Women, Revolution and Violence in Modern World History

Home , Adam Lux, Charlotte Corday, Shi Jianqiao, The Death of Marat

THREE ASSASSINS:

WOMEN, REVOLUTION AND VIOLENCE IN MODERN WORLD HISTORY

Ashleah Zigmond

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of

The Wilkes Honors College

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences

with a Concentration in History

Wilkes Honors College of

Florida Atlantic University

Jupiter, Florida

December 2011

Three Assassins: Women, Revolution and Violence in Modern History

Ashleah Zigmond

This thesis was prepared under the direction of the candidate’s thesis advisor, Dr. Christopher Ely , and has been approved by the members of her/his supervisory committee. It was submitted to the faculty of The Honors College and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences.

SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE:

______Dr. Christopher Ely

______Dr. Douglas McGetchin

______Dean, Wilkes Honors College

______Date

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I owe an enormous debt to my advisor Dr. Christopher Ely for all the advice, time, and encouragement he gave me. Without his help, I would not have been able to start over my thesis from scratch and be able to complete it in less than a semester. I know I frustrated him beyond words at times with all my questions and the time constraints, but never once did he lack reassuring comments. Special thanks goes out to

Dr. Douglas McGetchin who came to my need during the last few weeks of the semester to read through my thesis and provide me with constructive comments. And to the entire library staff who jumped through hoops trying to get all my books through interlibrary loan. My friends and family have been extremely supportive throughout this process. I would like to thank my best friend, Bobby, for taking all my late night calls and talking me ‘off the edge.’ To all my friends at the Honors College, especially Sean, for looking after me when I did not have time to look after my physical, mental, and emotional health. Lastly, I would like to thank my family for giving me the optimism that I lacked often in the process and the support I needed to get through weeks of nearly sleepless nights. I owe many thanks to my mother who bore the brunt of my breakdowns during the semester: Thank You for allowing me to pick your brain when my own decided to stop working from lack of sleep and for keeping me sane throughout the semester. To my father: Thank You for listening to me as I worked through the different topics and providing me with emotional and intellectual support throughout the process. And to my brother, Zachary, thank you for always being there for me when I needed any help and encouragement. Ultimately, I want to thank those who have been there for me throughout this chaotic process and for everyone who has cheered me on along the way.

iii

ABSTRACT

Author: Ashleah Zigmond

Title: Three Assassins: Women, Revolution and Violence in Modern

World History

Institution: Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University

Thesis Advisor: Dr. Christopher Ely

Degree: Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences

Concentration: History

Year: 2011

This thesis examines three women who committed the unprecedented crime of attempting to assassinate a key male figure in three separate times and places. It involves the government’s and society’s reaction and implications about the role of gender in the violent deeds transforming society at times of revolutionary upheaval. The women examined are Charlotte Corday from eighteenth century France, Vera Zasulich from nineteenth century Russia, and Shi Jianqiao from twentieth century China. These women shared numerous qualities that, when combined, provided the women with the ability to see themselves as equals in the patriarchal societies in which they lived, allowing them to participate in the typically male dominated public sphere.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ...... vi

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 1: Charlotte Corday ...... 3

Chapter 2: Vera Zasulich ...... 29

Chapter 3: Shi Jianqiao ...... 57

Conclusion ...... 85

Bibliography ...... 89

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1: Charlotte Corday painted by Jean-Jacques Hauer in her cell……………… 20

Figure 2: Vera Zasulich in her early twenties.……………………………………….. 42

Figure 3: Shi Jianqiao in jail, 1936…………………………………………………... 74

INTRODUCTION

In times of revolution, chaos and crisis sweep over nations and people are caught up in the revolutionary fervor of the moment. It is in these moments that people become politically active, even those otherwise inactive in times of peace. As social norms typically dictate the exclusion of women from most politics and the public sphere, women often lack access to the male dominated world outside the household. The extraordinary circumstances of revolution, though, sometimes allow women to escape from their solely traditional role of domesticity and enter the supposedly masculine public sphere. Despite their subordinate position, women have transcended traditional gender roles in times of revolution, which provided them with a new purpose to work towards the advancement and betterment of society. This thesis examines the effect of certain women who committed unprecedented ‘masculine’ and violent acts against key male figures, and its impact on the society.

Modernization was crucial in enabling women to step into the public sphere.

Women with both money and a desire to change their status in life now were able to take on employment outside of the house and pursue higher education. Education was indispensable if women were to achieve economic independence and intellectual equality with men. With increasing education, women began to think along political lines.

