Who was the hero: Marat or Corday? 2 Corday

Following her murder of the revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat in his bath on 13 July 1793, Charlotte Corday was arrested at the scene of her crime, and made no attempt to deny or excuse the murder. While she was held in prison she was examined three times by judicial officers over a period of three days.

Raymond Monvoisin (–1870), Charlotte Corday (before 1870), oil on canvas, 230 × 200 cm, Palacio Cousiño, Santiago, Chile. Wikimedia Commons.

Raymond Monvoisin’s painting of Charlotte Corday in prison, completed before his death in 1870, shows her during that period, when she must have been certain of her fate. One difficulty that continued to rankle was the fact that Corday was a woman: at the end of the eighteenth century women, particularly genteel well-educated women, just didn’t do this sort of thing. Monvoisin reinforces that conundrum.

After she had been sentenced to death, Corday requested that her portrait be painted. For this, she chose a National Guard officer and minor painter, Jean-Jacques (Johann Jakob) Hauer, who apparently had already been sketching her when she had been attending court.

Jean-Jacques Hauer (1751-1829), Portrait of Charlotte Corday (1793), oil, dimensions and location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

Jean-Jacques Hauer’s momentous Portrait of Charlotte Corday (1793) is the artist’s only surviving painting.

Jean-Baptiste Bertrand (1823-1887), Johann Jakob Hauer Painting Charlotte Corday (c 1860), further details not known. Wikimedia Commons.

The act of painting Corday also had to be recorded on canvas for posterity. Jean-Baptiste Bertrand’s Johann Jakob Hauer Painting Charlotte Corday (c 1860) shows Corday with an innocence and simplicity reminiscent of Joan of Arc. Given that Corday was clutching her well-thumbed copy of Plutarch’s Lives, that seems hardly appropriate.

Emery Duchesne (1847-?), Hauer Painting the Portrait of Charlotte Corday (1880), oil on canvas, 242 × 222 cm, Musée d’art et d’histoire de Lisieux, Lisieux, France. Wikimedia Commons.

Emery Duchesne’s Hauer Painting the Portrait of Charlotte Corday (1880) puts Corday in a red gown ready for the guillotine, and portrays her looking more malevolent than any other of these later paintings.

Arturo Michelena (1863–1898), Charlotte Corday (1889), oil on canvas, 234 x 315.5 cm, Galería de Arte Nacional, Caracas, Venezuela. Wikimedia Commons.

Arturo Michelena’s Charlotte Corday of 1889 is the unknown gem of these portraits. This shows Hauer at the right, his work on her portrait completed just in time for the model’s execution. A jailer is preoccupied in lighting his pipe, and an executioner’s assistant standing behind Corday carries the scarlet overblouse (rather than Duchesne’s red dress) she had to wear to denote her status as traitor.

By the end of the nineteenth century, it was Corday who was attaining cult status.

Tony Robert-Fleury (1837–1912), Charlotte Corday at Caen in 1793 (date not known), oil on canvas, 210 x 125 cm, Musée Bonnat-Helleu, Bayonne, France. Wikimedia Commons.

Although Tony Robert-Fleury’s Charlotte Corday at Caen in 1793 is undated, I suspect that it was painted in the last decade or so of the nineteenth century. The heroine is here strolling in her garden at home, near Caen, reading Plutarch as she psychs herself up to go to Paris and change history.

Jean-Jacques Scherrer (1855-1916), Charlotte Corday in Caen (1894), media and dimensions not known, Musée Charles-de-Bruyères, Remiremont, France. Image by Ji-Elle, via Wikimedia Commons.

For Jean-Jacques Scherrer, in his Charlotte Corday in Caen (1894), Corday is a heroine who goes out to meet the crowds of supporters on a balcony in Caen, albeit before she tries to call a halt to the murderous revolution by murdering Marat in his bath.

Jacques-Louis David pressed on with his deep involvement in the Revolution, but was soon to come to grief. In early December 1793 a fourteen year-old boy, Joseph Bara, attached himself to the revolutionary Republican forces fighting a Royalist uprising in the west of the country, to the south of the River Loire. When he was leading a pair of horses he was attacked by a group of thieves who demanded that he hand the horses over. He refused, and the brigands killed him.

This was seized on by Maximilien Robespierre, who praised the boy as a hero of the nation. Word went out that Bara had been cornered by Royalist forces, and ordered to shout “Long live the King!” When he responded by asserting his allegiance to the Republic instead, the Royalists murdered him in cold blood. This caught David’s attention, who saw the opportunity to portray an even more emotionally-charged episode of revolutionary valour.

Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), The Death of Young Bara (1794), oil on canvas, 119 x 156 cm, Musée Calvet, Avignon, France. Wikimedia Commons.

David’s unfinished painting of The Death of Young Bara from 1794 was overtaken by events: Robespierre and perhaps David had arranged for Bara’s body to be interred in the Panthéon in Paris during a grand revolutionary festival, but that never happened as Robespierre was overthrown the day before the planned ceremony, and swiftly guillotined in public. David only narrowly escaped being executed alongside Robespierre, and was arrested and imprisoned for several months in late 1794 and the middle of 1795.

Today it is David’s presentation of history that remains famous, although most of us would surely see Corday as the real heroine.