French Revolution: Radicals (part 4): She Killed Him In The Bathtub

Vulgar History Podcast

French Revolution Radicals (Part 4): She Killed Him In The Bathtub 

May 7, 2025

Hello, and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women’s history comedy podcast. My name is Ann Foster, and in this miniseries, it’s like a sub-series within a bigger series, the mini-series is looking at women of the French Revolution… To complete my sentence, in this mini-series, we’re looking at women of the French Revolution in a sub-series that we’re calling “Liberté, Égalité, Sororité: You Can’t Stop the Women of the Revolution. In the first several episodes, we’ve alluded to Charlotte Corday, who was a woman who was famous as the angel of assassination because she killed a guy. I don’t think that’s a spoiler, this is kind of, like, what she’s best known for doing. We alluded to that, and today we’re going to be talking about who she was, who she killed, why she did it, and what effects that had as well, not just on society, but also on the artistic world. 

To get into that, I need to have a special guest. And the special guest is Gavin Whitehead from the podcast, The Art of Crime. So, The Art of Crime is a podcast where Gavin looks at, I mean, he looks at crime from history, but it’s sort of like, all kinds of different crime; it could be a murder; or it could be this one time that these drag queens stole a bunch of wigs from the Metropolitan Opera. I was on the podcast before talking about Princess Caraboo, whose crime was kind of like pretending to be a princess. He’s also talked about the theft of the diamond necklace, the Affair of the Necklace, which happened during the French Revolution as well. Anyway, he connects crime and history with art. So, sometimes that means a painting, sometimes that means a play, sometimes that means a book. And Charlotte Corday, all of the above are related to her story. 

So, Gavin was last on this podcast talking about Madame Tussaud. And I was so happy that he agreed to be on the podcast again today to talk about Charlotte Corday. Honestly, it’s a long-ass conversation, so I’m going to stop introducing it and just let you enjoy this really fun conversation about Charlotte Corday with Gavin Whitehead from The Art of Crime podcast. 

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Ann: So, it’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for. It’s the return of one of the most popular guests we’ve ever had: Gavin Whitehead!

Gavin: Oh my gosh, I had no idea I was one of the most popular guests you’ve ever had! Now I’m even more honoured to be on this show. I was honoured already, and now I am doubly or triply honoured. [laughs]

Ann: After we did the Madame T episode, and then I aired the one that I did, like, we did Princess Caraboo in your podcast, and I aired on my show, and people were just like, “We love Gavin.” And I’m like, “So do I! This is great.” So, I’m excited to have you back. 

Gavin: I mean, Madame T and Princess C are a pretty killer combo, too. I feel like it’s hard to go wrong with either of those ladies. 

Ann: They were pretty iconic topics. Actually, can we talk about Madame T for a second? 

Gavin: Of course. I am always prepared to talk about Madame T. 

Ann: I know! I saw you did talk about Madame T on Art of History as well. 

Gavin: That’s right. [laughs] 

Ann: Everyone should listen to that too, because we can never have enough. I just thought it was funny; after reading the biography and then talking with you about her, I really got a good sense of who she was and what she was all about. And then, when Luigi Mangione was arrested and everyone realized how gorgeous he is, I was like, Madame T? 

Gavin: Oh, she’d be all over that, yeah. 

Ann: Like, overnight, she would have had a life-size waxwork of Luigi, and people would be lined up. Could you imagine? 

Gavin: And it would have been shirtless to show off that six pack as well, you know? 

Ann: Yes! 

Gavin: I don’t know if you saw this, but there was news footage, there was a picture of Luigi Mangione shirtless on a camping trip or whatever, and he was ripped. He was ripped. And all the pundits were like, “Oh my god, those abs.” And I was like, “Wow, this is what we’re talking about.” 

Ann: It’s preposterous to me. He is the world’s most photogenic human. It’s ridiculous. Every picture of him is amazing. And Madame T would have had that figure, people would be in there… And this is the thing, the week that he was identity revealed or whatever, what the actual Madame Tussaud’s was revealing, do you know what they were revealing that week? 

Gavin: No! 

Ann: A waxwork of Paddington. 

Gavin: Oh, hell yeah. I mean, can’t complain about that. I love the Paddington movies. Paddington 2 is a flawless movie; everyone should see it. And Hugh Grant is in it as the villain, and it is the performance of his career. I am not even joking right now. It is required viewing. They always get an A+ lister for the villain in those movies. Have you seen the movies? 

Ann: I have not seen the movies, but all I’ve heard is that they’re so good. 

Gavin: They are so good. I mean, if your heart is not warmed, you are a monster. You are a grade A irredeemable monster. But also, Luigi Mangione is really apt, and probably this is why you’re bringing it up, because in some ways, you can trace the history of the glamorous assassin back to Charlotte Corday. 

Ann: I was thinking of him when I was going through this because it was the real thing, just like, a person who’s gorgeous and a murderer— I mean, allegedly for Luigi. 

Gavin: Allegedly. Right. 

Ann: Definitely for Charlotte. But yeah, and just the way that this person kind of takes the world by storm, the art world. 

Gavin: The other really hot assassin… I do a podcast called The Art of Crime, as listeners might know, and each season is structured around a different theme, and the second season was all about assassins. And so, the big name on that season was John Wilkes Booth, who obviously assassinated President Abraham Lincoln. What I had not known going into that was… Obviously, John Wilkes Booth was an actor, that is pretty common knowledge, but he was considered to be the hottest man alive, basically, in the mid-19th century. It is really funny to read some of these contemporary eyewitness accounts of his performances because everyone is just gushing. Men and women, everyone, everyone is like, “Oh my god, what a Roman god! What an Apollo! What an Adonis!” you name it. And they’re just fanning themselves in the theatre. Personally, I don’t see it, but I’m not a 19th-century person, and to each his, her, their own. 

Ann: Well, and it’s interesting to me, too, because in my historical research, too, when you read about someone who’s like, “This is the most gorgeous person who ever lived,” and then I look up a portrait, and I’m like, “Him?” [Gavin laughs] So, I think a lot of it might be, like, in person, the charisma really wins you over. 

Gavin: Yes, I think that’s part of it. Although I will say, not to sound kind of a little bit superficial, but to be kind of a little bit superficial…

Ann: Please.

Gavin: In the John Wilkes Booth episode, I also had to talk about John Brown, the abolitionist, and John Wilkes Booth was actually present at John Brown’s execution. Okay, John Brown had it going on in a timeless way, not in a 19th-century way, like, in a timeless way. So just, I think, tuck that away. File that away somewhere in your brain and look him up later. 

Ann: It’s interesting. It is, honestly… [laughs] I just posted about this the other day on social media, because I was like, I’m consistently disappointed when I read about like, “This is the most handsome man ever,“ and I look at the picture and I’m like, “Eugh!” Especially in like, well, in the Charlotte Corday time period, where it’s, like, the men are wearing wigs and stuff. It’s just like, no one looks good in those wigs. 

Gavin: [laughs] They could. I mean, yeah, it’s true. I can’t really think of any… I mean, who’s an example of a man who was supposed to look good from this period, who you looked up? Can you think of one right now? 

Ann: I’m trying to… Oh, no one you would have heard of, honestly. 

Gavin: Okay. [laughs] 

Ann: [laughs] I’m doing some pretty deep cuts coming up on this podcast. Some of the French Revolutionary guys were supposed to have been pretty hot, and they were, like, spoiler, not. 

Gavin: I think it’s part of your due diligence as a historian, right? Is to perform a hotness check on each subject. 

Ann: And I think that the listeners deserve to know when I’m talking about someone who is hot, so they can factor that in. 

Gavin: I mean, you would be doing them a disservice otherwise. 

Ann: If they didn’t know. And so, I will say today’s topic, Charlotte Corday, gorgeous. 

Gavin: Hot. She had it going on. And it’s not just the hat, which I’m sure we will talk about at great length. 

Ann: There’s some real fashion moments in this story, for sure. But yeah, that was the thing, when she was arrested and brought in—spoiler, she’s going to be arrested—everyone was just like, “My god!” 

Gavin: Like, “Okay, if I had to be assassinated by someone, I guess I would choose her.” Right? [laughs] 

Ann: Sitting in your bathtub. Like, who do you want to see? I guess her. 

Gavin: Right. She was the original femme fatale, you know? 

Ann: Literally, literally. Okay. So, I do want to say I’ve been pleased this season so far. We’ve been looking at the women revolutionaries, and none of them have been called Marie, which just makes me happy because everyone… 

Gavin: Is either Marie, or Louis, or Jacques. 

Ann: Yeah. But I will say Charlotte Corday technically is Marie. Her name was Marie-Anne Charlotte de Corday. 

Gavin: She’s letting us down right from the outset, but you know what? 

Ann: Apparently, yeah. 

Gavin: There’s time for her to redeem herself. Okay. 

Ann: God knows. And apparently, people called her Marie in her life, so she is technically a Marie. But she’s known as Charlotte Corday, so that’s what we’re going to call her. 

Gavin: Cool. 

Afa: Well, I guess it was more like her friends and family called her Marie but, like, Charlotte Corday was her assassin name. 

Gavin: Right. Students of her life can refer to her as Charlotte Corday. We’re not on such intimate terms with her. 

Ann: No, exactly. We’re not. We’re not close friends. So, she was born— I always like to say, I don’t know, I always say the birth dates of people. And I’m like, do I need to do this? And I was like, I do! Because the horoscope girlies need to know. Like, this means something to somebody. So, she was born July 27, 1768, in Normandy in France. Her father Jacques… [laughs]

Gavin: [laughs] There you go. 

Ann: Of course. So, she was from a noble family, but he was the younger son of the noble family, so there’s that whole thing where it’s like, yes, your family is noble, but you are not actually wealthy, like that sort of situation, which we hear a lot. Also, the whole family is descended from. I’ve not heard of this person, the French dramatist, Pierre Corneille. 

Gavin: Oh, you will have heard of him by the end of this episode. Let me tell you that. [Ann laughs] Little teaser. Well, you’ve already heard of him, obviously. But you’ll know a thing or two more about him. 

Ann: Oh, fantastic. So, her mother was also a destitute noblewoman [chuckles] called Charlotte. So, she’s born into this kind of family that’s technically, I don’t know, aristocrats, but poor. This poor family, but they have this sheen of like, “Well, we’re not like you poors.” 

Gavin: Yeah. They’ve got a title, and the title is worth something. 

Ann: Not much, but something. So, she was the fourth of five children. As a girl, she was a quiet child given to moods, studious and serious. We’re going to see that she’s, like, a big reader, she likes to just be alone with her books and her thoughts, and she’s like that as a kid. When she was 13, her mother and one of her sisters both died, and her father, Jacques, was like, “I can’t. I’m poor. I can’t raise these children by myself.” And so, Charlotte and her surviving sister, Eleonore, were sent to live in a convent in a place called Caen, C-A-E-N. Don’t know how to pronounce that. 

Gavin: Yeah, I’m not sure either, TBH. 

Ann: It’s also in Normandy. Caen, shout-out to anyone who lives there. Anyway, so she went there, and this is actually a great move because she’s provided an excellent education by the nuns because she just was a studious girl. She likes to read books, and the nuns were like, “Guess what we have here? So many books.” 

Gavin: I was thinking about this a little bit because you have to be careful of a bookworm. Bookworms can form very strong opinions about things like politics and other weighty matters. And of course, that’s exactly what Corday will do later on. 

Ann: No, exactly, exactly. 

Gavin: Deep thinkers. 

Ann: Someone who’s reading a lot… You know, books can be dangerous, and that’s why some people want to ban some books. 

Gavin: That’s right. Get ‘em out of here! [laughs]

Ann: [laughs] So, she was shy, she’s awkward, but by the nuns, she was taught to be well-mannered and refined. Like, she thrived with the nuns at the nun school. It says, “She exuded an easy elegance befitting her aristocratic background.” So, she’s gorgeous, she’s elegant, she’s well-read. She’s also talented at drawing and singing, and also, gorgeous. 

Gavin: She’s got it going on. She’s the full package. 

Ann: Yeah. So, this describes her. “She is about five feet tall. She is slender with soft gray eyes, a high forehead and a dimpled chin.” The hair colour is up for debate because she was described as having auburn hair. But later, in portraits, it seems like it’s blonde. But I will say, as a kid, I had very red hair, and it’s gotten less red as I age. 

Gavin: I will say I read an entire academic essay on this very topic in preparation for this episode, and according to that scholar, her hair is given as “chestnut” on her passport, which is like a government document and is therefore reliable. But as you mentioned, she is “blonded,” over the course of many years, in various visual depictions of her. And there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on there. 

Afa: Yeah. So, I don’t know, she’s gorgeous. Like, hair dye, not a thing. Wigs might be involved. I don’t know. Her hair colour: up for debate. 

She’s also like, again, studious. She could often be found in the convent library engrossed in Greek and Roman histories. This is a big thing because she’s a big fan of reading about the Classics. She likes to read about ancient Rome and ancient Greece, and what were their democracies like, and what were the philosophies of… basically, democracy. She’s just really interested in what is fair and just and what is a good society. That’s what she’s reading about. 

And a lot of people were, honestly, in the last couple of episodes and the ones coming up after this, like, women in this time period (and men, I guess, too, I’m not reading about them), but people were really interested in reading about ancient Greece and ancient Rome and the concept of a republic and, like, that whole thing. 

Gavin: Right. And what do you do if you have a Julius Caesar, for example? What are the things you can do to solve a problem like Julius Caesar? 

Ann: And Charlotte would say, and Brutus would say, “You stab Caesar.” 

Gavin: Many times. Yes, exactly. 

Ann: That’s what you do. So, she’s kind of… She’s reading all these things, she’s such a bookworm. And then as she’s growing up, like again, she’s born in 1768. The French Revolution, like “officially,” kicks off in 1789 but, like, it didn’t suddenly happen. There was protests, there was unhappiness well before that. So, she’s aware of the political tension going on in France. So, she’s like, “I want to read some contemporary philosophy.” This is like, you know what? It’s relatable. It’s like, she didn’t have the Internet, but she had books, and she’s like, “Oh, I want to read like this Wikipedia article. I want to deep dive on these topics.” 

