Charlotte Corday - Cultural References

Cultural References

• Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote about her in his Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson (1810).
• Alphonse de Lamartine devoted to her a book of his Histoire des Girondins (1847), in which he gave her this now famous nickname: "l'ange de l'assassinat" (the angel of assassination).
• Italian composer Lorenzo Ferrero (1951– ) composed an opera in three acts Charlotte Corday, which was premièred at Teatro dell'Opera di Roma in February, 1989.
• In Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade, the assassination of Marat is presented as a play, written by the Marquis de Sade, to be performed by inmates of the asylum at Charenton, for the public; the patient performing the role of Corday in the play-within-a-play (Glenda Jackson in the stage production and subsequent film adaptation) is, somewhat ironically, a narcoleptic.
• American dramatist Sarah Pogson Smith (1774–1870) also memorialised Corday in her verse drama The Female Enthusiast: A Tragedy in Five Acts (1807).
• A minor character in P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves series is named after Charlotte Corday.
• British singer-songwriter Al Stewart included a song co-written by Tori Amos about Corday on his album Famous Last Words (1993).
• In Katherine Neville's novel The Eight, Charlotte Corday changes place with the heroine Mireille, who kills Jean-Paul Marat for revenge.
• Appears briefly in Madame Tussaud, a historical fiction by Michelle Moran. Corday is seen by Madame Tussaud directly after Marat's murder, when the guards have arrested her. Madame Tussaud is also present at Corday's execution. Her bravery and youth is strongly noted.
• French dramatist François Ponsard (1814–67) wrote a play, Charlotte Corday, which was premièred at the Théâtre-Français in March, 1850.
• Charlotte appears briefly but significantly, in Caen, in A Far Better Rest, by Susanne Alleyn, a reimagining of A Tale of Two Cities.
• Drieu La Rochelle wrote a play in three acts called Charlotte Corday in 1939. In was performed in southern France during World War II. Corday is depicted as a fervent republican who hopes eliminating Marat will save the revolution and prevent it from degenerating into tyranny.
• A novel by the English writer Fife, Graeme (2009), Angel of the Assassination, USA: Merit Publishing, tells Charlotte's story.
• The historical-fiction "My Bonny Light Horseman", part of the Bloody Jack series by L.A. Meyer, references a Jean-Paul de Valdon, who claims to be the cousin of Charlotte Corday
• Rock band mewithoutYou reference Corday in their 2012 song 'Nine Stories.'
• Harper's Weekly mentioned Corday in their April 29th, 1865 edition, in a series of articles analyzing the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, as the "one assassin whom history mentions with toleration and even applause," but goes on to conclude that her assassination of Marat was a mistake in which she became Marat's victim rather than saving or helping one of his victims. Her case is pointed to as a pattern that matches all other assassinations in harming rather than helping the cause for which the act was carried out. (Harper's Weekly article reproduced in Killing Lincoln by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard).