Charlotte Corday

Raised in a convent in Caen, Corday was deeply immersed in classical Roman ideals of republican virtue and liberty. Horrified by the September Massacres and the Jacobin purge of the moderate Girondin deputies who fled to Normandy, she resolved that Marat's elimination was necessary to save France from civil war.

Traveling to Paris, she purchased a six-inch kitchen knife at the Palais-Royal. Gaining entrance to Marat's home under the pretense of revealing Girondin conspiracies, she stabbed him in his bath. At her trial before the Revolutionary Tribunal, she declared: 'I killed one man to save one hundred thousand'.