The Angel Assassin

On a mild June day in 1793, as Marie-Anne-Charlotte de Corday d’Armont read by an open window of her cousin’s parlor, she was jarred to attention by the sharp sound of carriage wheels on the cobblestone street below. Charlotte, as she was known to her family, wondered what could be astir in this normally sleepy quarter of Caen, a town in France’s Normandy province. Something big was happening.

A servant informed her that the commotion was the arrival of the Girondin deputies, a faction of elected officials recently deposed by the French Revolution’s Jacobin radicals in Paris. The Girondins had come to Caen to seek refuge while preparing to fight back against what they saw as revolutionaries-turned-tyrants. Charlotte felt a small stir of hope at the news.

Charlotte was devastated by the radical turn the French Revolution had taken over the past year. Rag-tag citizen armies wielding pikes and kitchen knives had stormed the Tuileries, the king’s royal palace. The mob slaughtered the Swiss Guard and the remaining royal retinue, surged through the palace and set it aflame. Weeks later, the September Massacres began. Mobs invaded Paris’s prisons and summarily executed any inmates suspected of royalist sympathies–including women and children. Three months after that, on January 21, 1793, King Louis XVI was beheaded.

“All of these men who promised to bring liberty have, instead, murdered it,” Charlotte wrote bitterly to a friend. A crowd of nearly 100,000 spectators had swarmed to watch the king’s beheading. “They are no more than butchers,” Charlotte continued, “Let us weep for the future of poor France.”

In the eyes of the Girondin deputies now gathered in Caen, no figure was more to blame for the revolution’s bloody excesses than Jean-Paul Marat, a strident journalist and tireless political agitator claiming to represent the Parisian working class. Marat had once urged that anyone wearing silk stockings should have their throats slit. An acquaintance asked what would happen if “patriots” were killed accidentally while massacring the aristocrats. “Say out of one hundred men killed, ten turn out to be patriots,” Marat replied coolly. “You would still have eliminated ninety traitors.” In Caen’s fashionable salons, where the refugees were welcomed with open arms by the city’s wealthier strata, Charlotte heard again and again the same refrain from their lips: ce monstre, Marat, had to be stopped.

Weeks after their arrival in Caen, the Girondins called for volunteers to assemble on the public square to join a growing liberation army. They were planning to march to Paris and stop the revolution’s excesses.

Charlotte joined the crowd to watch the promised military parade, but she was crestfallen when a paltry 17 soldiers volunteered. Seeing the tears well up in her eyes, a Girondin deputy standing nearby smiled knowingly. “You’re mourning the departure of your sweetheart,” he suggested.

Charlotte was startled out of her thoughts. She blushed with shame and anger. At 24 years old, she was tall, well-formed, with a prominent chin, soft gray eyes and sandy blonde hair. She knew that as an upper-class woman, she was expected to wait, to watch and to mourn while her country burned to the ground. But something was coming over her, a determination to do more, to do what nobody would ever believe a young woman of means could do. To kill the monster who was slowly killing her beloved France. To become an assassin.

She turned abruptly to the deputy. “You judge me today without knowing me,” she assured him. “Someday you will know who I am.”

Marat had a daring woman not unlike Charlotte Corday by his side: a 26 -year-old factory worker turned revolutionary firebrand named Simonne Evrard. Before the King’s execution, Marat’s rabble-rousing news sheet, L’Ami du peuple (The People’s Friend), and its scorched-earth policy toward anyone suspected of royalist sympathies made him a frequent target of censorship and arrest. Simonne first came to the aid of The People’s Friend by giving him a printing press when the authorities confiscated his own in 1790. From that point on, she became both Marat’s lover and his staunchest protector, helping him navigate a network of safe houses in working class cellars and garrets all across the city.

When the risk of arrest was particularly acute, Marat took refuge in the sewers of Paris, a centuries-old netherworld where the city’s muck and waste mixed with the metaphorical dregs of society: criminals and prostitutes, the destitute and the desperate. Even the police would avoid entering this putrid underworld. But Marat came to know the city’s underground entrails like the back of his hand: they were the dank, midnight mirror image of the knot of avenues and twisting lanes above ground that formed the light and life-filled streets of Paris.

