| On this day, Jean-Paul Marat, a leader of the radical Montagnard faction during the French Revolution, was stabbed to death in his bath by Charlotte Corday, a young Girondin supporter from Normandy. The author of Plan de législation criminelle (“Plan for Criminal Legislation”), which was considered subversive and was suppressed by French authorities, Marat assimilated the ideas of such critics of the ancien régime as Montesquieu and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and corresponded with the American ... |