Major Mike | Today in History 07/13 (The Death of Marat)

The Death of Marat' painting by Jacques-Louis David showing the murdered French revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat (© Sergio Anelli/Electa/Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images)

(1793) Clash of ideologies ends in a bathtub assassination

As French revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat lays in his bath, Royalist sympathizer Charlotte Corday stabs him in the chest with a kitchen knife and kills him. The act will lead to her being guillotined, and also inspire the famous Jacques-Louis David painting, ‘The Death of Marat.’

The Death of Marat is a 1793 painting by Jacques-Louis David of the murdered French revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat. It is one of the most famous images of the French Revolution. David was the leading French painter, as well as a Montagnard and a member of the revolutionary Committee of General Security. The painting shows the radical journalist lying dead in his bath on 13 July 1793 after his murder by Charlotte Corday. Painted in the months after Marat’s murder, it has been described by T. J. Clark as the first modernist painting, for “the way it took the stuff of politics as its material, and did not transmute it”.

Date completed: 1793
Artist: Jacques-Louis David
Subject: Jean-Paul Marat
Period: Neoclassicism
Location: Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium
Genre: History painting

Jacques-Louis David – Marat assassinated – Google Art Project
wiki/The_Death_of_Marat

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(1793) Clash of ideologies ends in a bathtub assassination.
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Engraving of the draft riots on Lexington Avenue, New York City, July 13, 1863 (© Getty Images)

(1863) US Civil War draft incites huge riots

Racial tensions and class warfare mix into a deadly brew as a protest by working-class whites against newly enacted Civil War draft laws spiral out of control into a city-spanning riot. Some 120 die and thousands are injured, with New York City's black population the target of racist violence.

The New York draft riots, known at the time as Draft Week, were violent disturbances in Lower Manhattan, widely regarded as the culmination of working-class discontent with new laws passed by Congress that year to draft men to fight in the ongoing American Civil War. The riots remain the largest civil and racial insurrection in American history, aside from the Civil War itself.