As the revolution progressed and years of this cat-and-mouse game with the authorities wore on, the stones above Marat’s head rumbled with the sound of cannons dragged across the cobblestones, the muffled pop of muskets and the crash of cannon fire.

Simonne was fearless and undeterred, descending into remote corners of the subterranean tunnels to deliver supplies and messages to her lover. When the royal palace was taken, she brought Marat the remarkable update, the dim light of her lantern illuminating his diminutive figure.

Marat stood barely five feet tall, short even by 18th century standards. But his compact body exuded a kind of tense, outsized energy. He had a large, wide-boned face (some said out of all proportion to his body), an aquiline nose and a nervous twitch about his mouth and lips. The skin on his face was sallow and blistered beneath the dirty rag on his head. His eyes glowed with an edgy, keen attention, like a watchful cat, giving the impression that he was taking note of the smallest detail of his surroundings. Though from a middle-class family, he had long before adopted the loose ankle-length trousers, open-necked tunic shirt and headscarf of the urban working class. He was a sight to behold. But then, Simonne had fallen in love, less with Marat the man, than with the fire-and-brimstone righteousness of The People’s Friend, self-anointed champion for the poor.

“Good news, citoyen Marat!” she said. “It is done; the people have taken the Tuileries.” The king had not yet been executed, but it was only a matter of time. She continued, “I think it is safe to say that you can come out of hiding now.”

Soon after Marat emerged from underground, he was elected to the National Convention, France’s newly-formed legislative body. He strode into the assembly hall for the opening session with his dirty hair wrapped in a headscarf, his shirt flying open at the neck and a pistol stuffed in his waistband. He looked unkempt and feral.

Few of the other deputies had ever laid eyes on the mythical Marat. Some had even believed that he was an entirely fictional character, a rhetorical creation rather than a flesh and blood man. The Girondins had sought to paint Marat as a despot-in-waiting, a political radical who would establish a revolutionary dictatorship of the people. They made a motion to charge him with sedition and arrest him on the spot.

Marat took the floor to defend himself, and he convinced enough of the deputies of his innocence to avoid arrest. Before he took his seat, however, he could not resist pulling one last stunt of political theater. He put his pistol to his head and cried: “Had the Convention moved to have me arrested, this gun would have instantly put me far beyond the power of my persecutors to touch me!”

Marat’s rhetoric and showmanship were undeniably powerful. It was Marat who helped stoke the September Massacres with his incendiary words in L’Ami du peuple. “What is the duty of the people?” he asked. “The surest and wisest path is to take the prison by storm, pull the traitors from their cells, and put them to death at the point of a sword.” Mobs executed innocent inmates across the nation in a frenzy of paranoid violence. And it was Marat who had engineered a coup against the Girondin faction, whom he considered royalist sympathizers — he was the one who sent them into their exile in Charlotte Corday’s Caen.

After emerging from the sewers, Marat wielded his influence from a sanctum set up by Simonne, a modest four room apartment in the rue de l’Ecole des Médecins. After a heat wave exacerbated his chronic skin problems — an unwanted symbol of his martyrdom that he attributed to his time in sewers — he’d spend the better part of each day soaking in a medicinal bath. A tub was installed in the center of his small office chamber for these purposes. A plank of wood across the tub created a makeshift desk, providing him privacy as well as a surface on which to write: only his chest, head (wrapped in a towel like a mock-king) and arms were visible once he was seated in it. The desk was cluttered with pen and ink and books; old copies of The People’s Friend lay scattered on the floor surrounding the tub. The room was close and dark. Only one small window opened out onto the courtyard.

Marat continued to churn out issues of his newspaper, re-christened Le Journal de la République Française in a bid to soften the tone. On one wall near his tub hung a map of France. On the opposite wall, two pistols were fixed on hooks, with a small hand-written sign beneath them: DEATH.

Simonne doted on him. She changed his bath and bandages, and hired a cook to prepare his favorite foods. She scrupulously oversaw meal preparation, lest an enemy should try to sneak some poison into his food. Danger could come from anywhere.