Gavin: Yeah. I mean, she was keyed into political discourse. And she was all into, like, Rousseau and Voltaire too. Right? Yeah. 

Ann: Now, this is the point where she kind of pivots from reading about the classics to reading about like Rousseau and Voltaire and just kind of like “What are these guys saying? What are some contemporary…” You know, she’s in the convent school, she took lessons, obviously, but she’s doing her own reading. She’s doing kind of like a self-guided philosophy degree, basically, with all of her reading that she’s doing. 

Gavin: Check her out!

Ann: She’s intrigued by all this stuff. And so, when the Revolution begins, May 1789, the Storming of the Bastille, she’s 20 years old, and she’s just in Caen, wherever this is, this little rural area, and she’s just like, “What’s the latest news? What’s the facts?” She’s waiting to get the dispatches to know, like, what’s happening in Versailles, what’s happening in Paris. She was, I want to say, like small-R republican, is what people were back then. So, those are people who want a republic instead of a monarchy, basically. Or what is it called where you have like a monarch, but also parliament? So, she’s just like, she probably would have been happy with what the Revolution was doing early days, like the Declaration of Rights of Man and the Citizen. She’s just like, “Yes! This is like Rome times. This is like ancient Rome, ancient Greece vibes. I love it.” 

Gavin: Yes. 

Ann: And the people who were doing those documents were also like, “Let’s be like ancient Greece and ancient Roman times.” So, intentionally, it was so much of those sorts of things. 

Gavin: Yeah! It must have felt gratifying for her to be able to trace a kind of through line from some of the classical readings she had done to political discussions that were happening in the present moment and that were affecting just momentous change, right? 

Ann: Yeah. And remember, she was growing up poor. So, I think she would have been like, “Yeah, you know what? Our society does need some fixing.” Like, the younger siblings of noblemen are poor. Let’s change some stuff. 

Gavin: Right. She was that rare aristocrat who could kind of relate to the everyday struggles of less fortunate French people. 

Ann: And you said she’s the rare aristocrat, also, like, within her family; the rest of her family was just like, “Uhhh, we’re aristocrats, so we don’t support this.” But both of her brothers left the family to join the army to defend the monarch. 

Gavin: Like, got the hell out of Dodge. Yeah. 

Ann: So, on the night before her youngest brother was going to leave for the army, the family had a farewell dinner in which someone made a toast to Louis XVI. Charlotte alone did not stand for this toast. When her father asked why she refused to drink to the health of their good and virtuous king, she responded, “I believe he is virtuous, but a weak king cannot be a good king. He is powerless to prevent the misfortunes of his people.” 

Gavin: I love that. I love that because there’s, like, a little bit of nuance to her objection, right? She’s like, “Listen, no one’s saying he isn’t virtuous, okay? But look, people are suffering under his rule. So, he’s weak. He’s not powerful enough to improve the lives of his subjects.” 

Ann: It’s just relatable in the sense of like, you know, a family at a Thanksgiving dinner or whatever, like, everyone’s politics don’t agree. And some like, 20-year-old, who’s just been reading, you know, some philosophy, is like, “Hey, actually I have strong opinions.” It’s just like, yeah. 

Gavin: It is relatable, god. Yeah. 

Ann: So then, she was asked by her family, like, “Oh my god, Charlotte, are you a republican?” And she’s like, “I should be if the French were worthy of a republic.” 

Gavin: Oh, snap! Yes, Charlotte! That’s what I’m talking about. 

Ann: She’s got some good lines. [both laugh] She’s gorgeous, and she can read you. 

Gavin: I mean, she can read you. She’s like, “I knew I was born to go down in the history books. Okay? Let me tell you: I’ve got the looks, I’ve got the wits, I’ve got it all.” 

Ann: Exactly. So, other than this dinner, apparently, she mostly just avoided talking about politics with her family because she’s just like, “You know what? I don’t have the energy for this, whatever.” 

But then, she’s personally affected. July 1790. The National Assembly, which is the new government, they ordered that all convents and monasteries in France should be closed because part of their thing was like, “We’re going to change the religion a little bit,” which meant Charlotte, who’d been living in this convent, couldn’t live there anymore because it was closed. 

Gavin: Right. That’s a problem. 

Ann: She’s removed from her library! Like, devastating. 

Gavin: Yeah. And she must not have had a lot of… Like, a library in her own house growing up, right? Because she came from a family that was not well off. 

Ann: And books were so expensive at this time. So anyway, she read all she could, and now she can’t have books anymore. Rather than moving back with her father, she remained in Caen, moving in with, she had a cousin there, Madame de Bretteville, who is like a cousin, but a wealthy cousin, so I feel like books are on the table. 

Gavin: Love it, love it.

Ann: So, despite their political differences in that her cousin supported the king, the two became close friends, and Charlotte was actually named as her cousin’s sole heir. So, I guess Madame de Bretteville, unmarried— Or no, she’s Madame. A widow, no children. 

Gavin: Well, I think that’s actually interesting because that means that, you know, future livelihood is at stake later on when Charlotte makes her big decisions. You know, she could have lived probably quite comfortably if she was going to inherit everything that her cousin owned. And her cousin loved her enough to kind of take her in and support her. 

Ann: Yeah, exactly. So, it’s like Charlotte, she’s… Yeah, she’s giving something up when she’s doing this. Not unlike, allegedly, Luigi, who also came from a wealthy family. 

Gavin: That’s right! 

Ann: So, meanwhile, back in Paris, the Revolution is happening. She’s in Caen, but in Paris, the streets are running red with blood, basically. So, by September 1792, and we’ve talked about in the last couple episodes of the show, they haven’t all come out yet, but each episode, it’s somebody, it’s a woman living in the French Revolution. And each time we get, like, a bit further into the story, and then the woman dies. [Gavin laughs] So, it’s like we have, I keep cutting off at around the same time. But actually, I should mention in all the episodes, all the women we’ve talked about before, in all of them, I’m like, “And then Charlotte Corday kills Jean-Paul Marat,” like, that’s happened in all the stories. So, it’s like, we’re explaining the backstory. 

Gavin: Teased so many times. 

Ann: Now we’re going to get into it. So, it’s like, those other women we’ve talked about, they’re out there doing their thing, you know, beating people up with their wooden clogs, et cetera. So, by September 1792, the French Revolutionary Wars were underway, the monarchy had been overthrown, and the first French Republic had been established. So, like, things are happening real quickly. 

So then we’ve got, as we talk about in every episode… You know, last time we talked, Gavin, about Madame T, I was just a baby in terms of my learning about the French Revolution. I know a lot more now. I know about the Girondins, I know about the Jacobins, I know the difference. 

Gavin: Oh, hell yeah! 

Ann: So, I had to, like, figure this out, but I understand it now. Basically, we’ve got the Girondins. And they’re worried… They’re less fanatical. The Girondins are a bit more like, “Guys, can we chill for a minute, please? Like, let’s have a king, and we can have a parliament system. But let’s not murder everybody.” 

Gavin: It’s like, “What if we didn’t murder everyone?” 

Ann: And the Jacobins are like, “But what if we did murder?” 

Gavin: “I see your point, but…” [laughs] 

Ann: [laughs] So, this is kind of it. So, the Jacobins, this is like, Robespierre. We talked about this in the last episode because I came to understand this in last week’s episode. So, the Jacobins are like, “Let’s just have this like big overthrow,” but they can’t do it on their own. They’re like, “Well, let’s get the mob. Let’s pretend that we’re with the mob,” because the mob, that’s like, they have the numbers, they have the people. So, the Jacobins are kind of like working alongside the mob, who they would, spoiler, later murder many of. Anyway, so the Jacobins, that’s what they’re up to. They’re just kind of being like, like a contemporary politician might today, to be like, “Yeah, you! The working class, I’m with you!” It’s like, well, you’re not really, but you just want their votes or whatever. 

And the Girondins were like, “Okay, too much of the Revolution’s fate is being dictated by the mob,” the Paris mob, and it’s like, you know, there’s like, a whole rest of France? There’s the whole rest of country. The Paris mob can’t decide everything. Anyway, so these are the two sides. And Charlotte is on the Girondins’ side. That’s kind of like, “Guys, can we come down for a minute, please?” 

Gavin: It’s like, maybe, could we not execute our king? Like, maybe we’re going a little bit too far there. You know? 

Ann: Yeah. Let’s just read some classical philosophers and try to do like a small-R republic, and let’s just kind of be chill, please. So, she’s grossed out by the mob violence that the Jacobin activists are encouraging. And this is, just philosophically, she’s opposed to it, but also, it’s affected her personally. So, April 1793, the Jacobins, they’re sending search parties out into the countryside to find enemies of the republic. And one of the people they found was Father Gombault, who was a priest who had administered the last rites to her mother back when Charlotte was 13. So, this is like her parish local priest, and he was a counterrevolutionary, he was, I guess, a Girondin. He was executed on, I want to mention April 5th, which is my birthday. 

Gavin: [gasps] I love that. 

Ann: I mentioned that because I don’t know about other people’s birthdays, but things in history often happen on April 5th, and I’m just like, what a day! 

Gavin: Well, my birthday is April 30th, which means you recently celebrated your birthday…

Ann: And you’re about to! 

Gavin: … and I’m getting ready to celebrate my birthday, which is perfect. So, my birthday is April 30th, and Hitler committed suicide on April 30th, so it’s a pretty good, pretty good day for history. 

Ann: These are, I think, is this why you and I are interested in history? Because we were born on these days, these significant days? Well, happy almost birthday! 

Gavin: We probe history so deeply. We’re like, “How does this relate to my birth?” [laughs] 

Ann: Exactly. Charlotte Corday, what is her connection to me? I need to know. So, you’re Taurus or you’re Aries? 

Gavin: I’m Taurus. I’m not a big horoscope guy, but you know, I am Taurus. That’s me. 

Ann: I am Aries. And one of the reasons, and I think this is very Aries of me, I don’t know. I don’t know anything about any star sign except for Aries because I’m like, why do I need to know about anyone except for me? [Gavin laughs] So, people are like, “Oh, that’s so Sagittarius.” I’m like, “Don’t know what that means. All I know is Aries. I’m fiery.” 

Gavin: There you go. [laughs] 

Ann: So, anyway, this priest was killed on my birthday. And then Charlotte is just like, “This is getting… Now it’s personal.” She’s like John Wick at this point. 

Gavin: That’s right. Is that Charlotte Corday or Keanu Reeves? Like, I am not sure. 

Ann: Exactly. And so, after his death, like, these Jacobins counterrevolutionary hunters are going to the countryside, they’re killing people. So, they went to Caen, this was the first person to be guillotined in Caen. I guess they had to, like, drive the guillotine there to do it. And then after his death, political violence in the place where she lived became more frequent. So, she’s like living in it; she’s in it, she’s seeing the violence, she’s seeing the death. 

Gavin: It’s spreading outward. 

Ann: And then on this podcast, we’re always excited for a pamphlet moment. 

Gavin: Oh, god yes. Give me a pamphlet. 

Ann: So, the pamphlets arrive, like, in Caen. So, there’s pamphlets attacking the Jacobins, accusing them of instigating violence, which is true. So, Charlotte for sure would have read these pamphlets. Like, she’s politically involved, she’s a big reader, and she’s in the city, like, she’s going to see these pamphlets. One of the pamphlets read, “Let Marat’s head fall, and the Republic is saved.” So… 

Gavin: There you go. 

Ann: Might put some ideas in her head. 

Gavin: I know. I know. It’s like, “I got a guillotine for this guy!” 

Ann: Yeah. So, I think, you know, she had these ideas, she had these thoughts, she supports the republic, but then to be, like, suddenly to have the violence right outside of your house, like a literal guillotine. It’s like, you know, it radicalizes anyone really to see death like, up close.  

Gavin: Yeah. I mean, she’s literally grown up among nuns. Let’s not forget. And now she’s like, “All right, where’s the nearest knife? Give me a kitchen knife, someone.” I mean, yeah, it is it is radicalization, isn’t it? 

Ann: Yeah. So, I think like if we look at her actions in the context of what was happening around her, it’s like, people are killing people everywhere in front of her, so why wouldn’t you get your kitchen knife? 

Gavin: Right. What’s one more dead guy, you know? 

Ann: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It’s not like she’s doing this in the middle of this eutopia. Oh, but she the dead guy she chose… 

Gavin: Is like, so significant. On one hand, it’s like, “Oh, it’s one more dead body.” But it’s the death of Jean-Paul Marat, which is, you know, extraordinarily significant as she herself would eloquently articulate later. 

Ann: So, June 2nd, 1793, the day after my sister’s birthday. [laughs]

Gavin: [laughs] When was Hepburn born? And like, how does Hepburn fit into this story? 

Ann: Oh man, I wish I don’t know when she was born, but her honorary birthday is January 1st, because that’s the birthday that the vets give cats when you don’t know the birthday. She’s a mysterious… 

Gavin: Well, maybe we can just claim that Jean-Paul Marat was born on January 1st, just to make sure there’s a connection. 

Ann: There has to be connections to everything. So, June 2, 1793. This is the purging of the Girondins from the National Convention. We talked about that when this episode comes out, I think last time, where Robespierre got like the lady sans-culottes with their, like, handheld knives to be like the woman army. Anyway, the Girondins were purged from the National Convention because Robespierre is like, “Can’t have these people here. I need only extreme fanatics in my National Convention. Thank you.” So, the leaders of the Girondins were arrested. The remaining Girondins and their supporters escaped to rural areas of France, like Caen. 

Gavin: There you go. 

Ann: So, this became a bastion for Girondins on the run. So, a lot of them took up residence at the Hôtel de l’Intendance, which is only a short stroll from the estate where Charlotte lived with her cousins. So, she’s now seeing these Girondins leaders, and that’s her team, that’s her side, and they’re in her little village now. So, she’s just like, she’s in it. She could not be any more in it. 

So, they had meetings, you know, they gave speeches. She’s attending them. She’s listening to those speeches. There was a military parade held by the Girondins on July 7th as a defiant show of force against the Jacobins. So, this little village where she lives, everything’s happening right there around her, like, of course, she’s all in it. 

