The Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat is presented as a striking instance of a woman intervening directly in the French Revolution: Charlotte Corday’s killing of Marat significantly influenced the outcome. Its importance lies in the contrast between that consequential act and the broader exclusion of women from the Revolution’s leadership and gains.

Revolutionary Context

The Revolution might have seemed likely to transform women’s fate, but the book argues that it preserved bourgeois institutions and values and was waged almost exclusively by men. Women appeared in demonstrations and riots, including the march to Versailles to find the royal family, yet popular participation did not mean that women led the Revolution or reaped its fruits.

Corday’s Intervention

Among a small number of bourgeois women who ardently supported freedom, Corday stands out for the consequence of her action. Her assassination of Marat is singled out as significantly influencing the Revolution’s outcome. The account gives no further description of the killing, its immediate circumstances, or its precise political effects; its emphasis is on the exceptional force of a woman’s intervention in a movement whose power remained overwhelmingly male.

Women’s Political Exclusion

Corday’s act appears alongside other attempts by women to claim a place in revolutionary politics. In 1791, Olympe de Gouges proposed a declaration demanding the abolition of masculine privileges, but the effort failed and de Gouges was executed. Women’s clubs were largely absorbed or taken over by men. When Rose Lacombe and a delegation forced their way into the Conseil Général, prosecutor Chaumette insisted that women’s proper tasks were childcare and domestic work; women were then barred from the Conseil and soon from the clubs where they had learned politics.

The Revolution did bring limited legal changes: in 1790, daughters and sons were made equal in succession, and the 1792 divorce law loosened strict marital ties. The book treats these as feeble gains. Bourgeois women, integrated into family life and economically dependent, lacked the separate collective position needed to press demands; working women, meanwhile, were constrained by class. Corday’s consequential action therefore sharpens the account’s central contrast: a woman could affect revolutionary events, while women as a group remained excluded from the authority and benefits of the new order.