Corday's decision to kill Marat was stimulated by her repugnance for the
September Massacres, for which she held Marat responsible.
After 1791, Charlotte lived quietly with her cousin, Mme Le Coustellier de Bretteville-Gouville in Caen. 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. 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.
A political cover-up was attempted prior to the trial;
Claude François Chauveau-Lagarde, who would later represent
Marie Antoinette, was appointed as defence for Charlotte Corday. The president of the Tribunal ordered him to enter a plea of insanity on his client's behalf, in order to remove any notion of patriotic idealism from the act. Chauveau-Lagarde, who more than understood Corday's actions, although unable to disobey the Tribunal made a mockery of it with a well-honed piece of equivocal verbiage.
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.
She was promptly autopsied, and announced to have been found a virgin. The body was disposed of in a trench along with other victims of the guillotine; it is uncertain whether the head was interred with her, or retained as a curiosity. It has been suggested that the skull of Corday remained in the possession of the Bonaparte family and their descendants (via the royal marriage of Marie Bonaparte) throughout the twentieth century.
The
assassination did not stop the Jacobins or the Terror: Marat became a martyr, and busts of Marat replaced
crucifixes and religious statues that were no longer welcome under the new regime. The
anti-female stance of many revolutionary leaders was increased by Corday's actions. The Revolution now turned with full force on
Marie Antoinette, the king's imprisoned widow.
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