Gavin: Yeah, there’s no way to escape revolutionary politics. And also, to have heard, you know, eyewitness accounts of people who had come from Paris, you know, that must have made it much more real too, because then you’re not just reading about it in a pamphlet or anything like that, you’re hearing people who really came very close to mortal danger, other forms of danger, you know? 

Ann: You know what? This is all going to pivot back to what we were talking about before, which is historical hotness. And I want to say that this one, I think I agree with. So, one of the Girondin leaders to arrive in Caen was the handsome Charles Barbaroux. 

Gavin: Oh, okay. 

Ann: Now, if you look up Charles Barbaroux, the first portrait that comes out, he’s wearing a hat kind of like Charlotte’s hat that she later wears, and he’s kind of half in shadow in this kind of sexy, exciting way. And I was like, “Oh!” He’s got, like, a dimple on his chin. I’m like, “Yeah, I think he was a handsome man.” 

Gavin: Didn’t Charlotte Corday have dimples too? 

Ann: She had a dimple in her chin. 

Gavin: There you go. I mean, it’s the reci— It is, what is the phrase? It is necessary and sufficient to hotness. [laughs]

Ann: To have the dimple chin, exactly. So, she meets Charles Barbaroux, who’s hot, which matters, to me, not to her. There’s never, she’s never expressed— Nothing I’ve read has anything about her having any interest, or you know what? So, like, asexual community, here’s your heroine. [Gavin laughs] She never in her life, I didn’t see anything about her ever thinking about romantic or sexual relationships. Later on, people would allege things. 

Gavin: Yeah, right. 

Ann: Anyway, so she meets Charles Barbaroux, and she’s like, “This guy’s hot. But more importantly, he’s a Girondin leader and all I care about is politics.” 

Gavin: There you go. 

Ann: And so, he’s like, “What we are doing, me and the Girondins, we want to raise forces. We want to march to Paris and we want to overthrow the Jacobins.” And she’s like, “I am down for that. Hell yeah.” So, she was convinced by everything we’ve just talked about that she’s experienced and seen. She’s just like, the Jacobins are leading France down a dark and bloody path. True! If they were not stopped, she wholeheartedly believed the Revolution would become corrupt and thousands would die, which did happen. So, she decided the only way to prevent civil war slaughter would be to kill a Jacobin leader. And then it’s like, “Which one should I choose?” So, we’ve got Maximilien Robespierre, we’ve got Camille Desmoulins, who we haven’t talked about, but we will later. But she ended up choosing Jean-Paul Marat, who she believed was the most deserving of death. 

So, we’re going to explain why she chose him, who he was. So, Marat was a physician prior to the Revolution. He had become a prominent revolutionary activist who could often be found at the center of the Revolution’s bloodiest moments. Whenever a crowd of people stormed a place and murdered everyone in that place, Marat was there. He’s on the front lines of all these things. 

Gavin: Fanning the flames. 

Ann: Stabbing the people. He also has a newspaper called The Friend of the People, which had instigated the infamous September Massacres. I think, augh, there’s so many… There’s, like, the October Days, the September Massacres. Anyway, but truly fanning the flames. If we think about him in modern times, he’s the Joe Rogan of his time. He’s just like, people are listening and they’re doing what he says, and the things he says to do are pretty shitty things. 

Gavin: I mean, he calls for mass violence. At one point, you know, he becomes a deputy in the National Convention, and he’s literally calling on people to rise up against the Convention and overthrow the government. So, it really is like one of these figures who, I mean, you know, Josh Hawley famously, you know, a senator in the United States, pumped his fist in the air to the mob on January 6th, right before the Capitol riot took place. I mean, he definitely comes to mind, a figure like that. 

Ann: Yeah. So, it’s somebody who’s fanning the flames. This is where we see Charlotte. Again, she’s saying like, “Who should I kill? I could kill the leader. No, I’m going to kill this guy who’s fanning the flames. It’s this guy who’s like making everything kind of worse with his newspaper.” So, with him dead, she felt that, like, the worst of Jacobins excesses could be avoided. But she also felt that she was working in tandem with handsome Charles Barbaroux, and this whole, kind of like, “The Girondins, we’re going to go to Paris, we’re going to overthrow everything.” Well, he didn’t know she was going to do that, and he didn’t ask her to do this. But she felt she was part of, philosophically, this team. 

And so, she’s like… Do you watch Doctor Who? Are you familiar with Doctor Who? 

Gavin: No, not really. I’m vaguely, vaguely familiar. 

Ann: All I’m going to tell you is there’s an episode of Doctor Who called “Let’s Kill Hitler!” And so, she’s like, “Let’s kill Marat!” 

Gavin: [laughs] There you go. 

Ann: So, anyway. She’s going to kill Marat, this is what she’s going to do. And she came to this decision because, as you mentioned, be careful of a bookworm. She’d been reading about, like, the murder of Julius Caesar, she’d been reading about, like, ancient Greece, ancient Rome. And she’s just like, “Okay, I have a sense of destiny.” She’d been reading philosophers, talking about everybody, the power of the individual and stuff, so she didn’t see this as a murder; she saw this as, like, a necessary sacrifice for the betterment of society. 

She knew that she would die for doing this. Well, because her plan was that she was going to go to the National Convention and kill him in front of everybody. And she’s like, “I know that these people will rip me limb from limb.” It’s like, yeah, they will. That’s what they do to people. So, she was prepared to sacrifice her life. But this would be her contribution to France. She would provide an example for other patriots. She would show that it’s like, “Look. Look what one person…” kind of like Luigi. She’s like, “If I do this, maybe it’ll inspire other people to do similar things.” But this is where she’s like, “To have the greatest impact, people need to know I did this on purpose. People can’t be like, ’Oh, a hysterical woman did a crazy thing.’” 

So, every step of what she did was written. She wrote letters to Charles Barbaroux and to her father explaining what she was going to do (they would get the letters later). And then she also wrote letters to the French people, and she pinned them inside of her clothes. Because she thought like, “Okay, when I’m ripped limb from limb, these papers will be discovered, and people will know.” So, she’s like, “I did this. I did this on purpose.” 

Gavin: It speaks to her assertiveness. And it’s interesting too, that she’s sending these letters to men who you might expect to have been authority figures in her life, right? She’s like, “Hey Dad, I’m not asking your counsel. I’m not seeking your input. I’m telling you, like, I’m going to go commit an assassination. Love, Charlotte.” You know, it’s really assertive. 

Ann: And actually, that’s a really good point too, because we’ve talked in the other episodes before this, in this miniseries, and this will also come into effect after she’s arrested, but women in France at this time were encouraged to be quiet, and modest, and not involved in politics, and assumed to be kind of like, all that they do is they do what their husbands tell them or what their fathers tell them. Like, it was a really shitty time for women. 

Gavin: Submissiveness, the whole thing. Yep. 

Ann: So, she made her preparations, but she informed no one. Like, she wrote these letters, but she didn’t mail them yet. So, from handsome Charles Barbaroux, she got a letter of introduction to a Girondin who is still somehow in the Convention. So, she hoped that if she was like, “Hey, Charles Barbaroux introduced me,” she hoped to get into the Convention so she could kill Marat in front of everybody. 

So, she’s got everything coming together for her little plan. She told her friends and family she was going to England because she could no longer live in a country so torn by violence, and then she burned her papers. Like, she sent out the letters she wanted people to read, and she burned the rest of her papers, I guess her letters and diaries. And then this is iconic. She left her Bible laying open, I guess, in her room, to the story of Judith killing Holofernes. 

Gavin: Hell yes. I had never heard that detail before, and I’m just loving it. 

Ann: And Judith killing Holofernes is very important to me personally. So, that’s a very famous painting by a famous painter, Artemisia Gentileschi, because it’s like a righteous woman who kills this man who’s in charge of something. I don’t know if you can see, you can’t see, but I will hold up my arm because I have a tattoo of Judith killing Holofernes on my arm. 

Gavin: I didn’t realize that. That’s pretty awesome. When did you get that? 

Ann: I got this like, I don’t know, 2020, 2021. 

Gavin: So, it’s a recent tattoo. Kind of a late or not late life, but like, it’s… Yeah, I love that. 

Ann: No, I was just like… So, Charlotte, c’est moi! So, she leaves the Bible open to the story of a woman who stabs a man to death. It’s just like, iconic, iconic on top of iconic. And again, how does the story relate to me? That’s another way. [Gavin laughs] 

So, she wrote to her father, like, one of her letters… Oh my gosh! So, she wrote to her father be like, “Dear dad,” [laughs] “I’m going to kill this guy.” But she also said like, “Sorry for leaving home without your permission.” [laughs] 

Gavin: [laughs] It’s like, there are certain limits even to Charlotte Corday’s assertiveness. “I knew you wouldn’t give me permission, so I’m sorry, Dad.” 

Ann: Yeah. Exactly. It’s this balancing act that all the women we’ve been talking about all kind of have where they’re like, “Hell yeah! There should be rights for women, but not so many that we have as many as men because men are so important.” It’s this weird balancing act.

Gavin: Right. “Let’s not go crazy here.” 

Ann: Yeah. Okay. So, then she took the coach to Paris, which is like, trains weren’t invented yet, so some sort of, you know, bus mixed with carriage, and she arrives on June 11th. On the way, a young man proposed marriage to her because she’s gorgeous. She ignored him because… 

Gavin: She’s a woman on a mission. 

Ann: She’s not here for your meet-cute. [Gavin laughs] In Paris, she took a room at the Hôtel de la Providence and then made her way to meet with a contact, the guy, the Girondin who’s in the Assembly, and he was like, “Ooh, bad news. Marat is ill and confined to his lodgings. He’s not here today.” 

So, just to explain where Marat was. He had arthritic psoriasis, a skin condition that flared up on hot days. And just to remember, this is July in Paris, which is a hot time even now, but this was, like, an especially hot summer. 

Gavin: Right, sweltering. 

Ann: Yeah, because the climate change at that time, the weather was bananas. 

Gavin: It wasn’t just because Charlotte Corday rolled up in town, people. It was actually just hot. 

Ann: [laughs] It’s getting hot in there because she’s in town, she’s on the scene. So, it was like unusually hot at this point, and he had this skin condition that flared up on hot days, which is why—and honestly, I didn’t know this. Maybe you told me this before, but I forgot, but it’s like, that’s why he’s famously in his bathtub. So, one of the only ways to ease the itching of the sores on his body was to soak in cool kaolin, which is a kind of clay. So, he’s in, like, a clay bath, which I think it’s, you know, like when you have chicken pox, like calamine lotion, I think it’s that sort of thing, just to stop the itching. 

Gavin: Part of what he did do was wrap his head in a vinegar-soaked turban, or like a towel, which is always why he’s usually depicted with a turban on his head. 

Ann: Oh! I didn’t know that part. 

Gavin: It was apparently kind of like, yeah, it didn’t smell very good. A lot of people commented on that. 

Ann: A vinegar turban, yeah. But basically, he was so… Like, on these hot days, he just like sat in the bathtub— We’ll explain about the bathtub later. But basically, he sat in the bathtub 24 hours a day; he was just in the bathtub, he set up a desk next to him, he took meetings in the bathroom. He’s just like, you know, “I have this skin condition. I have to be in a bathtub, but that’s not going to stop me from my important revolutionary work.” Like, he just got it done from the bathtub. But this meant that her hopes for this big public moment, she couldn’t stab him in front of everybody. But she was just like, “Okay, pivot. We’ve got to go to plan B.” 

So, at 8:00 AM, like we’re getting into like, you know, we’re serious. We’re, like, on a crime documentary, [dramatic tone] “8:00 AM, July 13th” 

Gavin: [equally dramatic tone] “8:00 AM. July 13th, 1793.” 

Ann: Yeah. So, the blazing sunshine, it’s a hot day. 

Gavin: It’s an exterior shot. [laughs] 

Ann: She walks from her lodgings to the Palais Royale, which was crowded with outsiders who had arrived in the capital for— Oh, so this is July 13th. Bastille Day is the next day, right? So, this is the fifth anniversary of the Storming of the Bastille; there are street parties, celebrations, you know, there’s always market ladies on the street. There’s vendors selling, I don’t know, you know, like the tricolour pins or whatever. So, she just, like, blends into the crowd. You’ve done H.H. Holmes on your podcast, have you? 

Gavin: I haven’t actually, but I’m familiar with him. 

Ann: Yeah. And it reminds me, because he set up this whole murder thing. He’s like, “What if I do this during the big fair?” 

Gavin: The World Fair. 

Ann: The World Fair! So many people are in town, people come and go. Like, you’re less noticed when there’s a big crowd like this. 

Gavin: Yeah. It’s so easy for people to go missing too, which was a big part of it, because people would go to the fair to visit it, and then they would just disappear. And it was like, there are so many ways they could have gone missing because Chicago was a big city, and so many people were there. So, it made it easier for Holmes to get away with the crimes. Yeah. 

Ann: Maybe he was inspired by Charlotte Corday because she came to town during these celebrations, so she could blend in with the crowds better. So anyway, so she goes down to the— By the time this episode comes out, last week’s episode, I talked heavily about the market ladies, and I love the market ladies. I would die for the market ladies. They are just like, they will cut a bitch. 

Gavin: Like, I’m thinking, I don’t want to overstep a bound here, but I’m wondering if it’s a full-body tattoo. Just market ladies, full body tattoo. 

Ann: I am the market ladies. 

Gavin: [laughs] Think it over, think it over. 

Ann: Anyway, so this is the only appearance of the market ladies in this story, but they’re there. They are terrifying. [laughs] They will cut you. Anyway, so from the market ladies, she buys a newspaper, a new tall, black hat with black tassels and green ribbons. 

Gavin: Yes. Love it. 

Ann: And a kitchen knife with a wooden handle and a five-inch blade. 

Gavin: I love it. I like to imagine that she made both purchases at the same establishment. She’s like, “I’ll take this jaunty hat, which would look great on the Grim Reaper, and this sharp kitchen knife, please.” 

Ann: And it’s Bastille Day, so anything goes. 

Gavin: So, anything’s like, okay! 

