Assassination of Marat (1793): Charlotte Corday and the Bathtub

The assassination of Marat took place on the evening of 13 July 1793, when Charlotte Corday, a young woman from Normandy, stabbed the radical journalist Jean-Paul Marat as he sat in his medicinal bath in Paris. Corday hoped to end the violence of the French Revolution by killing one of its most extreme voices. Instead, her act turned Marat into a revolutionary martyr, and Jacques-Louis David’s painting of his death became one of the most famous images in Western art.

Background: Marat and the Girondins

Jean-Paul Marat was born in 1743 in Boudry, in the principality of Neuchâtel, now part of Switzerland. Before the Revolution he worked as a physician in London and Paris and wrote on science and politics. From September 1789 he published a newspaper, L’Ami du peuple (The Friend of the People), which denounced conspiracies and called for the execution of traitors.

Marat was elected to the National Convention for Paris in 1792. He was widely blamed for encouraging the September Massacres of 1792, when more than a thousand prisoners were killed in Paris. He was a leading enemy of the Girondins, the moderate republican faction, and helped bring about their fall when armed crowds forced the Convention to expel and arrest their leading deputies on 2 June 1793.

Several Girondin deputies fled to Caen in Normandy, where they tried to raise the provinces against Paris. There they met Charlotte Corday.

Charlotte Corday

Marie-Anne Charlotte de Corday d’Armont was born on 27 July 1768 into a minor noble family at Saint-Saturnin-des-Ligneries, in the Orne area of Normandy. She was a descendant of the seventeenth-century dramatist Pierre Corneille. Educated in a convent in Caen, she read widely, including Plutarch and the philosophers of the Enlightenment, and came to support a moderate republic.

Corday was horrified by the expulsion of the Girondins and by reports of revolutionary violence, for which she held Marat largely responsible. She decided, apparently without telling anyone, to kill him. On 9 July 1793 she left Caen for Paris, arriving on 11 July, and wrote an “Address to the French” explaining her reasons.

The murder

On the morning of 13 July Corday bought a kitchen knife with a wooden handle at a shop in the Palais-Royal. She then went to Marat’s apartment in the rue des Cordeliers but was turned away. She sent him a letter claiming to have information about the conspirators in Caen.

Marat by then rarely left home. He suffered from a skin disease, whose exact nature is still debated, and spent hours soaking in a bath with medicinal mixtures, working on a writing board placed across the tub. When Corday returned at about 7 pm, his companion Simonne Évrard tried to stop her, but Marat heard her voice and asked for her to be let in.

According to Corday’s own account at her trial, Marat took down the names of the Girondins in Caen and said they would soon be guillotined. She then drew the knife from her dress and struck him once, in the chest just below the collarbone, cutting a major artery. Marat called out for help and died within minutes.

Corday made no serious attempt to escape. She was seized in the apartment by Marat’s household and neighbours and protected from the crowd by officials, who took her to the Abbaye prison.

Trial and execution

Corday was tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal on 17 July 1793. Her lawyer, Claude François Chauveau-Lagarde, who later defended Marie Antoinette, argued that her calm certainty showed political fanaticism rather than ordinary criminality. Corday herself admitted everything and said she had killed one man to save a hundred thousand.

She was condemned to death and guillotined that same evening on the Place de la Révolution, wearing the red shirt prescribed for assassins. After the execution, a man named Legros, who was helping the executioner, slapped her severed head. The act caused public outrage and he was punished. A young German deputy from Mainz, Adam Lux, published a tribute to her and was himself executed in November 1793.

The making of a martyr

Marat’s death was turned into a national event. The painter and deputy Jacques-Louis David organised his funeral on 16 July, and his embalmed heart was placed in an urn hung in the Cordeliers Club. Streets, towns and children were named after him, and busts of Marat appeared across France.

David’s painting The Death of Marat, finished in 1793 and presented to the Convention in November, shows Marat slumped in his bath with a quill in his hand and a letter from Corday, in a pose recalling Christ taken down from the cross. The picture deliberately left out Corday and idealised Marat’s appearance, hiding his skin disease. It is now in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels.

Marat’s cult did not last. His remains were placed in the Panthéon in September 1794, but were removed only a few months later, in February 1795, as the political climate turned against the radicals.

Consequences

Politically, Corday’s act backfired. The Girondins were blamed for the murder, and their leaders were tried and executed in October 1793. Radicals used Marat’s memory to demand tougher measures against suspects, and within weeks the Convention declared terror “the order of the day”, opening the Reign of Terror.

The murder also hardened attitudes towards political women. Corday was portrayed in revolutionary propaganda as unnatural and fanatical, at a time when women’s clubs were being closed down. Later in the year Marie Antoinette and Madame Roland were executed.

Myths and facts

• Corday was part of a Girondin plot. Investigators searched hard for accomplices, but no evidence was found that the Girondin deputies in Caen knew of her plan. She insisted she had acted alone.
• David painted Marat as he really looked. The painting is a carefully composed political image. David smoothed Marat’s skin, simplified the room and gave him a calm, almost religious dignity.
• Marat’s disease is known for certain. Suggestions include eczema, dermatitis herpetiformis and a fungal infection, but the illness has never been firmly identified.

Legacy

Corday’s reputation changed with the political tides of the nineteenth century. The poet Alphonse de Lamartine, in his history of the Girondins in 1847, called her “the angel of assassination”, and she became a heroine for many moderates and royalists. Paul Baudry painted her in 1860, and later writers and filmmakers returned to the story.

For the left, Marat remained a hero of the poor; for others he was the archetype of the bloodthirsty demagogue. Peter Weiss’s play Marat/Sade (1963) used his murder to explore revolution and madness. The bathtub scene remains one of the most retold moments of the French Revolution.

Timeline

• 1789, September: Marat begins publishing L’Ami du peuple.
• 1793, 2 June: Leading Girondin deputies are expelled from the Convention.
• 1793, 9 July: Charlotte Corday leaves Caen for Paris.
• 1793, 13 July, evening: Corday stabs Marat in his bath.
• 1793, 16 July: Marat’s funeral is staged by Jacques-Louis David.
• 1793, 17 July: Corday is tried and guillotined.
• 1793, November: David presents The Death of Marat to the Convention.
• 1795, February: Marat’s remains are removed from the Panthéon.

Why it matters

The assassination of Marat showed how political murder could produce the opposite of what its author intended. Corday wanted to stop the violence, but her act strengthened the radicals, gave the Revolution a martyr and helped clear the way for the Terror.