Charlotte viewed the deposed Girondin officials as heroes as they continued to deliberate their next move from their refuge in Caen. The September Massacres had been weighing heavily on her mind; indeed, Marat’s recklessness in igniting the flames of violence had touched her personally. Georges Bayeux, a Caen city magistrate and family friend of Charlotte’s, had been set free after his imprisonment for being a counter-revolutionary. A mob outside the jail grabbed the man, throwing him to the ground and covering him with kicks and blows in front of his horrified wife and 12-year-old son. One soldier, brandishing a bayonet, ran the downed magistrate through the chest; another sliced his jugular with a pocket knife. Within minutes, the magistrate’s head was mounted on a pike amid the crowd screaming: “Here’s what happens to friends of the king and protectors of emigrés!”

No wonder doubts haunted Charlotte: what if the Girondin exiles failed to take back her beloved France? Mourning or waiting idly were not options. She knew how precarious it was to depend on others and how the world’s vicissitudes led to heartbreak. Her father had been an impoverished aristocrat who would pass off responsibility for her to relatives when he ran out of money.

When she was 15, her mother died, and she and her younger sister were taken in by the nuns at the convent of Abbaye aux Dames in Caen. Charlotte’s time in the convent was the happiest of her life until 1790, when the revolution forced the dissolution of all monasteries and convents. Collecting her worldly possessions into a single suitcase, she presented herself at the door of a distant cousin, Madame de Cousteflier de Bretteville-Gouville, whom she had never met.

She would sit in the salon with her cousin in the evenings, each by their little reading lamps. Madame de Bretteville pushed Charlotte toward a conventional life. In the early days of the revolution, she had invited Monsieur de Tournelis, an eligible bachelor, to the house, hoping to play matchmaker for Charlotte before the gentleman traveled to Austria, where he planned to wait out the national unrest.

The evening of his visit, Charlotte appeared radiant, dressed in the finest silks, wearing a rose-and-white striped taffeta dress to match her rose-colored hair ribbon. The older cousin proposed a toast to the health of the king. Charlotte refused to raise her glass. “A weak king can never be a good king,” she declared. “He can never prevent the suffering of his people.”

The visitor was shocked. “How can you so callously insult all seated here, your friends and family, by refusing to raise your glass to the king?”

“And if you are such an ardent supporter of the king,” she replied evenly to the gentleman, “how is it that you show your love for him by fleeing the country?”

That ended the illusion of a marriage between the two. But marriage was not a goal to which Charlotte aspired. “The man hasn’t yet been born who could be master of me,” she once admitted with a laugh.

The older woman’s worries about her cousin went far beyond her marital qualms. “There’s something not quite right with the girl; she frightens me,” she had declared at one point. “She gives one the impression that, at every moment, she is plotting some secret mischief.”

Now, as the two cousins sat together in the salon, Charlotte turned the pages of her well-worn Bible, consumed as she so often was by what she read. She found solace and inspiration in the written word, whether the Bible, Voltaire or Plutarch. Her books transported her into a time and place when humans had been giants instead of mere pawns. “I’m going to bed,” she at length announced to Madame de Bretteville. “Bonne nuit, my friend.” Her cousin gave her a pinched smile in return.

Before Madame de Bretteville retired, she walked over to the table where Charlotte’s Bible lay. It was open to the Book of Judith. In these passages, the city of Bethulia was under siege by the fierce Assyrian general Holofernes. The Israelites were on the verge of capitulating when the beautiful widow Judith hatched a plan. She washed herself with perfume and oil and plaited her hair. She “took her bracelets, and lilies, and earlets, and rings, and adorned herself with all of her ornaments” and went down to Assyrians’ camp. Holofernes, staggered by her beauty, invited her into his tent. Later, when the general was heavy with wine and sleep, Judith unsheathed his sword and prayed to her God. “Bring to pass, O Lord, that his pride may be cut off with his own sword. Give me constancy in my mind, that I may despise him: and fortitude that I may overthrow him. For this will be a glorious monument for thy name, when he shall fall by the hand of a woman.” And then she cut off his head.

Madame de Bretteville squinted at the door frame through which her cousin had so lately disappeared. What mischief was that strange girl planning?

