She came into the room with a sharp dinner-knife which she had bought the day before for two francs concealed in the bodice of her dress together with her baptismal certificate and a paper entitled ‘Adresse aux Français’ which explained the political motives behind her intended deed. She found Marat lying in a high-walled copper bath wrapped in towels, for he could now only thus find relief from the pain and irritation of the skin disease which was slowly putrefying his flesh. She told him what was happening at Caen, giving him the names of men she said were working there against the Jacobins. He picked up a pen from the board upon which he had been writing and copied the names down, commenting, ‘They shall soon all be guillotined.’ At these words, Charlotte Corday took out her knife and plunged it into his chest, piercing the left lung and the aorta. At his cry of ‘À moi, ma chère amie!’ his distraught mistress, Simone Évrard, rushed into the room and seeing the blood pouring from the wound, put her hand over it in an attempt to stop the flow. But Marat was already dead. His murderess calmly walked out of the room and, although she seems to have had no intention of escape, Bas seized a chair and with it knocked her to the ground. She got up and he ‘clutched her by the breasts, threw her down and struck her’. ‘Je m’en fous!’ she cried. ‘The deed is done; the monster is dead!’
To the jealous Robespierre’s disgust, Marat was now the heroic martyr of the extreme Left. His coffin was followed by young girls in white dresses who strewed flowers upon it, by boys carrying branches of cypress, by deputations from the sections, and by Montagnards who displayed or affected the deepest sorrow. Some members of the Jacobin Club had his bust placed on a pedestal in the Convention; his heart was suspended in a porphry urn from the ceiling of the Cordeliers Club; his ashes were later given a place of honour in the Pantheon; his mistress, ‘the widow Marat’, was granted a pension. Streets, squares and no less than thirty-seven towns in various parts of France were renamed after him; poems and hymns were composed in his honour; in some schools children were told to make the sign of the cross when his name was mentioned. His portrait, ‘Marat Assassinated’, by a fellow-Montagnard, the ugly Jacques Louis David – who had voted for the death of the King, his former patron – was acknowledged to be one of the great masterpieces of the Revolution. The Enragés claimed him as their patron saint, founded newspapers with the titles which he had chosen for his own, and invoked his name in pressing their demands upon the government. And the Committee of Public Safety deemed it prudent to give way to some of these demands by introducing the death penalty for hoarders, allocating a large sum of money for the purchase of grain, and establishing warehouses in various parts of Paris for its storage.
The Enragés were not the only influential critics of the Committee of Public Safety. The Committee also had to contend with the followers of Danton, who, far from being a spent political force, had been elected President of the Convention a fortnight after losing his seat on the Committee of Public Safety. Perhaps in the hope that Robespierre would show himself incapable of exercising such a burdensome responsibility, Danton proposed that the Committee should now be given the omnipotence of a provisional Government of France backed by a grant of a hundred million livres. This proposal was rejected, but it was clear that the Dantonists were a strong and devious group whose activities could not be ignored.
Nor could the activities of another group which became known as the Hébertists after the editor of that extremist newspaper, Le Père Duchesne, which defamed the Queen and Madame Roland be ignored. Hébert, who considered himself ill-used by the Jacobin leadership which had failed to reward him for his help in the overthrow of the Girondins, presented himself to the Paris sections as the most eloquent supporter of radical proposals for the exemplary punishment of speculators, the round-up of suspects, stricter price controls, the purge of all noble officers still remaining in the army, and the trial of the Girondins and of the Queen.
Prodded and harassed by both Dantonists and Hébertists, the Committee of Public Safety became more zealous than ever in their conduct of the war against both foreign enemies and provincial rebels. General Custine was dismissed from his command, arraigned before the Revolutionary Tribunal and accused of having pitied Louis XVI, prevented the circulation of Le Père Duchesne in the army, denigrated Robespierre and Marat, ‘surrounded himself with aristocratic officers and never had good republicans at his table’. He was sentenced to death and guillotined. General de Biron was also executed, while Pitt was execrated as ‘the enemy of the human race’. The devastation of the Vendeé was authorized; the federalist leaders were denounced as traitors, negotiations with them being abruptly terminated; troops were ordered to overthrow the royalist counter-revolutionaries in Lyons; the trial of the Queen was authorized; so was the arrest of all enemy aliens not resident in France on 14 July 1789. Then, following the election of Lazare Carnot to the Committee of Public Safety, the Convention called out the entire population of the country to fight for the Revolution in a levée en masse.
Carnot, the practical, unflaggingly energetic organizer of the Revolution’s victory, had been a captain in the Engineers when elected to the National Assembly as a deputy for the Pas-de-Calais. Frequently employed as a military commissioner, he had displayed a remarkable talent for organization, exposition and detecting talent. Although still only a captain at forty, he was recognized as a brilliant soldier, capable of building an army of conscripts that could overcome the more carefully drilled and far more experienced forces of the old European powers. Carnot, of course, was well aware that general and total mobilization was not immediately practicable for it would be impossible either to train or equip so vast a host. The decree enforcing it was largely propagandist in intent. For the moment, therefore, only unmarried men and childless widowers between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five were recruited into the army. But the rest of the population, both male and female, were liable to be called up for any kind of work which was held to be conducive to the war effort, and funds were provided for the construction of armaments factories. A target was set for the manufacture of a thousand muskets a day.
From this moment until mat when the enemy shall be driven from the territory of the French republic [ran a decree of 23 August], all the French people shall be in permanent requisition for the service of the armies. The young men will go forth to fight. The married men will forge the arms and transport the supplies. The women will make tents and clothes and act as nurses in the hospitals. The children will make lint from rags. The old men will be carried to the public places to excite the courage of the warriors, to preach hatred of kings and love of the republic.