Equal opportunity for murderers

#Feminism, I guess...

With the full name Marie-Anne Charlotte de Corday it comes as no surprise that Mademoiselle Corday was an aristocrat. What’s more surprising is that when she became embroiled in the French Revolution, she was essentially on the same side as the man she decided to murder.

She was a Girondin – a moderate branch of the revolutionaries, who were in favour of disbanding the monarchy but against the violent direction the revolution was starting to go in. Her victim, Jean-Paul Marat, was a senior figure in the Jacobin group that she opposed; these were more extreme revolutionaries who later brought about the bloody period known as the Reign of Terror during which over 16,500 people were executed.

In July 1793, she wangled an audience with Marat by claiming to have the names of some traitors, and in an assassination worthy of an Alfred Hitchcock film, she stabbed him while he was in the bath. How did she get in? Apparently, he suffered from a skin condition so it wasn’t unusual for Marat to receive visitors during a wash.

Arrested there and then, at her trial she said she ‘killed one man to save a hundred thousand’, but was executed for the crime four days later, at the age of 24, by guillotine.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/e1c459d3-8c1e-4ad2-8e40-73c354bd4dcb