Through communication with other educated females, some began to realize their capacity for action. These women, above all others, had the means and opportunity to engage in social and political activities. In the eyes of men, the concerns educated women rose, at times, were deemed extremely radical because they went against the female’s normative place in society and broke with long established traditions. The

fixation by the majority of their society made the acts, successful or not, committed by female assassins shocking, frightening and scandalous.

This thesis examines the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat by Charlotte Corday in eighteenth century France, the attempted assassination of Fedor Trepov by Vera Zasulich in nineteenth century Russia, and the assassination of Sun Chuanfang by Shi Jianqiao in twentieth century China. While there have been numerous historical incidents in which women used violence against powerful political male leaders, I selected these women and their crimes to examine because their actions occurred in societies undergoing political and social revolution in which women had begun to establish greater freedoms for themselves, including a presence in the public sphere and increased educational opportunities. Each woman seized the opportunity to act according to her conviction she could better society through the elimination of a male that represented, to her, the main flaws present in the political and social structure of her time. The extent to which these women crossed the gender boundaries and surpassed gender expectations gave them and their acts, and the social reaction to them, a different weight and meaning, resulting in unforeseen social and political possibilities and consequences. Though these three women committed their ‘masculine’ acts of violence in order to bring to light problems within society, in some cases they also inadvertently caused greater strife through a forcible return to traditional values by patriarchal governments. This return to tradition resulted in the oppression of society as a whole, but focused on the submission, seclusion and destruction of the ‘threat’ of ‘masculinized’ women that the patriarchy feared.

CHAPTER 1: CHARLOTTE CORDAY

“Intelligent and well read, passionate and idealistic, courageous and generous,

[Charlotte Corday] nonetheless lacked any political sophistication, naively believing that

her single grand gesture could resolve France’s profound problems and restore peace.

To her, it all seemed so simple.” 1

- Gelbart

By the end of the first year of revolution in France in 1789, the revolution had started down a radical path. The storming of the Bastille, a symbol of the power of the monarchy, signified the starting point for a rapid succession of changes in French society.

Parisian delegates could not get along with the irrational autocracy and called for a change. They had determined “authority was no longer deemed to derive from God, nor was it vested in the king [instead] it resided with the people and was entrusted to representatives of the nation.” 2 The radical press gained ground in 1789 with the abolition of censorship. Many of the revolutionaries believed that a radical press was needed because the people “did not know and could not articulate their own interests and that shock tactics were necessary to enlighten them.” 3 One of these revolutionaries, Jean-

Paul Marat started publishing his radical paper L’Ami du peuple (The Friend of the

1 Nina Rattner Gelbart, “Death in the Bathtub: Charlotte Corday and Jean-Paul Marat,” in The Human Tradition in Modern France , ed. Vincent, K. Steven, and Alison Klairmont-Lingo, (Wilmington, Delaware: A Scholarly Resources Inc., 2000), 20.

2 James F. McMillan, France and Women 1789-1914. Gender, Society and Politics, (New York: Routledge, 2000), 15.

3 Jeremy D. Popkin, Revolutionary News: The Press in France, 1789-1799, (London: Duke University Press, 1990), 146.

People ) in September 1789. In both print and speech, he violently denounced anyone who opposed the direction of the Revolution and revealed conspiracies, traitors, and plots. He p ublished denunciations without giving preferential treatment; he called the people to action against everyone from aristocrats, hoarders, unsuccessful generals and counterrevolutionaries to agents that supposedly represented the people and the revolution. 4 He referred to himself as “the eye of the people” and “dénonciateur patriote;” he would publicly earn the title “l’ami du peuple” for his defense of the “oppressed and violated” women and the radical militants of the lower classes, the sans-culottes. 5 When he was not writing for his paper, he responded to letters and welcomed visits from any seeking his help, making the people see him as their most ardent advocate. He spoke for and defended them when no others were willing. Marat encouraged the people to adopt the use of force and violence, for he believed that democracy could only be created through “popular insurrection.” 6

Not long into the revolution, the people saw through the help of the radical papers that they needed to use force to remake the government. In August, the National

Constituent Assembly took over as the main form of government and abolished the

Estates system, freed the peasants from their debts and obligations, and wrote The

Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. This document became the justification for the revolution and stated: “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. . .[of] liberty, property, security and resistance to opposition” and all laws are “the expression

4 Emmet Kennedy, A Cultural History of the French Revolution , (London: Yale University Press, 1989), 308.

5 William Vaughn and Helen Weston, “Introduction,” in David's The Death of Marat , ed. William Vaughn and Helen Weston, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 9; Gelbart, 27.

