Fact, Fiction, and Volk: Prescription and Action in Engel Christine Westphalen’s Charlotte Corday

Despairing at the senseless brutality she has witnessed in Paris at the height of the Terror, Engel Christine Westphalen’s fictionalized Charlotte Corday from her eponymous 1804 historical tragedy resolves to strike as a brave martyr at the force that has thrown France into chaos: Jean-Paul Marat. Through her actions, Westphalen’s Corday hopes to rescue the blind and misled Volk from the clutches of demagogic Jacobins. Despite the drama’s focus on the Volk, this amorphous category is almost entirely excluded from the stage, relying instead on witness and testimony by historically based characters. The repeated use of testimony based on specific historical facts contains a subtle inversion of the Terror’s chronology that alters the causation of provincial revolts while simultaneously assigning all guilt to Marat and key leaders in the Convention. This inversion of key events further contributes to a portrayal within the drama of the Volk as both corrupted by the evil machinations of Marat and utterly incapable of meaningful political engagement. Westphalen’s depiction of the Volk as a violent yet blind force, essentially equating the term with the Parisian sans-culottes, presents a model of republican politics that excludes the immediate viability of mass participation.