Ann: It’s like someone going into, you know, a hardware store to be like, “I’m going to buy these zip ties…” 

Gavin: “And this chainsaw and this machete and this roll of duct tape.” 

Ann: “Oh, and it’s Halloween, so can I also get this full-face mask?” 

Gavin: Right. [laughs] Yes.

Ann: It’s like, “Okay, sir.” But it’s Bastille Day so everyone’s like, “Cool.” I love the hat detail. We’re going to talk about her outfits, but I love that part of her whole plan was like, “I’m going to wear this outfit. It needs a hat.” 

Gavin: Well, this is actually one thing that I’m really getting. She knew how to make a spectacle, right? And that was part of, I think she did see herself as an actor on the world stage, right? On the historical stage, however you want to put it, in many ways. That’s part of why she wanted to go into the Convention and make a scene of murdering him, but it’s also why she wanted to look… I mean, well, come on, if you’re like going to go meet your destiny, you want to look good. You want to look busted up. But also, you know, I think she wanted to make a spectacle of herself in whatever way she could just to, you know, enhance the impact of what she was going to do. 

Ann: Exactly. And this, it goes towards the planning, like how she wrote up these letters, she had the letter pinned to her. Like, she was just like, “I want everyone to know this was not a spur of the moment occasion.” 

Gavin: Right. Yeah. She has control over every aspect of it. 

Ann: So, she hides the knife beneath her dress. There’s a lot, a lot is in this bodice of this dress. She’s got her letters, she’s got her blade. 

Gavin: It tells quite the story, doesn’t it? Every bodice tells a story, but, you know, this one… 

Ann: This one, it just opens like Mary Poppins’s bag, like, things just keep coming out.

Okay. So, she arrived close to 11:30 AM and she’s greeted at the door by Catherine Evrard, who is the sister of Marat’s fiancée, Simonne. And Charlotte’s just like, [laughs] I imagine her like frantic, weird energy because she’s from this small town, she’s got this— I don’t know. I don’t know if she arrived and she was calm and cool, or if she arrived and she’s just like, [desperate, raspy voice] “Let me in!” So, anyway, whatever, Catherine turned her away. She’s just like, “No, you can’t see Marat. He’s in the bathtub, covered in sores. Who are you? I would let Robespierre in cause they’re friends and business associates, but you’re just a strange woman in a hat.” 

Gavin: Right. [laughs] It’s like, “I don’t admit— You‘ve got to take your hat off in my house. Show some respect.” 

Ann: So, Charlotte, again, so it’s like, okay, Plan B didn’t work, so she’s like, “Okay, Plan C.” So, she goes back to the hotel, and this is iconic. She summoned a hairdresser. 

Gavin: I was going to talk about this. Okay. 

Ann: She summons a hairdresser. She’s just like, she’s like, “I need a blow dry.” [laughs] 

Gavin: Listen! It’s hot out. She’d been running all over Paris. Like, it’s time to freshen up, you know? 

Ann: Yeah, exactly. It’s like, “Bring me some dry shampoo. I need to get my chestnut/blonde/auburn hair needs to be styled for this assassination.” 

Gavin: [laughs] Yes. 

Ann: And then she changes her dress, and you know what? You’re right. The heat is probably why. So, she changes into a spotted muslin dress with a pink fichu shawl. 

Gavin: Oh my gosh. Okay. Good. 

Ann: So, then she has to take all this stuff from her previous dress into this dress, but still… She tucks the knife, her birth certificate, and a letter to the French people inside of her bodice. I guess the birth certificate is ID, so people know, like, who did this. Oh, Charlotte Corday. 

Gavin: Yeah, yeah. 

Ann: So, one of these letters to the French people says, I’ll quote part. This is like, dear the French people. “I can offer you nothing but my life, and I thank heaven that I am free to dispose of it. I desire only that my head carried through Paris may be a rallying standard for all friends of the law.“

Gavin: Hell yeah. I mean, wow. That’s commitment, right? I mean, when you’re already imagining your severed head being paraded around town, you’re like… You’re in it! 

Ann: I will say, though, like this is not… The context of this is a lot of people’s severed heads were paraded around at this time. She didn’t… “I would like my severed head as so many before me to be paraded…” 

Gavin: Right. There’s a humility to it, right? 

Ann: Yeah. “And this is where I would like my head with my new blow-dried hairstyle.” 

Gavin: It’s like, as long as they put the hat on. The hat must be on. [laughs]

Ann: [laughs] Okay. So, then she put on her hat and headed out. It’s now 7:00 PM. So, she returns to Marat’s house. Her arrival coincided, like, finally luck is on her side, with a delivery of fresh bread, I assume baguettes, and the day’s newspapers. So, she was able to slip in with this crowd of people. So, she came inside and headed up the stairs. Bold. But then she stopped at the top of the stairs by Simonne, who is Marat’s fiancée, who is suspicious, understandably. [laughs] Like, “Who is this strange woman in my house wearing this hat?” She’s just like, “Why are you so determined to see Marat? Mmm, it’s the French Revolution. I’m suspicious.” Like, good for you, Simonne. So, Corday was like, “I have news about traitors in Normandy,” and she raised her voice so that Marat could overhear in the next room, which was the bathroom. Simonne was going to send her on her way, but then Marat’s voice came from the bathroom saying, “Let her in.” So, Simonne led Corday into the room where Marat was soaking in the tub. 

Gavin: Soaking in his tub. 

Ann: With his vinegar turban. 

Gavin: Getting some work done, editing, you know, for Friend of the People. 

Ann: He is, he had a piece of wood laid across to act as a writing desk on the bathtub. People have those for bathtubs now, where you have kind of like, your thing, you put your book on it, you can put your drink, like, have a mimosa. 

Gavin: You know, it’s a day, “I’m working from the tub today.” You know? 

Ann: Yeah. Work from tub day. 

Gavin: Yeah. 

Ann: And so, he was talking to Charlotte, and Simonne stayed because she was just like, “I’m going to stay in this room. I have… Let’s see what’s going on.” And so, she was just, he questioned her about the supposed Girondins traitors in Caen, which like, she had literal information because she’d hung out with all of them. She’s like, “Yeah, there’s Charles Barbaroux. He’s super hot. There’s pamphlets.” 

Gavin: That was the first thing that Corday dressed in the bathroom. Just like, “Okay, there’s a very steamy Charles that everyone needs to know about.”

Ann: “This is the information I have for you. He’s hot. This is dangerous.” Anyway, so she supplied him with a list of the traitors. And then Marat said, “Good. In a few days, I will have them all guillotined.” And then, eventually, Simonne was like, “You know what? This is a business meeting.” It’s been, like, 15 minutes, and she’s like, “Okay, yeah.”

Gavin: “Boooring.”

Ann: Like, “Okay, I’m going to bounce.” So, she left. And then when she left, Charlotte reached into her dress, drew out the knife, plunged it into Marat’s right side, just beneath the clavicle. He managed to shout, “Help me, my beloved!” But by the time Simonne came back in, he was unresponsive. The bath water turned red. She had hit an artery or something like that. Like, she just… I don’t know, had she been looking at books of anatomy? I don’t know, but she hit exactly the spot to kill someone instantly. 

And then, Simonne yelled, “My God, he has been assassinated.” The bathroom window had been kept open. “The window…” Mmm, the window? I’m just reading this, and I’m like, wait, the bathroom window into the rest of the house? Not to the outside or maybe to the outside? 

Gavin: I think it might’ve been to the outside. That sounds vaguely right to me. 

Ann: Oh no, you’re right. Because the first person to enter was Laurent Bas, who worked for Marat delivering the newspapers. So, he would have just delivered the newspapers, so he was outside, heard the struggle and then came in. Okay, that makes sense. Horrified, he grabbed a chair and hurled it at Charlotte. People are just reacting on pure adrenaline. Like, where’s their weapon? A chair. Sure. He throws a chair at Charlotte before leaping on top of her. He kept her pinned down as Marat’s neighbours filtered into the room. So, I guess everyone from outside was just like, “What’s happening? It’s the French Revolution.” So, two of these neighbours, a dentist and a surgeon, lifted his body from the tub and attempted to stop the bleeding, but he was super dead. 

Within an hour, news of the assassination of Marat had spread. A crowd formed outside the apartment. Like, everybody knew what was happening. And the crowd, like Charlotte anticipated, wanted to bring her outside and kill her. One market lady said she’d like to cut her into pieces and eat her. 

Gavin: Of course. [laughs]

Ann: Classic market lady. 

Gavin: That’s just clichéd, right? She’s living the cliché. [laughs]

Ann: [laughs] But a committee of six deputies from the National Convention arrived to interrogate her, and they also convinced the crowd somehow that if the crowd killed her, they’d never find out who she was and why she did this and who was she working for, et cetera. And she’s just sitting in Marat’s apartment, guarded by the neighbours who had apprehended her. She had made no attempt to resist or escape. Because her whole thing was like, “I’m going to kill him and then I know I will die.” So, she’s not trying to escape. She’s not trying to run away. She answered every question she was asked. She’s just like, “Yeah, I came to Paris purely just to kill him. I acted alone, and that’s what’s up.” But they did not believe her because of this whole society, which is just like, “Oh, women are just appendages to men.” They were just like, a woman could not have come up with this herself; a woman could not have done this herself.

Gavin: Impossible.

Ann: Obviously, some man got her to do this. And who is that man? So, they were just like, “We need to get to the bottom of this and figure out who is the man behind this. She’s obviously a victim of some man.” So, she was ordered to be taken to the Abbaye prison. 

So, thousands, by this time, like, the mob… It takes nothing for the mob to amass in the French Revolution era. They’re just  24 hours like, mob. 

Gavin: It’s like, you want to see a flash mob? I mean, like that was… [laughs] yeah. 

Ann: They are prepared at all times. And this is because Marat was such an important, famous person, and this is why she chose him. So, people took to the streets when she was taken out to go into the carriage to go to the prison, they had to have security guards all around her. And along the route, people surrounded the carriage; they cursed her, they tried to get her in the carriage. Only narrowly did the police keep her alive on the journey. The crowd was like, “We will kill this woman.” But as she was arrested… So, remember, Hot Charles? So, he was just like, “The Girondins are going to go to Paris and we’re going to overthrow the Jacobins.” Like, that was very easily stopped while this is all happening; his plan was not good or effective. 

So, anyway, at the prison, she spent the night on a straw mattress, her only companion… [Gavin gasps] a black cat. 

Gavin: Love it. Love it. 

Ann: You know, when I tell these stories and Hepburn’s around, I’m like, “I’m sorry, I don’t think there’s a cat in this story.” 

Gavin: There you go. Marat no longer has to have been born on January 1st. We now have a cat in the story. 

Ann: A cat is… I have to, I’m going to boldly say, Hepburn’s ancestor. 

Gavin: It was Hepburn’s ancestor. 

Ann: Yeah. A cat during the French Revolution who’s just, like, emotional support cat to people arrested. 

Gavin: Somebody, Revolutionary Cats. That’s a book that I want. A collection of essays. 

Ann: Oh my gosh, yeah. On their collar, they have, like, the cockade pin. 

Gavin: Yes. Love it. 

Ann: I was just really happy, like, I want to sit in this moment. I’m really happy that there was a cat. There’s never a cat in these stories. Sometimes a dog, never a cat. [Gavin laughs] 

Anyway, so the prison that she was in, this was the first site of the September Massacres, which was when all the prisoners were— When some Jacobins, including Marat, broke into some prisons and killed all the prisoners. So anyway, so she’s just like, “Okay, so I’m just in this jail cell where like people were killed recently.” And actually, the cell she was in had one month earlier housed her, another Girondin heroine, Manon Roland, who we’re going to talk about on a later episode. So, she’s just kind of like, you know, “Good vibes. Good vibes in this prison cell. Like, you know, the people who’ve been here before were on my side. The Girondins-type people. There’s a cat, cool.” 

Gavin: Yeah. She’s riding high. You know, she’s like, “I did what I came here to do. I’ve got a great cat. Hell yeah.” 

Ann: What happened to the hat? Unclear. Left at his house, I guess. Maybe the crowd ripped the hat apart because I think it would kill her. 

Gavin: I mean, how many great hats have disappeared from history, though? You know? 

Ann: [laughs] Someone, you know, someone took that hat and good for them. You know what? Madame T. 

Gavin: I know it would have been the perfect relic for her to display. 

Ann: Okay. So, like, we’re following Charlotte, but we know, like, as she’s in the jail, Madame T is in that room sketching it to make her waxworks. 

So anyway, this death sent shockwaves throughout Paris because people had been killed a lot recently, but no one had been like, no leaders had been assassinated like this. And shockingly, like, you know, she wanted to do it in public, but I think this was even more shocking in his bathtub. Like, it’s so intimate, it’s so scary. 

Gavin: Yeah. There’s a home invasion element to it as well. Right? 

Ann: Yeah! Yeah. So, it’s like, no one is safe, even in your own bathtub, like the place where you think you’d be the most secure. So, people were shocked he was assassinated. People also were shocked that it was a woman, and they were confused because they’re just like “Women? But they don’t act—”

Gavin: Quoi?! 

Ann: [laughs] Big quoi energy. 

Gavin: Yes.

Ann: So, they’re just like, “Okay, we know that she did it, but like, but aren’t women biologically incapable of doing this?” So, a man must’ve told her to do it. Or there was a rumour that it was like, it wasn’t her. It was a man dressed as a woman, and then she was arrested. They’re all just like, it does not compute. Like, woman cannot be killer. Like the convolutions people going through just to be like, “But it couldn’t have been her because women don’t act on their own.” 

Gavin: Circuitry was fried. Definitely. 

Ann: Yeah. Her own siblings didn’t believe that she had done it, which is like, understandable. Today, you see with murders and stuff, it’s like, family members or friends are often like “No, it couldn’t have been him. He was always so nice.” 

Anyway, Charlotte wrote about this topic. “No one is satisfied to have a mere woman without consequence to offer to the spirit of that great man.” And that’s part of it, where it’s like, Marat was this great man people admired, and she was just this woman, woman, A. But also, she was from the country, she was no one. And so, they’re like, if Marat was going to be killed, he has to have been killed by some huge like, you know, Charles Barbaroux, they would have bought that, some leader. But they’re just like, no, it was just this woman. And everyone’s like, “Does not compute. Cannot. What?” 

