Mademoiselle Corday Rendezvous With Dr. Guillotine

 

Charlotte Corday in the tumbril which bore her to the guillotine, by James E. McConnell. 

By all accounts Charlotte Corday stepped on the scaffold in Paris on July 17, 1793 with remarkable calm and dignity.  She knelt laying her reportedly lovely neck in the yoke of the apparatus.  At the appointed time the sure knife of the guillotine fell, and her head tumbled into the waiting basket.  Suddenly, a man named Legros, who may, or may not, have been an assistant to the executioner or perhaps a carpenter who worked on the machine that morning, rushed forward grabbing the head by its light brown hair and slapped it across the face.  A witness wrote that Corday’s face had an expression of “unequivocal indignation” at the slap. 

Twenty-four-year-old Corday came to this final indignity by meddling in French politics—with a butcher knife.

She was born on July 27, 1768 in a Normandy village and was graced with the elaborate name of Marie-Anne Charlotte de Corday d’Armont because her father, Jacques François de Corday, seigneur d’Armont was a member of the minor, but impoverished, nobility.  After her mother and older sister died of some sort of contagion, Charlotte and a younger sister were sent to a Convent in Caen.  While there she had access to the library where she read widely, enjoying particularly the classics like Plutarch in Latin.

By 1791 she left the convent and was living with a cousin, Madame Le Coustellier de Bretteville-Gouville who first brought her into the orbit of Girondin politics.

                    Mademoiselle Corday as portrayed by François-Séraphin Delpec.

The Girondin were the party of moderate Republicans who dominated the National Assembly when the King was overthrown.  At first their main opposition came from moderate Royalists who favored a constitutional monarchy.  Their main allies in the Assembly were the slightly more radical Montagnards.  Both were factions of the Jacobin Club, the main revolutionary society.

Back in Normandy Corday avidly read the writings of the most important members of the Girondin and associated with other provincial supporters.  And like the Girondin, she watched in horror as the Revolution seemed to spiral violently out of control.  Two events particularly shocked her.

First was the sudden overthrow of Louis XVI in March of 1792.  The Girondin were indeed in favor of abolishing the monarchy but had pinned their hopes on a more orderly transition to a republic.  The second event was the September Massacres when thousands of priests, aristocrats, monarchists, and other political detainees were dragged from their prisons and murdered or hastily tried and executed by the sans-culottes of the Paris Mob.

Both of those events transpired as the Girondin held nominal power in the government.  But the Montagnards, now assuming the mantel of the Jacobins, were scrambling for power, trying to keep up with the radicalized and angry poor of Paris.  Under the leadership of Maximilien Robespierre, Georges Danton, and Jean-Paul Marat Jacobins plotted the over-throw of their former allies and their complete elimination as a political force.  In May of 1793 the people of Paris rose against the Girondin government which had threatened to attack them with loyal levies from the provinces. In early June the National Guard officially ousted the government.  Within weeks the Reign of Terror was on.

                                Jean-Paul Marat by Jean Francois Garneray--a remarkably ugly little man.

Watching all of this with mounting horror in Normandy, Corday lay most of the blame not on the more active politicians, Robespierre and Danton, but on the movement’s ideological leader, Marat.  The former physician and scientist dedicated himself to revolutionary politics from the earliest stirring of the people.  A radical democrat he made himself the champion of the poor—the sans culottes—and the stinging critic of any perceived conservatism or weakness in a parade of revolutionary governments in his newspaper Le Journal de la République française under the nom de plume L’Ami du people.  He was often forced into hiding but kept, as best as he was able, his sometimes-outlawed paper in print.  He was an idol to the Mob in ways that ambitious politicians like Robespierre and Danton could only dream of.  In the Reign of Terror he undertook the role of prosecutor.

Corday decided that if Marat was somehow removed from the scene the Reign of Terror would collapse and France would be spared a civil war.  At some point she decided to act on her own.

