December 5, 2023 • 30 mins
A minor aristocrat, Charlotte Corday could have lived an ordinary life in Normandy in the 18th century. Instead, she took it upon herself to kill the prominent leader of the Jacobin revolutionaries - a newspaper writer named Marat - while he soaked in his bathtub.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Noble Blood, A production of iHeartRadio and Grimm
and Mild from Aaron Mankie Listener Discretion advised July seventeenth,
seventeen ninety three. A young woman only twenty four years
(00:24):
old gets ready to don the red overblouse worn by
condemned traitors of the French people. The woman has been
found guilty and she will be executed, but in the
hours before she's led to the guillotine, she has one
final request. Since I still have a few moments to live,
(00:48):
might I hope citizens, that you will allow me to
have my portrait painted. The President of the Revolutionary Tribunal
apparently had a soft spot for this woman, and so
at the last moment her request was granted. Her artist
was to be a National guardsman, Jean Jacques Hower, who
(01:09):
had already begun sketching the woman during her trial. His
studio was her prison cell. He was given the extremely
brief time to work between her sentencing and her ride
in the Tumbril to her death. The infamous executioner Charles
Henri Sensen reflected in his memoirs that when he came
(01:32):
to cut the prisoner's hair while the portrait was still
being painted. The woman first cut off a lock herself
and gave it to the painter. The small gesture sparks
a lot of questions. Was it a token of appreciation,
a reference material to ensure that he got her hair
color right? And then there are the larger questions, why
(01:56):
did this woman ask for a portrait to be painted
in the first place? And perhaps the question you were
wondering at this very moment listening to this podcast, who
is this woman? That question I can answer right now.
Her name was Charlotte Corday. She was a minor noble
and by all accounts, a fairly ordinary young woman until
(02:19):
she became the murderer of the revolutionary and unofficial Jacobin
leader Jean Paul Murran. On July thirteenth, just four days
before she would be executed for it. Corday had gained
entrance to Murat's home and stabbed the famous journalist to
death with a kitchen knife while he soaked in his bathtub.
(02:43):
Charlotte was not a trained killer, and she wasn't an
anti revolutionary royalist. Instead, she was a simple follower of
the more moderate Girondin faction of the revolution. Throughout her trial,
Charlotte maintained that she acted alone, formulating and executing the
murder entirely on her own and of her own volition.
(03:07):
The act of violence and loss of a leader shook
France at one of its most volatile moments, not only
sparking further tension among the revolutionary factions, but invoking a
reckoning regarding the role of women in the revolution and
in French society at large. Charlotte herself is a controversial
(03:31):
figure within the revolution and history. That controversy, plus the
fact that she was a young, beautiful female assassin, has
only fueled a sense of cultural iconography. Her name and
image showed up in and within Percy Shelley poems, the
pages of Les mis rob, a number of works of arts,
(03:54):
even video games. It seems that Charlotte knew that she
was destined for infamy, but she may have even shrewdly
understood before her death that revolutionary leaders would try to
erase her, and thus she asked to be memorialized before
her death, immortalized in Pate before Charlotte Corday, the woman
(04:18):
would dissolve forever into Charlotte Corday, the legend. To understand
her legacy and her power in death. I think it's
worth going back and trying to make sense of her life.
So listeners, allow me to be another Jean Jacques Hower
and attempt to paint you a portrait. I'm Danish Schwartz,
(04:41):
and this is noble blood, as is the case for
most minor country nobles in eighteenth century France. There is
not an extensive wealth of information surround Charlotte's childhood. We
(05:02):
know that she was born in Normandy as Marie Anne
Charlotte de Corde d'Armont, the second of four children, and
her family was aristocratic but poor. She was a descendant
of the dramatist Pierre Corne, considered one of the great
French playwrights of the seventeenth century. Perhaps Charlotte's destiny was
(05:22):
shaped by her ancestor's love of tragedies. When Charlotte was eight,
possibly because of the death of her mother, she was
sent to live with an uncle, an abbot, and she
became a student at a girls boarding school in a
port city in northern Normandy. There she received not only
a religious education but also a secular one, reading the
(05:46):
Bible and Plutarch alongside each other as well as having
access to the works of Voltaire, Rousseau and dramatists, including
her great great grandfather. Charlotte's reading made her, she would
later claim quote a Republican before the revolution. During her
eventual trial, she would claim to have read over five
(06:09):
hundred political texts with both revolutionary and counter revolutionary viewpoints.
It seems that whatever religious education she got resonated with
her less than her political education, as there is no
mention of God in any of her writings. Anyway, In
seventeen ninety one, the school was closed due to revolutionary pressures,
(06:33):
and Charlotte moved in with a cousin. It was during
this time that she began to go to political meetings
and was particularly inspired by the ideas of the Girondin faction.
The Girondin were a more moderate political offshoot of the
more extreme Jacobins. The Girondin were the leading voice in
(06:55):
the revolution up until an insurrection in May seven ninety
three headed by one Jean Paul Murran. What had happened
was a number of Girondin representatives had voted against the
execution of the king, which was seen as inherently anti
revolutionary because of a number of economic and political Girondin failures.
