French convent girl Charlotte Corday ‘killed one man to save thousands’

FRENCH beauty Charlotte Corday believed killing Jean Marat, 225 years ago, would save thousands of lives.

Murder of Marat by Charlotte Corday, 1880, by J. Weerts.

AS she drove a kitchen knife cleanly and fatally into the chest of bath-bound French revolutionary publisher Jean-Paul Marat 225 years ago, Charlotte Corday believed her act would save thousands of lives.

Billed as “the people’s friend” for his revolutionary newspaper, Marat suffered a debilitating skin disease often attributed to his time hiding in Paris sewers during the early days of the French revolution in 1789.

In the bloody foment of broiling allegiances that pledged to deliver “liberty, equality, fraternity”, Marat, a former royal surgeon, and noble-born but poor Corday aligned with different factions.

Marat, born in Boudry, Switzerland in 1743, had been a well-known doctor, specialising in skin and eye conditions, in London where he published research papers in the 1770s. In 1777 he was appointed as physician to guards of the comte d’Artois, later Charles X, youngest brother of Louis XVI, and also called to consult at the Palace of Versailles. After failing to be appointed to the French Academy of Sciences, Marat quit his medical post to publish articles pleading for the drafting of a liberal constitution when the States General met in June 1789, the first since 1614.

In September 1789 he published a daily newspaper, Le Publiciste Parisian, later changing the name to L’Ami du peuple, or the people’s friend. Forced to flee to London in late 1789 because of his virulent attacks on royalty, he returned in May 1790 to condemn monarchy, government and the aristocracy in his newspaper.

Jean-Paul Marat, was a radical journalist and politician during the French Revolution.

Corday was born on July 27, 1768 in a village near Vitmoutiers, Normandy. Her older sister and their mother, Charlotte Gaultier de Mesnival, died when she was a child. At age nine her father Jacques Francois de Corday, Seigneur d’Armont, sent Charlotte and a younger sister to Caen to be educated at a convent, then a common way for women of poor means to get an education. She left the convent, where she read works by philosophers Plutarch, Rousseau and Voltaire, in 1791 to live in a gloomy Caen mansion known as the Grand Manoir with a relative, Madame Le Coustellier de Bretteville-Gouville, who introduced her to Girondin politics. The Girondins were moderate republicans among the half-million strong Jacobin Club that dominated the anti-Royalist French National Assembly in the early days of the revolution. The Jacobins splintered after Louis XVI was overthrown in March 1792, with the Montagnards, or Mountain faction, advocating violent revolution.

As Prussian troops advanced into France in the Revolutionary War, inflaming mass panic, Paris erupted in bloodshed in the 1792 September Massacre. Poor and working class residents, or sans-cullotes because they could not afford silk pants favoured by nobles, joined murderous riots, encouraged by powerful orators and journalists. Lower classes stormed prisons on September 2, killing up to 1400 prisoners, including Swiss Guards and royal soldiers detained after an August 10 attack on the Tuileries, as well as nobles, clergymen and suspected counter-revolutionaries.

Born into French nobel family in Normandy in 1768, monarchist Charlotte Corday was guillotined four days after she murdered revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat by stabbing him in the heart in 1793.

Horrified, Corday, read articles by leading Girondin members and constantly heard Marat’s name. She identified him as the ideological leader behind the excesses of Georges Danton and Maximilien Robespierre. Her thoughts of Marat’s advocacy for cruelty became an obsession, and Corday blamed him for every revolutionary crime. Rid of Marat, she later wrote, Heaven might “be more kindly” to France.

As Montagnards attacked, a Girondin leader Charles Barbaroux took refuge in Caen in June 1793. He gave Corday a letter of introduction to Girondin politician Claude Perret, who in April 1793 had threatened Marat with a sword during parliament.

Corday, a pretty women tanding about 160cm, travelled to Paris, where at 11am on July 13 she knocked on the door of Marat’s house at Rue des Cordelliers. Denied access, at 7pm she returned, saying she had a letter identifying Girondin refugees hiding in Normandy. She found Marat at a makeshift desk across his bath, where he spent most days soaking in a herbal solution. Although his face was misshapen with illness, Corday attacked when he gloated at the prospect of Girondin heads laying on a guillotine. The “indignation that swelled” in her own heart at Marat’s words had shown her where to strike his chest, she said, slicing his lung, aorta and left ventricle.

After intensive interrogation, she was tried quickly. She admitted she was in Paris to kill Marat, saying “I killed one man to save 100,000”. Sentenced to the guillotine, her thick chestnut curls were cut off above her neck on the orders of the executioner. On July 17 she was driven to Place de la Revolution, the only one of 12 prisoners wearing a red dress, identifying her a murderer. Suspecting Corday acted on orders from a lover, Jacobin authorities had her body examined to determine if she was a virgin, but found her “a woman of virtue”.