On July 13, 1793, Jean-Paul Marat, both guilty of depravity and “martyr” of the Revolution, was assassinated in his controversial bathtub.
The bath was not always this foaming moment, mixing the useful with the pleasant. Some know that it was feared by our ancestors and still by some of our fragrant contemporaries. However, mentalities change in the 18th century and there are from the middle of this century two ways of being in your bath as you are in the world.
In Paris, the Albert baths, installed in 1783, then the “Chinese baths”, opened in 1787, played on a new amalgam of idle and elitist paddling, hygiene and cure. In Versailles, work for Marie-Antoinette’s bathroom began in 1784, the plumbing for hot and cold water was installed in 1788. The sovereign never saw the room finished, immersed in a treatment with disputed virtues. Among all these baths, public and private, there is a second category devoted to relieving or curing the sick.
The bath associated with the aristocracy is also associated with the character attributed to the latter: the hot water softens the body as well as the spirit, so that the masculine nature comes dangerously close to that of the woman, this being weak. Add the heady fragrances, the promiscuity and we get the picture of a libertine and depraved aristocracy which offers the revolutionaries an album declining all sorts of dissolute mores.
Marat’s bathtub is a small hip bath, in zinc, equipped with a drain tap and installed in a tiled room lit by a window, on the first floor of the small Cahors private mansion, located at 30, rue des Cordeliers (today today rue de l’École de médecine). Bathing in brackish water, the mountain deputy does not consider his bathtub as a place of pleasure, but as a medical device. Marat’s bath is also his office and the small room, the antechamber of the Convention. He receives there, he laments there, he raises the plots hatched against him, he accuses, he denounces and demands the blood of the enemies of the people. Even if his companion Simone Évrard would have soaked him in a comfortable bathtub, he would not have come out of it softened. Marat’s bathtub is not a place of relaxation, it is neither his vocation nor his destiny.
Marat is a virile bather, in every way opposed to these effeminate and corrupt aristocrats. He reviles the lack of vigor of the people whom he exhorts to act. His calls are not in vain.
Charlotte Corday (1768-1793), a young single girl from a penniless noble family, a constitutionalist and a well-made head, will take matters into her own hands and administer a radical remedy to Marat. Ironically, she is the antithesis of the depraved image given by the revolutionaries of the nobility. Who can accuse Corday of debauchery when her autopsy reveals she remained a virgin? Who can accuse her of softness when she assassinates Marat?