Charlotte Corday
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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What I have to say cannot be said in writing --Charlotte Corday in Marat/Sade (1964) |
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Charlotte Corday (1768 – 1793) was a French aristocrat executed in 1793 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 depicted in the painting The Death of Marat by Jacques-Louis David, which shows Marat's dead body after Corday had stabbed him in his medicinal bath.
In Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade, the assassination of Marat is presented as a play, written by the Marquis de Sade, to be performed by inmates of the asylum at Charenton, for the public; the patient performing the role of Corday in the play-within-a-play (Glenda Jackson in the stage production and subsequent film adaptation) is, somewhat ironically, a narcoleptic.
