Happy Birthday, You Bastard

July 27th, Charlotte Corday

Marie-Anne Charlotte de Corday d'Armont
July 27th, 1768

The observant regular reader of these daily articles may have noticed something by now, beyond the sparkling wit and carefully manipulative political agenda woven into each one like the finest silk damask. Most of the people covered here are born relatively recently in the historical arc of the human journey and most of them are men. There are reasons for this. Firstly, the exact birthdates of people born before, say, 1700 are quite hard to nail down. They’re either not recorded, or recorded and then lost, or sometimes just estimated.

William Shakespeare famously died on his birthday, 23rd April, 1616. Because nobody is exactly sure when his birthday was, and his age at death was recorded simply as 52, rather than, say, 52 and two months, it is then simply assumed that he was born exactly 52 years earlier, on 23rd April, 1564. The truth is that nobody knows precisely when he was born.

The second reason is that women didn’t exist until the 17th Century when they were invented to fill a gap in the Mad Cat Lady market to give conservative buffoons something to be angry about, having exhausted their stocks of pretend anger on such things as Huguenot migration, the exact gender roles of the newly introduced potato and vegan lamprey posset.

What few women did exist in history were not allowed to speak or write anything down. It’s often said that history is written by the victor, but this is only partly true. History is written by men and rich men at that. That they may also be the victor is incidental. As women are overly emotional and prone to fits of hysteria, the delicate task of boasting about how wonderful you are couldn’t be left to the whims of the flightier sex. Much better to simply leave it to the more rational and sober men; men who deal with their sports team losing by crying and punching holes in the wall, or settle their drunken differences by brawling in the street because someone looked at you funny.

Those women who do manage to participate in the historical record are either witches, whores or conniving jezebels who’s fiendish plotting is abnormal and wicked, unlike the complex nuanced and intelligent bitching that men engage in. Evil Stepmother versus Machiavellian Spy master.

When women finally break free of these restrictions, they are either greeted with horror that they aren’t at home spinning yarn and dying in childbirth, and are instead on the streets expressing human emotion because they're fucking pissed, or they’re engaged in actions that can only then be couched in masculine terms.

Ultimately, if a woman does something that is seen as heroic, noble, bold, or daring, regardless of whether it is good or bad, it has to be described in masculine ways. By acting in such a manner, she has acted ‘like a man’.

And because she has acted like a man, that deserves respect from the people who write history. Who are men.

So, women only appear in history if they’re a Queen, a bitch, a slut or she did something ‘manly’. Queen Elizabeth I, Agrippina, Cleopatra or Margaret Thatcher.

Charlotte Corday did something manly. She assassinated an asshole.

She was born in 1768 in Saint-Saturnin-des-Ligneries, Normandy, France, a member of a minor aristocratic family. As you can probably imagine, late 18th Century France wasn’t the best place to be a member of an aristocratic family, minor or not. She was sent to a convent at a young age where she discovered the works of Plutarch, Rousseau and Voltaire in the library and soon she became a passionate supporter of revolutionary thinking.

The Revolution of 1789 famously descended into la Terreur, Charlotte began to sympathize with the Girondins, a political group who initially supported the republican cause but then grew disturbed by the radical and spiralling direction France was heading in. Their opponents believed that the only way the Republic would survive elements that opposed them was to terrorize and execute them.

Charlotte’s opposition to this extremist ideology ultimately led her to formulate a plan to murder the leader of the radicals, Jean-Paul Marat.

Marat was a member of the Montagnard faction that had a leading role in la Terreur. He was a journalist and political theorist who wielded great influence through his newspaper, L'Ami du peuple ("The Friend of the People"). Charlotte feared his radical ideas had brought France to the edge of civil war and his involvement in the notorious September Massacres of 1792, in which thousands of political opponents and prisoners were hunted down and summarily executed, served to drive her determination. She saw Marat as a direct threat to the Republic and that by murdering him, she could save the lives of thousands.

On 9th July 1793, Corday, carrying a copy of Plutarch's Parallel Lives, went to Paris, where she took a room at the Hôtel de Providence. There she bought a dagger and over the next few days sat in her room, writing her manifesto, Adresse aux Français amis des lois et de la paix ("Address to the French, friends of Law and Peace").

Her plan was to assassinate him in public, preferably in front of the whole National Convention, to make an example of him. But when she found out that Marat was in poor health and rarely ventured outside, she changed her plans.

She went to his home on July 13th, claiming to have knowledge of a Girondins plot, but was turned away. She returned that evening and Marat himself let her in. He conducted most of his affairs sitting in his bathtub due to his health condition. She gave him the names of the Girondins plotters, which Marat wrote down, then she drew her dagger and stabbed him once in the heart. He cried out Aidez-moi, ma chère amie! ("Help me, my dear friend!"), and then died.

