Execution Day: Salem Witches 1692

The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings before local magistrates followed by county court of trials to prosecute people accused of witchcraft in Essex, Suffolk, and Middlesex counties of colonial Massachusetts, between February 1692 and May 1693. The episode has been used in political rhetoric and popular literature as a vivid cautionary tale about the dangers of religious extremism, false accusations, lapses in due process, and governmental intrusion on individual liberties.

At the end of June and beginning of July, grand juries endorsed indictments against Sarah Good, Elizabeth Howe, Susannah Martin, Elizabeth Procter, John Procter, Martha Carrier, Sarah Wilds, and Dorcas Hoar. Only Sarah Good, Elizabeth Howe, Susannah Martin and Sarah Wildes, along with Rebecca Nurse, went on to trial at this time, where they were found guilty, and executed on July 19, 1692.

Despite being generally known as the Salem witch trials, the preliminary hearings in 1692 were conducted in a variety of towns across the province: Salem Village, Ipswich, Andover and Salem Town. The best-known trials were conducted by the Court of Oyer and Terminer in 1692 in Salem Town. Over 150 people were arrested and imprisoned, with even more accused but not formally pursued by the authorities. At least five more of the accused died in prison. All twenty-six who went to trial before this court were convicted. The four sessions of the Superior Court of Judicature in 1693, held in Salem Village, but also in Ipswich, Boston and Charlestown, produced only three convictions in the thirty-one witchcraft trials it conducted. The two courts convicted twenty-nine people of the capital felony of witchcraft. Nineteen of the accused, fourteen women and five men, were hanged. One man (Giles Corey) who refused to enter a plea was crushed to death under heavy stones in an attempt to force him to do so.

Execution Day: Charlotte Corday 1768-1793 French Assassin

Marie-Anne Charlotte de Corday d'Armont (27 July 1768 – 17 July 1793), known to history as Charlotte Corday, was a figure of the French Revolution. In 1793, she was executed under the guillotine for the assassination of Jacobin leader Jean-Paul Marat, who was partly responsible for the Reign of Terror. His murder was memorialized in a celebrated painting by Jacques-Louis David which shows Marat after Corday had stabbed him to death in his bathtub. In 1847, writer Alphonse de Lamartine gave Corday the posthumous nickname l'ange de l'assassinat (the Angel of Assassination).

Biography

Born in Saint-Saturnin-des-Ligneries, a hamlet in the commune of Écorches (Orne), in Normandy, France, Charlotte Corday was a member of a minor aristocratic family. She was a descendant of the dramatist Pierre Corneille, in direct line (5th generation) from his daughter and down the women's side of the family. Her parents were cousins. [[1]]

While Charlotte Corday was a young girl, her mother, Charlotte Marie Jacqueline Gaultier de Mesnival (1737-1782) and her older sister died. Her father, Jacques François de Corday, seigneur d'Armont (1737-1798), unable to cope with his grief over their death, sent Charlotte and her younger sister to the Abbaye-aux-Dames convent in Caen where she had access to the abbey's library and first encountered the writings of Plutarch, Rousseau and Voltaire.[1] After 1791, she lived in Caen with her cousin, Madame Le Coustellier de Bretteville-Gouville. The two developed a close relationship and Charlotte was the sole heir to her cousin's estate.[2]

Marat's assassination

Charlotte Corday by Paul Jacques Aimé Baudry, posthumous (1860): Under the Second Empire, Marat was seen as a revolutionary monster and Corday as a heroine of France, represented in the wall-map.Jean-Paul Marat was a member of the radical Jacobin faction which would have a leading role during the Reign of Terror. As a journalist, he exerted power and influence through his newspaper, L'Ami du peuple ("The Friend of the People").

Charlotte Corday's decision to kill Marat was stimulated not only by her revulsion at the September Massacres, for which she held Marat responsible, but for her fear of an all out civil war.[3] She believed that Marat was threatening the Republic, and that his death would end violence throughout the nation. She also believed that King Louis XVI should not have been executed.[4]

On 9 July 1793, Charlotte left her cousin, carrying a copy of Plutarch's Parallel Lives, and went to Paris, where she took a room at the Hôtel de Providence. She bought a kitchen knife with a six-inch blade. She then wrote her Addresse aux Français amis des lois et de la paix ("Address to the French people, friends of Law and Peace") to explain her motives for assassinating Marat.