(07:20):
Murrah was able to rally the support of the people,
and forty thousand men showed up to demand the arrests
of the representatives. Twenty two Girondin ended up under the
blade of the guillotine, and that event is considered by
many historians to be the starting point of a violent
(07:40):
period referred to as the Reign of Terror. Many of
the Girondin who escaped the fate of their colleagues fled
to Normandy, where they attempted to gather enough support to
challenge Mirah and his followers. The Girondin found perhaps more
support than they had envisioned, in Charlotte Corday. Charlotte believed
(08:03):
that the Girondin would save France and decided that she
could save the Girondin. It was simple, really, all she
would have to do is kill their most prominent enemy.
In the spring of seventeen ninety three, Charlotte procured a passport,
as required by all travelers by the Revolutionary Authority. From
(08:26):
this passport we know a number of small details about Charlotte.
She was five foot six, her hair was brown, and
her eyes were gray. The lack of a pandy photo
ID also meant that her passport had a detailed description
of her appearance quote fourhead, high nose, long mouth, medium
(08:48):
size chin, round, with her forehead held high. Apparently, Charlotte
first used this passport on July ninth to board a
carriage to Paris. It would be a two day ride,
and three days after she arrived would be July fourteenth,
the four year anniversary of the storming of the Bastille.
(09:11):
It would be on that day Charlotte decided that she
would execute Jean Palmurra in an act of spectacle as
he spoke to the public during the festivities. It was
to be bold and symbolic, snuffing out what she saw
as the evil at the heart of the current revolution
in order to usher in a new era of revolutionary prosperity,
(09:34):
and it would happen on the anniversary of a day
that represented it all. It was only when Charlotte arrived
in Paris on July eleventh, however, that she learned Morale
would not be attending the festivities. In fact, he wouldn't
be leaving his house at all. Jean Palmarrat came from
(09:55):
a modest background but as a teenager he was inspired
by his highly educated father to pursue his own education.
His Wikipedia and Tree contained the puzzling a sentence. He
worked informally as a doctor, which more precisely means that
he received a medical education, but he had no formal qualifications.
(10:19):
When he wasn't busy being a casually practicing doctor, he
became more interested in politics, and he began to publish
both political and medical papers during his time he spent
living in England. Following the fall of the Bastille, he
founded his newspaper The Friend of the People, which published
(10:40):
attacks on authoritative groups and figures from Louis the sixteenth
ministers to leaders within the Revolution that Mara considered too conservative.
The paper's main focus was investigating those that Marah believed
to be quote counter revolutionary. Did not make Mara a
(11:01):
popular figure among those in power, and he was often persecuted,
having to spend time hiding out in the Paris sewers.
On more than one occasion, Charlotte blamed Marah and The
Friend of the People for the September massacres of seventeen
ninety two, a mass killing of prisoners by armed civilians
(11:24):
based on the idea that the prisoners were planning to
rise up in their jail as a counter revolutionary plot.
The aftermath of the massacre found Mara elected to the
National Convention, and, following the fall of the Girandin, Mara
was one of the most prominent leaders of the revolution.
(11:44):
His zealotry was growing so intense, however, that even some
of his colleagues and supporters were beginning to grow tense.
As Mara's influence grew, his health declined. At fifty years old,
he had been sick for many years with a skin disorder. Perhaps,
(12:05):
and this is my informal medical guess, not helped by
all the time he spent in the sewers, Morale was
not bedridden, but rather bath ridden. His painful dermatitis was
only soothed by a vinegar concoction that he bathed in,
so he resigned to conducting his business from his tub,
(12:28):
answering letters and conducting meetings while soaking for hours at
a time. With this knowledge, Charlotte Corday spent the day
of July twelfth formulating a new plan for her assassination.
Early the next morning, she walked to the Palais Royal
and purchased an ebony handled kitchen knife in a cardboard
(12:51):
sheath from a cutlery shop. She paid forty sous, which
were small coins worth one twentieth of the leaf. She
first attempted to ask to see Marit in person, but
she was turned away at the door with the insistence
that he was too sick for visitors. She tried again
later and received the same response. Pivoting strategy, she decided
(13:16):
to send a note instead, claiming that she had information
regarding the counter revolutionary activity in the city of ken
in Normandy. Quote. My great unhappiness is enough for me
to have a right to your good will, she wrote.
In her note, she would apologize for her deceit in
gaining entry during her trial, but counteract that apology with
(13:39):
her claim that tyrants do not deserve the truth. While
Charlotte waited for a response, the story goes that she
had her hair curled and powdered by the neighborhood coiffure.
She got dressed for the meeting, putting on a fancy dress,
a black hat with green ribbons, a pink so garf,
(14:00):
and long gloves into her bodice. She stuffed a written
address she had composed the night before, in which she
calls upon the people of France to kill Mara in
the case that she failed. In the note, she quoted
Voltaire's LaMonte to Caesar, citing Brutus's belief that killing Caesar
(14:21):
was his duty. Charlotte also wrote that if she did succeed,
she believed that you would die nearly instantly at the
hands of Mara's supporters. Is that why she had her
hair done and dressed in her best clothes, or was
it an attempt to present herself favorably as she sought
an audience. Maybe she was simply anxious and killing time.
