The Death of Marat is a 1793 painting by Jacques-Louis David, now in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels. It shows the revolutionary journalist Jean Paul Marat dead in his bath, stabbed by Charlotte Corday on 13 July 1793. David, a political ally of Marat, painted a martyr for the Revolution, not the murder as it happened.
David presented the canvas to the Convention, France's revolutionary assembly, on 14 November 1793, four months after the killing.
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That martyr has smooth, unmarked skin. The real Marat did not. He worked in his bath because of a skin disease, and a drop of his blood still survives on one of his newspapers in Paris. In 2020, geneticists read the DNA in that stain. It describes a very different body.
David did not lie about Marat so much as edit him, the way a good funeral speech does. I think the editing, not the murder, is what has kept the painting alive.
Who let the killer in?
Marat did. Charlotte Corday had left Caen, in Normandy, on 9 July and reached Paris two days later. On the morning of 13 July she bought a kitchen knife and walked to the apartment on the rue des Cordeliers, where Marat lived with his partner Simonne Évrard.
At the door, Catherine Évrard, Simonne's sister, turned her away. Marat was too ill to receive anyone. Corday left a letter about a supposed plot among the moderate Girondins in Caen and returned that evening.
This time she slipped in behind a delivery of fresh bread. Simonne stopped her on the stairs. Corday raised her voice, loud enough to carry to the bathroom, and said she had news of traitors in Normandy. A voice from the bathroom answered: "Let her in."
The bait was a list of names. As an essay in Apollo magazine puts it, her letter promised the names of "enemies of the people," and the promise bought her an audience at his bathside. She stabbed him once, below the right collarbone.
She made no attempt to run. Deputies of the Convention reached the apartment within the hour, and she told them, and later the Revolutionary Tribunal, that she had acted alone. Four days later she was guillotined, and the room she left behind looked nothing like the one David would paint.
What You'll Discover
What the room really looked like.
What the blood on his newspaper revealed.
What David planted in plain sight.
What the Convention did with it.