She went first to the National Assembly to carry out her plan, but discovered Marat no longer attended meetings. She went to Marat's home before noon on 13 July, claiming to have knowledge of a planned Girondist uprising in Caen; she was turned away. On her return that evening, Marat admitted her. At the time, he conducted most of his affairs from a bathtub because of a debilitating skin condition. Marat wrote down the names of the Girondists that she gave to him, then she pulled out the knife and plunged it into his chest, piercing his lung, aorta and left ventricle. He called out, Aidez-moi, ma chère amie! ("Help me, my dear friend!") and died.

Trial

At her trial, Charlotte Corday testified that she had carried out the assassination alone, saying "I killed one man to save 100,000." It was likely a reference to Maximilien Robespierre's words before the execution of King Louis XVI. On 17 July 1793, four days after Marat was killed, Charlotte Corday was executed under the guillotine.

After her decapitation, a man named Legros lifted her head from the basket and slapped it on the cheek.[5] Witnesses report an expression of "unequivocal indignation" on her face when her cheek was slapped. This slap was considered unacceptable and Legros was imprisoned for three months because of his outburst.[6]

Jacobin leaders had her body autopsied immediately after her death to see if she was a virgin. They believed there was a man sharing her bed and the assassination plans. To their dismay she was found to be virgo intacta (a virgin) a condition that focused more attention on women throughout France -- laundresses, housewives, domestic servants -- who were also rising up against authority after having been controlled by men for so long.[7]

The assassination did not stop the Jacobins or the Terror: Marat became a martyr, and busts of him replaced crucifixes and religious statues that had been banished under the new regime.

Hair and controversy

Soon after her death, confusion arose surrounding the color of Corday's hair. Although her passport, filled out and signed by a Caen official, describes her hair as chestnut brown, the painting "The Murder of Marat" by Jean-Jacques Hauer pictures Corday as having powdered blond hair. Following Corday's execution and the popularity of Hauer's painting, stories quickly spread about how Corday had hired a local coiffeur to straighten and lighten her hair. Although this story rapidly became popular in Paris at the time, there is no historical evidence to support that it actually happened. Part of the reason for the discrepancy in descriptions of Corday can be attributed to the stigma attached to powdered hair. At the time, only nobility and Royalty ever powdered their hair, and in a time of violent anti-royalist revolt, such association can be powerful in influencing popular opinion.[8]

Cultural references

Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote about her in his Posthumous Fragments of Margret Nicholson (1810).

Alphonse de Lamartine devoted to her a book of his Histoire des Girondins (1847), in which he gave her this now famous nickname: "l'ange de l'assassinat" (the angel of assassination).

Italian composer Lorenzo Ferrero (1951– ) composed an opera in three acts Charlotte Corday, which was premièred at Teatro dell'Opera di Roma in February, 1989.

In Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade, the assassination of Marat is presented as a play, written by the Marquis de Sade, to be performed by inmates of the asylum at Charenton, for the public.

American dramatist Sarah Pogson Smith (1774–1870) also memorialised Corday in her verse drama The Female Enthusiast: A Tragedy in Five Acts (1807).

A minor character in P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves series is named after Charlotte Corday.

British singer-songwriter Al Stewart included a song co-written by Tori Amos about Corday on his album Famous Last Words (1993).

In Katherine Neville's novel The Eight, Charlotte Corday changes place with the heroine Mireille, who kills Jean-Paul Marat for revenge.

French dramatist François Ponsard (1814–1867) wrote a play, Charlotte Corday, which was premièred at the Théâtre-Français in March, 1850.

A novel by the English writer Graeme Fife, "Angel of the Assassination" tells Charlotte's story. It was first published in 2009 by the American publisher Merit Publishing International.

