An addendum

The newsletter I just sent out was supposed to include this image of Jacques-Louis David’s famous 1793 painting The Death of Marat, but I was in a hurry and forgot it. Here you can see Marat, stabbed in his bathtub, and possibly the drapery in the painting is the same fabric that Victor Hugo was describing in Les Mis. Certainly Hugo would have had this painting in mind, since it was a famous piece of political propaganda. (David was a revolutionary of the same faction as Marat, the Montagnards.)

Also, here’s a bonus painting, Paul Baudry’s 1860 Charlotte Corday, depicting the instant after the assassination. Visually, I don’t like it as much as the David painting, but it does show you the opposite political viewpoint: Corday as hero, rather than Marat as martyr.

It’s important to pair your bold political murder with equally bold fashion choices, like the blue-and-white-striped dress Charlotte is sporting

Corday was also a revolutionary, but she was a Girondin (the more moderate faction), rather than a Montagnard like Marat. She believed that he was the most radical of the Montagnards, responsible for the Revolution’s turn toward invasive public surveillance and the mass executions of anyone deemed a counter-revolutionary. She famously said at her trial “J’ai tué un homme pour en sauver cent mille” (I have killed one man to save a hundred thousand). She was executed by guillotine four days after killing Marat.