She travelled from Normandy to Paris intent on killing Marat and composing a manifesto explaining the action she planned to take.  She first tried to approach him at the National Assembly only to discover that he no longer attended the meetings.  Next, she sought him out at his house after purchasing a 6-inch butcher knife on the morning of July 13.  A servant turned her away initially, but when she returned that night claiming to have a list of Caen Girondin who planned an insurrection, Marat allowed her to be admitted.

Marat, who suffered from a painful and debilitating skin condition was working as usual from a makeshift desk stretched across his bathtub.  He conducted the interview and collected the list.  According to her later statement he either said that those on the list would be immediately disposed of or arrested and put to death.  

                            The Death of Marat by David.

With that Corday rose from her chair and strode to the bathtub pulling her knife from her corset.  She plunged deep into the chest of the helpless man who could only manage to blurt out “Aidez-moi, ma chère amie!” (Help me, my dear friend) before dying.  Corday pierced Marat’s lung, aorta and left ventricle.  He died all but instantly.

As the household responded with alarm, Corday sat quietly awaiting inevitable arrest.

Everything went quickly after that.  She was interrogated at length—and most likely tortured in an attempt to find out if she was part of a wider conspiracy.  In her hurried trial she told the court that “I killed one man to save 100,000.”  She had no illusion that she would not pay with her life.

For their part the Jacobin authorities, terrified for their own lives and unsure if Corday acted alone, ordered her body examined to see if she was a virgin.  They believed that she must have been sleeping with a man who controlled her.   They steadfastly refused to believe a woman would be able to conceive and execute such a plan on her own.  Unfortunately for them, she turned out to be a virtuous virgin.

Although her manifesto, Address to the French people, friends of Law and Peace was secretly published and circulated, at least in Paris, Marat was elevated to the status of martyr/hero.  His bust was installed on the altars of former churches when the new revolutionary Cult of Reason was proclaimed.  The popular painter David portrayed Marat’s lifeless body in the bath in a picture that took Paris by storm and was widely reproduced.

If Marat’s reputation won the immediate propaganda war, it was not to last.  The excess of the Reign of Terror spun rapidly out of control, appalling many former supporters and even eventually members of the notorious mob.  Outside Paris the provinces seethed with resentment and rebellion brewed.  Within a year they were ousted from power and on 9 Thermidor by its new Revolutionary calendar and July 10, 1794 by the Gregorian, Robespierre’s head was separated from his shoulders, likely on the same busy guillotine that had been so effective on Corday.

The surviving moderate Republicans, surviving younger aristocrats, and royalists were back in sway for a while under the Directorate until the shrewd Napoleon Bonaparte, hero of the wars of invasion by the European powers seeking to restore the monarchy, gathered up the power for his personal dictatorship and ultimate Empire.

The eventual fall of Napoleon and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy at the point of Europe’s bayonets calmed France for a while, but glaring class inequality continued to fester, particularly in Paris which erupted in street rebellions in 1830 and again in 1832.  The latter was a paltry, doomed affair now remembered only because it inspired Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and, of course the musical stage and screen blockbuster of our time.   

                        The revisionist view with Corday as heroine by Paul Baudry.

Supporters of the monarchy sought out historical figures to write an alternative myth of the bloody past, someone of undeniable courage who dared to face the howling mob.  Charlotte Corday was the perfect candidate.  Her story was retold and embellished in books and stage melodramas, something that would be repeated after the brief Republic following the fall of the Bourbons to the 1848 uprising when Louis Napoleon came to power. 

In 1860 Paul Jacques Aimé Baudry painted the same scene of Marat dead in the bathtub as celebrated by David from a different angle showing a heroic Corday surveying her work.

Marat/Sade on stage in London with Patrick Magee, Glenda Jackson, and Ian Richardson directed by Peter Brook in the 1967 Royal Shakespere Company film version.

In the 1960 the story was retold in the international theater sensation The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade better known simply as Marat/Sade and the 1967 film directed by Peter Brook based on his Royal Shakespeare Theater Company London production.   Songs from the show including Poor Old Marat were recorded as a medley by Judy Collins on her best-selling album In My Life.

