Okay, this is it. My last post here at FrancoFiles.blogspot.com.
On Thursday, April 1, 2010, as part of their study of the French Revolution, the 8th grade class at the International School of Paris took a walking tour of the era with Charlotte Corday. Charlotte is known for having assassinated Jean-Paul Marat, radical journalist and proponent of the Reign of Terror. She blamed Marat for destroying the true revolution. She felt that his death would bring an end to the fear and bloodshed tearing her country apart. She decided to do it herself.
Her tour, Beware Madame La Guillotine, prototype itinerary of the Time Traveler Tours, recounts her journey to end Marat’s life, and her own. She narrates the last four days of her life, from July 11, 1793, when she left her Norman home, until her execution on July 17th.
ISP students followed her movements, from the Palais Royal, birthplace of the French Revolution and where she bought her weapon; to Marat’
s home near the revolutionary hot spot, Le Café Procope, where she stabbed him through the heart as he soaked in the bath; to the Conciergerie, where she was imprisoned, tried, and labeled an “enemy of the revolution”. Charlotte was guillotined at the Place de la Revolution (now the Place de la Concorde) six months after Louis XVI and two months before Marie-Antoinette.
“Very compelling [to view the Revolution] from the perspective of the characters” who lived it, reports one ISP 8th grader. “I liked how we learn more specifically [about the Revolution]. And get to know the places that related to Charlotte,” said another.
Overall the students liked the experience: “Cool trip.” “Interesting and fun.” “GOOD JOB! And well done!”
Images by Julia Luu, Intern, ISP External Affairs.
On the evening of 13 July 1793, I found Marat thus, in the bath at his apartment around the corner from his press. It was my third visit to his house that day. The first two times – once in the early morning, then at mid-day – I had been turned away by Simone. This time, however, I succeeded in gaining entry. I climbed the steps to Marat’s door, one heavy foot at a time, and plucked up the courage to knock yet again. I was confronted once more by a scowling and suspicious Simone, but before she could dismiss me a third time, I offered her, with a slightly trembling hand, a letter addressed to Monsieur Marat. I had written the letter myself, in the heat of the afternoon after my second failed attempt to cross his threshold. The letter stated that I had come to name names; that I was prepared to give him information regarding the missing Girondin “Enemies of the Revolution” that he sought.
Who would suspect a 24-year old girl?
Simone took the letter and shut the door with a slam, leaving me alone on that drab, inhospitable landing. I could have turned around right there and then. But Marat was just on the other side of that door. I took a long, deep breath, and held it. Would I again be turned away? If so, so be it. Or would I meet the monster Marat at last?
I met my enemy in a small, square room with a brick-tiled floor. A map of France hung upon worn wall-paper. His tub was the shape of a sabot, an old wooden shoe. A board lying across it served as a writing table so that Marat could work on his articles and conduct his interviews even while soaking. To keep warm, he sat upon a linen sheet, the dry ends covering his bare shoulders. A second sheet draped across the tub and writing table offered him a bit of privacy from his visitors.
Marat was strange and unpleasant, thin and feverish. His head was wrapped in a filthy, vinegar-soaked handkerchief. On his skin were open lesions that reeked of decaying, rotten flesh. My eyes began to tear, struggling so against the fumes of death and medicine that I did not at first notice Marat motioning me to take the chair placed beside his bath. I sat as requested, my head turned toward the window, searching the still, hot summer air for what little breeze might chance to come my way. And in the gloom of evening’s waning light, Marat took great pleasure in scribbling down one by one, his head bent over his writing table, the names of each of my beloved Girondin friends.
Once finished he raised his head, his blood-shot eyes met mine for the first time. He proclaimed viciously, hate dripping from his lips, “We’ll soon have them all guillotined in Paris!”
At that moment I knew I had justly come. I pulled out my knife and stabbed Marat right through the heart.
One blow was all it took. I felt the knife penetrate flesh, bone, muscle. It was shocking how easy it was.
Marat died almost instantly.
For more on Beware Madame La Guillotine and other tours in the Time Traveler Tours Paris series, see www.timetravelertours.com.
Image:
Baudry, Paul-Jacques-Aimé. Charlotte Corday. 1860. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes.
Isn't this a great picture? Just this week, I received permission to use it in the prototype itinerary of the Time Traveler Tours, Beware Madame La Guillotine....most of the desired images, all hailing from the era of the French Revolution and therefore in the public domain, are in French museums and are controled by a single agency. And it appears that this agency may be demanding a healthy sum for their use. A sum I will not be able to pay.
I'm working on finding a resolution to the problem. And no doubt there is one. But in the meantime, it feels like sabotage.
Did you know that the word sabotage originates from French? The story goes like this:
Back in the early 19th century, as the Industrial Revolution took off in France, laborers dropped
their shovels and pick axes and left their ancestral fields for work in the growing numbers of factories and coal mines. They sought a better life; they hoped for a better economic future for their families. But work was hard and conditions were unbearable. People were pushed to phyical extremes on bellies that remained empty day after day after day. They soon found that there was no hope.
In those days, poor French laborers wore a type of wooden shoe or clog called a sabot. And when their hunger became unendurable and their hope forgotten they rose up as one to strike. They used their wooden sabots to jam the machines of the factories all over France. With their sabots they stopped all production; they sabotaged the captains of industry.
Today, it feels like the behemoth that is the French bureaucracy is sabotaging the future of the TTT. But we,too, shall overcome.
Stay posted...
It's happening, folks! The Time Traveler Tours are going live. They now have their very own website and blog.
" In the wee hours of October 6, 1789, a mob of peasant women broke into the Palace of Versailles. They had been encamped outside the chateau since the previous evening, awaiting an audience with my King, Louis XVI (16th), and his Queen, Marie Antoinette.
Before dawn, the King and Queen were found with their two children and the King’s sister, Madame Elizabeth, huddled like mice before a gang of hungry cats, still in their bedclothes in the King’s private apartments. They were forced to dress quickly and pressed into waiting carriages bound for Paris, driven there by the mob so that they might bear witness to the misery of their subjects. 
