Charlotte Corday on Trial: Gendered Reception of a Political Murder

This paper examines Charlotte Corday's assassination of Jean-Paul Marat through eighteenth-century ideas of anger, gender, and political agency. It analyzes trial records and her writings to foreground Corday as a politically engaged and articulate actor. These archival sources reveal her deliberate assumption of responsibility and her self-presentation as rational and composed, challenging dominant constructions of female emotional excess. By assessing both Corday's intellectual agency and the public responses to her act, the paper interrogates the gendered meanings of women's participation in political violence.