Charlotte Corday Politics really do get people hot under the collar. So it was with Mademoiselle Corday. She was only twenty five when she had had quite enough with Marat, one of the leading Jacobins of the French Revolution and one who had instigated the Reign of Terror (and there is no hyperbole in its name either). He was a journalist who stirred up opinion in his newspaper; she was a member of a minor aristocratic family who was more than a little fed up with their class ending up in the final caress of the guillotine. On 10 July 1793 she put her plan in to action. Getting access to Marat was easy – she told his housekeeper that she would be informing him of a plot against the state. She was admitted – approaching Marat in his bathtub (he had a skin condition and conducted many of his affairs from there). After giving Marat the names of the plotters she pulled out a knife and plunged it deep in to his chest, an act immortalized in much artwork. She herself was guillotined just a week later. Records maintain that her decapitated head was picked up, slapped on the cheek and the face registered a look of ‘unequivocal indignation’ at this post mortem attack.