6 Kennedy, 309.

of the general will.” 7 With the King’s attempt to flee France, the revolutionaries put through the Constitution of September 3, 1791, which stated the permanent legislative body of France would be the one chamber National Assembly formed every two years by elections. 8 The Constitution firmly stated that the King could not dissolve the National

Assembly, which formally separated the monarchy from the executive and legislative power over France.

The rule of the monarchy officially ended in August with the storming of the

Tuileries Palace by a mob of 30,000 French citizens. The mob murdered several Swiss guards along with any servants they could find in their search for the King. The royal family was promptly arrested when found hiding in the Legislative Assembly building.

France had initiated war with Austria in April and the occupied counter-revolutionary

Nice and Savoy. 9 The Prussian Army invaded France in August, breeding distrust and thoughts of betrayal among the revolutionaries. As a result of rumors, a massacre of counter-revolutionary prisoners housed in Paris prisoners took place; of the 1,200 killed at least half were not counter-revolutionaries and instead were common criminals and prostitutes. 10 Finally, in September 1792, the First French Republic was established. In

December, the King was put on trial for his crimes against France, found guilty, and executed January 21, 1793.

7 David S. Mason, Revolutionary Europe, 1789-1989. Liberty, Equality, Solidarity, (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, INC., 2005), 29; McMillan, 16.

8 Peter Davies, The French Revolution: A Beginners Guide, (Oxford: Oneworld, 2009), 51.

9 Davies, 59.

10 Allan Todd, Revolutions, 1789-1917, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 60.

Throughout this period, radical and revolutionary clubs and societies had formed and served to further divide the revolutionaries into greater radical factions. Club des

Valois, Club des Impartiaux, Club Monarchique, and some others supported the monarchy, while the Club of ’89, Society of Friends of the Rights of Man, the Citizen or

Cordeliers Club, and the Jacobin Club supported the revolution. 11 The Jacobin Club would become the most prominent of those supporting the revolution. As the revolution continued, the revolutionary party split into two factions: the radical Jacobins, or

Montagnards, and the moderate Girondins. The Girondins were satisfied with many of the gains made in 1789 and wanted to preserve them at all costs, while the Montagnards saw 1789 as the starting point of a greater change. 12 The Girondins eagerly backed spreading revolutionary ideas and eliminating their enemies through war. The

Montagnards did not want to risk France getting into a war when a legitimate government was still in the process of reformation.

The Girondins and Montagnards faced an increased rift when Marat was elected to the National Convention alongside the radical Montagnards Maximilien Robespierre and Georges Danton. The Girondins began to target him and his paper; they blamed him for inciting the sans-culottes to massacre Girondins held in Paris prisons in September and accused him of wanting to become a dictator. On April 12, 1793, the Girondins put

Marat on trial before the revolutionary tribunal. He was acquitted of all charges and carried triumphantly from the courthouse by the Parisian crowds. Upset by the actions taken against him, Marat proposed on May 19 “the Convention shall decree complete

11 Davies, 51.

12 Ibid.

freedom in the expression of opinion, so that I may send to the scaffold the faction which voted for my impeachment.”13 Robespierre and Marat strongly encouraged in the sans- culottes this idea of patriotism: “either you were with the revolution, and believed in the war [being fought abroad], or you didn’t and you were automatically a suspect .”14 The

Girondin party began to be perceived as ‘suspects’ and ‘traitors’ according to Marat.

Then on June 22 nd , 1793 sans-culottes carried out Marat’s revolt against the Girondins.

An armed mob of 80,000 sans-culottes surrounded the National Convention and demanded the arrest of the Girondins. The mob forced the Convention to submit its will, which resulted in the arrest of twenty-nine Girondins. The Montagnards had beaten the

Girondins in a popular coup, but their victory would lead to the demise of Marat at the hands of an attractive, intelligent, and ‘unnatural’ young woman, Charlotte Corday.

The Role of Women

Leaders of the revolution based many of their beliefs off the ideas established by the Enlightenment philosophes in the eighteenth century. A fundamental belief was the right of the individual to have certain privileges within society the government could not infringe on. Individual rights, according to the enlightened philosophes, would not be applicable to women and, in fact, would further exclude them from the public sphere.