July 1793, Charlotte, the former Catholic convent ward, steeled herself to become an assassin. She began preparations for a trip to Paris. In April, she had already procured a laissez-passer or visa from the local magistrate allowing her to travel to Paris–a document required of all travelers during the French Revolution.

But how could she explain her extraordinary wish to visit the capital to her watchful family? She hit upon the perfect pretext: an emigré friend in Austria was having financial difficulties that needed a lawyer’s attention. As luck would have it, one of the Girondin leaders now lodged in the hotel de l’Intendance, the stately mansion across the street from Madame de Bretteville’s house, was a lawyer from whom Charlotte could solicit a letter of introduction to the proper Parisian authorities on her friend’s behalf. Such a charitable mission, on behalf of a fellow aristocrat, would surely find favor in her family’s royalist eyes. She approached the heavy swing doors of the hotel hewed in ancient oak.

One of the Girondin officials holed up there, Jean-Baptiste Louvet, later recalled seeing Charlotte in the hallway, patiently awaiting a meeting. “She was tall, well-proportioned, well-dressed. There was something about her face and her whole manner of being, a mixture of sweetness and pride, that struck the observer” (d’Almeras 35). Louvet later supposed that “she wanted to be sure that her face would be forever etched in our memory.” She knew, after all, that she would never return from Paris.

Having procured the letter of introduction that would allow her free passage into the capital, Charlotte breathed a sigh of relief. She had her alibi. Now all she had to do was execute the real mission behind her errand. That evening she said her goodbyes to Madame de Bretteville, assuring her wary cousin she would return soon. By the next morning, July 9, before sunrise, Charlotte Corday was gone.

A two day voyage by public carriage brought Charlotte into the beating heart of Paris at noon on July 11. As she descended from the carriage, a peddler handed her a card: “Madame Grolier, Hotel de Providence, no. 19, Rue des Vieux Augustins. Furnished rooms, all prices.” Charlotte liked the name. After all, she believed she had been anointed by the hand of Providence to save her country from itself. She hired a porter to take her to the lodging house.

She was given a room on the first floor, with a window hung with faded red and white striped curtains opening out onto the street. It was cavernous, cool even in summer, and tiled with brick. It was sparsely furnished with a bed, desk and a few chairs. Having asked the porter to fetch her quill, ink and paper, Charlotte settled down to write. At the top of the sheet, she inscribed: “Letter to the French, Friends of the Rule of Law and Peace.” Then she began her manifesto.

“How long, O miserable France, will you let yourself be consumed with this turmoil and these divisions? We are now working towards our own downfall with more energy than we ever put into conquering Liberty!… France, you know who your enemies are! Rise up! March! Crush the Montagnards [Marat’s radical faction], leave behind only friends and brothers! I don’t know what Heaven holds in store for France, whether we will ever achieve a Republic. But only a wicked Heaven could intend for us to be ruled by a Montagnard despot.”

She thought of her place in the larger sweep of history. “Let my life be an example for all friends of the rule of Law to rally around.” And she closed with a passionate plea: “Let the Montagnards see their doom written in my blood.”

When she finished, she folded the document and placed it under the pillow on her bed.

The next day she rose early and made her way to the Palais Royale, re-christened by revolutionaries “Palais Egalité.” The once-sumptuous royal building, a square arcade of apartments opening out onto a courtyard filled with trees, pebbled garden paths and the murmur of fountains, had been converted into a commercial space. Cafés, restaurants, theaters and shops bustled with activity. The day was beautiful, the air clear and cool in the early summer morning. The birds called to one another in the trees, and Charlotte sat for a while taking in the scene.

She stopped outside the quincaillerie, or neighborhood kitchen shop, and when she saw the shopkeeper pulling back the metal gate to open for business, she approached. He must have been surprised to see this early morning patron, who even in her simple attire exuded the air of an aristocrat rather than a servant. Charlotte asked to see his selection of knives. She chose a 12inch kitchen knife with an ebony handle and handsome leather sheath. Paying her four francs, she returned to the Hotel Providence.

