Norman noble and Girondin sympathizer who assassinated Marat
On 13 July 1793 she gained an interview with Marat by claiming to know of a Girondin plot, then stabbed him to death in his medicinal bath.
A figure of the French Revolution who supported the Girondins. On 13 July 1793 she assassinated the Jacobin leader Jean-Paul Marat, whom she held responsible for the September 1792 massacres; she judged that the radicalised Jacobins had placed the Revolution in danger. Arrested at the scene and convicted by the Revolutionary Tribunal, she was guillotined on 17 July.
Also known as: Charlotte de Corday
Activities and affiliations
Related historical events
Posthumous image and political memory
Corday's posthumous image was never fixed; it split along the political demands of each era. From the time of her trial she was either honoured as a liberating tyrannicide or reviled as a parricidal murderess. Immediately after her execution a song celebrating her spread in her native Auge region, and within days the Corday d'Armont name won unexpected prestige among moderate and counter-revolutionary opinion. In 1806, when her nephew Alexis de Corday d'Armont returned from emigration, he was haloed by his sister's fame; five years later Frédéric de Corday du Renouard was noticed by Kellermann on account of his name and presented at court.
In the nineteenth century the image multiplied further. On one side she was framed as a deviant woman, with her celibacy and her conduct toward her father held against her. At the end of the century this criminalisation intensified as the Republic sought to build a political culture founded on moderation, civil peace and the rejection of political violence; Corday became an example used to condemn women's political engagement. On the other side she was progressively turned into a victim. At first this was religiously framed, likening her to a saint martyred by the Revolution; in the nineteenth century that religious dimension faded and the notion of victim became more political and secular. In monarchist, conservative and anti-republican circles she was recast as a victim of the Revolution and the Republic: her trial reread as a judicial error, her execution as an injustice. Her image also shifted into that of a 'consenting victim', a woman who voluntarily accepted death for her country, and this model of courage, sacrifice and patriotism was widely taken up in the early twentieth century by nationalist and anti-parliamentary circles.
Cultural representation rode on these currents. Alphonse de Lamartine, in his Histoire des Girondins, gave her the nickname l'ange de l'assassinat (the Angel of Assassination), and nineteenth-century historians depicted her either as an ardent heroine of the Revolution or as a deluded royalist. The execution narrative in Sanson's Mémoires is an apocryphal text by Balzac and another hand, not authentic testimony, and it reveals rather the place Corday held in the memory of the Catholic and royalist nobility of the nineteenth century.