Women were believed to be inferior not only because of gender oppression carried out through laws made by patriarchal societies, but because nature had “ordained” them to be

13 J.M. Thompson, The French Revolution, (London: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1985), 180-181.

14 Davies, 67.

“inferior.” 15 The philosophes looked at the female gender as lacking the strength, intelligence, attentiveness, self-denial, and dedication that public life and politics demanded; women supposedly lacked these qualities because they had other purposes that they alone as women could perform.16 A woman’s place in society was one of domesticity, a life centered around the home and the family. Louis-Marie Prud’homme, a prominent journalist in the early years of the revolution, echoed this position in an article in his newspaper Révolutions de Paris. He expressed that in order for a woman to be a good patriot she must be “honest and diligent girls, tender and modest wives, [and] wise mothers.” He also linked the idea of patriotism with gender differences in that “ true patriotism consists of fulfilling one’s duties and valuing only rights appropriate to each according to their sex and age, . . . always punish courageously . . . any crime which tends to disorganise society by changing sexes or indecently confusing them with anti- civic and perfidious intentions.’” 17 The civic aims the revolutionaries tried to instill in women were those of becoming a good patriotic mother who would birth, educate and raise future virtuous citizens of France.

Women in the early years of the Revolution were optimistic that a better life would come for their oppressed gender as a result of promised societal and political reforms. This optimism was reflected in pamphlets, which, at times, made bold

15 McMillan, 8.

16 McMillan, 30.

17 Helen Weston, “The Corday-Marat Affair. No Place for a Woman,” in David's The Death of Marat , ed. William Vaughn and Helen Weston, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 136.

statements relating women of the past to “slaves” that will be reborn “citizens.” 18 Marie

Dorbe reiterated this point in her 1972 speech to the “Amies de la Constritution” of

Bordeaux: “Before the Revolution we were forgotten, reduced to housework and the education of our children; deprived of the benefits of the law, we lived in abject obscurity, painfully enduring our degradation . . . [Now] the blindfold which hid the truth from us has been lifted; in turn, we too have become free citizens.” 19 Laws in relation to marriage helped to increase the liberation of women through the process of removing the power of the Church by transforming marriage into a civil commitment and legalizing divorce. 20 Daughters gained equal inheritance rights with sons through the dismantling of the ancien régime and its laws. The government reformed the educational system to provide primary education for girls and reformed the legal system permitting women to testify in court.

Though the number of schools increased significantly in the eighteenth century, the nature of a woman’s education did not change dramatically in the early years of the revolution. Before the revolution, a girl’s education existed to prepare her for a woman’s domestic purposes. Women rarely attended formal schools; they received their education either from within the home where daughters were taught by a family member, governess, or tutor, from studies at a convent, from teaching oneself, or from a

18 Suzanne Desan, “Women’s Experience of the French Revolution: An Historical Overview,” in Literate Women and the French Revolution of 1789 , ed. Catherine Montfort-Howard, (Birmingham, AL:Summa Publications, Inc., 1994), 20.

19 Suzanne Desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 87; Desan, 20

20 Desan, “Women’s Experience, “ 21.

combination of the three. 21 The education a woman would receive would focus primarily on religion along with “intellectual skills” like reading and writing and “basic manual skills” such as needlecraft. 22 When more schools opened to girls, few female students received instruction beyond the basics. The common belief at the time was that it was better to “avoid . . . educating women who may become as sand in the well-oiled wheels of family and society.” 23

Women had become politically aware not only through increased literacy, but in their ability to attend various Club and society meetings. At these meetings, the male members would hold debates over ideological beliefs and practices. Not all Clubs were willing to allow women to watch their proceedings; the radical Jacobins and Cordeliers tolerated the women’s presence in their galleries as long as they remained spectators in the proceedings. The toleration constituted only informal participation in the meetings where women could “[applaud] their favorite speakers, [shout] out comments, and [draft] and [present] petitions.” 24 The limits placed upon women strengthened their resolve to improve their position in the male dominated society. In their ability to take part, even if just partially, in the political sphere women gained a better understanding of politics along with a taste for political freedom.

21 Catherine R. Montfort and J.J. Allison, “Women’s Voices and the French Revolution,” in Literate Women and the French Revolution of 1789 , ed. Catherine Montfort-Howard, (Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications, 1994), 4.