So, the Jacobins tried to get her to admit to a wider Girondins conspiracy, like, “Who put you up to this? Who did this?” So, she’s cross-examined three separate times before the revolutionary tribunal. Each time she proudly insisted, “No, it was just me. It was just me. No one knew I was doing this.” When asked why she had killed Murat, she said, “I knew that he was perverting France. I’ve killed one man to save a hundred thousand. I was a republican before the revolution, and I have never lacked energy.” [both laugh] Why’d you kill him? “Well, I’ve never lacked energy.” 

Gavin: It’s like, “I was trying to commit that murder starting at 8:00 AM in the morning.” 

Ann: “On a hot day.” [both laugh] So, she was asked, “Who told you to murder him? What man did this?” She replied, “I would never have committed such an attack on the advice of others. I alone conceived this plan and executed it.” 

While awaiting her trial, she was allowed to write letters, and so she composed a letter to Charles Barbaroux explaining like, “Here’s what I did.” And then she also complained in a letter to the Committee of Public Safety that the guard attending her wasn’t giving her enough privacy, which is like, I love this for her. I love that she’s just like, “In addition… Yes, I know I’m being held in prison for the murder that I did, but this guard is creeping me out. And could you please have him removed? The prison conditions are deplorable!” It’s the French Revolution, and she’s just… 

Gavin: “Could you give me the cat back? I was happy with the cat.” 

Ann: “Who is the manager of the prison?” 

Gavin: That’s right. File a formal complaint. 

Ann: Anyway, so this letter never reached Barbaroux, but she probably knew that, and so she’s consciously preparing her own eulogy by writing this document.

Anyway, Barbaroux, just to catch up on this hot man. So, he had gone to Paris with his bad plan to overthrow the Jacobins. Didn’t work. So, he fled and, close to capture in an open field, shot himself… Not to death. Still alive!

Gavin: Ahh! This is like Robespierre, who also…

Ann: Which we’re going to get to in a later episode. 

Gavin: Sorry, spoiler. You can cut that. [laughs] 

Ann: No, I will keep that as a teaser. This is like Rasputin. Anyway, he shot himself to death unsuccessfully. Still alive, he was dragged away to be guillotined. So, that’s the end of a hot man. You know, hotness doesn’t save anyone, even in the French Revolution. 

Gavin: That’s right. It’s like, it happened to Madame du Barry, right? 

Ann: Yeah, it’s just like, you’re too gorgeous. She’s like, “You can’t kill me. I’m beautiful!” It’s like, “Mmm, that actually doesn’t stop us.” 

Gavin: “Tell it to the guillotine,” yeah. 

Ann: Again, it makes me think Luigi.

Gavin: Mm-hm. Alleged murderer, okay? He still has got to have his day in court. 

Ann: Oh, I am 100 percent, Luigi is an alleged murderer, but he’s also the handsomest man alive. 

Gavin: The hotness is verified. It’s not up for debate. 

Ann: Yeah, I feel like he was arrested around the time the People magazine was doing Sexiest Man Alive, and I was on board with, like, Luigi. [laughs] That’s who should be on your cover, People magazine. 

Gavin: [laughs] It’s a bold choice, but I mean, sometimes…

Ann: But it’s like, if we’re taking an objective decision. 

Gavin: Yeah, I mean, the Facebook pictures don’t lie sometimes. 

Ann: Yeah. So, she admitted her guilt, maintained she acted alone. Her trial was short because she was guilty. 

Gavin: Yeah. She made it easy. 

Ann: She was found in the room holding the knife and said, “I did it.” So, it was pretty straightforward. 

Gavin: It’s like, right before the chair sailed at her head, there was a full confession. 

Ann: Yeah, pinned to her body. But there was a trial, technically. So, she had her public defender, who was a Jacobin, so I’m sure he didn’t work that hard. Anyway, her lawyer, interestingly, Claude François Chauveau-Lagarde, would later defend Marie Antoinette in her trial. So, this is, like, the guy you get for hopeless cases of women on trial. 

Gavin: Heavy hitter or something? Maybe? I don’t know. 

Ann: This is the guy you get. 

Gavin: Or maybe, I mean, the Marie Antoinette was such a sham trial, so maybe he’s, like, the opposite of a heavy hitter. I don’t know. 

Ann: He’s just kind of like, you could just put a mannequin there and it would be as effective. 

Gavin: Yeah, it’s like a scarecrow. Is that a scarecrow or a lawyer? Yeah. 

Ann: So, Charlotte Corday, condemned to die by guillotine on July 17th. And the murder was on July 13th, so this all happened in a matter of days. So, as the verdict was being announced, this is where we’re going to segue into Gavin’s part of the story, but as the verdict was being announced, she noticed an officer of the National Guard was making a sketch of her, like a courtroom artist, and she was intrigued. She asked the court if she was allowed to have a portrait made of her before her death. And they were like, “You’re gorgeous, so yes.” [Gavin laughs] So, once this is granted, she asked the officer, Jean-Jacques Hauer, to turn his sketch into a painting. 

So, for two of her final hours, she sat with Hauer in the Conciergerie, which is the prison where political suspects were kept before the guillotine, and he sketched her and was making a portrait of her. And so, she made comments on the portrait. Though, before it was finished, he finished it later, I guess (maybe you’ll know those details), the pair were interrupted by the executioner who had come to take her away. So, they cut off her hair, which is what you do before someone is guillotined, so the hair doesn’t get in the way, I guess. She offered a lock of her hair, her chestnut blonde auburn hair, to Hauer as a token of her appreciation. And she also had time to write one last letter to her father, apologizing for not consulting with him concerning her life choices. 

Gavin: All right. So, it must have been so sincere, right? I think up until now, I think she’s made it pretty clear. [laughs]

Ann: She doesn’t listen to him. She’s like, “Sorry, Dad.” Anyway, she’s dressed in a red shirt to symbolize her role as a murderer. Her hands were tied, and she was put in an open cart for the ride across the city to the Place de la Révolution, where the guillotine awaited her. They were like, “Do you want to sit in the cart?” And she’s like, “No, I want to stand.” And they’re like, “Do you want to confess to a priest?” And she’s like, “I have no sins to confess.”

Gavin: [laughs] “Contrary to what I just told my dad in a letter.”

Ann: “Other than not listening to my father, I can’t think of anything I’ve done that’s wrong.” Who is it, the woman from Game of Thrones, who is like, “Tell Cersei it was me.” She’s just unapologetic. She’s like, “Yeah, I did it and I’d do it again.” 

Gavin: Hell yeah. 

Ann: So, she travelled down the streets of Paris, standing up in this cart, a sudden summer storm broke out, soaking her and giving her this ethereal, angelic appearance.

Gavin: Of course. 

Ann: It’s just, God is like, “I’m going to be…” 

Gavin: This is a music video. We’re turning this into a music video. 

Ann: It’s like, I’m going to make this as gorgeous as possible. So, Mother Nature is on her side. Anyway, so people were on the streets watching her go by, and they’re just like, “We hate her. Oh my god, she’s beautiful! Do we hate her? Not sure.” 

Anyway, night was coming when she was brought to the scaffold. There were so many people out there for the execution, and people along the route have been yelling at her, et cetera. She ignored the crowds who were yelling at her, and she just chatted with the man, the executioner who’s in the cart as well. I guess this is when they left. So, she’s like, “Oh, how far is it to the guillotine?” Just making conversation like you do with an Uber driver. And he’s like, “Oh, it’s pretty far.” And she’s like, well…  

Gavin: Can I get an ETA on that, please? [laughs]

Ann: [laughs] He’s like, “It’s pretty far.” And she’s like, “Well, even so, we’ll surely get there.” So, she’s just like reassuring him. 

Gavin: Okay, all right. 

Ann: Exactly, like “ETA on my death by execution? Okay… okay. If we could get there faster, that would be cool too.” 

Gavin: “Five or six minutes. Okay, cool.” 

Ann: Yeah, depending on traffic. Depending how many peasants attack us. Anyway, so the cart stops at the scaffold. The sky cleared. So, it’s raining as she’s going, and then it stops. And then, you know, it’s evening, night is falling, but I feel somehow like a beam of perfect moonlight is hitting her just beautifully. She went to her death composed and graceful. One onlooker wrote, “Her beautiful face was so calm that one would have said she was a statue. Behind her, young girls held each other’s hands as they danced. For eight days, I was in love with Charlotte Corday.” 

Gavin: It’s like, what happened on the ninth day? [laughs]

Ann: [laughs] So, she was executed by guillotine, July 17, 1793, 10 days before her 25th birthday. After she was beheaded—so, this is legendary, and maybe you’ll have stuff about this—allegedly, the executioner’s assistant grabbed the severed head and slapped it on the cheek. According to legend, “the head blushed under the slap. A tale that has been used as evidence for those who believe humans retain consciousness for some time after being decapitated.” I feel it’s more like… I don’t think it’s like, “Oh my gosh, she blushed.” I think it’s more just like you hit her on the face, so the blood vessels, like… Anyway, so that’s a weird thing. Aftermath. I’m going to go through this, but then we will pivot to your art talk. 

Gavin: Cool. 

Ann: So, she was killed, and the Jacobins did what they could to ruin her martyrdom, which is like another… Again, like Luigi, as we’re recording this, still very much alive, but you know, when Luigi was first arrested, even before that, when people didn’t know who had done this, everyone was just like, “Whoever did this is a hero.” And like all of society, like the left, the right, everyone is just like, “We support this.” So, news were trying to be like, “Oh, this alleged murderer!” And we’re like, “We’re not going to hate him if you’re running this article next to this picture of the hottest man alive.” So many people are so confused that so many people are on Luigi’s side. Didn’t Reddit have to like, shut down the Luigi thing because people were being too…? 

Anyway, so everything that she had planned, like, the look, the hat, the way that she did it, the bathtub, like the cart with the rain (not that she planned that, but maybe she did), she had become a martyr, like instantaneously. She was this angel… What was she called? The angel of assassination? So, the Jacobins were like, “We need to get people not to support her because she is against us, the Jacobins.” So, you know what they turned to is pamphlets. Some anti-Charlotte pamphlets. The pamphlet circulated claiming, “Actually, she was not beautiful. Actually, she was deformed.”

Gavin: [laughs] “That beautiful woman we all saw wasn’t Charlotte Corday.” 

Ann: Exactly, exactly. ”There’s so many horrible things about her. She read books. She was a woman who read books.” 

Gavin: Oh my god. 

Ann: Including pornography. She was so monstrous. She’s basically not even a woman. They’re just trying to be like… Because that was part of what was so iconic about it, was that it was a woman who was unapologetic, and that just made people think and be confused. And so, the pamphlets were like, “Actually, she looks like a woman, but she’s not a woman. And she reads books, so she sucks.”

Gavin: Right. 

Ann: The Jacobins, like this is just shitty. She’s dead, thank god, because they ordered an autopsy to see if she was still a virgin because they were still convinced that she had acted… Like, some man, her lover, must have gotten her to do this. So, like, “We’ll prove that she’s had sex.” It’s like, guess what? She hadn’t. And they’re like, “That makes her even more monstrous!” 

Gavin: [laughs] I love that. It’s like, either way, no winning. 

Ann: “She’s unnatural. She’s unnatural. Why didn’t she have sex? That’s weird.” 

Gavin: I know. Oh my gosh. 

Ann: And then 10 days after her execution, Robespierre, who’s always wanted to just jump on something else that happened in the world to his advantage. He was just like, “You know, I should be in charge because look what’s happening, women are killing Marat in bathtubs. Like, you need a strong man to be in charge, and that’s me, Robespierre.” So, 10 days later, he took his place for the first time on the Committee of Public Safety, and thus began The Terror. 

So, the Committee of Public Safety was a group of 12 men who ushered in the new era, which was no longer about revolution, but about terror. One of the first things they did was to say, women can’t be politically involved, women can’t have political clubs, women can’t… Basically, what Charlotte did was so terrifying to them, about like, “Oh my God, if women start doing shit, we can’t handle that.” In that way, she kind of pivoted things. She wanted, she thought, she hoped that this would stop the Revolution— Not the Revolution, but the murders and the Terror. But in fact, this pivoted everything into revolution and terror. 

Gavin: Right. Just ratcheted everything up. 

Ann: And so, Gavin, you’re here to talk about the art of it all, because how could you not make art out of this extremely exciting situation? 

Gavin: Yeah. Spectacular person. All right, let’s do it. So, I have three works of art that I want to talk about in depth, all of which are variously related to Charlotte Corday. So, let’s just dive right into it, okay? 

So, as we all know, there was intense public interest in both Corday as the criminal right after her execution, but also there was interest in the crime she had committed, the murder, how did the murder play out on the day of the assassination, right? So, artists of various kinds all stepped up to satisfy this curiosity however they could; maybe that meant painting a picture, doing an engraving, writing a detailed lored account for publication in a pamphlet somewhere else. And I even read about one puppeteer who created a marionette version of Charlotte Corday, yes. 

Ann: Nooo! That’s the most French thing. 

Gavin: I mean, puppet theatre, man, it was real. So, this is essentially true crime entertainment, right? You can see this as a kind of precursor to the true crime podcasts that some people listen to and that some people make nowadays. And this kind of true crime entertainment has always been sort of a risky business for the artist because you run the risk of appearing to celebrate the murderer while exploiting the misfortune of the victim. And things are even dicier because unless people have forgotten, we’re in the middle of the French Revolution, where it is very easy to get killed if you are seen as ideologically suspect at all. Remember that puppeteer who created the marionette of Charlotte Corday? 

Ann: Yeah. 

Gavin: He was executed. 

Ann: Nooo!! 

Gavin: Yes, yes. So, you have to be very, very careful as an artist whenever you decided to take up the story of the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat. 

Ann: You had to really make sure that you were not on her side. 

Gavin: Exactly. 

