Page 62 - All About History - Issue 186-19

On 13 July 1793,

revolutionary Paris was

stunned when the popular

politician Jean-Paul

Marat was murdered by

a very unlikely assassin

Written by Melanie Clegg

hen the Palais Royal, official
Parisian residence of the duc
d’Orléans, was first opened
to the public in 1786, it very
quickly became one of the most
fashionable places in the capital. Wealthy and stylish
Parisians gathered there to shop, dine, drink coffee
and enjoy other less salubrious pleasures either in the
shade of the elegant arcades, which sheltered dozens
of shops, or in the beautiful gardens. After 1789, with
the advent of the French Revolution, the arcades of
the Palais Royal were as bustling and popular as ever,
so it was only natural that Charlotte d’Aumont Corday,
a fresh-faced 25-year-old from Caen in Normandy,
headed there during her first ever visit to Paris in July
1793. She had arrived two days earlier and taken up
residence in a hotel on the nearby Rue Hérold, where
she impressed everyone with her well-bred elegance
and fine manners, the result of being sent to a convent
school after the death of her mother. Corday’s family
belonged to the lower ranks of the aristocracy,
enjoying a quietly comfortable lifestyle but unable
to afford the legendary excesses of the royal court at
Versailles. Nonetheless, they boasted one illustrious
ancestor in the dramatist Pierre Corneille, who had
specialised in tragedy and was considered, along with
his peers Racine and Molière, to be one of the greatest
playwrights of the 17th century, although by 1789 his
popularity had waned, due in part to the scathing
criticism of Voltaire.

62