22 Nina Corazzo and Catherine R. Montfort, “Charlotte Corday: femme-homme ,” in Literate Women and the French Revolution of 1789 , ed. Catherine Montfort-Howard, (Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications, 1994), 53n5.

23 Montfort and Allison, 4.

24 Todd, 83.

The more radical of the women in support of the revolution started Clubs and societies that would work toward the establishment of greater political and educational rights. These women believed that by gaining these types of rights women would ultimately gain equality with men through citizenship. The Society of Revolutionary

Republican Women (SSRW), founded in February 1793, gave poor working women, like tradeswomen and washerwomen, the ability to organize their talents behind shared beliefs, such as inflation and hoarding. 25 This organization became the “first political interest group for ordinary women to be established in Europe.” 26 The SSRW promoted equality for all people, the necessity of sacrifice for the new nation of France, supported the wars occurring outside of France, and upheld the ideal of feminine virtue. 27 In the struggle between the Girondins and the Montagnards, the SSRW supported the latter, effectively “[merging] the interest of middle-class radicals with those of the Parisian poor.” 28 They played a key role in the Montagnards take-over of the National Convention by guarding the doors to the Convention and preventing the Girondins from entering.

The Woman and Her Deed

Born Marie-Anne Charlotte de Corday d'Armont, the daughter of a family of minor Norman gentry, Charlotte Corday lived a comfortable life in a manor house. Her lifestyle provided her with a level of education that surpassed that of the typical middle-

25 Rachel G. Fuchs, Gender and Poverty in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ( New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 30.

26 Todd, 83.

27 Fuchs, 30.

28 Todd, 83.

and upper-class woman. While still a young girl, her mother and older sister passed away.

Her grief-stricken father sent her to the Abbaye-aux-Dames convent in Caen where she received her education from nuns. She read the works of her great-grandfather, Pierre

Corneille, a French dramatist of the seventeenth century, along with literature from ancient world, Plutarch’s Lives and the Enlightenment works of Voltaire, Guillaume

Thomas François Raynal and Rousseau. Through these readings, she developed a political consciousness that most women of her time did not possess. She came to understand the revolution could bring about a moral transformation in society forming in her the “dedication to fight for worthy public causes as the austere Spartans and Romans had done.” 29 Her superior knowledge of history and philosophy was later attacked and blamed for her “irrational act.” 30

In Caen, Corday resided with an elderly relative in a home close by the Hôtel de l'Intendance, which would later become the political base for Girondins and their supporters. The coup ‘d’état lead by Marat purged the moderates from the National

Convention in early June. Marat had effectively sentenced the Girondins and all moderates to death as traitors through his articles in his popular newspaper months earlier; he claimed the Girondins were “’unmitigated royalists’ who had wanted to

‘annihilate liberty by reason and re-establish despotism by civil war.’” 31 The Girondins arrival in Caen in June spurred on Corday’s political thoughts. Though born of nobility,

Corday never related to the sentiments of the royalists; the flight of her cowardly

29 Gelbart, 20.

30 Weston, 143.

31 Vaughn and Weston, 9-10.

aristocratic relatives from danger caused her to develop further disinclination with the aristocracy and their ideals. She claimed to have been a “republican before the

Revolution.” 32 She was well educated in the having read over five hundred accounts representing both the revolutionary and counterrevolutionary views. 33 She attended the political meetings of the Girondins and there for decided that the best route for France would be a republic; she also realized that in order to establish a republic a serious moral transformation of the citizens of France had to happen first. Upon reading accounts in

Girondin newspapers that claimed that Marat was an anarchist and was “perverting

France” Corday saw in Marat, and others like him, the reason for all the civil discord and chaos in France. She decided to take on the mission of the ‘patriotic martyr’ by killing one to “save thousands . . .And [preventing] many other disasters.” 34

On the pretext of traveling to Paris to help a friend, Corday arrived in Paris on

July 11, 1793 with a well thought out plan on how she would assassinate ‘the friend of the people.’ Corday was forced to alter her plan to murder Marat in at the Convention in front of the “representatives of the Nation” on the anniversary of the storming of the

Bastille. 35 Marat was afflicted with a skin condition known as dermatitis herpetiformis, which required him to constantly soak in an herbal bath to ease the pain of the sores. The state of his deterioration was not known outside of the capital nor was the fact well

32 Graeme Fife, The Terror. The Shadow of the Guillotine: France 1792-1794, (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2004), 9.

33 Corazzo, 48.

34 Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution , (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 730-731; Arno J. Mayer, The Furies. Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 191.

35 Schama, 735

known that he made his last appearance to the National Convention in June and no longer attended the Society of Jacobin meetings. 36 Corday understood she must murder Marat in his home, which she believed should not be too difficult because he was rumored to open his doors to anyone in need of his help or could offer a denunciation. 37

On July 13, Corday purchased a six-inch-long butcher’s knife and hailed a cab to take her to Marat’s apartment. Upon her arrival, Catherine Evrard, the sister of Marat’ common-law wife, Simmone, turned her away because of Marat’s ill health. She returned to her room where she wrote and sent a note to Marat stating, "I have come from Caen.

Your love of your country must make you curious to know what plots are being hatched there. I await your answer.” 38 When she did not receive a reply, she returned to Marat’s apartment. Again, Corday was refused, but Marat, on hearing the commotion, allowed her entrance. They spoke for fifteen minutes about the situation in Caen and Corday gave

Marat the names of the plotters and traitors. As he wrote down the names, Corday took the knife out from its hiding spot in her dress and drove it into his chest. The blade puncturing his lung and sliced into his aorta causing him die almost immediately after calling out for help, “Help me, my beloved, help me.” 39 The call alerted those within and nearby the house of the attack resulting in Corday’s immediate seizure and arrest; Corday had not intended to escape her punishment on account she wished to make her motives known. Three senior members of the Committee of General Security formally interrogated her in Marat’s apartment. She explained “that she had been convinced that

36 Gelbart, 18.

37 Schama, 735.

38 Fife, 5.

39 Fife, 6.

France was about to be engulfed in civil war, that Marat was the author of the worst disasters which had afflicted the country and that she wished to sacrifice her own life on behalf of the people of France." 40 The interrogation finished at dawn and she was taken from Marat’s apartment to a cell in the Abbaye prison formally occupied by the Girondin

Brissot and Girondin supporter Marie-Jeanne Roland.

Reaction and Trial

News spread quickly throughout the streets of Paris about the death of the people’s friend, hero, and most ardent defender.41 The people felt that in a single instance they had lost their voice in the revolution, a voice they believed came from Marat. A large crowd gathered outside of Marat’s apartment to get a look at the murderess. On seeing Corday exit the apartment, the already emotional crowd become more enraged.

People in the crowd threatened to tear her to pieces; one woman stated she would “like to dismember the monster and eat her filthy body, piece by piece.” 42 Several in the crowd exclaimed that death by guillotine would be “too mild for such a heinous crime;” the publicist Jacques Hérbert reiterated the statement in print that she deserved a “more terrible and degrading [punishment] than death by guillotine.” 43 It was clear to the

Jacobin leaders that they had to calm the emotionally unstable crowd quickly or risk a mob like consciousness developing. Jean-Baptiste Drouet, one of Corday’s escorts to the

40 Fife, 6-7.

41 Gelbart, 19.

42 Schama, 737.

43 Mayer, 192.

prison, convinced the crowd that they could not kill Corday without a trial because they would risk losing “the links in the plot.” 44

The Jacobins commonly believed that a woman such as Charlotte Corday could not commit the ‘masculine’ act of murder without a man in the background supporting and goading her into action. The Jacobins reasoning behind this idea pertained to their belief that women were “conditioned to repress an attraction to violence culturally perceived as ‘masculine.’” 45 The leaders also hoped to gain complete control of the government through a confession that Corday had been backed by the Girondins. If the

Girondins had planned the assassination and encouraged a woman to commit a crime that forced her to go against her gender then the Jacobins could justify the destruction not only of the Girondins, but all groups that could pose such a threat. Georges Couthon, a member of the Committee of Public Safety, asserted “that this monster to whom nature has given the form of a woman is an envoy of Buzot, Barbaroux, Salle and all the other conspirators of Caen.” 46 Corday understood the importance behind the idea that a woman was backed by men. For women, in the Jacobin view, could not conceive of such violence naturally. She stated this common view in a letter, “[Marat’s supporters] are not exactly happy to have a mere woman of no importance to sacrifice to the ancestors of this great man.” 47 All through her trial, the Jacobin prosecution pushed for her to identify those behind the plot. Each time, Corday denied any sort of conspiracy. At one point, she

44 Schama, 737.

45 Montfort and Allison, 13.

46 Schama, 738.

47 Weston, 138.

firmly asserted, “I would never have committed such an act on the advice of others. I alone conceived the plan and executed it.” 48