She took up pen and ink and composed a letter, dated 12 July, Year 2 of the Republic, and addressed to “Citoyen Marat.” It read:

I have just arrived from Caen; your love for the nation allows me to assume you will be eager to hear news of recent regrettable events in this part of the Republic. I will come to see you at one o’clock. Please grant me just a moment of your time, I hold important information that would allow you to render a great service to your country.

She sent the letter out with the porter, setting her trap, and awaited a reply.

By mid-afternoon, there was no response from Marat. Charlotte was growing restless. If Marat found the letter suspicious, he could send a guard to track down its source, and she could be detained. And wouldn’t the shopkeeper recall how his first unlikely customer that morning had purchased a large knife? She had to hope she had not already drawn too much attention when suspicion filled the air and Jacobin operatives and informants lurked everywhere.

By early evening, still with no word from Marat, she decided to make a bolder move. She took the document she had placed under her pillow for safekeeping and pinned to it her certificate of baptism, which she brought from Caen–she wanted everyone to know her name. She tucked the packet securely inside the bust of her dress. Into the same pocket went the knife. Dressed in a simple gray-and-white striped cotton shift, she donned a fashionable high black hat decorated with a knot of black and green ribbons, collected her fan, and ordered a carriage to take her to Marat’s address.

Simonne stood in the kitchen mixing a medicinal cocktail of mud and diluted almond paste. It was a country remedy that she hoped might prove a balm for Marat’s sores. Though Marat was a magnet for public attention, Simonne, 25 years his junior, was the household’s protector and its secret source of strength. Like Charlotte, Simonne was left without parents during her teenage years. She had to rely on her instincts for survival and her intelligence for advancement.

Simonne Evrard was “a generous and affectionate woman,” one acquaintance later said, who had “welcomed and saved” Marat. When he had lived on the run, Simonne had been instrumental in helping him evade the authorities, arranging hiding places and fabricating stories to throw them off his trail. Later, evidence suggests Simonne and Marat had made a commitment to each other in what amounted to a common law marriage. As militant as he was, Marat had a romantic side. Simonne’s “beautiful qualities,” he admitted, “have captivated my soul.” Simonne, in turn, saw through his rough exterior and was convinced her husband was “the most intrepid and the most outraged defender of the people.”

Marat sat in his office, immersed in his medicinal bath and scribbling away at his correspondence. Even his allies worried Marat overworked himself. A group of Jacobins who had checked in on him claimed he was afflicted with “an excess of patriotism, squeezed into too small a body.” Whatever illness he had was brought on by his intense love of his country: “the passionate demands of patriotism, that one feels so strongly in his presence, is what is killing him.”

In the attached sitting room, four members of his trusted inner circle were quietly chatting, readying the latest issue of Marat’s publication for distribution. Neither health nor seclusion would slow Marat’s implementation for his vision for revolutionary France.

Charlotte knocked on the door. A servant answered, blocking the stranger from entering the apartment. Charlotte insisted on seeing Marat, but the servant denied her.

Simonne slipped out from the kitchen to see what the commotion was about. She found herself face-to-face with a tall, neatly dressed, regal-looking yet nervously animated young woman. They locked eyes.

“I’ve told her Marat isn’t well,” the servant said to Simonne, “that it is absolutely out of the question that she see him.”

From where she was standing, Charlotte could have stolen a glimpse of the many obstacles that would await her inside. The apartment was filled with Marat’s close friends and other supporters who served as his ad hoc bodyguards.

Charlotte pleaded. “I have made a long and tiring journey to speak with him. I have some news of the utmost importance to communicate to him.”

Charlotte’s plea pitted Simonne’s protectiveness of Marat’s health against her revolutionary fervor. To believe in Marat was to believe in his politics. After weighing the options, Simonne relented. She led Charlotte into Marat’s chamber, then retreated to the kitchen, closing the door behind her.

At last Charlotte was alone with her enemy. Marat’s clandestine life had always given him something of the air of a phantom: he was everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Face to face with ce monstre Marat, Charlotte felt a cold wave of panic roll through her body. She had to contain it. If her mission foundered, Marat’s screeds would likely grow more violent.

