonse de Lamartine gave Corday the posthumous nickname l'ange de l'assassinat (the Angel of Assassination).
Biography
Born in Saint-Saturnin-des-Ligneries, now a hamlet in the commune of Écorches (Orne), in Normandy, France, Corday was a member of a minor aristocratic family. She was a descendant of the dramatist Pierre Corneille on her mother's side.
While Corday was a girl, her mother, Charlotte Marie Jacqueline Gaultier de Mesnival (1737-1782) and older sister died. Her father, Jacques François de Corday, Seigneur d' Armont (1737-1798), unable to cope with his grief over their deaths, sent Corday and her younger sister to the Caen Abbaye-aux-Dames. While there, Corday had access to the abbey's library where she first encountered the writings of Plutarch, Rousseau and Voltaire. After 1791, Corday lived with her cousin, Madame Le Coustellier de Bretteville-Gouville in Caen. Corday and Bretteville would become close companions and Charlotte was the sole heir to her cousin's estate.
Marat's assassination
Jean-Paul Marat was a member of the radical Jacobin faction which would lead the Reign of Terror, which followed the early stages of the Revolution. 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 repugnance for the September Massacres, for which she held Marat responsible, but for her fear of an all out civil war. She believed that Marat was threatening the Republic, and that his death would end violence throughout the nation. Corday also believed that the execution of King Louis XVI was unnecessary. Corday was not a Royalist, but she found virtue in all life, although not necessarily Marat's.
On 9 July 1793, Charlotte 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 ("Speech to the French who are Friends of Law and Peace") to explain her motives for assassinating Marat. She went first to the National Assembly to carry out her plan, but discovered Marat no longer attended meetings. 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, but on her return that evening, Marat admitted her. He conducted most of his affairs from a bathtub because of a debilitating skin condition.
Marat wrote down the names of the Girondists that Corday gave to him. She pulled the knife out and plunged it into his chest, piercing his lung, aorta and left ventricle. He called out, Aidez, ma chère amie! ("Help me, my dear friend!") and died.
This is the moment memorialized by Jacques-Louis David's painting (illustration, left). The iconic pose of Marat dead in his bath has been reviewed from a different angle in Baudry's painting of 1860, both literally and interpretively: Corday, rather than Marat, has been made the hero of the action.
Trial
At trial, Corday testified that she had carried out the assassination alone, saying "I killed one man to save 100,000." It was likely a reference to Maximilien Robespierre's words before the execution of King Louis XVI. Four days after Marat was killed, on 17 July 1793, Corday was executed under the guillotine. After her decapitation, a man named Legros lifted her head from the basket and slapped it on the cheek. Witnesses report an expression of "unequivocal indignation" on her face when her cheek was slapped. This slap was considered unacceptable and Legros was imprisoned for three months because of his outburst.
Jacobin leaders had her body autopsied shortly after her death to see if she was a virgin. They believed there was a man sharing her bed and assassination plans. To their dismay she was found to be virgo intacta (a virgin) which intensified the issue of women throughout France -- laundresses, housewives, domestic servants -- were rising up against authority that had been controlled by men for so long.
The body was dumped in a trench next to Louis XVI; it is uncertain whether the head was interred with her, or retained as a curiosity. It has been suggested that her skull remained in the possession of the Bonaparte family and their descendants (the Bonaparte family had acquired the skull from M. George Duruy, who acquired it from his aunt) throughout the twentieth century.
The assassination did not stop the Jacobins or the Terror: Marat became a martyr, and busts of Marat replaced crucifixes and religious statues that were no longer welcome under the new regime. The misogyny of many revolutionary leaders was increased by Corday's act. The Revolution now turned with full force on Marie Antoinette, the king's imprisoned widow.
Cultural references
Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote about her in his Posthumous Fragments of Margret Nicholson (1810).
Alphonse de Lamartine devoted to her a book of his Histoire des Girondins (1847), in which he gave her this now famous nickname: "l'ange de l'assassinat" (the angel of assassination).
Italian composer Lorenzo Ferrero (1951- ) composed an opera in three acts Charlotte Corday, which was premièred at Teatro dell'Opera di Roma in February, 1989.
In Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade, the assassination of Marat is presented as a play, written by the Marquis de Sade, to be performed by inmates of the asylum at Charenton, for the public.
American dramatist Sarah Pogson Smith (1774-1870) also memorialized Corday in her verse drama The Female Enthusiast: A Tragedy in Five Acts (1807). A minor character in P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves series is named after Charlotte Corday.
British singer-songwriter Al Stewart included a song co-written by Tori Amos about Corday on his album Famous Last Words (1993).
Further reading
- Charlotte Corday, L’Addresse aux Français amis des lois et de la paix ("Address to French lovers of the laws and of peace").
- Stanley Loomis, Paris in the Terror. 1964: J. B. Lippincott.
- Franklin, Charles. Woman in the Case. New York: Taplinger, 1967.
- Goldsmith, Margaret. Seven Women Against the World. London: Methuen, 1935.
- Sokolnikova, Halina. Nine Women Drawn from the Epoch of the French Revolution. Trans. H C Stevens. New York: Cape, 1932.
- Corazzo, Nina, and Catherine R. Montfort. "Charlotte Corday: femme-homme." In Literate Women and the French Revoltuion of 1789, edited by Catherine R. Montfort. Birmingham, Alabama: Summa Publications, Inc., 1994.
- Gutwirth, Madelyn. The Twilight of the Goddesses; Women and Representation in the French Revolutionary Era. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992.
- Kindleberger, Elizabeth R. "Charlotte Corday in Text and Image: A Case Study in the French Revolution and Women's History." French Historical Studies 18, no. 4 (1994): 969-999.
- Outram, Dorinda. The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class and Political Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.
- Whitham, John Mills. Men and Women of the French Revolution. Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, Inc., 1968.
External links
|
| |
|
|