(14:45):
Or maybe, as is theorized in the article The Blonding
of Charlotte Corday, the story of the hairdresser is a
complete fabrication on the part of Mara's supporters that emerged
after Charlotte's death. Powdering one's hair was seen by many
as an indulgent practice, and a pompous aristocrat would be
(15:09):
an easy villain to rally against. No matter what Charlotte
was wearing or the true state of her hair, we
know that, in addition to the letter for the people,
she also carried on her person copies of articles from
her hometown newspaper and another note for Mara in case
her first flattering letter to him hadn't gotten his attention.
(15:31):
There was, also, of course, the kitchen knife. That evening,
still having heard no news, she once again appeared on
Mara's doorstep. This time she was turned away by his
common law wife, Simone, but when Charlotte loudly asked if
Mara had received her patriotic note, he overheard and permitted
(15:54):
her entrance. He was apparently planning to focus the next
issue of his newspaper paper on the Girondin in Kin
and wanted Charlotte first hand account of the situation in Normandy.
He received her in the bathtub, soaking in vinegar, and
I assume naked. It was almost too easy, but Charlotte
(16:17):
didn't make her move right away. She instead sat with
him for fifteen minutes, providing him information on the fugitives
in Ken while he took notes. Mara's wife and her
sister were both apparently suspicious of Corday, and they listened
at the door as the pair spoke, sometimes making an
(16:37):
excuse to quickly pop into the room. When Charlotte finished
her story, Mara vowed that the Girondin would be guillotined.
With that, Charlotte stood up and with one sudden move,
plunged her knife into his torso, penetrating a lung in
the corroded artery. Mara called out to his wife standing
(17:00):
in the hallway, help me, my love, but it was
too late. He died almost instantly, and Charlotte was arrested
almost as quickly after. She was seized by Simone and
a collection of neighbors. She didn't resist, There was no debate.
It was Corday in the bathroom with the kitchen knife.
(17:21):
Charlotte would be imprisoned for four days, during which time
an elaborate funeral was held for Mara, and investigators sought
to uncover a larger Girondin plot. Charlotte spent her remaining
days writing letters, which were addressed to friends and family,
but seemed to speak as well to the public at large.
(17:43):
Her trial was held on the seventeenth of July and
was dominated by attempts to find her supposed co conspirators.
The problem there just weren't any, but the men of
the Revolutionary Tribunal just didn't believe that a young woman
would be capable of formulating and executing such an important
(18:05):
act alone. When the prosecutor insisted that Charlotte must have
practiced in order to kill with one blow, Charlotte exclaimed,
oh the monster. He takes me for an assassin. She
owed the precise strike only to luck. She similarly maintained
that she alone conceived of and acted on her plan,
(18:28):
despite the fact that they found no evidence to contradict
her statement. A number of Girondin who moved in similar
circles as Charlotte were arrested. One letter that Charlotte had
written to her father during her brief stay in prison
was intercepted and read during the trial. Quote, forgive me,
(18:49):
my dear Papa, for having disposed of my existence without
your permission. I have avenged many innocent victims. I have
prevented many other disasters. The people one day disillusioned will
rejoice in being delivered from a tyrant. If I tried
to persuade you that I was passing through England, it
(19:09):
was because I hoped to keep it incognito, but I
recognized the impossibility. I hope you will not be tormented
in any case. I believe that you would have defenders
in ken. Good Bye, my dear Papa. Please forgive me,
or rather rejoice in my fate. The cause is good.
I kiss my sister, whom I love with all my heart,
(19:31):
as well as all my parents. Do not forget this
verse by Cornille. Crime brings shame, not the scaffold. It
is tomorrow at eight o'clock that I am judged. This
is sixteen July. She was in fact judged the next
morning and found guilty. Bringing us back to the opening
(19:51):
of our story, Charlotte was calm as her portrait was
painted and dignified as she approached the guillotine. Despite Charlotte's
hopes the people had rallied against the Girondin, it seemed
as though Charlotte Corday had doomed their cause by giving
their enemies a martyr. A fellow Girondin was present at
(20:12):
the execution. He remarked, she is killing us, but she
is teaching us how to die. The guillotine blade came down,
and a man often identified as an assistant of the executioner,
lifted Charlotte's head and slapped its cheek. According to Albert
Camu in Reflections on the Guillotine, quote, Charlotte Corday's severed
(20:36):
head blushed, it is said under the executioner's slap. It
seems Charlotte was conscious of her image even after the end.
In one of her last letters to a friend, she
had written, it is the last act that crowned the
work the executioner. Samson, distancing himself from an act that
(20:57):
even he believed to be too vulgar, claimed that the
man who had slapped Charlotte's face was not one of
his assistants, but just a carpenter who had been hired
to make repairs to the guillotine. It said that following
her execution, Charlotte's headless body was autopsied to see if
she was a virgin. Jacobin leaders still believed that she
(21:19):
could not possibly have worked alone, and speculated that she
was perhaps the mistress of a co conspirator. To their disappointment,
she was, in fact, quote found to be a virgin,
at least according to the very limited medical beliefs and
understanding of the construct of virginity at that time. In
(21:41):
the aftermath of her death, which Charlotte saw as an
act that would save France, did not have the effect
she envisioned. The Jacobin only grew in power. Marat's paranoia
about dangerous counter revolutionaries was seemingly validated when he let
one into his home. In killing Mara, Charlotte created a martyr.