Marat’s tyranny might have stood for so much more to Charlotte than unsavory politics. She faced tyrannical demands for obedience at every turn, from her father who dictated her unwanted moves between relatives, to her cousin’s social strictures, to the many men who waited for her to fall in line.

The sight of the near mythical monstre must have been jarring. When Dante Alighieri describes reaching Lucifer at the bottom of Inferno, he faces an underwhelming beast, drooling and inert, not the charismatic demon of Milton or Faust. Charlotte may have expected to look upon evil incarnate. What she faced instead was a sickly, scholarly, small man in his bath. Marat himself had wondered what people thought when meeting him. “Perhaps they will drop by to see the Dictator Marat. What they will find is a poor devil in his bed who would give all the dignities on earth for a few days’ health.” Charlotte trembled as her eyes caught a glimpse of the pistols on the wall with their sinister caption, DEATH. Both a warning and a command.

“I’ve just arrived from Caen, citizen, where [the Girondins] have taken refuge,” she began, her words shaky. She had to control herself; one wrong note and he could scream for his guards. “They have taken over the département and organized a counter-revolutionary army to march on Paris. At least four administrators in the Caen municipal government have colluded with them.”

“Names?” Marat inquired, dipping his quill in the ink. As Charlotte recited their names, Marat patiently recorded them, mumbling to himself at each entry: “To the scaffold with him.”

As he condemned one man after another, Charlotte saw her chance. She drew the knife from her bosom, raised the weapon high, eyes fixed on the soft oval of flesh just above his right clavicle that emerged from the water. Judith’s final prayer from the Bible floated through her head like a prophecy: “Let him be caught in the net of his own eyes in my regard. And do thou strike him by the graces of the words of my lips.”

Charlotte met Marat’s blazing, startled gaze for just an instant. Then she plunged the knife into his chest, burying it bloody up to the hilt.

“Help me, dear wife! Oh, help me!” Marat had just the strength to call out before he fell still. His soldiers burst into the room, knocking Charlotte over with a chair and pinning her to the ground. But she had made no move to escape. Simonne rushed in, wailing.

“Assassin!” she screamed. The bath water turned crimson.

Charlotte’s bloody dagger lay where it had fallen, across Marat’s bathtub desk. The dead man’s blood seeped across the letters and newspapers scattered on the desk and floor, blooming like red roses against the black-and-white print. Simonne collapsed on her knees by the side of her now lifeless husband. Charlotte sat calmly, erect, in the center of the circle of mourning patriots and waited for the gendarmes to arrive.

When they wrestled Charlotte to the ground, they discovered the manifesto she had tucked into her dress. “O France,” it read, “your peace depends upon the execution of the law, and I in no way violate that law in killing Marat…. You will not miss this savage beast who fattened on your blood.” The letter closed with a quotation from Voltaire, who puts these words in the mouth of Brutus before he killed the tyrant Julius Caesar:

“If the universe is shocked at my action

Looks upon it with either surprise or admiration

My soul cares not if my name be remembered

Cares not for reproach nor glory:

My duty suffices unto me, all the rest is nothing.”

Even Charlotte’s defining moment was undermined by sexist expectations. It seemed impossible that a pretty young woman could come out of nowhere to murder arguably the French Revolution’s most powerful provocateur. It seemed so improbable that a woman could have pulled this off, that rumors circulated that the assassin had been a man dressed up as a woman. Once that was quashed, a frantic search for Charlotte’s male co-conspirators began; surely, a woman would be incapable of masterminding such a murder on her own. When that avenue reached its dead end, the only remaining explanation was that it was a crime of passion: the girl had been driven to murder out of love for an injured paramour. But none could be identified.

The simplest explanation was the hardest to accept: Charlotte had been motivated by her own self-determined brand of patriotism. She was no Antigone, nor Cleopatra. She was Brutus. She was Judith. She had never given anyone, either by word or deed, reason to believe otherwise.

Charlotte Corday’s trial at the Palais de Justice was brief. She did not deny any of the accusations. On the morning of July 16, la fille Corday, as the legal documents identified her, was brought before the tribunal to face her accusers. She wore a brown dress and the same ribbon-festooned black hat that she had donned the night of Marat’s murder. The questioning was short and to the point; Charlotte responded to the interrogation with a quick, firm voice.