People rushed into the room and seized her. Frantic attempts to save Marat failed and within minutes, Republican officials had arrived to interrogate Charlotte and calm a baying mob that had gathered outside to lynch her.

Her trial began almost immediately and the Republicans brought in all their top men to cross examine her. She remained defiant, resolutely expressing her Republican values, insisting that she had acted in the bests interests of France and the Revolution, citing the values of Republican Rome as her inspiration. To her, Marat was a monster and she said "I have killed one man to save a hundred thousand."

The prosecution was insistent that, as a woman, she could not have acted alone. She lacked the ability or drive to plot such a murder without male influence. Charlotte insisted "I alone conceived the plan and executed it." They didn’t believe her, even as they sentenced her to death. Women weren’t capable of such deeds; they were second-class citizens who belonged in the home, even the daughters of the Revolution.

Charlotte wrote a letter to her father. it exonerated him from any blame, and demonstrated that she had premeditated the murder, but still the idea that she was part of a larger plot wouldn’t go away:

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 recognized the impossibility. I hope you will not be tormented. In any case, I believe that you would have defenders in Caen. I took Gustave Doulcet as a defender: such an attack allows no defense, it's for the form. Goodbye, my dear papa, please forget 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 Corneille:

Crime is shame, not the scaffold!
It is tomorrow at eight o'clock that I am judged. This 16 July.

She was sentenced to the guillotine. Before the execution, she asked that her portrait be painted so that her likeness be captured. "Since I still have a few moments to live, might I hope, citizens, that you will allow me to have myself painted." She was given permission and selected as the artist a National Guard officer, Jean-Jacques Hauer, who had already begun sketching her from the gallery of the courtroom. Hauer's initial painting was done shortly before Corday was dragged to the tumbril and after she had suggested a few changes.

On 17th July, 1793, just four days after she murdered Jean-Paul Marat with what she called a ‘lucky blow’, she was executed by the guillotine at the Place de Grève, wearing the red overcoat of a condemned traitor. She remained calm, although drenched by sudden rainfall.

After her decapitation, a man named Legros stepped forward, lifted it from the basket and slapped it across the cheek. Witnesses observed a look of “absolute indignation” on her face when her cheek was struck. This frequently recounted story has been used to imply that guillotine victims might remain conscious for a brief period. Albert Camus also referenced this in his work, Reflections on the Guillotine, noting that “Charlotte Corday’s severed head blushed, it is said, under the executioner’s slap.”

This unacceptable outrage, made worse because it was a woman, saw Legros imprisoned.

More indignity was to come. So obsessed were the Republicans that Charlotte had acted on the compulsion of a man, so determined were they that a woman alone lacked the ability to organize such a crime, that they had her body autopsied to determine if she was still a virgin and hence must have hatched her deeds in the midst of passion. To their dismay, the ‘test’, for whatever that’s worth, determined that she was still a virgin.

The outcome of her assassination was the exact opposite of what she had hoped to achieve. Marat became a martyr. Busts of him were erected across the city and street names changed in his honor. And as a result of the ‘plot’, la Terreur just got more terrible.

She had her supporters, many of them, and to them she had transformed the notion of what a woman was capable of. Before, women had been expected to live almost exclusively private lives and outside of socializing among their peers, engaging in public acts, even legal ones, was frowned upon. To her supporters, she was a heroine.

To her detractors, she also changed the way women were viewed, however her acts were seen as a typically masculine reaction to her opposition. They could only view her actions through the lens of a man. Either way it was viewed, her actions changed the political and societal role of women in the Revolution.

Charlotte was surprised by the reaction of other female Revolutionaries: "As I was truly calm, I suffered from the shouts of a few women. But to save your country means not noticing what it costs."

The general reaction among women was to distance themselves from her actions, primarily in fear of reprisals and because it might be seen to damage any concessions the nascent feminist movement had won.

One of her supporters, André Chénier, wrote a poem in her honor.

Virtue alone is free. Honor of our history,
Our immortal opprobrium lives there with your glory,
Only you were a man, and avenged the humans.
And we, vile eunuchs, a cowardly herd without a soul,
We know how to repeat a few complaints from a woman,
But the iron would be heavy in our feeble hands.

Again, even to her supporters, Charlotte Corday wasn’t allowed to have acted as a woman. Here, Chénier openly describes her as a man and the men who didn’t mirror her actions as somehow lesser eunuchs.

What Coday did, right or wrong, for good or for bad, she did as a woman. Not as a woman acting like a man. They way women act, even in history, doesn’t have to be measured against the actions of men, nor validated by them.