Marat and Corday remain to this day potent symbols in France to be extolled or reviled depending on one’s politics.

 

Antoine Lavoisier—When the World’s Most Famous Scientist Lost His Head

                            Antoine Lavoisier isolated, identified, and named oxygen.

What with climate change deniers, anti-evolutionists, new earth enthusiasts,  anti-vaxers, and Trumpista zealots, a lot of scientists these days are feeling pretty put upon and threatened by politics.  But, believe me, it could be worse.  Ask Antoine Lavoisier.

The French Aristocrat was indisputably the most famous and important scientist in the world.  He is rightfully considered the Father of Modern Chemistry and made major contributions to biology as well.  Most famously, he identified and named oxygen as essential to combustion.  His English contemporary, the theologian/philosopher/scientist Joseph Priestley had isolated the element but didn’t understand what he had found insisting until he died that it was dephlogisticated air, a particularly pure form of common air deprived of its phlogiston, a theoretic substance within bodies released during combustion.  Lavoisier would have none of that.  

Lavoisier creating water by combining Hydrogen and Oxygen.

He also isolated, identified, and named Hydrogen.  Other accomplishments included helping construct the metric system, creating the first extensive list of elements, reforming chemical nomenclature, establishing sulfur as an element rather than a compound, predicting the existence of silicon, and discovering that although matter may change its form or shape, its mass always remains the same. 

That’s a pretty impressive portfolio of accomplishments.  You would think that a scientist of such enormous achievement would be admired by the self-avowed worshipers of reason at the head of the ever-tumultuous revolutionary French Revolutionary regimes.  You would be wrong.

Like many minor aristocrats, Lavoisier had been generally supportive of the early stages of the Revolution but became increasingly alienated by growing violence and enmity to the Catholic Church to which he was devoted.  Despite generally trying to remain aloof from the political turmoil around him, it was known that he was generally as conservative as his English rival Priestly was radical.   After the execution of Louis XVI in January 1793, his days were numbered.

Lavoisier was born to a wealthy family in Paris on August 26, 1743, the son of an attorney at the Parlement of Paris.  His mother died when he was five years old leaving him a substantial fortune of his own.   His formal schooling began at age 11 at the Collège des Quatre-Nations in Paris.  In his final years before matriculation, he became obsessed with science, particularly chemistry, botany, astronomy, and mathematics under the tutelage of Abbé Nicolas Louis de Lacaille, a noted astronomer.

Despite these passions the young man dutifully followed his father into a legal education, graduating with a Bachelor of Law in 1763 and was admitted to the bar the following year.  He never practiced, however, and began devoting himself to his experiments.  He published his first article on chemistry the year he graduated law school and read the paper before the prestigious French Academy of Science.  In 1766 he was awarded a gold medal by the King for an essay on the problems of urban street lighting. Then he studied geology under Jean-Étienne Guettard, a leading Enlightenment scholar. That led to an appointment to a geological survey of Alsace-Lorraine in 1767.   In 1768 his rapid advancement was recognized by his appointment to membership in the Academy.

Around that time, he picked up a sideline to assure himself of a steady stream of income while leaving plenty of time for his experiments.  That sideline would help lead to his downfall.  He bought a share of the Ferme générale, a corporation which lent money to the Government and Court in exchange for the right to collect taxes and import duties.  He became a part time fermier généraux—literally tax farmer—a position that was a license to print money.  It was also widely despised by those from whom it collected taxes and seen as enormously corrupt. 

                        Portrait of Monsier Lavosier and His Wife by David.

At the age of 28 Lavoisier married the even wealthier Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze, the 13-year-old daughter of a senior member of the Ferme générale.  Despite the age difference, it was a good match, and the well-educated and talented young woman became the scientist’s most important associate as well as his wife.  She kept his notes, collaborated on his efforts to systematize chemical nomenclature, and translated important English scientific papers, including those of Priestly.  She even made sketches and engravings to illustrate Lavoisier’s experiments.

In 1772 he began the long series of experiments on combustion that led him finally to identify oxygen and dispute Priestley’s conclusion in his famous Easter Memoir in 1778.