Ann: You had to make sure that you were just like, “She was an unnatural woman who read books, and Marat was this bathtub guy who…” 

Gavin: He was the hero in the bathtub. So basically, I wanted to start with a painting that offers a case study in how one painter went out of his way to represent the murder of Jean-Paul Marat without appearing to glorify Charlotte Corday. So, as a way of catering to public interest in the crime without, you know, losing your head. 

So, as it happens, Ann, you have already introduced us to this painter: It was Jean-Jacques Hauer; he’s the guy who goes to paint a portrait of Charlotte Corday in prison. And I had not realized this until I started preparing for this episode, but actually, Hauer painted multiple images of Charlotte Corday, and one of them went on display at the Paris Salon in August of 1793. So, this is just about a month after the assassination took place. It’s still very fresh in people’s minds. So, I have sent you an image of this painting. Maybe you could just describe it for listeners. 

Ann: This is the first one? 

Gavin: Yes. 

Ann: Okay. So, what I’m looking at, it’s got, like, a gold frame around it. Actually, I just think it’s so iconic that this guy, who’s an artist, this is his breakout moment was Charlotte noticed him sketching, and he’s like, “You know what I’m going to do? Launch an art career.” 

Gavin: Right. 

Ann: So, what we have here is a painting… It’s the situation. Okay. We need to clarify that Marat’s bathtub is shaped like a giant shoe, [Gavin laughs] which it was. It’s a shoe-shaped bathtub. So, what we see is Marat is dead in the shoe-shaped bathtub. He’s got his little bathtub desk on top with paper, he’s always signing it. And he’s just kind of slumped off to the side. He’s wearing a shirt, he’s got his turban on, and then next to him is Charlotte, who’s wearing her polka dot dress, she’s wearing her iconic hat, and she’s just, kind of like, standing there holding the knife. In terms of like, if we’re looking at, you know, Artemisia Gentileschi, “Judith Killing Holofernes” is an action-packed thing, like, full of emotion. This is very much just kind of like, here’s a man in a bathtub. It looks like he might have just fallen asleep. And then Charlotte is standing there, and she’s just kind of like, “Doot-doo,” she’s kind of holding her knife. She doesn’t look passionate, she doesn’t look… It’s a very just kind of like, here’s two people standing posing in a room, is how I would describe it. 

Gavin: Yeah. It’s not a very good painting, so it doesn’t, like, vibrate. If it were hanging on the wall, it would not necessarily appear to vibrate. But there are some interesting things about it and things that could have potentially gotten Hauer into trouble. Although, as you say, it’s not necessarily the kind of high drama you might expect. 

So, significantly, you’ll notice that Charlotte Corday is standing right in the centre of the image, right? So, that sends an important sign to any viewer. It’s like, okay, who is this about? Who is this painting really about? Is it about the fallen martyr and wonderful politician/journalist Marat? Or is it about the murderer, right? 

Ann: Absolutely, yeah. She’s right in the middle. I’m just noticing a couple other details. There is a chair in the background, which I appreciate because we know what that chair did. 

Gavin: Right. [laughs] Also, another thing that I point out is her, this is just for me, her hat, her black hat, is so eye-grabbing, and it’s the first thing that my eye goes to when I look at the painting. So, I think that’s another way of Hauer’s efforts to kind of pull attention toward the murderer, toward the “villain,” the criminal in this act. Okay, so in some ways, like, Hauer’s getting into risky territory here, right? Because he is foregrounding Charlotte Corday, he’s not really making an effort to mourn the death of Jean-Paul Marat. But according to one art historian I came across, Hauer does something absolutely essential to, you know, avoid any trouble. And that lies in the portrayal of Charlotte Corday’s hair. Now, if you look very closely at her hair, you will see that it is powdered. 

Ann: Yeah. 

Gavin: And you mentioned it was like, okay, we know that Charlotte Corday wore a black hat to the murder scene. Did she powder her hair? As you mentioned, there are already all these anecdotes swirling around town about how she had taken the time out of her day to have her hair styled on the afternoon of the assassination. And in some versions of that story, the hairdresser powdered her hair. 

Ann: And powdered hair, that’s aristocratic, right? 

Gavin: Oh, okay, you’re seeing where this is going. Yes. So, in some ways, like, these stories might be apocryphal; it’s hard to know whether she actually had her hair done. But it’s like the least interesting question you can ask, because as you already point out, there’s a deep significance to powdered hair, and it is not one that was specific to the late 18th century. Powdered hair carried really negative connotations and associations with the old regime and the aristocracy, going all the way back to the reign of Louis XIV in the mid-17th century. And since, question: Do you happen to know what people used to powder their hair? 

Ann: No, I don’t. 

Gavin: Flour. 

Ann: Oh. 

Gavin: Essential for… 

Ann: Oh! Bread! And this is bread shortage. 

Gavin: Uh-huh. So, it is seen as this aristocratic indulgence that is so wasteful. It’s just another example of how the rich can do whatever they want to follow the fashion while people are, like, literally starving to death. And since I know that you love a pamphlet, I have to cite a 1649 pamphlet. A 1649 pamphlet, mind you, that basically chastises aristocratic men and women for “Profaning the use of flour to make it serve as decorations for their body rather than for food.” So, it was seen as wasteful, totally disrespectful. Fast forward to the end of the 18th century, you have writers like Louis-Sébastien Mercier, a really important source for anyone who looks at this period in history, he compared hair powder to luxury items like liqueurs, silks, porcelain, things that only the wealthiest elements of society would have had access to. 

So, back to Hauer’s portrait. By having Charlotte Corday appear with powdered hair, he is implicitly aligning her with the aristocracy and therefore against the Revolution. So, it’s a way of actually subtly casting her as kind of an enemy of the people, an enemy of all the good that the Revolution was doing. And of course, we know that she came from a minor aristocratic household. 

Ann: Well, that’s what I was going to say. That’s interesting because when I like what I read about when people were criticizing her and trying to get everyone to hate her, they’re like, “She reads books, she’s not really a woman.” But I didn’t see them saying, like, “She’s an aristocrat,” which she was and that’s the way that they could have criticized her. 

Gavin: Yes, it would have been a really easy way just to call her into question. Yeah, damage her reputation, all of it. Yeah, that’s interesting. 

Okay. So, this painting goes up in the Paris Salon in August of 1793. Some historians believe that this painting might have inspired a truly famous painter, Jacques-Louis David, one of the most important artists of this period in history, to paint his own version of the assassination of Marat. That’s sort of unconfirmed. We don’t know how much that is true, but it has been suggested by art historians. So, four months after the assassination of Marat, Jacques-Louis David comes out with one of his own paintings and it is, like, the most famous painting from the French Revolution. It is truly iconic. And that is the next painting that I want us to look at, usually just called The Death of Marat. So, if you could describe that one for us. 

Ann: Okay, so this one is just Marat, there’s no Charlotte Corday in this at all. So, right at the centre of the picture, it’s interesting. The top half is just black, and the bottom half is Marat. You see him, he’s leaning off to the side, he’s in the bathtub, obviously dead. He’s got his turban on, he’s not wearing a shirt. You can see some blood around, there’s cloths around. I don’t know. It’s like he’s in the bathtub with sheets on. Anyway, he’s holding a piece of paper in his hand, I assume that that’s the piece of paper Charlotte gave him of like, “Here’s the names, the traitors or whatever.” And then next to him is, like, a wooden desk that says, I guess that’s the title of the picture. It says, “À Marat, David,” like, it’s carved into the desk, but there’s paperwork. So, it’s very, like, here is this dead person; he’s centred and it’s very sympathetic, I would say. 

Gavin: Yes. So, I think that’s one of the most important differences is that, remember, Charlotte Corday, standing smack dab in the middle of the first painting. This time around, she’s eliminated from the composition entirely, at least her body is. 

Ann: And I want to say, sorry, just about like in the first one too, the dead Marat, he’s just kind of “Blerghh!” [Gavin laughs] It’s kind of like a cartoon of a dead person, but this is very much like a beautiful dead person. 

Gavin: Okay. That’s a key point. So, Marat was not in great health at the time of his death, but what David has purposely given us here is a beautified version of him. He looks like a much younger man, he looks like he’s in much better health. And how would you describe his facial features for listeners? 

Ann: Well, I would not describe him as hot, but I would say that he looks peaceful. 

Gavin: Yes. Yes. That’s the important point, right? You would never know that he had, like, died in agony, screaming out for help, right? 

Ann: Versus in the first one, he’s like, “Blerghh!” [laughs]

Gavin: “Blerghh!” Exactly. [laughs] Right, [laughs] it’s the complete opposite of the first image. So, what is really important here is that we have, um, a look of serenity that has come over his face. It’s almost like he’s at peace with his death, but there’s a lot more to this image. And David is purposefully invoking a long artistic tradition. Okay. So, could you describe for me the way… You notice his arm? Can you talk about his right arm? 

Ann: Yeah. Yeah. So, his right arm is sort of draped, like, he’s leaning off to the side, to the right side. His arm is draped onto the ground, he’s holding a feather in his hand, I assume it’s a quill pen. And then next to that is the knife. 

Gavin: The knife, right? 

Ann: On the ground. 

Gavin: Yeah. If you look at the right arm, the way it’s hanging down, it sort of calls attention to itself because it is actually unnaturally elongated. 

Ann: Oh yeah. 

Gavin: Do you see that? For me, I didn’t notice it when I first looked at the painting, but as soon as it was pointed out to me by an art historian, I couldn’t unsee it. I was like, “Oh yeah, that’s totally right.” 

` Okay. So, now if you’ll just scroll down to the next image that I sent to you. 

Ann: Mm-hm.

Gavin: Okay. So, this is the Pietà by Michelangelo, completed 1498 to 1499. It’s a marble sculpture. It depicts the Virgin Mary lamenting the death of Christ. He has been taken down from the crucifix at this point. He’s lying on her lap. I mean, it’s one of the great masterpieces of sculpture. It’s currently in Saint Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican City, formerly the home of our dearly departed Pope Francis. 

Ann: Oh my god. R.I.P. Pope Francis. 

Gavin: I know. R.I.P. But okay. So, can you look at the right arm of Christ there? Could you describe it for us? 

Ann: Well, it is similar to the painting. So, his right arm is draped, like, it’s a similar angle. It’s kind of like… Yeah, the right arm looks very similar to how the right arm is. Is it also unnaturally elongated? I don’t know. 

Gavin: It’s hard to tell from the… I’ve heard that it is, but it’s kind of hard for me to see from this angle in the picture. But I think it’s up to you, in the eye of the beholder. It doesn’t look elongated to me, but it certainly is elongated in the Marat composition. I do think it’s a way of, kind of, calling attention to that particular limb. 

But if you scroll down to the next image, there’s just one more. This is The Entombment of Christ by Caravaggio, the Renaissance master, completed 1603 to 1604. And then you’ll see here again, we have Christ with his right arm draping down. So, this is the kind of thing that serious students of art, serious painters and serious art historians would immediately latch onto. These are some of the most famous works of art in art history that have come before David’s painting. So, he’s trying, David, is very consciously trying to align Marat with Jesus Christ, who was like the martyr of all martyrs, right? So, he’s drawn on Christian iconography to make a martyr, a secular martyr, of Jean-Paul Marat. 

Ann: I want to say too, like, in this picture, the Caravaggio, Jesus is, there’s sort of white cloths draped around him. And it’s kind of similar to how there’s the white cloths in the David of Marat as well. 

Gavin: Yeah, absolutely. So, that’s Marat. So, one thing that’s interesting is that this painting also has certain things to say about Charlotte Corday, even though she is not depicted, and this is really interesting. So, she has been sidelined, right? But her presence is nevertheless felt because you mentioned it earlier, he’s holding a note in his left hand. That is the letter from Charlotte Corday that she supposedly sent to him. And if you look closely, it is actually legible, you can read what it says. It says something to the effect of, you know, “Today is the 13th of July 1793, my name is Charlotte Corday, this is addressed to Marat.” And then she says something like, you know, “Suffice to say that I am miserably desperate, I need your help.” It’s something like that. 

Ann: Well, and that’s, I didn’t mention that in my story, but that is true. She sent a letter to the house, she didn’t just show up. She sent a letter being like, “I would like to see Marat, please.” 

Gavin: Yeah. But it’s curious, too, because what basically David has highlighted then was actually the fact that Charlotte Corday visited Marat under false pretenses. So, she’s not heroic. She isn’t triumphant the way that she arguably may seem in the painting by Jean-Jacques Hauer. She’s duplicitous, she’s a liar; she is a murdering liar. That is the implication of this painting. So, a lot of these painters, you know, are, David is really controlling or trying to exert control over how we interpret the murder victim and the murderer. 

Ann: I was just going to say too, like I mentioned before, there’s the knife on the ground, and I just keep thinking about that. It’s like, such a significant thing to just kind of have, he’s dead. Like when you look at the painting, if you didn’t know the context of it, if you look at this, like eventually you could figure out like what happened; there’s a knife on the ground next to him, and he’s kind of bleeding in the bathtub. It tells a story. 

Gavin: It does. It does. And he’s holding a quill and he’s holding a note in one hand and a quill in the other. So, he couldn’t have stabbed himself, right? 

Ann: Right. Right. Right! Yeah! 

Gavin: Okay. So, that’s enough for painting. So, with time, once the French Revolution dies down, it becomes more acceptable for people to portray Charlotte Corday as a heroine, someone who sacrificed herself for the good of her country, a martyr, all that. There are a lot of paintings that do that later, especially in the 19th century, but we’re not going to talk about that. 

Instead, I wanted to talk about a different aspect of Charlotte Corday because people were not just fascinated by the commission of the murder itself, they were awestruck by the way that she behaved, both in prison and on her way to the guillotine because she was so self-possessed, so calm, like, “Okay, is it five or six minutes? Like, how long? How long until we get there?” And part of the way they talked about this was the fact that she claimed to descend from the great playwright, Pierre Corneille. So, here’s where we’re going to talk a little about him. 

So, to give you a little bit of an example, if someone in 18th-century France came up to you and was like, “Oh, Pierre Corneille was my great-great-grandfather, it’d be like someone coming up to you and being like, “Charles Dickens was like my great-great-great-great-grandfather.” It’s like, as famous as it gets. So, who is Pierre Corneille, and why did Charlotte Corday want people to know that she descended from him? 

