Charlotte Corday: The Woman Who Killed Marat and Insisted She Acted Alone

Charlotte Corday was born into a minor noble family in Normandy in 1768. After her mother died she was sent to the Abbaye aux Dames in Caen, where she read her way through the abbey library.

When the Revolution turned to terror, she sided with the Girondins, the moderate republicans driven out of Paris in 1793. She came to see Marat, and his newspaper L’Ami du peuple, as most responsible for the violence.

On 9 July 1793 she left for Paris with a copy of Plutarch’s Lives and wrote an address explaining what she was about to do.

On the evening of 13 July she was let into Marat’s rooms, where he worked from a medicinal bath, and stabbed him once in the chest. She was arrested on the spot.

Before the Revolutionary Tribunal she was questioned three times. The judges wanted a Girondin conspiracy, and a man behind it. She repeated that she alone had conceived the plan and carried it out.

After her execution, Jacobin leaders even had her body examined to see whether she had had a lover who might have guided her. They found nothing.

After the sentence, she asked the court for one favour: to have her portrait painted. The National Guard officer Jean-Jacques Hauer, who had sketched her from the courtroom gallery, finished it shortly before the cart came, and she suggested a few changes.

The Conciergerie itself notes that some prisoners could have a last portrait made. Corday’s is the most famous.

She was guillotined on 17 July 1793, four days after Marat. Her act did not stop the Terror, which grew harsher, and historians have linked it to the ban on women’s political clubs that followed.