Charlotte Cordero

Charlotte Corday appears in Simone de Beauvoir’s account of the French Revolution as a bourgeois woman whose intervention had a direct effect on the course of events. Her assassination of Marat gives her an exceptional place in a revolution that, despite its language of freedom, was waged and politically controlled almost exclusively by men.

Identity and Historical Role

Corday is identified among the few bourgeois women who ardently joined the cause of freedom. The account gives no further biographical details or description of her motives; it emphasizes instead the consequence of her action. By assassinating Marat, she significantly influenced the outcome of the Revolution, making her political agency visible even within a history that largely denied women a place in its decisive events.

Women and the Revolution

Corday’s action belongs to a wider contrast between women’s participation and their exclusion. Working women appeared in demonstrations and riots, including the march to Versailles in search of the royal family, but, in the book’s analysis, the people who led the Revolution were not those who reaped its fruits. Bourgeois women such as Corday could support freedom, yet their class position left them without an independent economic basis for collective political power.

Other women tried to turn revolutionary ideals into claims of equal rights. In 1791 Olympe de Gouges proposed a declaration of women’s rights equivalent to the declaration of men’s rights, demanding the abolition of masculine privilege; those efforts failed, and de Gouges was executed. Women’s clubs were absorbed or taken over by men, and after women activists forced their way into the Conseil Général in 1793, they were excluded from the assembly and soon from the political clubs where they had learned to organize.

Significance

Corday’s decisive act complicates the Revolution’s claim to universal freedom: a woman could alter its course through individual action, while women as a group remained barred from its institutions and rewards. Her exceptional influence thus underscores the gap between women’s capacity to participate in political history and the structures that prevented them from securing political power. The account frames that contradiction in class as well as gender terms: working women were constrained by class, while women of the agitating class were kept at the margins because they were women.