With no proof that support a behind the scenes conspiracy, various groups looked for ways to explain Corday’s action. To the men of the revolution, there was no way that a woman was capable of thinking independently and politically; some overriding, irrational feminine emotion must have caused her to turn to violence. Rumors spread that

Corday had committed the act to avenge the death of her childhood love, the Royalist

Henri Vicomte de Belsunce, who was torn apart by a mob influenced by Marat. 49 Others claimed she had given herself to Barbaroux and out of love ‘obeyed’ his desire for

Marat’s death; the examination of her corpse proved her “virgin purity” and showed the rumor as mere slander. 50 The anti-Jacobin British press downplayed the political act by focusing on Corday as “feminine, saintly in here martyrdom, motivated by romantic love for one of Marat’s victims, and typically transformed [her] into an ‘angel of the assassination,’. . .[acting] as an instrument of divine wrath against republicanism.” 51 The

British press ignored key points in their reporting on the female assassin. The Times avoided mentioning that she was a republican and only emphasized the fact she came from a ‘noble family’ while The London Chronicle stated “[a] woman has been the first

48 Schama, 739.

49 Corazzo, 48; Jeannette Van Alstine, Charlotte Corday, (London: W. H. Allen & co., 1890), Google eBook Edition, 31.

50 Michel Corday, Charlotte Corday , trans E. F. Buckley, (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1931), 153.

51 Adriana Craciun, "The New Cordays: Helen Craik and British Representations of Charlotte Corday, 1793-1800", in Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution , ed. Adriana Craciun and Kari E. Lokke, (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001), 202.

instrument of [the Caen conspirators’] crimes.” 52 Even though Corday disproved all the rumors in various written and verbal statements, the majority of society found it was more reasonable to believe a woman committed such a heinous act out of passion, love or revenge, than for political convictions and patriotism. 53

Passion played a significant role in the citizens, especially sans-culotte women, making Marat a martyr. Marat had lost power and influence within the Convention and though his political voice through his newspaper still influenced the citizens, he was fading as an important member of the revolution. If Corday had not killed Marat, there existed a strong possibility that his natural death would not have made him a martyr.

Marat had established himself as ‘friend of the people’ becoming the hero of the sans- culottes to the point of idolization; in death, he became a point around which to rally, along with a martyr and god in their eyes. Corday had done with his death what Marat could not do in life; Marat had wished to adopt the “personality of the revolutionary

Jeremiah – dreamer, prophet, bringer of doom,” but in life, he lacked the essential quality of martyrdom. 54 Corday had successfully completed the process that Marat had started and a cult was built around his name and image. The painted Jean-Jacques David played an immense role in the restoration of Marat to the people through a glorified painting depicting Marat’s untimely end in the tub. David, too, was responsible for organizing

Marat’s grand funeral; the grandeur went against the wishes of Robespierre who had wanted it to be simple to keep people from being spurned to vengeance and out of

52 Craciun, 203.

53 Corazzo, 48.

54 Schama, 734.

jealousy for the canonized male. 55 His heart hung in the Cordelier’s club like a “sacred relic,” while he is body lay enshrined for a time in the Pantheon. 56

The government formed a cult around the image of Corday through their ‘anti-

Corday campaign,’ encouraging her vilification and condemnation not only as a criminal, but as a member of the ‘fairer sex.’ 57 The government portrayed Corday as a

‘public woman,’ a term often used for a prostitute, and condemned her as unnatural to be unmarried and still a virgin at the age of twenty-five. The Répertoire du Tribunal

Révolutionnaire s article on Corday emphasized each of these points:

“This woman, who they say was very pretty, was not pretty at all; she was a virago, fleshier than flesh, graceless, unclean like almost all female wits and philosophers. . .Charlotte Corday was twenty-five; that is, in our mores, almost an old maid, and especially with a mannish demeanor and a boyish figure. This woman absolutely threw herself out of her sex. . .sentimental love and its gentle emotions cannot come near the heart of a woman with pretensions to knowledge, wit, strength of character, the politics of nations. . .or who burns to be noticed. . . . Right-thinking, amiable men stay clear of women of this type.” 58

The intent of the revolutionaries’ emphasis on the negation of Corday as a handsome woman was a ploy to further degrade her status as a woman. The revolutionaries found that an image, especially a beautiful image, could spark sentiment among the masses. The moderate press painted her in a positive light; they pointed out her feminine qualities as an affectionate, obedient, and submissive daughter through the letter she wrote to her father before her trial. In it she asked for his forgiveness for having “disposed of my