The historical-fiction "My Bonny Light Horseman," part of the Bloody Jack series by L.A. Meyer, references a Jean-Paul de Valdon, who claims to be the cousin of Charlotte Corday

Notes

1.^ Whitham, John Mills, Men and Women of the French Revolution, Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, Inc., 1968, pp. 154-155.
2.^ ib. Whitham, p. 157.
3.^ ib. Whitham, p. 161.
4.^ ib. Whitham, p. 160.
5.^ Charles-Henri Sanson, the executioner, indignantly rejected published reports that Legros was one of his assistants. In his diary, Sanson stated that Legros was in fact a carpenter who had been hired to make repairs to the guillotine. See:La Révolution française vue par son bourreau : Journal de Charles-Henri Sanson, Éditions de l'Instant, 1988; Le Cherche Midi, 2007, p. 65, ISBN 2-7491-0930-2, ISBN 978-2-7491-0930-5,(French).
6.^ Mignet, François, History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814, (1824).
7.^ Corazzo, Nina, and Catherine R. Montfort, Charlotte Corday: femme-homme, in Literate Women and the French Revolution of 1789, ed. Catherine R. Montfort, 47 (Birmingham, Alabama: Summa Publications, Inc., 1994), 45.
8.^ "The Blonding of Charlotte Corday", in Eighteenth Century Studies, by Nina Rattner Gelbart, (Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004)

Further reading

Guillaume Mazeau, "Le bain de l'histoire. Charlotte Corday et l'attentat contre Marat (1793-2009"), Seyssel, Champ Vallon, 2009.
Guillaume Mazeau, "Corday contre Marat. Deux siècles d'images", Versailles, Artlys, 2009.
Guillaume Mazeau, "Charlotte Corday en 30 Questions", La Crèche, Geste éditions, 2006.
Charlotte Corday, L’Addresse aux Français amis des lois et de la paix ("Address to French friends of the Law and Peace").
Stanley Loomis, Paris in the Terror, J. B. Lippincott, 1964.
Franklin, Charles, Woman in the Case, New York: Taplinger, 1967.
Goldsmith, Margaret, Seven Women Against the World, Methuen, London, 1935.
Sokolnikova, Halina, Nine Women Drawn from the Epoch of the French Revolution, Trans. H C Stevens, Cape, New York, 1932.
Corazzo, Nina, and Catherine R. Montfort, Charlotte Corday: femme-homme, In Literate Women and the French Revolution of 1789, edited by Catherine R. Montfort, umma Publications, Inc., Birmingham, Alabama, 1994.
Gutwirth, Madelyn, The Twilight of the Goddesses; Women and Representation in the French Revolutionary Era, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1992.
Kindleberger, Elizabeth R, Charlotte Corday in Text and Image: A Case Study in the French Revolution and Women's History, French Historical Studies 18, no. 4 (1994): 969-999.
Outram, Dorinda, The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class and Political Culture, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1989.
Whitham, John Mills, Men and Women of the French Revolution, Books for Libraries Press, Inc., Freeport, New York, 1968.

Catcher in the Rye Published 1951

The Catcher in the Rye is a 1951 novel by J. D. Salinger. Originally published for adults, it has since become popular with adolescent readers for its themes of teenage confusion, angst, sexuality, alienation, and rebellion. It has been translated into almost all of the world's major languages. Around 250,000 copies are sold each year, with total sales of more than sixty-five million. The novel's protagonist and antihero, Holden Caulfield, has become an icon for teenage rebellion.

The novel was included on a 2005 Time Magazine list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923, and it was named by Modern Library and its readers as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. It has been frequently challenged in the United States for its liberal use of profanity and portrayal of sexuality and teenage angst. It also deals with complex issues of identity, belonging, connection, and alienation.

References to The Catcher in the Rye in media and popular culture are numerous. Works inspired by The Catcher in the Rye have been said to form their own genre. Dr. Sarah Graham assessed works influenced by The Catcher in the Rye to include the novels Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis,The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, and Judith Guest's Ordinary People. Graham also includes the films The Graduate, Dead Poets Society, Tadpole, Igby Goes Down, Chapter 27, The Good Girl and Donnie Darko. It has also been mentioned in an episode of the popular show South Park, and references to the novel form a major plot point in the first season of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. In the decade following its publication, there were more than 70 essays on the novel printed in American and British magazines.

Mark David Chapman's shooting of John Lennon (Chapman was arrested with a copy of the book), John Hinckley, Jr.'s assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan, Robert John Bardo's shooting of Rebecca Schaeffer, and other murders have also been associated with the novel.

Poe Speaks at the Lyceum

Dr. Frank Pisano, as Edgar Allan Poe, gives this wonderful performance at the Daniel Boone Regional Library in Columbia, MO. Robert Wimer and his wife Sonja give a bit of music to the evening's events.