Pierre Corneille was a 17th-century playwright born in 1606, studied law first, and then goes into playwriting. And he’s most famous for a play called Le Cid. And Le Cid was not just one of the most popular plays of the 17th century, but it was also one of the most controversial plays. And to understand why, we have to know a thing or two about dramatic conventions at this time. So, there was a school of theorists called the neoclassicists, and they were basically coming up with a bunch of rules that all good plays must abide by. It’s like, “If you do not follow this rule, it’s not a play. You suck, we hate you.” And we don’t have to go through all these rules, but the three that we need to know are called the three Aristotelian unities. They’re Aristotelian because, according to these guys, the Greek philosopher Aristotle had proposed all three of these theories. 

Ann: This is just, sorry. Again, France is just like, “You know what we love? Ancient Greece, ancient Rome.” 

Gavin: Yeah, it is. Yeah! They’re drawing all this inspiration from Aristotle and then other guys from Rome as well. Yeah, yeah, it’s very much in line. 

So, the Aristotelian unities are the unity of action, the unity of time, and the unity of place. So, unity of action is one that’s pretty familiar to us even today. It’s basically, like, every play should tell a coherent story with a beginning, middle, and an end, right? Okay, that’s fine. So, unity of place. This is not in Aristotle anywhere; it was completely made up by the neoclassicists, but they argue that all effective plays must take place in a single location. And then beyond that, you have the unity of time. And that basically suggests that all good plays must take place in the span of 24 hours. So, these are getting very restrictive, right? And this is where Pierre Corneille is going to get into trouble. 

So, Le Cid. I’m going to tell you what happens in this play right now. So, it’s based on a medieval Spanish myth. And our hero and heroine are two young lovers named Rodrigue and Chimène. Rodrigue and Chimène are madly in love with each other, Ann, but there’s a problem. Their fathers were feuding, and they disapprove of the union. Toward the beginning of the play—  And you have to remember, all this is happening in the span of a single day. So, they’re like, “Oh my God, it’s 9:30 AM and we’re so in love with each other.” Okay. At 10:00 AM that same day, the fathers get into a dispute, and Chimène’s father slaps Rodrigue’s father across the face. This is an insult that cannot be brooked. Rodrigue challenges Chimène’s father to a duel right in front of her and kills him. And Chimène is like, “Oh my god! The man of my dreams just murdered my father. What do I do?” She’s very upset about all of this. So, that took place at, like, 10:00 AM. 

10:30 AM, Chimène goes to her maid, and she’s like, “Oh my God, what can I do about this? This is terrible. I need to murder Rodrigue and then kill myself.” So, one hour ago, madly in love. Now, one hour later, literally contemplating murder-suicide. And so, as it happens, Rodrigue has been overhearing this entire conversation and leaps out of his hiding place, and he’s like, “Do it. Here’s my sword, kill me now, kill yourself. Let’s do it.” And then Chimène is like, “I can’t, I can’t,” like, sobbing into her hands, “I can’t do this.” The drama is pretty high, right? 

So, what you do not know, Ann, because I have not told you, is that at the same time, the Moors are getting ready to invade Seville, where this play is set. So, someone runs in and is like, “Oh my God, the Moors are invading! The Moors are invading!” And Rodrigue is like, “Listen, hold that thought, we’re going to get back and sort this out later. I need to go defeat the Moors really quickly.” So, he, you know, gets on his armour, goes off to the battlefield and single-handedly stops the invasion in, like, an hour. All this happens in an hour. And then he comes back, and he was so valorous on the battlefield that the Moors were like, “You are the Le Cid,” which is like, I think it’s a bastardized version of the word for ‘Lord,’ maybe in Arabic, I’m not sure, but that’s where the title of the play comes from. So, basically, at this point, then it gets really weird, and there’s another duel that takes place, and whoever wins the duel gets to marry Chimène. Rodrigue participates in the duel. He wins. And then Chimène is like, “Oh my God, I love you now. I’ve always loved you all along.” And then she marries him, the man who murdered her father earlier that day, before he defeated an entire Moorish army earlier that day, and they live happily ever after. 

So, that’s what happens in the play. [chuckles] And it was, like, a box office smash, audiences loved it. But the critics were like, “This is garbage. All that shit couldn’t happen in a single day. That’s preposterous. And how could she marry the man who literally slew her father in a duel?” So, this leads to a giant, literally three-year, controversy. People are debating this play for three years. In the end, the French academics are like, they issued a formal verdict, and they’re like, “This is not a play. We don’t know what it is, but it’s not a play.” [both laugh] So, that’s Le Cid controversy. 

So, what can we draw from this that is relevant to Charlotte Corday? I think one thing to know is that Corneille is writing about some of the most profound human emotions expressed in their biggest way, right? So, it’s like, the hunger for revenge, the sense of filial duty, my sense of filial duty is so deeply felt that I will murder the love of my life, right? Or love of country or homeland, right? Le Cid is so valorous, he’s going to go out and single-handedly take down an army, an invading army. He’s superhuman in his valour. So, these, these characters are just larger than life, and they take the kind of actions that can change the course of history, in other words. It also helps that Corneille was this just sensational writer who wrote this burnished, flawless verse. There’s a very strict way for how you had to write verse at this time as well. 

Ann: Is this the stuff where it’s like, when you’re acting, you have to do the specific arm gestures? Is this that whole thing too? 

Gavin: It was more before that. Yeah. 

Ann: Okay. 

Gavin: Yeah. That’s more of, like, an 18th-century conceit, but this is more like a declamation, almost. Like, you know that you’re giving a speech because this tragic playwright has given you this amazing French to deliver. Yeah, they had to write what was called the Alexandrine, which was rhyming couplets, each line had to be 12 syllables. 

Ann: Oh god.

Gavin: So again, extremely restrictive, like, almost impossible to pull off. But these guys, that’s part of why they were blowing people’s minds, is they could work wonders even within these constraints. So, Corneille is this amazing writer with larger-than-life characters, and that’s what’s so important about his reputation, and that’s why Charlotte Corday wanted people to know that she had him in her family tree. 

So, when we talked a bit about Charlotte Corday getting ready to go meet her maker, you know, on the scaffold or whatever, Samson, the executioner, comes in to shear her hair. And there are all kinds of different anecdotes about what happens here. But in one of them, I love this, get ready for this. So, she has her hair shorn, and she just stands up and she goes, “Behold the toilette of death.” [Ann bursts into laughter] Pause for dramatic effect, very long pause, and then, “Done by rough hands, but it leads to immortality.” [laughs]

Ann: Yes, Charlotte. Yes! 

Gavin: I mean, metal as hell, right? 

Ann: Yes, yes. 

Gavin: And so, later biographers cite this line, and they’re like, she could deliver Corneillein speeches with complete naturalness, right? So, she spoke the way Corneille wrote, and she also acted the way Corneille’s characters performed because she was this absolute titan who was so steely, so determined to act for the good of her country and all of that. So, the relationship with Corneille shaped the way that some people interpreted it, and probably in many cases, imagined some of her last hours on Earth. So, there you go. 

Ann: And I mean, we talked about this a lot in the Madame T episode, but also, can you talk about the Madame T, Marat waxwork? 

Gavin: Sure. So interestingly, to my knowledge, Charlotte Corday herself was never depicted in the Chamber of Horrors. 

Ann: Well, I now understand why, because Madame T would have been in danger. 

Gavin: It would have been a danger. Yeah, she had to be very careful about how she positioned herself during the French Revolution. But yeah, so there’s a bit of a controversy. She unveiled her tableau of Jean-Paul Marat, so it’s very similar to the David painting; you see Marat lying dead in the bathtub with his, I believe, his right arm dangling over toward the ground. So, the compositions are very similar. 

And Madame Tussaud made several claims about the origins of this tableau. And if you listened to our episode on Madame T, or if you’ve maybe listened to the season that I did about Madame Tussaud, you know that you better be skeptical because Madame Tussaud made the claim. She was known to tell a fib or three, but she claimed to have visited the crime scene herself and done sketches of Marat while he was still dead in the bath. And then she also claims to have inspired the composition of David’s painting, which is kind of a bold claim because this is considered, like, one of the most important paintings from this period of history. The Marat tableau stayed in Madame Tussaud’s wax museum for the rest of her life, and she lived a very long life. It also stayed in the Chamber of Horrors well into the 21st century, and I believe it’s still on display today. So, it’s kind of one of the OG attractions. 

Ann: This is like, all circling back to, I know we talked about this in the Madame T episode, but when I was a youth in the early ‘90s, my family went to London, we went to Madame Tussaud’s. It was one of my favourite parts of the whole trip, and I remembered the Chamber of Horrors, obviously, [laughs] imprinted on me, like it did on so many people, and I remember this dead guy in a bathtub. 

Gavin: Okay, you saw him. There you go. 

Ann: No, but I didn’t know the context. And then when I was researching for… just, actually for the Madame Tussaud episode you and I did, and then just for the French Revolution, I’m like, “Oh! That was that guy, dead guy in a bathtub. I remember seeing a dead guy in a bathtub. Oh, that’s who that was! Okay.” Like it was, it’s a memorable, weird, like if she had killed him at the National Assembly, it wouldn’t be as famous, I don’t think, as this weird shoe-shaped bathtub, the turban on his head. It’s just like, it’s a startling image. It’s memorable. Yeah. 

Gavin: Yeah. It’s also a great way, I think, to introduce, like, children to a historical event, I guess, you can make an argument, right? Because it is so indelible, and whose curiosity would not be piqued by such an image? 

Ann: Well, and also for me, just researching this too, it’s like, I just assumed that he was taking a bath as anyone might. I didn’t realize that he had this skin condition and was, like, working in the bathtub. [laughs] Like, he was never not in a bathtub. That was interesting to me too. 

Gavin: Tub day, you know. 

Ann: Yeah. So, what we need to do next is to score, to put this martyr, Charlotte Corday, in the Scandaliciousness Hall of Fame for Vulgar History. So, we have four categories, and I believe I sent them to you before. So, everything is on a scale of 0 to 10 to cement her legacy here. 

So, the first category is the Scandaliciousness, which is how scandalous was she seen by people in her life and time. And I feel like we need to find an average number of before the murder and after the murder. Because after the murder, she could not have been more scandalous, like, a woman who did a murder. But before, I think she was just living… She’s a quiet kid reading books, like she wasn’t the sort of person who’s like, “Oh my gosh, all these scandals.” Like, she was just very much doing what was expected of a young woman. 

Gavin: I agree. But, but she also grew up in a convent, right? So, it’s almost like that pre-history makes the shock of the assassination even crazier, even more scandalicious, right? 

Ann: Yeah. I mean, and the scandal is like very high with the murder of it all. 

Gavin: Yeah. I mean, so for me, I’m like, 10. 

Ann: Yeah. I think 10 makes sense to me as well. Like, you know, she didn’t live a life of ongoing scandals. She did one thing, but it could not have been a more scandalicious thing. 

Gavin: Yeah. But also think about, like, the implications are so far-reaching and social and cultural and political. I mean, you have Robespierre stepping things up, and then you have all these debates about the nature of gender, right? And they’re like, “Wait, there’s no way a woman could have carried this out herself. There must’ve been some sort of man planning this.” So, I think, I mean, it really touched a lot of different nerves. 

Ann: It really did. It reminds me too of, I think, I forget if I said this in the last episode, but during the Women’s March and then they went to Versailles, and they broke in and whatever, there was rumours after that, that were like, “Well, that couldn’t have been women. That must have been men in dresses because women wouldn’t do those things. It must have been men in dresses.” 

Gavin: Oh my god, the kind of mental gymnastics, the backflips, that people turn to make sense of these… Yeah, events.

Ann: Just like women couldn’t have possibly done things, so it must have just been men in disguise. And she was just such a big case. Like, the fact that she’s like, ”It was me and it was just me.” And it’s just like… exactly. That’s like a 10 plus, just in terms of everything cultural understanding of, like, society at the time. And then I love that she was also like, “Dear dad, I’m sorry I didn’t ask your permission to leave the house.”

Gavin: [laughs] “Don’t be mad at me.” 

Ann: That’s what she’s sorry about. Okay. The next category. And again, like, it’s interesting because she’s someone who, you know, she did one big thing in her life. So, the next category is the Schemieness. Like, how much did she come up with a plan? Did she execute the plan? And I’m just like, I feel like 10 out of 10. 

Gavin: 10. 10! Okay. When you’re like buying a fetching hat and… But also, one thing that is so interesting that came out to me this time too, was that she had, she was very schemey, she had planned out everything, but she was also so ready to adapt because the plan changed. She wanted to go to the Convention, but then she’s like, “Oh fuck, he’s not at the Convention. He’s in his bathroom. That’s fine. I’m going to try and get in there. Oh, I got turned away. That’s fine. I’ll dream up a Girondin conspiracy that I can, you know, infiltrate his house that way.” Like, so, so scheming and also adaptable. 

Ann: Yeah! I admire that in a person, just the adaptability of, like, having, and you know, I want to put this all in the context of the French Revolution. Everyone’s killing everyone. So, it’s just like, if I support Charlotte, which I do, it’s like, she wasn’t living in a society where everyone was like kind and wonderful, and she ran up and killed this guy. It’s like, everything was shit, everyone was killing everyone. And in that context, what she did was, I feel like, understandable and admirable. And just in terms of, like, having a plan and… 

Gavin: Following through. 

Ann: It was a good plan. And she didn’t… She came up with it by herself, notably. You know, like, but I think she just, she read so much of the classics, the Greeks and the Romans, and she’s like, “What would they have done? How would the Greeks have dealt with this? That’s what I’ll do.” 

Gavin: Or how would a tragic hero from Corneille, you know, like these are the kinds of huge steps they take. Yeah. 

Ann: Yeah. Well, when you were describing the plotline to the fact that the woman in the play, what was her name? Chimene? 

Gavin: Chimène. Yeah. 

Ann: Chimène was like, “Here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to stab you, and then I’m going to stab myself.” And I’m like, oh, okay. A woman taking action. I’d love to see it. But yeah, just Charlotte, her plan, everything she’s like, and “I’m going to leave the Bible open to this page. And I’m going to pin this, my birth certificate to my body, because I know I’m going to be ripped limb from limb.” Like, she couldn’t have been more prepared. 