Lavoisier's English rival Joseph Priestly isolated oxygen first but did not understand what he had discovered.  Later the Unitarian dissenter, radical, and supporter of the French Revolution lost his home, laboratory, and nearly his life to a Tory mob.

In addition to his regular scientific work and his lucrative activities as a tax collector, Lavoisier won another rich plum when he was appointed one of four members of the Royal Gunpowder Commission, which was charged with improving the quality French powder and improving the manufacturing process.  He was very successful at this and turned a former loss for the Crown to a profit making enterprise and significantly improved French arms.  As part of the deal, he was also given a home and a laboratory at the Royal Arsenal where he lived and worked between 1775 and 1792.

Those were the happiest and most productive days of his life.  Working in close cooperation with a young and beautiful wife he adored, he made discovery after discovery, published important papers, and reaped honors.  And the family’s already considerable fortunes were fattened by the steady stream of income from the Ferme générale and Gun Powder commission.  Despite his royal patronage, he stayed mostly away from the intrigue and distraction of Court life—and from the rising discontent bubbling under the surface of the country.

It all started to fall apart in 1789 with the eruption of the Revolution—which he quietly supported in its early days.  Knowing that the Ferme générale was widely unpopular, Lavoisier proposed reforms which would reduce perceived corruption and ease the onerous tax burden on the lower levels of society.  But anger at the corporation was too much.  It was dissolved and its fermiers généraux publicly reviled and humiliated.  Next he was dismissed from the Gun Powder Commission and forced to leave his home and laboratory.

In 1791 Jean-Paul Marat, the radical journalist, propagandist, and popular leader of the sans-coulottes singled Lavoisier out for attack.  He charged that the scientist had become rich as a tax collector with a scheme to “adulterate French tobacco.”  No formal charges were immediately filed, but he found himself in mounting danger.  Perhaps when Marat was assassinated he felt the crisis had passed.

Indeed, despite his distress at the mounting violence and anticlericism of the Revolution, he seemed to feel that his personal prestige as a scientist would insulate him.  He even spent some of that prestige in an appeal to allow foreign born scientists to leave the country.  Those scientists were given leave, but his meddling angered many in power.

In August of 1793 the Academy, and all other learned societies were repressed, stripping Lavoisier of his last layer of protection.

The architect and leader of the Reign of Terror, Robespierre.

Then at the height of the Reign of Terror Maximilien de Robespierre, the demagogic leader of the Convention ordered the arrest of former fermiers généraux including Lavoisier.  In addition to the general charges of corruption against the others, he was also charged with the alleged tobacco adulteration scheme.

On May 8, the scientist was arrested and brought to trial.  An appeal for clemency so that he could continue his vital scientific research was harshly denied by the revolutionary judge who said, “The Republic needs neither scientists nor chemists; the course of justice cannot be delayed.”  He and his 27 other co-defendants were immediately taken from court to the guillotine.

Robespierre, who had overplayed his hand, followed Lavoisier to the guillotine just three months later.  By the end of 1795 the new government officially exonerated him returning his confiscated possessions with the note “To the widow of Lavoisier, who was falsely convicted.”  She spent the rest of her life organizing and publishing her late husband’s notes.

Lavoisier riding to his execution on the guillotine.

Meanwhile, Lavoisier’s old scientific rival Priestly had his own problems for opposite reasons.  Priestly was an ardent supporter of the French Revolution.  Unfortunately, he lived in England which was at war with the Republic and was an unpopular religious Dissenter.  In 1791 a mob, whipped up by Tory rhetoric, attacked and burned his Birmingham home and laboratory.  Eventfully he had to flee to the United States with the assistance and support of Thomas Jefferson.  He settled in Pennsylvania where he concentrated on his preaching.  He introduced English style Unitarianism, which differed from the theology emerging from the New England churches, to the middle-Atlantic region.

In the end, both men were honored.  Fat lot of good it did Lavoisier’s health.