(22:03):
A bust of Maraw quickly replaced a religious statue on
one street in Paris. Charlotte's own image, which she seemingly
sought to preserve through portraiture and her letters, was often shunned.
The famous painting Death of Mara by the deceased's good
friend Jacques Louis da Vide hangs to day in the Louver.
(22:26):
In that famous work, we see Mara as a christ
like figure in the bath, with one arm gracefully falling
over the edge of his tub, a pose which mirrors
that of Jesus in Caravaggio's The Intubement of Christ or
Michelangelo's version of Jesus in The Pieta. It's an idealized
portrayal of the man. His famously diseased skin is clear,
(22:51):
with the exception of the knife sized hole in his
chest dripping crimson. Where is Charlotte, though in Davide's portrait
she is only present in the note that Marat holds
an indictment of her guilt. David feared that the presence
of a pretty young woman in the portrait would attract
(23:13):
sympathy on her behalf. Jacobin leaders harbored the same fears,
and they published a text that circulated across Paris. Quote,
this woman being called pretty was not pretty at all.
She was a virago, chubby rather than fresh, slovenly, as
female philosophers and sharp thinkers almost always are. Moreover, this
(23:35):
remark would be pointless were it not generally true that
any pretty woman who enjoys being pretty clings to life
and fear's death. Her head was stuffed with all sorts
of books, she declared, or rather she confessed with an
affectation bordering on the ridiculous, that she had read everything
from Tacitus to the Portier de Chatreux. All these things
(23:59):
mean that this woman had hurled herself completely outside of
her sex. End quote. In his own writing previous Noble
Blood subject, the Marquis de Sade claimed, quote Murat's barbarous assassin,
like those mixed beings whose sex is impossible to determine,
vomited up from hell to the despair of both sexes,
(24:23):
directly belongs to neither. It's funny. In a way, Charlotte
would be villainized for a crime that some actually saw
as a greater sin than murder, transgressing her sex. She
understood that that would be her fate, writing quote, no
one is satisfied to have a mere woman without consequence
(24:44):
to offer to the spirit of that great man. Among
revolutionary women, many denounced Charlotte on grounds of their love
for Mara, who they saw as sympathetic to their unique plight,
while many other women men simply distanced themselves out of
a fear of a growing backlash against women at large.
(25:07):
In the end, however, it was Charlotte who saved herself
in the eyes of the public, at least in the
long term. Her portrait successfully preserved her image in the
face of many attempts to erase and deform it. In
their collection, the met houses a print of the painting,
first shown at the Royal Academy of Arts in London
(25:30):
in eighteen sixty three, nearly a century after charlotte execution.
In the painting, she is portrayed with beautiful, flowing curls
which are about to be chopped by the executioner as
she sat for the final portrait, her calm gaze is
a clear appeal for sympathy, just as David had correctly feared.
(25:52):
She was also eventually given the feminized nickname that she
is now associated with the Angel of Assassination. It's a
double edged sword, her sympathy as a figure in popular
culture being rooted in her youth and beauty, her being
a woman, and her villainization rooted in the erasure of
(26:16):
the feminine, both obscuring the nature of the crime itself.
It was not a crime of passion. It was a
crime of philosophy. Charlotte Corday had not killed Mara because
she was a woman. She had killed him because she
thought she was doing the right thing. You can't control
how you'll be remembered, but Charlotte did her best to try.
(26:40):
Modern judith or wicked, she devil. Charlotte Corday's place in
history and culture is secure. That's the story of Charlotte
Corday's famous assassination. But keep listening. After a brief sponsor
(27:03):
break for a very fun noble blood cameo. While David
sought to erase Corday among his circle, the Angel of
(27:23):
Assassination had one artistic admirer who sought to preserve her
in a rather literal way. She was a woman of
similar age, then known as Marie Groscholtz, but more famously
known today as Madame Tousseaud, still an apprentice at the
time of the wax modeler Philippe Cusius, she sent her
(27:46):
at the behest of David to take a cast of
the newly deceased Mara. On the night of his murder,
she caught a glimpse of Corday as she was ushered
out of Mara's home, and she went to see her
in her cell. During her imprisonment, Madame Tousseau would cast
a death mask of Charlotte's severed head, as she would
(28:09):
four others on the receiving end of the guillotine. The
result ended up being a wax tableau of Mara with
Corday beside him, staged as the murder happened. The display
drew huge crowds, all of whom would have to look
upon both parties and determine where their loyalties lie. If
(28:32):
you've been a very very long time listener of this podcast,
you might recall that in our very first episode I
talked in the epilogue about Madame Tussaud also being on
hand to sculpt a death mask of a woman who
would be guillotined just a few short months after Charlotte
Corday Marie Antoinette. Noble Blood is a production of iHeartRadio
(29:12):
and Grim and Mild from Aaron Mankey. Noble Blood is
created and hosted by me Dana Schwartz, with additional writing
and researching by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender,
and Lori Goodman. The show is edited and produced by
Noemi Griffin and rima Il Kahali, with supervising producer Josh
(29:36):
Thain and executive producers Aaron Manke, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Noble Blood, A production of iHeartRadio and Grimm
and Mild from Aaron Mankie Listener Discretion advised July seventeenth,
seventeen ninety three. A young woman only twenty four years
(00:24):
old gets ready to don the red overblouse worn by
condemned traitors of the French people. The woman has been
found guilty and she will be executed, but in the
hours before she's led to the guillotine, she has one
final request. Since I still have a few moments to live,
(00:48):
might I hope citizens, that you will allow me to
have my portrait painted. The President of the Revolutionary Tribunal
apparently had a soft spot for this woman, and so
at the last moment her request was granted. Her artist
was to be a National guardsman, Jean Jacques Hower, who
(01:09):
had already begun sketching the woman during her trial. His
studio was her prison cell. He was given the extremely
brief time to work between her sentencing and her ride
in the Tumbril to her death. The infamous executioner Charles
Henri Sensen reflected in his memoirs that when he came
(01:32):
to cut the prisoner's hair while the portrait was still
being painted. The woman first cut off a lock herself
and gave it to the painter. The small gesture sparks
a lot of questions. Was it a token of appreciation,
a reference material to ensure that he got her hair
color right? And then there are the larger questions, why
(01:56):
did this woman ask for a portrait to be painted
in the first place? And perhaps the question you were
wondering at this very moment listening to this podcast, who
is this woman? That question I can answer right now.