Gavin: Yeah. 10. 

Ann: Yeah. 10 out of 10. 

Gavin: Easy 10. 

Ann: Yeah. 

Gavin: I will also say too, just to the point of scandalous, we already agree that she’s getting a 10, but I think the controversy actually extends beyond, and you can tell by looking at art history, because the Soviets, for example, were not fans, broadly speaking, we’re not fans of Corday, but then the Nazis were, and there were very different political reasons for why they chose that stance. But I think it’s a crime that people continue to debate the ethics of, you know, even today. So yeah. 

Ann: Yeah. No, I’m just, as I’m talking through it, I’m just like, why do I support her so much? And it’s like, well, because so like… You know, I don’t condone murder in general. [laughs]

Gavin: Go out on a limb. [laughs] 

Ann: But like, in this specific context, it’s just kind of like, she was like, “Someone has to do something and here’s what I’m going to do.” And it’s like, if we’re going death for death, like, how many people did Robespierre kill? How many people did Marat contribute to dying? Like, she wasn’t, yeah, it wasn’t just like some… She didn’t kill Pope Francis, you know? It’s not like somebody who’s just completely blameless. And she’s living in a world, like, in her city, she saw the guillotine in her city. She saw the guy who gave her mother the last rites, his head chopped off. Like, it’s just like, this is what life is like, and when you’re living in that situation, like, you’ve got to take some bold action. 

Gavin: So real. Yeah. I think also as a woman, right, she had very little ability to express herself politically in the political arena. Right? So, it’s sort of like, “Okay, well, I have no fucking voice. What I do have is a knife, and I can use that to achieve something politically.” 

Ann: Yeah. Like, “How can I make myself heard?” Well, she found a way, versus the other women I’ve been talking about on the show in the last couple of weeks who, like, would make speeches and publish pamphlets and stuff, and they were continuously dismissed as being like, oh, this is weird. Why are you talking? You’re a woman. Like, they tried; that didn’t effect any change. 

So, the next category is… Actually going to skip ahead and then double back. Okay. So, kind of related to this. So, we have the Sexism category, which is kind of like, this category is there to, you know, how much more could somebody have accomplished if not for the patriarchy, if not for sexism. And I think her score in this would be… like we were just saying like, maybe if she could have been politically involved, she could have acted differently. Yeah. But I don’t know how much sexism was holding her back. It’s like, she wasn’t forced to marry somebody when she was 12. She wasn’t like… She had more. 

Gavin: Yes. Yeah. I think definitely had more agency. I would say that, you know, it did prevent people from hearing what she was saying in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, right? She’s like, “I did this for a reason. I did this to prove a point. I killed this one man to save the lives of a hundred thousand.” She had a serious message that she was trying to send, and people were like, “Okay, but who is your husband? Where’s your dad? Who’s the guy who put you up to all this?” Right? So, I don’t know… I think… 

Ann: I might do something like a 5. 

Gavin: I’d be cool with that. 

Ann: Yeah. Like, it certainly affected her life, but other people who score highly in this category have much more stuff getting in their way. Like she… yeah. And again, she was sort of like, “This is what my life situation is like. This is how I can move around in the world that I’m in.” Yeah.

And then the final category is Significance. And this is like, this is like significance, I would say, to the French Revolution. She has a significance of, like, her action kind of gave Robespierre an excuse to do what he already wanted to do, but let him kind of speed that timeline up. But then the significance to art history, the significance to political history. 

Gavin: I would say Marie Antoinette is like a 10, right? Like, that’s a 10?

Ann: Yeah. 

Gavin: For me, I think Charlotte Corday is extremely significant politically, culturally, et cetera. But I don’t know if she’s, like, on the same level as Marie Antoinette, you know? So, for me, my hot take would be, like, 8. 8? Maybe we want to give her a 9, I don’t know. 

Ann: Let’s do 8.5. 

Gavin: Okay. If we can do 0.5, like, if we can bring in some 0.5s, let’s do it. 

Ann: So, that gives her a total of 33.5. And I just want to see where… 

Gavin: Pretty high scoring. 

Ann: It is a high score. Let me just see where that lands her. She’s the highest rated of any of the women of the Revolution we’ve done so far.

Gavin: Wow! 

Ann: And I think that’s partially because she was kind of the most impactful. Well, and also because, well, you know, there’s a lot of different categories, but because she had the impact, but she also had the Schemieness. Like, some of the other women were like, “I want to effect change, so I’ll write some pamphlets.” It’s like, well, that’s not a scheme. That’s just kind of like a thing you’re doing, and I respect it, but that’s not what we reward at this podcast. 

Gavin: You’re not really thinking outside the box there. 

Ann: No. And like, the other women too. People are like, “Oh my god, women are being revolutionaries.” It’s like, yeah, that’s like a 6 or a 7 scandalousness, but she like killed Marat in his bathtub. Like, no, she’s definitely the highest rated. Do you know the painter of this era, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard? 

Gavin: Yes. 

Ann: Yeah. So, she has a 32. 

Gavin: She has a 32. Wow, okay. 

An: Yeah. Charlotte Corday, 33.5. So, they’re neighbours in this area. 

Gavin: Who has the highest score of all time? 

Ann: Of all time? Of all time is Fredegund, queen of Neustria, who, I don’t know if you’ve heard of. 

Gavin: Yeah, I haven’t heard that one. 

Ann: She’s a major heroine of this podcast. This is like, I want to say like the 10th century, like, proto-France. I named the scale after her, the Fredegund Memorial Scandaliciousness Scale, [Gavin laughs] because she was like— 

Gavin: Okay. That says it all. 

Ann: It’s like one of Charlotte Corday was queen in a war time, in medieval times, and just like killed Marat every five years for decades. 

Gavin: Damn!

Ann: Like Fredegund, like she got it done. 

Gavin: But she also experienced extreme sexism? 

Ann: She did, yes. 

Gavin: See, that’s amazing to me because it feels like… Yeah, that’s amazing. 

Ann: Yeah. The thing with Fredegund is, well, I did like three two-hour episodes about her because there’s a lot to tell. But part of the thing with her is just like, she always had to be like, “Well, I’m actually just the regent for my young son.” She could never actually be in charge. She always had to be like, “Well, this is my husband. This is my son. I’m just doing this all for him.” She could never… And then when she died, the grave just said, “Here lies Fredegund, mother of kings.” And it’s like, [groans]. 

Gavin: Yes. “Mother of,” right. That’s all she was. 

Ann: Do we know anything about Charlotte Corday’s burial? I mean, I assume she was just thrown in a pile with all the other bodies that were executed. 

Gavin: Yeah, that’s probably true. I’m sure it was an unmarked grave. I mean… 

Ann: Yeah. And I don’t know, it would be still controversial to this day if France put up a statue of her or something, I guess, because it’s like, are we celebrating a murderer? 

Gavin: Yeah. I actually don’t know. That’d be interesting to look into. I’m not sure what the feeling is about… 

Ann: She’s so memorialized, though, in artwork, I guess, and a lot of women in history are not. So, she’s got that for her legacy, for her artistic legacy. 

Gavin: She’s all over the place. 

Ann: So, Gavin, this is an XX-long episode, but honestly, all the episodes this season are because it’s a complicated time to talk about. But you know what? We have more to talk about. So, we’re going to… For all the Patreon listeners, Gavin is going to join me for a short Aftershow, where we can talk about some more things. So, all the Patreon listeners can head over there. Gavin and I, I feel like, personally, I need to take a short break, but we will reconvene in the Aftershow. 

Gavin: Yes, let’s do it. I also need to plug my computer in so it doesn’t die. [laughs]

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So, if you want to hear what Gavin and I had to talk about next, head over to The Aftershow, which is available on my Patreon for all Patreon members at $6 a month or more. Or if you just want to hear more Gavin, just go listen to his podcast, The Art of Crime podcast. It is so good. I mean, you heard what a good time he is, and how well read he is, and how much he knows about, like, the specifics of art history and theatre history. It’s such a good show, and I’m so happy to have gotten to chat with him here. 

Next week on the podcast, we’re going to be talking about… I know I told Gavin this, but I forget if we recorded it here or if it’s in The Aftershow. But next week, we’re going to be talking about a spy. We’re going to be talking about a spy, a woman who was a spy during the French Revolution. She’s another one of the women of the French Revolution, and she’s not talked about as much as some of the others, but her name does come up pretty often. And I’m excited for you to hear that as well as to hear my best attempts at pronouncing some Dutch words. Some listeners from the Netherlands helped me out with that, and so I hope that I make them all proud. 

Anyway, in terms of this podcast and me and how to follow me and stuff, I’m on Instagram, I’m on Threads and Bluesky. If you want to just get my updates, the best thing to do is just to join my Patreon, which you can do for free. You go to Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter or go to Patreon, like, the app on your phone or whatever and look up “Ann Foster.” It’s under my name, not under the podcast’s name. That’s where I post all my updates. That’s where I post things because I like to post things for people who want to know about them. And when I post things on Instagram and Threads or whatever, sometimes people see them, sometimes strangers see them, but I’m like, I want the people who are interested to see them. And that’s why I started posting more on the Patreon. So, you can join there for free, or you can join there for paid. 

If you pay $1 a month on the Patreon, then you get early, ad-free access to all episodes of Vulgar History, including past episodes. So, like once you join the Patreon, you can connect it to your Spotify or Apple or whatever, and the podcasts are all there. So, if you want to listen to a classic old episode of Vulgar history, like, you want to listen to the episode I did with Gavin before about Madame Tussaud or the one we did about Princess Caraboo, I’m going to take it all the way back to Season One, listen to Jeanne de la Motte, the story of the Affair of the Necklace, which is to do with the French Revolution, you can do that all ad-free if you are a member of the Patreon at $1 a month, $1 or more a month. 

If you join the Patreon at $6 or more a month, you’ll get access to bonus episodes, the whole back catalogue, the whole archives of bonus episodes of Vulgarpiece Theatre, where we talk about costume dramas, including we did talk about the movie, The Affair of the Necklace, and we’ve talked about the movie Chevalier, about the Chevalier de Saint-Georges. If you really just want to, like, ensconce yourself in Ann Foster-related French Revolution content, that’s all there as well. There’s also episodes at the $6 or more a month level of So This Asshole, which, coming soon on there, I’m going to be doing So This Asshole: Rousseau, and So This Asshole: Robespierre, and maybe some other men from the French Revolution, because I’m making a lot of nemesis just reading about how badly all these women were treated by these guys. And then also if you join the Patreon at $6 or more a month, you can join our Discord, which is just a big group chat, where we just kiki about whatever we feel like talking about. 

I also want to mention, another way that you can support this podcast is by purchasing something from our brand partner, Common Era Jewelry, which is a small woman-owned business in the United States, all the workers are in the United States. I can’t even speak about what tariffs might do, but if you want to buy something that’s made there, that’s not being imported from another country, this is a company that you can support. The pieces are made in New York City, they’re designed by the owner Torie. The packaging is made by a little family-run business in Chicago. She’s just changed the logo actually, into a new beautiful design, but because Torie is responsible, she’s going to use up all of her previous packaging before she switches to the new design on future orders. Anyway, they make beautiful jewelry inspired by women from history. You know, who would have been all about it is Charlotte Corday, with her love of Greek and Roman times. There’s people on there from, if you’re looking at ancient Egypt, there’s Hatshepsut is there, Cleopatra is there. From ancient Roman times, Agrippina is there, Livia is there. You can really just embrace your inner classicist by getting some of these designs. They also have a new Zodiac jewelry collection, which is really beautiful and really unique looking. Their pieces are available in solid gold, as well as in more affordable gold vermeil. And Vulgar History listeners like you can always get 15 percent off everything from Common Era by going to CommonEra.com/Vulgar, or use code ‘VULGAR’ at checkout. 

You can also buy Vulgar History merchandise, including boop-boop-ba-doo! Big news! New design, which is the Tits Out Brigade designed by friend of the podcast, past podcast guest, Karyn Moynihan. So, the design is inspired by a retro Girl Scouts of America design. Or are you called Girl Guides? They’re called Girl Guides in Canada. I think it’s Girl Scouts in America. It’s a retro design; it says “Tits Out Brigade.” There’s kind of this, like, stylized group of women’s heads, one of them is wearing glasses—that’s me, or you if you wear glasses—and it says “Tits Out Brigade,” and it’s gorgeous. And you can pick that up as well as the sister design to that, which are some merit badges. They’re not badges; merit badge-inspired stickers. Or you can get the design put on a mug or a phone case, or whatever. They are inspired by the badges that you get from the Girl Scouts or the Girl Guides, except these are things that people on Vulgar History excel at. They are things like stabbing, Charlotte Corday would get that one. Poisoning, Fredegund would get that one. There’s one for like stitchery, and the other one is, like, 365 party girl having a nice time. That would be one for Caroline of Brunswick, or Lola Montez, or Peg Plunkett, or Peggy Shippen. Anyway, you can get these beautiful new designs in one of our two merch stores. If you’re in America, go to VulgarHistory.com/Store, which takes you to our Dashery store, which is where you can order things in America with okay shipping in America. If you live anywhere else, including Canada, go to VulgarHistory.Redbubble.com, and that gets you all the same designs but just from a different store where the shipping is a bit better for, like, the UK or Ireland or the Netherlands or wherever you are. 

You can get in touch with me if you’d like to. If you go to VulgarHistory.com, there’s a little “Contact me” form, and that sends an email to me that I will see. Or also, my DMs are always open on Instagram. And yeah, next week we’re getting into some spy shit. It’s exciting! I love a spy moment. French Revolution, a great excuse for being a spy, frankly, and you can hear all about that there. So, until next time, my friends, keep your pants on and your tits out. 

Vulgar History is hosted, written, and researched by Ann Foster, that’s me! The editor is Cristina Lumague. Theme music is by the Severn Duo. The Vulgar History show image is by Deborah Wong. Transcripts are written by Aveline Malek. Find transcripts of recent episodes at VulgarHistory.com.

References:

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