Judge: What was the object of your trip to Paris?

Charlotte: I came with no other motive than to kill Marat.

Judge: And what crimes do you reproach him with?

Charlotte: Of the destruction of France, of the civil war that he ignited all across the kingdom. That he desired to become a dictator.

From her dingy prison cell, Charlotte wrote letters. “They are such good republicans here in Paris, that they can’t imagine a woman — whose existence can never amount to anything of value — could sacrifice herself for her country.”

Charlotte had one final request: that a portraitist be sent to her cell to sketch her image as she awaited execution. “In order to leave a memento for my friends,” she explained. Then, perhaps thinking it might be of more interest to her enemies, she reminded officials that “curiosity has always moved people to search for pictures of great criminals, portraits which serve to perpetuate the horror of their acts.” She was granted her request, and Jean-Jacques Hauer arrived with paper and sketch pencils in hand. Charlotte’s keen eye for dramatic effect was not unlike her victim’s.

The executioner entered Charlotte’s cell as Hauer was finishing up his work. “So soon?” she asked, wistfully. He was holding a pair of scissors and the regulation red vest that the law mandated for parricides. Charlotte, after all, had killed a “father” of the revolution. She obediently readied her sandy blonde locks for the shearing. Before he started, however, she asked her executioner to cut off a lock of her hair; she handed it to the visibly moved portraitist. “Keep it as a token of my gratitude, for the interest you have taken in me.”

Hands bound, she was led into the prison courtyard where she mounted a two-wheeled wooden cart that would parade her through the streets of Paris on her way to the place of execution. Charlotte refused the offer of a seat. She remained standing, resolute, eyes fixed on a far-off point beyond. A crowd of thousands had gathered on the Place de la Révolution. She tried to say a few parting words to the crowd swarming at the foot of the scaffold, but what she said remains unknown. The crowd’s jeers drowned out her voice before the blade did its bloody work.

Even after death, the public struggled to reconcile her gender with her actions. To prove at last that a lover must have inspired her, officials performed an autopsy. But, according to the incomplete medical understanding of the era, the examination indicated to the officials that Charlotte had died a virgin, just as she had stated after her capture. It was finally becoming clear that this young woman executed a daring coup against the revolution without any help from a man.

In a plot twist worthy of Charlotte’s beloved tragic playwrights, the murder of monstre Marat was not the country’s salvation but rather the catalyst for its further dissolution. Her ‘royalist’ coup against popular sovereignty unleashed a new wave of counter-revolutionary paranoia that culminated, in just a few months, in the Reign of Terror. The Girondin officials were among the thousands of revolutionary enemies who were guillotined.

The real monster–the one that could not be slayed–was the instinct to wipe out political enemies and instill ideological purity through sheer force, the instinct to turn brutality into patriotism. Charlotte’s compulsion to “crush” all enemies–“leave behind only friends and brothers!” — had consumed her as much as the man she assassinated.

To Simonne Evrard, now a widow, Charlotte and counter-revolutionaries like her were the true monstres. Simonne became an advocate for her late husband’s legacy and a political voice in her own right.

Charlotte Corday became known as the “angel of assasination.” The moniker conjured up an image of a righteous spirit still walking the streets of Paris. But after 10 years of political ferocity in France, the distinctions between angels and demons blurred. Though Marat’s extremism persisted, Charlotte did successfully slay the notion that women could be dismissed as mere spectators in the political arena. It was now clear that women were crucial, sometimes dangerous actors. Some historians claim that Charlotte’s crime paved the way for the execution of other female prisoners in France, including Marie Antoinette, who was guillotined just three months later. Whatever Charlotte Corday’s unheard last words had been, the message of her death was clear: women who had been expected to wait and mourn could rise up and stake claim to autonomy and power. They could take matters into their own hands and shake the foundations of society.

ELLEN WAYLAND-SMITH is associate professor of writing at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well Set Table and of The Angel in the Marketplace: Jean Wade Rindlaub and the Selling of America. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Guernica, Catapult, The Millions, Longreads, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.