Noble Blood - Charlotte Corday, the Angel of Assassination

Episode Date: December 5, 2023

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. Support Noble Blood: — Bonus episodes, stickers, and scripts on Patreon — Merch — Order Dana's book, 'Anatomy: A Love Story' and its sequel, 'Immortality: A Love Story'.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong,

dance and then there's your body having its own program. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion advised. July 17, 1793. A young woman, only 24 years old, gets ready to dawn the day. the red over blouse, 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, 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 Hauer, who 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 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 did this woman ask for a portrait to be painted in the first place? And perhaps the question you're 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 she became the murderer of the revolutionary and unrulyly. unofficial Jacobin leader, Jean-Paul Moran. On July 13th, just four days before she would be executed for it, Corday had gained entrance to Marat's home and stabbed the famous journalist to death with a kitchen knife while he soaked in his bathtub.

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. 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 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 Miserables, a number of works of arts, 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 paint before Charlotte Corday the woman 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 Howard and attempt to paint you a portrait. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood. As is the case for most minor country nobles in 18th century France, there is not an extensive wealth of information surrounding Charlotte's childhood. We know that she was born in Normandy as Marianne Charlotte de Corday D'Armond,

the second of four children, and her family was aristocratic but poor. She was a descendant of the dramatist Pierre Cognier, considered one of the great French playwrights of the 17th century. perhaps Charlotte's destiny was shaped by her ancestors' 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 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, as she would later claim, quote, a Republican before the Revolution. During her eventual trial, she would claim to have read over 500 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 1791, the school was closed due to revolutionary pressures, 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 the revolution up until an insurrection in May 1793, headed by one Jean-Paul Morat. 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, Mara was able to rally the support of the people, and 40,000 men showed up to demand the arrests of the representatives. 22 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 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 Mara and his followers.

The Girondin found perhaps more support than they had envisioned in Charlotte Corday. Charlotte believed 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 1793, Charlotte procured a passport as required by all travelers by the Revolutionary Authority. From this passport, we know a number of small details about Charlotte. She was 5'6, her hair was brown, and her eyes were gray. The lack of a handy photo ID also meant that her passport had a detailed description of her appearance.

Quote, forehead high, nose long, mouth medium size, chin round. With her forehead held high, apparently, Charlotte first used this passport on July 9th to board a carriage to Paris. It would be a two-day ride, and three days after she arrived would be July 14th, the four-year anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. It would be on that day, Charlotte decided, that she would execute Jean-Paul Mara 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, and it would happen on the anniversary of a day that represented it all. It was only when Charlotte arrived in Paris on July 11th, however,

that she learned Mara would not be attending the festivities. In fact, he wouldn't be leaving his house at all. Jean-Paul Maraq came from a modest background, but as a teenager, he was inspired, by his highly educated father to pursue his own education. His Wikipedia entry 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. 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 attacks on authoritative groups and figures, from Louis XVI ministers to leaders within the revolution that Mara considered too conservative. The paper's main focus was investigating those that Mara believed to be, quote,

counter-revolutionary. This did not make Mara a 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 Mara and the Friend of the People for the September massacres of 1792, a mass killing of prisoners by armed civilians, 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 Girondin, Mara was one of the most prominent leaders of the revolution. 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 50 years old, he had been sick for many years with a skin disorder. Perhaps, and this is my informal medical guess, not helped by all the time he spent in the sewers. Murrah 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, answering letters and conducting meetings, while soaking for hours at a time.

With this knowledge, Charlotte Corday spent the day of July 12th 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 sheath from a cutlery shop. She paid 40 sous, which were small coins worth one-twentieth of the leave. She first attempted to ask to see Mara 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 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 goodwill, she wrote in her note. She would apologize for her deceit in gaining entry during her trial, would counteract that apology with 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 scarf, 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 Lamorte Caesar, citing Brutus's belief that killing Caesar was his duty.

Charlotte also wrote that if she did succeed, she believed that she 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. 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 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. 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 her entrance. He was apparently planning to focus the next issue of his newspaper on the Girondin in Kane and wanted Charlotte's firsthand 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 didn't make her move right away.

She instead sat with him for 15 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 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 her. With one sudden move, plunged her knife into his torso, penetrating a lung and the corroded artery. Mara called out to his wife standing 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. 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. Her trial was held on the 17th 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 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. 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, 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 was because I hoped to keep it incognito, but I recognize the impossibility. I hope you will not be tormented.

In any case, I believe that you would have defenders in Ken. Goodbye, 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, as well as all my parents. Do not forget this verse by Corneal. Crime brings shame, not the scaffold. It is tomorrow at 8 o'clock that I am judged.

This is 16 July. She was, in fact, judged the next morning and found guilty, bringing us back to the opening 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. present at 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 Camus in reflections on the guillotine, quote, Charlotte Corday's severed 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 Sanson, distancing himself from an act that 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's said that following her execution, Charlotte's headless body was autopsied to see if she was a virgin.

Jacobin leaders still believed that she 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 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. A bust of Mara quickly replaced a religious statue on one street in person. 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-David, hangs today in the Louvre. 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 Carvaggio's

the entombment of Christ, or Michelangelo's version of Jesus in the Pietha. It's an idealized portrayal of the man. His famously diseased skin is clear, with the exception of the knife-sized hole in his chest, dripping crimson. Where is Charlotte, though? In David's portrait, she is only present in the note that Mara holds, an indictment of her guilt. David feared that the presence of a pretty young woman in the portrait would attract 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 remark would be pointless. were it not generally true, that any pretty woman who enjoys being pretty clings to life and fears 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 Portia de Chatro. All these things 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, Mara's barbarous assassin, like those mixed beings whose sex is impossible to determine, vomited up from hell to the despair of both sexes, 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 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 simply distanced themselves out of a fear of a growing backlash against women at large.

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 in 1863, nearly a century after Charlotte's 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. 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 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 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. 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 break for a very fun Noble Blood cameo. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong stance. And then there's your body having

its own program. I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. We share stories and scientific insights to help us all better navigate these periods. of turbulence and transformation. There is one finding that is consistent, and that is that our resilience rests on our relationships. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes.

Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong stance. And then there's your body having its own program. I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and host of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. We share stories and scientific insights to help us all better navigate these periods of turbulence and transformation. There is one finding that is consistent, and that is that,

that our resilience rests on our relationships. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. Listen to a slight change of plans on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. While David sought to erase Corday, among his circle, the Angel of 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 Grouchholz,

but more famously known today, as Madame Tussaud. Still an apprentice at the time of the wax modeler Philippe Cousseus, he sent her 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 Cordesians, as she was ushered out of Mara's home,

and she went to see her in her cell during her imprisonment. Madame Tussaud would cast a death mask of Charlotte's severed head, as she would for 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 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, is a production of I-Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky. 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 Noami Griffin and Rima Il-Ka Ali, with supervising producer Josh Thane and executive producers Aaron Manky, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans.

I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong stance. And then there's your body having its own program. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.