She stabbed him once. It made him a saint.
On 13 July 1793, Charlotte Corday walked into Jean-Paul Marat's home and killed him with a single knife wound, believing she was stopping a slaughter. Four days later, the blade that killed her was the guillotine's.
France in the summer of 1793 was tearing itself apart from the inside. The revolutionary government that had executed its own king six months earlier was now turning on itself, splitting into factions who accused each other of betraying the Revolution. Jean-Paul Marat, a fifty-year-old physician turned journalist, had made himself one of the loudest and most dangerous voices in that fight.
His newspaper, L'Ami du Peuple, had spent years calling for the killing of anyone he judged an enemy of the people, sometimes in the hundreds, sometimes in the thousands. In June, his faction had helped purge their more moderate rivals, the Girondins, from power entirely. Many of them fled Paris. Some were executed. Others went into hiding.
Charlotte Corday was twenty-four years old, from minor Norman nobility, educated partly in a convent, and a committed sympathiser of the Girondins her city had just watched destroyed. She had read Marat's paper. She believed, along with a great many people who were not aristocrats and not counter-revolutionaries, that he was personally responsible for driving France toward a bloodbath that had no end in sight. She decided to stop him herself.
She arrived in Paris on 11 July with a plan to kill him in public, at the Fête de la Fédération, in front of the crowd that would gather for it. The plan collapsed before it began. Marat, disfigured by a chronic skin disease, had stopped appearing anywhere. He worked from a medicinal bath now, confined to his own rooms, and if she wanted him she would have to go there herself.
She gained entry with a list of names, Girondin dissidents hiding in Caen, and Marat took it eagerly. He told her, in some accounts, that their heads would fall within a fortnight. While he wrote the names down, still in the bath, she drew a knife from her bodice and drove it once through his chest. He died almost at once. She made no attempt to run. She stayed where she stood and waited to be taken.
The tribunal moved fast. Within days, the president suggested she must have practised the stabbing beforehand, and she shot back, "Oh the monster, he takes me for an assassin!" Asked why she had done it, she gave the line that outlived the trial itself. "I killed one man to save a hundred thousand." It did not save her. She was guillotined on 17 July, four days after the killing, at the Place de la Révolution.
The Convention moved almost as fast as the tribunal had. Jacques-Louis David was commissioned to paint Marat's death, and what he produced borrowed its pose directly from Caravaggio's entombment of Christ, wound and all. The disfigured man who had spent his last months confined to a bathtub came out of David's hands young, smooth-skinned, martyred. The painting became one of the most reproduced images of the entire Revolution. A man who mattered immensely in life mattered even more in death, becoming sacred because of how he died, not just what he did.
Before her own execution, Corday asked for one thing. She wanted her portrait painted. Jean-Jacques Hauer did it in the hours she had left. Marat was given a canvas that erased the woman who killed him entirely, just a letter in his hand where she used to be.
She asked to be remembered on her own terms, and, for a few hours in a cell, she was. She sat for him while waiting for the executioner, reportedly even offering critiques and suggesting corrections to how he captured her likeness. When the portrait was finished, she cut off a lock of her hair and gave it to him as thanks just before she was taken to the guillotine.
Her portrait can still be seen today at the Palace of Versailes.
