Unlikely Heroines: First In A Series

Imagine being a poor but well educated idealist ... a woman exhilarated by all the French Revolution portended ... dedicated to the success of the upheaval that would so greatly advance all human rights.

But then imagine the disillusionment as one witnessed the knee-deep bloodbath of The Terror ... and became fixated on the architect-of-the-Revolution as the individual one felt was most responsible for trashing a utopian outcome with indiscriminate atrocities, beheadings.

Charlotte Corday was this idealistic murderer, the Girondist who took it upon herself to kill the Jacobin Jean-Paul Marat in his bath.

At her trial Corday said, "I killed one man to save 100,000." Four days after his death, her effort was repaid by a guillotine beheading.

Unfortunately, his killing resulted in Marat's martyrdom and a wave of anti-female activity within the highest ranks of the Revolution. Some think it may have hastened the death of Marie Antoinette.

Time is the ultimate revisionist historian. Within another two years, Marat had been declared bête noire and Corday posthumously rehabilitated: a heroine who advanced a cause by killing one of its most powerful leaders.

source material: wikipedia, of course.