Corday, a Girondin sympathizer, gained entry to Marat's home claiming to have a list of traitors, then killed him with a kitchen knife as he soaked in a bath meant to soothe his skin disease. Jacques-Louis David immortalized the scene in his painting 'The Death of Marat,' cementing the killing as revolutionary iconography and fueling the Reign of Terror that followed.
Marat suffered from a severe skin condition, likely dermatitis herpetiformis, that forced him to spend hours submerged in medicated water while continuing to write and conduct business from a makeshift writing board across the tub. Corday, 24, had traveled from Caen specifically to kill him, believing his fiery Jacobin rhetoric was driving France toward civil war.
She was tried and guillotined just four days later, defiant to the end, declaring she had killed one man to save a hundred thousand. Instead, her act backfired spectacularly: Marat became a revolutionary saint, his murder used by Jacobins to justify escalating violence against perceived enemies of the Revolution.
David's painting, commissioned almost immediately, shows Marat serene and Christ-like in death, knife wound barely visible, transforming a grim domestic assassination into one of art history's most enduring political images.