Her name was Charlotte Corday. She was a minor noble
and by all accounts, a fairly ordinary young woman until
(02:19):
she became the murderer of the revolutionary and unofficial Jacobin
leader Jean Paul Murran. On July thirteenth, just four days
before she would be executed for it. Corday had gained
entrance to Murat's home and stabbed the famous journalist to
death with a kitchen knife while he soaked in his bathtub.
(02:43):
Charlotte was not a trained killer, and she wasn't an
anti revolutionary royalist. Instead, she was a simple follower of
the more moderate Girondin faction of the revolution. Throughout her trial,
Charlotte maintained that she acted alone, formulating and executing the
murder entirely on her own and of her own volition.
(03:07):
The act of violence and loss of a leader shook
France at one of its most volatile moments, not only
sparking further tension among the revolutionary factions, but invoking a
reckoning regarding the role of women in the revolution and
in French society at large. Charlotte herself is a controversial
(03:31):
figure within the revolution and history. That controversy, plus the
fact that she was a young, beautiful female assassin, has
only fueled a sense of cultural iconography. Her name and
image showed up in and within Percy Shelley poems, the
pages of Les mis rob, a number of works of arts,
(03:54):
even video games. It seems that Charlotte knew that she
was destined for infamy, but she may have even shrewdly
understood before her death that revolutionary leaders would try to
erase her, and thus she asked to be memorialized before
her death, immortalized in Pate before Charlotte Corday, the woman
(04:18):
would dissolve forever into Charlotte Corday, the legend. To understand
her legacy and her power in death. I think it's
worth going back and trying to make sense of her life.
So listeners, allow me to be another Jean Jacques Hower
and attempt to paint you a portrait. I'm Danish Schwartz,
(04:41):
and this is noble blood, as is the case for
most minor country nobles in eighteenth century France. There is
not an extensive wealth of information surround Charlotte's childhood. We
(05:02):
know that she was born in Normandy as Marie Anne
Charlotte de Corde d'Armont, the second of four children, and
her family was aristocratic but poor. She was a descendant
of the dramatist Pierre Corne, considered one of the great
French playwrights of the seventeenth century. Perhaps Charlotte's destiny was
(05:22):
shaped by her ancestor's love of tragedies. When Charlotte was eight,
possibly because of the death of her mother, she was
sent to live with an uncle, an abbot, and she
became a student at a girls boarding school in a
port city in northern Normandy. There she received not only
a religious education but also a secular one, reading the
(05:46):
Bible and Plutarch alongside each other as well as having
access to the works of Voltaire, Rousseau and dramatists, including
her great great grandfather. Charlotte's reading made her, she would
later claim quote a Republican before the revolution. During her
eventual trial, she would claim to have read over five
(06:09):
hundred political texts with both revolutionary and counter revolutionary viewpoints.
It seems that whatever religious education she got resonated with
her less than her political education, as there is no
mention of God in any of her writings. Anyway, In
seventeen ninety one, the school was closed due to revolutionary pressures,
(06:33):
and Charlotte moved in with a cousin. It was during
this time that she began to go to political meetings
and was particularly inspired by the ideas of the Girondin faction.
The Girondin were a more moderate political offshoot of the
more extreme Jacobins. The Girondin were the leading voice in
(06:55):
the revolution up until an insurrection in May seven ninety
three headed by one Jean Paul Murran. What had happened
was a number of Girondin representatives had voted against the
execution of the king, which was seen as inherently anti
revolutionary because of a number of economic and political Girondin failures.
