Charlotte Corday

Charlotte Corday
Charlotte Corday by Jean-Jacques Hauer
Born	Marie-Anne Charlotte de Corday d'Armont 27 July 1768 Saint-Saturnin-des-Ligneries, Écorches (in present-day Orne), Normandy, France
Died	17 July 1793(1793-07-17) (aged 24) Paris, France
Cause of death	Execution by guillotine
Known for	Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat
Parent(s)	Jacques François de Corday, seigneur d'Armont Charlotte Marie Jacqueline Gaultier de Mesnival

Marie-Anne Charlotte de Corday d'Armont (27 July 1768 – 17 July 1793), known as Charlotte Corday (French: [kɔʁdɛ]), was a figure of the French Revolution. In 1793, she was executed by guillotine for the assassination of Jacobin leader Jean-Paul Marat, who was in part responsible for the more radical course the Revolution had taken through his role as a politician and journalist. Marat had played a substantial role in the political purge of the Girondins, with whom Corday sympathized. His murder was memorialized in the painting The Death of Marat by Jacques-Louis David, which shows Marat's dead body after Corday stabbed him in his medicinal bath. In 1847, writer Alphonse de Lamartine gave Corday the posthumous nickname l'ange de l'assassinat (the Angel of Assassination).

Born in Saint-Saturnin-des-Ligneries, a hamlet in the commune of Écorches (Orne), in Normandy, Charlotte Corday was a member of a minor aristocratic family. She was a fifth-generation matrilineal descendant of the dramatist Pierre Corneille. Her parents were cousins.

While Corday was a young girl, her older sister and their mother, Charlotte Marie Jacqueline Gaultier de Mesnival, died. Her father, Jacques François de Corday, Seigneur d'Armont (1737–1798), unable to cope with his grief over their death, sent Corday and her younger sister to the Abbaye aux Dames convent in Caen, where she had access to the abbey's library and first encountered the writings of Plutarch, Rousseau and Voltaire. After 1791, she lived in Caen with her cousin, Madame Le Coustellier de Bretteville-Gouville. The two developed a close relationship, and Corday was the sole heir to her cousin's estate.