Jacques-François de Corday d'Armont

Jacques-François de Corday d'Armont (baptized September 2, 1737 in Mesnil-Imbert (now part of Le Renouard , Orne ); † June 30, 1798 in Barcelona ) was a French nobleman and father of Charlotte Corday , the murderess of Jean-Paul Marat .

Life

Jacques-François de Corday d'Armont came from a family of the old Norman aristocracy and was the sixth child of Jacques-Adrien de Corday (* 1704; † 1795) and Marie-Renée-Adélaïde de Belleau de la Motte (* 1711; † 1800 ). As a young man, he embarked on a military career in line with family tradition and was first lieutenant in the La Fère infantry regiment in 1757, but ended his army service again in 1763. He returned to his birthplace Mesnil-Imbert and on February 14, 1764 married his cousin Charlotte-Jacqueline-Marie de Gautier, the daughter of Jacques de Gautier, Lord of Authieux and Mesnival, and Marie-Aimée Labbey . The couple had two sons and three daughters:

• Jacques-François-Alexis (January 15, 1765 - February 15, 1809)
• Marie-Charlotte-Jacqueline (born April 7, 1766; buried August 17, 1774)
• Marie-Anne-Charlotte (born July 27, 1768 - † July 17, 1793), famous for her murder of Jean-Paul Marat
• Jacqueline-Jeanne-Éléonore (born April 13, 1770 - † April 13, 1806)
• Charles-Jacques-François (born September 19, 1774 - † July 1795)

With their eldest son Jacques-François-Alexis, born in Mesnil-Imbert, the couple moved into a modest country house in Ronceray near Le Mans at the end of 1765 , where their three daughters were born. Around 1774 the poorly wealthy family settled in Mesnil-Imbert again, where the prematurely born eldest daughter Marie-Charlotte-Jacqueline died in August 1774 at the age of only eight and where the youngest son Charles-Jacques-François a month later was born.

Because his wife's relatives did not meet their payment obligations set out in the marriage contract, Corday d'Armont first exchanged angry letters with the Gautiers and then took legal action. The judgment was appealed to in Caen , to which city Corday d'Armont moved with his family in mid-1776. However, the more expensive city life forced him to adopt an even more modest way of life and his trial dragged on. He had his eldest son Jacques-François-Alexis attend the cadet school in Beaumont-en-Auge , leased his land in 1778, but then had to cope with the untimely death of his wife, who died in childbirth in Caen on April 8, 1782. He now managed to have his then 13-year-old daughter Marie-Anne-Charlotte, usually referred to as Charlotte Corday for short , and her younger sister in Caen in the Roman Catholic Abbey of Sainte-Trinité (usually called Abbaye-aux-Dames ) were recorded.

Corday d'Armont himself chose his estate in Ronceray again as his residence and bought a small heath which he had farmed. The brothers of his different wife, however, did not want to pay anything and the last-instance judgment passed in 1787 only awarded him the compulsory share. The court left the estimation of his wife's inheritance rights to the family council, which, however, was unable to resolve the dispute.

In Mesnil-Imbert, Corday d'Armont acted as syndic. In a pamphlet L'égalité des partages, fille de la justice , he turned against the birthright in 1790, on the basis of which he had not been able to live properly. After the abbey of Sainte-Trinité was dissolved on March 1, 1791 during the French Revolution , the 22-year-old Charlotte Corday returned to her father. While the latter was moderately royalist, his daughter adhered to more republican ideas and initially welcomed the French Revolution. In June 1791 she left her father and went to live with her aunt, Madame Le Coustellier de Bretteville-Gouville, in Caen.

Corday d'Armont's two sons were ardent royalists. The older of them, Jacques-François-Alexis, went into exile in Spain at the end of 1791, and in February 1792 the younger son Charles-Jacques-François also fled to emigration. On May 12, 1792, Corday d'Armont was almost murdered. He moved to Caen and after the execution of Louis XVI on January 21, 1793 . for security reasons to Argentan . Meanwhile, his daughter Charlotte Corday planned the assassination attempt on the radical and influential politician Jean-Paul Marat , whom she stabbed to death on July 13, 1793 in his Paris domicile, for which she was guillotined four days later . Although Corday d'Armont had not known about his daughter's murder plan, he was imprisoned in a Capuchin monastery in October 1793 , where his elderly parents were already being held. Soon after their release he also regained his freedom on February 2, 1795 and was again politically active. In 1797 he had to leave France and went to Spain. He died in June 1798 at the age of 61 in Barcelona and was buried there.

literature

• M. Prevost: Corday (Jacques-François de) . In: Dictionnaire de Biographie française . Vol. 9 (1961), Col. 618f.

Web links

• Biography of Jacques-François de Corday d'Armont (French)