Charlotte Corday Kills Marat in His Bathtub

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In this episode of pplpod, we explore the life of Charlotte Corday, the Norman noblewoman who assassinated the radical journalist Jean-Paul Marat in 1793, convinced that one act of violence could end the Reign of Terror. Born in 1768 into the minor nobility and descended from the dramatist Pierre Corneille, she lost her mother and older sister young, and her grieving father sent her to an abbey in Caen. There she read Rousseau, Voltaire, and above all Plutarch, absorbing a Roman ideal of civic duty and heroic self-sacrifice. In 1791 she moved in with her aunt and later became her heir, aligning herself with the moderate, decentralizing republicans of Caen against the centralized extremists of Paris.

The episode follows how the 1792 prison massacres led her to blame a single man, Marat, whose newspaper L'Ami du Peuple she saw as the engine of the Terror. In July 1793 she traveled to Paris, bought a five-inch kitchen knife, and wrote an address to the French people. She gained entry to his home on a second visit by promising names of traitors from Caen, then stabbed him once in his medicinal bath and made no attempt to flee. Under interrogation she insisted she acted alone, while the all-male tribunal searched for accomplices, her chosen lawyer's letter was delayed, and a portrait painted in her cell showed her blonde instead of brunette. Four days later she was guillotined in a red robe, a carpenter slapped her severed head, and an autopsy confirmed she was a virgin. Her act made Marat a martyr, intensified the Terror, and helped justify the ban on women's political clubs, leaving a legacy of conviction, irony, and contested memory.

In this episode we cover...

• The 1793 execution scene, the carpenter's slap, and Corday's Norman noble upbringing, family losses, and convent education in Caen
• Her reading of Rousseau, Voltaire, and Plutarch, her move to her aunt's home in 1791, and the split between moderate and extremist republicans
• The 1792 prison massacres, her decision to target Marat, her trip to Paris in July 1793, and the kitchen knife
• The assassination in Marat's bath, her calm arrest, the tribunal's search for accomplices, the intercepted letter to her lawyer, and the altered portrait
• Her execution in the red robe, the carpenter's jail term, the autopsy, Marat's martyrdom, the escalation of the Terror, the ban on women's clubs, and her nickname, the Angel of Assassination

Source credit: Research for this episode included transcript materials and supporting French Revolution, Enlightenment, Terror-era legal, gender history, and biographical sources accessed October 31, 2026. Content is summarized and adapted for commentary and educational use.