(07:20):
Murrah was able to rally the support of the people,
and forty thousand men showed up to demand the arrests
of the representatives. Twenty two Girondin ended up under the
blade of the guillotine, and that event is considered by
many historians to be the starting point of a violent
(07:40):
period referred to as the Reign of Terror. Many of
the Girondin who escaped the fate of their colleagues fled
to Normandy, where they attempted to gather enough support to
challenge Mirah and his followers. The Girondin found perhaps more
support than they had envisioned, in Charlotte Corday. Charlotte believed
(08:03):
that the Girondin would save France and decided that she
could save the Girondin. It was simple, really, all she
would have to do is kill their most prominent enemy.
In the spring of seventeen ninety three, Charlotte procured a passport,
as required by all travelers by the Revolutionary Authority. From
(08:26):
this passport we know a number of small details about Charlotte.
She was five foot six, her hair was brown, and
her eyes were gray. The lack of a pandy photo
ID also meant that her passport had a detailed description
of her appearance quote fourhead, high nose, long mouth, medium
(08:48):
size chin, round, with her forehead held high. Apparently, Charlotte
first used this passport on July ninth to board a
carriage to Paris. It would be a two day ride,
and three days after she arrived would be July fourteenth,
the four year anniversary of the storming of the Bastille.
(09:11):
It would be on that day Charlotte decided that she
would execute Jean Palmurra in an act of spectacle as
he spoke to the public during the festivities. It was
to be bold and symbolic, snuffing out what she saw
as the evil at the heart of the current revolution
in order to usher in a new era of revolutionary prosperity,
(09:34):
and it would happen on the anniversary of a day
that represented it all. It was only when Charlotte arrived
in Paris on July eleventh, however, that she learned Morale
would not be attending the festivities. In fact, he wouldn't
be leaving his house at all. Jean Palmarrat came from
(09:55):
a modest background but as a teenager he was inspired
by his highly educated father to pursue his own education.
His Wikipedia and Tree contained the puzzling a sentence. He
worked informally as a doctor, which more precisely means that
he received a medical education, but he had no formal qualifications.
(10:19):
When he wasn't busy being a casually practicing doctor, he
became more interested in politics, and he began to publish
both political and medical papers during his time he spent
living in England. Following the fall of the Bastille, he
founded his newspaper The Friend of the People, which published
(10:40):
attacks on authoritative groups and figures from Louis the sixteenth
ministers to leaders within the Revolution that Mara considered too conservative.
The paper's main focus was investigating those that Marah believed
to be quote counter revolutionary. Did not make Mara a
(11:01):
popular figure among those in power, and he was often persecuted,
having to spend time hiding out in the Paris sewers.
On more than one occasion, Charlotte blamed Marah and The
Friend of the People for the September massacres of seventeen
ninety two, a mass killing of prisoners by armed civilians
(11:24):
based on the idea that the prisoners were planning to
rise up in their jail as a counter revolutionary plot.
The aftermath of the massacre found Mara elected to the
National Convention, and, following the fall of the Girandin, Mara
was one of the most prominent leaders of the revolution.
(11:44):
His zealotry was growing so intense, however, that even some
of his colleagues and supporters were beginning to grow tense.
As Mara's influence grew, his health declined. At fifty years old,
he had been sick for many years with a skin disorder. Perhaps,
(12:05):
and this is my informal medical guess, not helped by
all the time he spent in the sewers, Morale was
not bedridden, but rather bath ridden. His painful dermatitis was
only soothed by a vinegar concoction that he bathed in,
so he resigned to conducting his business from his tub,
(12:28):
answering letters and conducting meetings while soaking for hours at
a time. With this knowledge, Charlotte Corday spent the day
of July twelfth formulating a new plan for her assassination.
Early the next morning, she walked to the Palais Royal
and purchased an ebony handled kitchen knife in a cardboard
(12:51):
sheath from a cutlery shop. She paid forty sous, which
were small coins worth one twentieth of the leaf. She
first attempted to ask to see Marit in person, but
she was turned away at the door with the insistence
that he was too sick for visitors. She tried again
later and received the same response. Pivoting strategy, she decided
(13:16):
to send a note instead, claiming that she had information
regarding the counter revolutionary activity in the city of ken
in Normandy. Quote. My great unhappiness is enough for me
to have a right to your good will, she wrote.
In her note, she would apologize for her deceit in
gaining entry during her trial, but counteract that apology with
(13:39):
her claim that tyrants do not deserve the truth. While
Charlotte waited for a response, the story goes that she
had her hair curled and powdered by the neighborhood coiffure.
She got dressed for the meeting, putting on a fancy dress,
a black hat with green ribbons, a pink so garf,
(14:00):
and long gloves into her bodice. She stuffed a written
address she had composed the night before, in which she
calls upon the people of France to kill Mara in
the case that she failed. In the note, she quoted
Voltaire's LaMonte to Caesar, citing Brutus's belief that killing Caesar
(14:21):
was his duty. Charlotte also wrote that if she did succeed,
she believed that you would die nearly instantly at the
hands of Mara's supporters. Is that why she had her
hair done and dressed in her best clothes, or was
it an attempt to present herself favorably as she sought
an audience. Maybe she was simply anxious and killing time.
