July 13: Today is anniversary of the murder of journalist and French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat, a member of a political opposition faction during the French Revolution in 1793.

Portrait of Jean-Paul Marat (1743-1793)

Jean-Paul Marat was a doctor, a political scientist and journalist during the French Revolution. His journalism made him famous for his fierce tone for his uncompromising stance toward the new leaders and institutions of the revolution, and the defense of basic human rights for the poorest members of society.

Our narcoleptic murderess and main character Charlotte Corday, played by Bonni Suval, is intoxicating. Her eyes have gauntness to them, yet her voice is nothing short of spectacular.

It is important to remember that the French Revolution was a bourgeois revolution because industrialists and traders were excluded from public office because the monarchy was absolute and only members of the nobility were assigned public functions.

Charlotte Corday by Paul Jacques Aimé Baudry, painted 1860.

Marat was a staunch defender of the sans-culottes (literally "without breeches") representing the lower strata and leftists of French society. City dwellers were actually workers in Paris.

The death of Marat by Jacques-Louis David (1793)

Jean-Paul Marat faced Republican Jacobins of the Revolution and who would come to rule France in June 1793. A Girondist sympathizer named Charlotte Corday asked him to let her visit him because he had received a list of people to be executed, since Martat published the execution of those who were not in his favor. Charlotte entered the house of Marat, found him bathing in the tub and stabbed him to death.

Charlotte Corday after stabbing Jean-Paul Marat