Celebrate Bastille Day (1789) with Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities (1935)

A Tale of Two Cities is a 1935 film based upon Charles Dickens' 1859 historical novel, A Tale of Two Cities. The film stars Ronald Colman as Sydney Carton, Donald Woods and Elizabeth Allan. The supporting players include Basil Rathbone, Blanche Yurka, and Edna Mae Oliver. It was directed by Jack Conway from a screenplay by W.P. Lipscomb and S.N. Behrman. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. The story is set in the French Revolution and deals with two men who are alike, not only in appearance, but in their love for the same woman.

A Tale of Two Cities (1859) is a novel by Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. With 200 million copies sold, it is the most printed original English book, and among the most famous works of fiction.

It depicts the plight of the French peasantry demoralized by the French aristocracy in the years leading up to the revolution, the corresponding brutality demonstrated by the revolutionaries toward the former aristocrats in the early years of the revolution, and many unflattering social parallels with life in London during the same time period. It follows the lives of several protagonists through these events, most notably Charles Darnay, a French once-aristocrat who falls victim to the indiscriminate wrath of the revolution despite his virtuous nature, and Sydney Carton, a dissipated British barrister who endeavours to redeem his ill-spent life out of love for Darnay's wife, Lucie Manette.

The novel was published in weekly installments (not monthly, as with most of his other novels). The first installment ran in the first issue of Dickens' literary periodical All the Year Round appearing on 30 April 1859; the thirty-first and last ran on 25 November of the same year.

The guillotine (English pronunciation: /ˈɡɪlətiːn/ or /ˈɡiː.ətiːn/; French: [ɡijɔtin]) was a device used for carrying out executions by decapitation. It consisted of a tall upright frame from which a blade is suspended. This blade is raised with a rope and then allowed to drop, separating the head from the body. The device is noted for long being the main method of execution in France and, more particularly, for its use during the French Revolution, when it "became a part of popular culture, celebrated as the people's avenger by supporters of the Revolution and vilified as the pre-eminent symbol of the Terror by opponents." Nevertheless, the guillotine continued to be used long after the French Revolution in several countries.

The Storming of the Bastille occurred in Paris on the 14th of July, 1789. The medieval fortress and prison in Paris known as the Bastille represented royal authority in the center of Paris. While the prison only contained seven prisoners at the time of its storming, its fall was the flashpoint of the French Revolution, and it subsequently became an icon of the French Republic. In France, Le quatorze juillet (14 July) is a public holiday, formally known as the Fête de la Fédération (Federation Holiday). It is usually called Bastille Day in English.

During the reign of Louis XVI, France faced a major economic crisis, initiated by the cost of intervening in the American Revolution (and particularly never-consummated efforts to invade Britain), and exacerbated by an unequal system of taxation. On May 5, 1789 the Estates-General of 1789 convened to deal with this issue, but were held back by archaic protocols and the conservatism of the Second Estate, consisting of the nobility and comprising 2% of France's population at the time. On 17 June 1789 the Third Estate, with its representatives drawn from the middle class, or bourgeoisie, reconstituted themselves as the National Assembly, a body whose purpose was the creation of a French constitution. The king initially opposed this development, but was forced to acknowledge the authority of the assembly, which subsequently renamed itself the National Constituent Assembly on 9 July.

The storming of the Bastille and the subsequent Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was the third event of this opening stage of the revolution. The first had been the revolt of the nobility, refusing to aid King Louis XVI through the payment of taxes. The second had been the formation of the National Assembly and the Tennis Court Oath.

The middle class had formed the National Guard, sporting tricolor cockades (rosettes) of blue, white and red, formed by combining the red-and-blue cockade of the Paris commune and the white cockade of the king. These cockades, and soon simply their color scheme, became the symbol of the revolution and, later, of France itself.

Paris, close to insurrection, and, in François Mignet's words, "intoxicated with liberty and enthusiasm," showed wide support for the Assembly. The press published the Assembly's debates; political debate spread beyond the Assembly itself into the public squares and halls of the capital. The Palais-Royal and its grounds became the site of an endless meeting. The crowd, on the authority of the meeting at the Palais-Royal, broke open the prisons of the Abbaye to release some grenadiers of the French guards, reportedly imprisoned for refusing to fire on the people. The Assembly recommended the imprisoned guardsmen to the clemency of the king; they returned to prison, and received pardon. The rank and file of the regiment, previously considered reliable, now leaned toward the popular cause.