 

Mademoiselle Corday Had a Date With Dr. Guillotine

Charlotte Corday in the tumbril which bore her to the guillotine, by James E. McConnell. 

By all accounts Charlotte Corday stepped on the scaffold on July 17, 1793 in Paris with remarkable calm and dignity.  She knelt laying her reportedly lovely neck in the yoke of the apparatus.  At the appointed time the sure knife of the guillotine fell and her head tumbled into the waiting basket.  Suddenly, a man named Legros, who may, or may not, have been an assistant to the executioner or perhaps a carpenter who had worked on the machine that morning, rushed forward grabbing the head by its light brown hair and slapped it across the face.  A witness wrote that Corday’s face had an expression of “unequivocal indignation” at the slap. 

Twenty-four year old Corday had come to this final indignity by meddling in French politics—with a butcher knife.

She was born on July 27, 1768 in a Normandy village and was graced with the elaborate name of Marie-Anne Charlotte de Corday d’Armont because her father, Jacques François de Corday, seigneur d’Armont was a member of the minor, but impoverished, nobility.  After her mother and older sister died of some sort of contagion, Charlotte and a younger sister were sent to a Convent in Caen.  While there she had access to the library where she read widely, enjoying particularly the classics like Plutarch in Latin.

By 1791 she had left the convent and was living with a cousin, Madame Le Coustellier de Bretteville-Gouville who first brought her into the orbit of Girondin politics.

                    Mademoiselle Corday as portrayed by François-Séraphin Delpec.

The Girondin were the party of moderate Republicans who dominated the National Assembly when the King was overthrown.  At first their main opposition came from moderate Royalists who favored a constitutional monarchy.  Their main allies in the Assembly were the slightly more radical Montagnards.  Both were factions of the Jacobin Club, the main revolutionary society.

Back in Normandy Corday avidly read the writings of the most important members of the Girondin and associated with other provincial supporters.  And like the Girondin, she watched in horror as the Revolution seemed to spiral violently out of control.  Two events particularly shocked her.

First was the sudden overthrow of Louis XVI in March of 1792.  The Girondin were indeed in favor of abolishing the monarchy but had pinned their hopes on a more orderly transition to a republic.  The second event was the September Massacres when thousands of priests, aristocrats, monarchists, and other political detainees were dragged from their prisons and murdered or hastily tried and executed by the sans-culottes of the Paris Mob.

Both of those events transpired as the Girondin held nominal power in the government.  But the Montagnards, now assuming the mantel of the Jacobins, were scrambling for power, trying to keep up with the radicalized and angry poor of Paris.  Under the leadership of Maximilien Robespierre, Georges Danton, and Jean-Paul Marat Jacobins plotted the over-throw of their former allies and their complete elimination as a political force.  In May of 1793 the people of Paris rose against the Girondin government which had threatened to attack them with loyal levies from the provinces. In early June the National Guard officially ousted the government.  Within weeks the Reign of Terror was on.

                                Jean-Paul Marat by Jean Francois Garneray--a remarkably ugly little man.

Watching all of this with mounting horror in Normandy, Corday lay most of the blame not on the more active politicians, Robespierre and Danton, but on the movement’s ideological leader, Marat.  The former physician and scientist had dedicated himself to revolutionary politics from the earliest stirring of the people.  A radical democrat he made himself the champion of the poor—the sans culottes—and the stinging critic of any perceived conservatism or weakness in a parade of revolutionary governments in his newspaper Le Journal de la République française under the nom de plume L’Ami du people.  He was often forced into hiding but kept, as best as he was able, his sometimes outlawed paper in print.  He was an idol to the Mob in ways that ambitious politicians like Robespierre and Danton could only dream of.  In the Reign of Terror he undertook the role of prosecutor.

Corday decided that if Marat was somehow removed from the scene the Reign of Terror would collapse and France would be spared a civil war.  At some point she decided to act on her own.

