The Angel of the Assassination: Marie-Charlotte de Corday d'Armont; Jean-Paul Marat; Jean-Adam Lux -- A Study of Three Disciples of Jean-Jacques Rousseau

xii, 336 pp. 8vo. "Marie-Anne Charlotte Corday d'Armont (July 27, 1768 - July 17, 1793), known by history as Charlotte Corday, was a figure of the French revolution. Marat, her future victim, was a member of the radical Jacobin faction which would become the Reign of Terror, which followed the early stages of the Revolution. He was a journalist, exerting power through his newspaper, L'Ami du peuple ("The Friend of the People"). Corday's decision to kill Marat was stimulated not only by her repugnance for the September Massacres, for which she held Marat responsible, but for her fear of an all out civil war. She recognized that Marat was the centerpoint for everything that was threatening the great virtues of Republic, and believed that his death would be the death of violence throughout the nation. Corday also believed that the execution of King Louis XVI was unneccessary and it grieved her. While Corday was not a Royalist, she did find virtue in all life; unfortunately for Marat, that virtue did not hold for those she felt were responsible for ending the lives of hundreds. On 9 July 1793, Charlotte left her cousin, carrying a copy of Plutarch's Parallel Lives under her arm, and took the diligence for Paris, where she took a room at the Hôtel de Providence. She bought a large kitchen knife with a six-inch blade at the Palais-Royal, and wrote her Adresse aux Français amis des lois et de la paix ("Speech to the French who are Friends of Law and Peace") which explained the act she was about to commit. She went to Marat before noon on 13 July, offering to inform him about a planned Girondist uprising in Caen. She was turned away, but on a second attempt that evening, Marat admitted her into his presence. He conducted most of his affairs from a bathtub because of a debilitating skin condition. Marat copied down the names of the Girondists as Corday dictated them to him. She pulled the knife from her scarf and plunged it into his chest, piercing his lung, aorta and left ventricle.[citations needed] He called out, Aidez, ma chère amie ! ("Help me, my dear friend!") and died. This is the moment memorialized by Jacques-Louis David's painting (illustration, left). The iconic pose of Marat dead in his bath has been reviewed from a different angle in Baudry's painting of 1860, both literally and interpretively: Corday, rather than Marat, has been made the hero of the action. At trial, Corday testified that she had carried out the assassination alone, saying "I killed one man to save 100,000." It was likely a reference to Maximilien Robespierre's words before the execution of King Louis XVI. Four days after Marat was killed, on July 17, 1793, Corday was executed under the guillotine. Immediately upon decapitation, one of the executioner's assistants - a man hired for the day named Legros - lifted her head from the basket and slapped it on the cheek. Witnesses report an expression of "unequivocal indignation" on her face when her cheek was slapped. This slap was considered an unacceptable breach of guillotine etiquette, and Legros was imprisoned for 3 months because of his outburst. Jacobin leaders had her body autopsied shortly after her death to verify her virginity. They believed that there was a man in her life capable of sharing her bed and assassination plans. To their dismay she was found to be virginal which intensified the issue of women throughout France, laundresses, housewives, domestic servants, were rising up against authority that had been controlled by men for so long. The body was disposed of in a trench next to Louis XVI; it is uncertain whether the head was interred with her, or retained as a curiosity. It has been suggested[citation needed] that the skull of Corday remained in the possession of the Bonaparte family and their descendants (the Bonaparte family had acquired the skull from M.George Duruy, who acquired it though his aunt) throughout the twentieth century. The assassination did not stop the Jacobins or the Ter