(14:45):
Or maybe, as is theorized in the article The Blonding
of Charlotte Corday, the story of the hairdresser is a
complete fabrication on the part of Mara's supporters that emerged
after Charlotte's death. Powdering one's hair was seen by many
as an indulgent practice, and a pompous aristocrat would be
(15:09):
an easy villain to rally against. No matter what Charlotte
was wearing or the true state of her hair, we
know that, in addition to the letter for the people,
she also carried on her person copies of articles from
her hometown newspaper and another note for Mara in case
her first flattering letter to him hadn't gotten his attention.
(15:31):
There was, also, of course, the kitchen knife. That evening,
still having heard no news, she once again appeared on
Mara's doorstep. This time she was turned away by his
common law wife, Simone, but when Charlotte loudly asked if
Mara had received her patriotic note, he overheard and permitted
(15:54):
her entrance. He was apparently planning to focus the next
issue of his newspaper paper on the Girondin in Kin
and wanted Charlotte first hand account of the situation in Normandy.
He received her in the bathtub, soaking in vinegar, and
I assume naked. It was almost too easy, but Charlotte
(16:17):
didn't make her move right away. She instead sat with
him for fifteen minutes, providing him information on the fugitives
in Ken while he took notes. Mara's wife and her
sister were both apparently suspicious of Corday, and they listened
at the door as the pair spoke, sometimes making an
(16:37):
excuse to quickly pop into the room. When Charlotte finished
her story, Mara vowed that the Girondin would be guillotined.
With that, Charlotte stood up and with one sudden move,
plunged her knife into his torso, penetrating a lung in
the corroded artery. Mara called out to his wife standing
(17:00):
in the hallway, help me, my love, but it was
too late. He died almost instantly, and Charlotte was arrested
almost as quickly after. She was seized by Simone and
a collection of neighbors. She didn't resist, There was no debate.
It was Corday in the bathroom with the kitchen knife.
(17:21):
Charlotte would be imprisoned for four days, during which time
an elaborate funeral was held for Mara, and investigators sought
to uncover a larger Girondin plot. Charlotte spent her remaining
days writing letters, which were addressed to friends and family,
but seemed to speak as well to the public at large.
(17:43):
Her trial was held on the seventeenth of July and
was dominated by attempts to find her supposed co conspirators.
The problem there just weren't any, but the men of
the Revolutionary Tribunal just didn't believe that a young woman
would be capable of formulating and executing such an important
(18:05):
act alone. When the prosecutor insisted that Charlotte must have
practiced in order to kill with one blow, Charlotte exclaimed,
oh the monster. He takes me for an assassin. She
owed the precise strike only to luck. She similarly maintained
that she alone conceived of and acted on her plan,
(18:28):
despite the fact that they found no evidence to contradict
her statement. A number of Girondin who moved in similar
circles as Charlotte were arrested. One letter that Charlotte had
written to her father during her brief stay in prison
was intercepted and read during the trial. Quote, forgive me,
(18:49):
my dear Papa, for having disposed of my existence without
your permission. I have avenged many innocent victims. I have
prevented many other disasters. The people one day disillusioned will
rejoice in being delivered from a tyrant. If I tried
to persuade you that I was passing through England, it
(19:09):
was because I hoped to keep it incognito, but I
recognized the impossibility. I hope you will not be tormented
in any case. I believe that you would have defenders
in ken. Good Bye, my dear Papa. Please forgive me,
or rather rejoice in my fate. The cause is good.
I kiss my sister, whom I love with all my heart,
(19:31):
as well as all my parents. Do not forget this
verse by Cornille. Crime brings shame, not the scaffold. It
is tomorrow at eight o'clock that I am judged. This
is sixteen July. She was in fact judged the next
morning and found guilty. Bringing us back to the opening
(19:51):
of our story, Charlotte was calm as her portrait was
painted and dignified as she approached the guillotine. Despite Charlotte's
hopes the people had rallied against the Girondin, it seemed
as though Charlotte Corday had doomed their cause by giving
their enemies a martyr. A fellow Girondin was present at
(20:12):
the execution. He remarked, she is killing us, but she
is teaching us how to die. The guillotine blade came down,
and a man often identified as an assistant of the executioner,
lifted Charlotte's head and slapped its cheek. According to Albert
Camu in Reflections on the Guillotine, quote, Charlotte Corday's severed
(20:36):
head blushed, it is said under the executioner's slap. It
seems Charlotte was conscious of her image even after the end.
In one of her last letters to a friend, she
had written, it is the last act that crowned the
work the executioner. Samson, distancing himself from an act that
(20:57):
even he believed to be too vulgar, claimed that the
man who had slapped Charlotte's face was not one of
his assistants, but just a carpenter who had been hired
to make repairs to the guillotine. It said that following
her execution, Charlotte's headless body was autopsied to see if
she was a virgin. Jacobin leaders still believed that she
(21:19):
could not possibly have worked alone, and speculated that she
was perhaps the mistress of a co conspirator. To their disappointment,
she was, in fact, quote found to be a virgin,
at least according to the very limited medical beliefs and
understanding of the construct of virginity at that time. In
(21:41):
the aftermath of her death, which Charlotte saw as an
act that would save France, did not have the effect
she envisioned. The Jacobin only grew in power. Marat's paranoia
about dangerous counter revolutionaries was seemingly validated when he let
one into his home. In killing Mara, Charlotte created a martyr.
