Who was Charlotte Corday?
Charlotte Corday (27 July 1768 – 17 July 1793), Marie Anne Charlotte Corday d’Armont, killed Jean-Paul Marat in 1793. Charlotte was a member of an aristocratic but poor family. She was educated at the Abbaye aux Dames, a convent in Caen, Normandy. She approved of the French revolution, supporting the Girondists. Jean-Paul Marat (1743 – 1793) was a member of the radical Jacobin faction which initiatied the mass atrocities and beheadings known as the Reign of Terror which followed the early stages of the Revolution. He was a journalist, exerting power through his newspaper, The Friend of the People (L’ami du peuple). In 1789, when Marat had twenty-two Girondists arrested, Charlotte Corday began to consider killing him. The execution of King Louis XVI (21 January 1793) and the denunciation of Marat by Jacques Pierre Brissot, a leading Girondist, helped her finally deci
