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Marie-Anne Charlotte de Corday d'Armont, (27
July 1768-17 July 1793), usually remembered as
plain Charlotte Corday, though newspaper reports at the time invariably spelled
it Corde, even without the accent.
She came from Caen in Normandie, was twenty-four years old, a Republican who supported the Girondins when they began to bring Enlightenment to post-monarchic France. Then the Montagnards brought down the government, driven by several, but it was Jean-Paul Marat who incensed Charlotte into doing something. She already suspected what government by Montagnards like Robespierre and Danton would be like, but it was Marat who had confirmed it, in multiple editorials over the past several years in his newspaper, “L’Ami du peuple”. In 1790, for example, he had written: “A year ago, by cutting off five or six hundred heads, you would have set yourselves free and happy forever. Today it would need ten thousand; within a few months perhaps you will need to cut off a hundred thousand…” She knew he had meant it entirely seriously, and now he had the power to make that Terror a reality. Someone had to stop him.
On the
afternoon of July 13th she tried to gain access to his apartment on the
Rue des Cordeliers in Paris, but Madame Marat slammed the door. When she came back in
the evening, she convinced Madame that she knew the names of traitors based in
Normandy, and when Madame informed her husband he apparently replied “I will
have them all guillotined,” and invited her into his bathroom, where he was
nursing his psoriasis. She stabbed him to death with a five-inch kitchen knife she
had hidden in her dress.
In court she insisted that she was a patriot, that she had “killed one man to save a hundred thousand”. The panel of judges wanted her to confess that she was just one member of a much larger conspiracy, but this too she rejected: “I didn’t need the hate of others,” she replied. “I had enough of my own.”
The sad irony of the assasination of Marat is that it probably enhanced the paranoia behind the ‘Reign of Terror’, and thus exacerbated the killings. To quote the Britannica: "By the time the Reign of Terror reached its conclusion, in July 1794, some 17,000 people had been officially executed, and as many as 10,000 had died in prison or without trial. The French Revolutionary government had devoured its own in spectacular fashion."
Marat is remembered in a very strange play by the German dramatist Peter Weiss (click here), which caused something of a revolution of its own, first in Germany, then in England when it was performed under the direction of newcomer Peter Brooke by the Royal Shakespeare Company in the early 1960s (click here); it was also a key moment in the early lives of several other major thespians, including debut-actress Glenda Jackson as Charlotte Corday in the Aldwych production which inspired then 16-year-old future playwright David Edgar (click here)
the painting above is a falsehood - she stabbed him in his bath, as below
Amber pages
Wole Soyinka, Nigerian author, born today in 1934
Gugliemo Marconi awarded a patent for the radio, today in 1898
Ernő Rubik, inventor of that extension of the rosary bead into advanced neurotics, also known as "Sudoku without numbers" and "Modern Architecture"; but also, rather more boringly, "Rubik's Cube", born today in 1944.
"Live Aid" concerts for Eritrea performed, in Philadelphia and London, but watched across the globe, today in 1985. The model, George Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh, can be found on Aug 1
Wordsworth wrote "Tintern Abbey", today in 1798 according to the almanacs, but to be absolutely honest I cannot believe that he could have written, start to finish, a poem of this depth and complexity, in just one day, and especially as he must have been completely exhausted by the time he got home - take a look at the photo in my piece in Private Collection. "Started" Tintern Abbey, perhaps. "Took extensive notes" and "sketched out the first draft", quite likely. Figured out in which direction to point the blood-jet, maybe. Put the date as a sub-title, definitely. But "wrote"? Not a chance
And two pieces which I cannot resist noting, but shall not write any more about:
First, the information that it was today in 1865 that somebody who nobody but his mother has even heard of, one Horace Greeley apparently, wrote the utterly unworthy-of-remembering cliché "Go West, young man, and grow ...", a statement typical of those who like to give advice that they themselves do not intend to follow; apparently he was the founder and editor of the New York Tribune, and presumably gave his advice as a way of encouraging the rabble to get out of his beloved city.
And second, that on this same day, in this same year, 1865, the first man ever, in all of history (the first white European Christian who bothered to make public that he had done it), from the time of the Neanderthals until this precise moment, finally achieved that uttely pointless ambition, of "conquering the Matterhorn" - his name was Edward Whymper, and we have to assume that taking on the challenge was a psychological strategy for dealing bangfully with that most unfortunate name.
And have you noticed the linear and colour parallels between the two illustrations? No? They're not there? Go west young man.
You can find David Prashker at:
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