Charlotte Corday

Marie-Anne Charlotte de Corday d'Armont was born 27 July 1768 into a family that would fracture along with France itself. A Girondin sympathiser, she watched the moderate revolutionaries lose ground to the Jacobins and held Jean-Paul Marat responsible for the September Massacres of 1792. She travelled to Paris, secured an audience, and on 13 July 1793 stabbed Marat to death while he sat in a medicinal bath. Jacques-Louis David immortalised the scene in paint; the Revolutionary Tribunal immortalised her sentence four days later. On 17 July she was guillotined at the Place de Grève, and in 1847…