Person1768 – 1793

Charlotte Corday

Also called: Marie-Anne Charlotte de Corday d’Armont

Norman supporter of the Girondins who stabbed Marat to death in Paris on 13 July 1793 and was guillotined four days later

Born in 1768 into an impoverished noble family in Normandy, she was raised in a convent in Caen, where she read Plutarch and the philosophes. A supporter of the republic who loathed the radicals’ violence, she sympathised with the Girondin deputies who fled to Caen after their expulsion in June 1793. Seeing Marat as the instigator of civil war, she went to Paris on 9 July and stabbed him to death in his home on the 13th. At her trial she said she had killed one man to save a hundred thousand, and she was guillotined on 17 July. She was later called “the angel of assassination” and became a subject of literature and painting.

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1 related event

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1793Assassination of Maratkey figure
Charlotte Corday, a Girondin sympathiser, stabbed Marat in his bath; David’s The Death of Marat made him a martyr of the Revolution.

People who appear alongside

Jean-Paul Marat1743 – 1793
Physician turned journalist and Convention deputy whose paper L’Ami du peuple urged radical revolution; assassinated by Charlotte Corday in 1793
Jacques-Louis David1748 – 1825
Neoclassical painter and Convention deputy who painted The Tennis Court Oath and The Death of Marat, staged the revolutionary festivals and later became Napoleon’s court painter

Themes this person appears in

The French Revolution1787 – 1799
From the Assembly of Notables and the Estates-General to the coup of 18 Brumaire — twelve years that toppled the absolute monarchy, founded a republic, passed through Terror and reaction, and ended with Napoleon