(22:03):
A bust of Maraw quickly replaced a religious statue on
one street in Paris. Charlotte's own image, which she seemingly
sought to preserve through portraiture and her letters, was often shunned.
The famous painting Death of Mara by the deceased's good
friend Jacques Louis da Vide hangs to day in the Louver.
(22:26):
In that famous work, we see Mara as a christ
like figure in the bath, with one arm gracefully falling
over the edge of his tub, a pose which mirrors
that of Jesus in Caravaggio's The Intubement of Christ or
Michelangelo's version of Jesus in The Pieta. It's an idealized
portrayal of the man. His famously diseased skin is clear,
(22:51):
with the exception of the knife sized hole in his
chest dripping crimson. Where is Charlotte, though in Davide's portrait
she is only present in the note that Marat holds
an indictment of her guilt. David feared that the presence
of a pretty young woman in the portrait would attract
(23:13):
sympathy on her behalf. Jacobin leaders harbored the same fears,
and they published a text that circulated across Paris. Quote,
this woman being called pretty was not pretty at all.
She was a virago, chubby rather than fresh, slovenly, as
female philosophers and sharp thinkers almost always are. Moreover, this
(23:35):
remark would be pointless were it not generally true that
any pretty woman who enjoys being pretty clings to life
and fear's death. Her head was stuffed with all sorts
of books, she declared, or rather she confessed with an
affectation bordering on the ridiculous, that she had read everything
from Tacitus to the Portier de Chatreux. All these things
(23:59):
mean that this woman had hurled herself completely outside of
her sex. End quote. In his own writing previous Noble
Blood subject, the Marquis de Sade claimed, quote Murat's barbarous assassin,
like those mixed beings whose sex is impossible to determine,
vomited up from hell to the despair of both sexes,
(24:23):
directly belongs to neither. It's funny. In a way, Charlotte
would be villainized for a crime that some actually saw
as a greater sin than murder, transgressing her sex. She
understood that that would be her fate, writing quote, no
one is satisfied to have a mere woman without consequence
(24:44):
to offer to the spirit of that great man. Among
revolutionary women, many denounced Charlotte on grounds of their love
for Mara, who they saw as sympathetic to their unique plight,
while many other women men simply distanced themselves out of
a fear of a growing backlash against women at large.
(25:07):
In the end, however, it was Charlotte who saved herself
in the eyes of the public, at least in the
long term. Her portrait successfully preserved her image in the
face of many attempts to erase and deform it. In
their collection, the met houses a print of the painting,
first shown at the Royal Academy of Arts in London
(25:30):
in eighteen sixty three, nearly a century after charlotte execution.
In the painting, she is portrayed with beautiful, flowing curls
which are about to be chopped by the executioner as
she sat for the final portrait, her calm gaze is
a clear appeal for sympathy, just as David had correctly feared.
(25:52):
She was also eventually given the feminized nickname that she
is now associated with the Angel of Assassination. It's a
double edged sword, her sympathy as a figure in popular
culture being rooted in her youth and beauty, her being
a woman, and her villainization rooted in the erasure of
(26:16):
the feminine, both obscuring the nature of the crime itself.
It was not a crime of passion. It was a
crime of philosophy. Charlotte Corday had not killed Mara because
she was a woman. She had killed him because she
thought she was doing the right thing. You can't control
how you'll be remembered, but Charlotte did her best to try.
(26:40):
Modern judith or wicked, she devil. Charlotte Corday's place in
history and culture is secure. That's the story of Charlotte
Corday's famous assassination. But keep listening. After a brief sponsor
(27:03):
break for a very fun noble blood cameo. While David
sought to erase Corday among his circle, the Angel of
(27:23):
Assassination had one artistic admirer who sought to preserve her
in a rather literal way. She was a woman of
similar age, then known as Marie Groscholtz, but more famously
known today as Madame Tousseaud, still an apprentice at the
time of the wax modeler Philippe Cusius, she sent her
(27:46):
at the behest of David to take a cast of
the newly deceased Mara. On the night of his murder,
she caught a glimpse of Corday as she was ushered
out of Mara's home, and she went to see her
in her cell. During her imprisonment, Madame Tousseau would cast
a death mask of Charlotte's severed head, as she would
(28:09):
four others on the receiving end of the guillotine. The
result ended up being a wax tableau of Mara with
Corday beside him, staged as the murder happened. The display
drew huge crowds, all of whom would have to look
upon both parties and determine where their loyalties lie. If
(28:32):
you've been a very very long time listener of this podcast,
you might recall that in our very first episode I
talked in the epilogue about Madame Tussaud also being on
hand to sculpt a death mask of a woman who
would be guillotined just a few short months after Charlotte
Corday Marie Antoinette. Noble Blood is a production of iHeartRadio
(29:12):
and Grim and Mild from Aaron Mankey. Noble Blood is
created and hosted by me Dana Schwartz, with additional writing
and researching by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender,
and Lori Goodman. The show is edited and produced by
Noemi Griffin and rima Il Kahali, with supervising producer Josh
(29:36):
Thain and executive producers Aaron Manke, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Host
Dana Schwartz
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