She travelled from Normandy to Paris intent on killing Marat and composing a manifesto explaining the action she planned to take.  She first tried to approach him at the National Assembly only to discover that he no longer attended the meetings.  Next she sought him out at his house after having purchased a 6 inch butcher knife on the morning of July 13.  A servant turned her away initially, but when she returned that night claiming to have a list of Caen Girondin who planned an insurrection, Marat allowed her to be admitted.

Marat, who suffered from a painful and debilitating skin condition was working as usual from a makeshift desk stretched across his bathtub.  He conducted the interview and collected the list.  According to her later statement he either said that those on the list would be immediately disposed of or arrested and put to death.  

                            The Death of Marat by David.

With that Corday rose from her chair and strode to the bathtub pulling her knife from her corset.  She plunged deep into the chest of the helpless man who could only manage to blurt out “Aidez-moi, ma chère amie!” (Help me, my dear friend) before dying.  Corday had pierced Marat’s lung, aorta and left ventricle.  He died all but instantly.

As the household responded with alarm, Corday sat quietly awaiting inevitable arrest.

Everything went quickly after that.  She was interrogated at length—and most likely tortured in an attempt to find out if she was part of a wider conspiracy.  In her hurried trial she told the court that “I killed one man to save 100,000.”  She had no illusion that she would not pay with her life.

For their part the Jacobin authorities, terrified for their own lives and unsure if Corday acted alone, ordered her body examined to see if she was a virgin.  They believed that she must have been sleeping with a man who controlled her.   They steadfastly refused to believe a woman would be able to conceive and execute such a plan on her own.  Unfortunately for them, she turned out to be a virtuous virgin.

Although her manifesto, Address to the French people, friends of Law and Peace was secretly published and circulated, at least in Paris, Marat was elevated to the status of martyr/hero.  His bust would be installed on the altars of former churches when the new revolutionary Cult of Reason was proclaimed.  The popular painter David portrayed Marat’s lifeless body in the bath in a picture that took Paris by storm and was widely reproduced.

If Marat’s reputation won the immediate propaganda war, it was not to last.  The excess of the Reign of Terror spun rapidly out of control, appalling many former supporters and even eventually members of the notorious mob.  Outside Paris the provinces seethed with resentment and rebellion brewed.  Within a year they were ousted from power and on 9 Thermidor by its new Revolutionary calendar and July 10, 1794 by the Gregorian Robespierre’s head was separated from his shoulders, likely on the same busy guillotine that had been so effective on Corday.

The surviving moderate Republicans, surviving younger aristocrats, and royalists were back in sway for a while under the Directorate until the shrewd Napoleon Bonaparte, hero of the wars of invasion by the European powers seeking to restore the monarchy gathered up the power for his personal dictatorship and ultimate Empire.

The eventual fall of Napoleon and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy at the point of Europe’s bayonets calmed France for a while, but glaring class inequality continued to fester, particularly in Paris which erupted in street rebellions in 1830 and again in 1832.  The latter was a paltry, doomed affair now remembered only because it inspired Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and, of course the musical stage and screen blockbuster of our time.   

                        The revisionist view with Corday as heroine by Paul Baudry.

Supporters of the monarchy sought out historical figures to write an alternative myth of the bloody past, someone of undeniable courage who dared to face the howling mob.  Charlotte Corday was the perfect candidate.  Her story was retold and embellished in books and stage melodramas, something that would be repeated after the brief Republic following the fall of the Bourbons to the 1848 uprising when Louis Napoleon came to power. 

In 1860 Paul Jacques Aimé Baudry painted the same scene of Marat dead in the bathtub as celebrated by David from a different angle showing a heroic Corday surveying her work.

Marat/Sade on stage in London with Patrick Magee, Glenda Jackson, and Ian Richardson directed by Peter Brook in the 1967 Royal Shakespere Company film version.

In the 1960 the story was retold in the international theater sensation The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade better known simply as Marat/Sade and the 1967 film directed by Peter Brook based on his Royal Shakespeare Theater Company London production.   Songs from the show including Poor Old Marat were recorded as a medley by Judy Collins on her best-selling album In My Life.

Marat and Corday remain to this day potent symbols in France to be extolled or reviled depending on one’s politics.