CHAPTER XVIII
ASSASSINATION OF JEAN PAUL MARAT
(July 13, 1793)
IN the letter of farewell which Charlotte Corday, from her prison cell as a doomed murderess, addressed to her father, she used the phrase (the French words are a well-known verse from a famous tragedy):
“’Tis not the scaffold, but the crime, that brings disgrace”;
for she still adhered to the belief that in killing Marat she had not committed a crime, but an act of patriotic devotion for which posterity would honor her, and history would place her name among the benefactors of mankind. In this belief she was more than half right, for in the long list of political crimes and assassinations there is not one which has been so willingly condoned by the world, so eloquently defended by historians, so enthusiastically immortalized by poets, and so leniently criticised even by moralists as that of Charlotte Corday. In her defence the law of heredity has been invoked, for it has been maintained that Charlotte Corday, who was a great-grandniece of the great Corneille, had inherited those sublime patriotic and republican sentiments which the great tragic poet so often and so eloquently expresses in his dramatic poems. In fact everything has been done to surround her crime with the halo of martyrdom, and to secure for her the glory of a national heroine.
It was in the middle of the year 1793. The French Revolution had reached that turning-point when the Revolutionists had almost exhausted their fury against the Royalists, and engaged in factional fights among themselves, always ending in the execution of the members of the vanquished party. The National Assembly—transformed into the National Convention—was under the absolute control of the Jacobins, and Marat, Danton and Robespierre were the absolute rulers of Paris and consequently of France. The King had been guillotined, the Queen and the other members of the royal family were imprisoned, and their execution was only a question of time. An insane craving for blood seemed to have taken possession of the men who were guiding the destinies of France. Danton, by far the most gifted of these Jacobins, had forever sullied his name as the author of the “September Massacres”; but far more odious was Marat, “the friend of the people,” the blood-thirsty demon of the Revolution, who quite seriously demanded, in the paper of which he was the editor and publisher, that two hundred thousand persons should be guillotined to purify the aristocratic atmosphere of France.
The powerful party of the Girondists, who were distinguished by a certain degree of moderation and had been a sort of counterpoise in the Convention to the Jacobins, had not only been defeated, but had been actually driven out of the Convention and been branded as traitors and enemies to the Republic. With Marat, Robespierre and Danton in the absolute and unrestrained possession of power, the destruction and execution of the Girondists was therefore only a question of time,—of months, weeks, perhaps only of days,—and most of them fled from Paris, seeking refuge in those parts of France which were known to be strongly attached to the moderate views of the defeated party. Normandy was one of these provinces, and in its ancient towns and villages quite a number of the proscribed leaders of the Girondist party—Buzot, Pétion, Barbaroux, Louvet and others—appeared with the outspoken intention of arousing the population and inducing them to march against Paris. There had been great excitement before their arrival. The enemies of the Terrorists were in a large majority, and had been active in organizing, equipping, and drilling an army, and General Wimpfen, the commandant at Cherbourg, was bold and imprudent enough to announce that he would march upon Paris with an army of sixty thousand men.