The Terror: An Assassination in Paris (Part 1)

On the 13th of July 1793, a 24-year-old woman named Charlotte Corday was arrested in Paris with a manifesto found on her person. It called for the death of Jean-Paul Marat, the radical journalist and revolutionary, and declared that "already the vilest of villains, Marat, whose name alone is the image of all crimes, is falling under the avenging blade." Corday had, minutes earlier, stabbed Marat to death in his bath. That single act—one of the most famous assassinations in history—did not end the French Revolution. It accelerated it, triggering the descent into the Reign of Terror.

The Making of a Modern Populist

Jean-Paul Marat was born in 1743 in Switzerland, the son of a Sardinian friar who had converted to Calvinism. He was, from an early age, fiercely ambitious. As he later put it, at five he wanted to be a schoolmaster, at fifteen a professor, at eighteen an author, and at twenty a creative genius. None of those ambitions worked out. He moved to London in the 1770s, where he was influenced by the radical journalist John Wilkes, and then tried his hand at medicine—writing a thesis on gonorrhea and peddling dubious cures for venereal disease and bad eyesight. He returned to Paris and reinvented himself as an experimental scientist, claiming to have proved that fire is an igneous fluid and that Newton was a fool. The French Royal Academy of Sciences rejected his work a