55 Fife, 10.

56 Gelbart, 23.

57 Corazzo, 35.

58 Gelbart, 28.

existence without your permission.” 59 In this representation, Corday fit the traditional role assigned to her gender. The Marquis de Sade warned artists and writers against the production of any work that made a hero out of Corday: “A funerary shroud must envelop her memory forever; everyone must stop presenting, as they now dare, her effigy under the enchanting symbol of beauty. Artists you are too credulous, break, destroy, disfigure the feature of this monster or offer her image to our indignant eyes only if it place amidst the furies of

Tartar.” 60 Adam Lux, a German who fled to Paris, had fallen in love with Corday on her way to the guillotine and wrote pamphlets praising her as “Greater than

Brutus;” he was arrested and Figure 1 : Charlotte Corday painted by Jean-Jacques Hauer in her cell condemned to the same fate for his positive portrayal. 61 In prison, Corday had had her portrait painted so that future generations would know the real woman behind the murder and not the stories and rumors told about her.

59 Weston, 140.

60 Corazzo, 36.

61 Steven Blakemore, Crisis in Representation: Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Helen Maria Williams, and the Rewriting of the French Revolution, (London: Associated University Presses, 1997), 205.

The revolutionary leaders, the citizens of France and the radical press had passed judgment and found Corday guilty before her trial took place July 17. The trial itself was a formality and used to establish legitimacy for the new government. Corday knew the nature of her crime did not allow for a defense. 62 She had not murdered an ordinary citizen, but a symbol of the revolution: “Her act was construed as constituting the slaying of the Patriarch and by extension, as life-threatening to the patriarchal structure as a whole.” 63 The courtroom was packed with spectators wanting to get a glimpse of the murderess; many found themselves awed by Corday’s lack of emotion and silent confidence. Her assigned lawyer, Claude François Chauveau-Lagardea, presented her with pleading insanity, but Corday knew that her fate was already sealed and any plea would take away the political and patriotic implications of the crime. 64 She admitted in open court that she had traveled to Paris with the sole motive of murdering Marat for his many crimes against France. She used an argument that Marat might have used if he were on trial: “anything was justified for the security of the nation. I killed one man to save a thousand. . . .I have never lacked that resolution of people who can put aside personal interests and have the courage to sacrifice themselves for their country.” 65 In an attempt to get Corday to admit to Girondin backing of her crime, the Revolutionary Tribunal’s two presidents along with the court’s chief prosecutor lead three cross-examinations. 66

Each time, Corday denied the involvement of others.

62 Fife, 7-8.

63 Corazzo, 47.

64 Fife, 9.

65 Ibid.

66 Schama, 738.

Immediately, she was found guilty the same day and her execution set hours later.

She was dressed in red shirt of parricide and put into the tumbril. She refused both the priest’s arrival for final confession and a stool to sit on in the cart showing her faith in her convictions and her desire to appear a strong women until the end. Spectators lined the streets trying to get one last look at the murderess. Her calm appearance impacted many;

Pierre Notelet felt just by the sight of her he had fallen in love for eight days. 67 It started to rain and thunder as she made her way to the guillotine. She showed no fear as she approached the guillotine and just base curiosity for the machine of death. 68 As her head fell into the basket, the executioner’s assistant, Legros, picked it up, held it up for the crowd to see and then immodestly slapped the cheek. Rumor spread that her cheek blushed with shame at the act and the crowd felt “scandalized” drawing out their anger and doubt in the “human efficiency of the machine.” 69 The assistant would later be punished for the act. Her body was thrown into the common burial pit in the Madeleine cemetery.

The Impact

The judges in her trial had asked Corday whether she believed she had slain all the Marat’s of the world she had replied that with “this one dead, all the others will be put in fear.” 70 Fear did spread through the revolutionary men’s hearts after the death of one of their own, a figurehead of their party, by a mere woman. Never had they expected a

67 Schama, 741.

68 Fife, 56.

69 Schama, 741.

70 Mayer, 192.

woman to be capable of an independent assassination, but “Corday’s Plutarchian and politicized determination had inverted their deepest public expectations.” 71 The

Girondins, too, were shocked by Corday’s act. They knew that their end had been determined by the assassination; the Girondin Vergniaud stated, “She is killing us, but she is teaching us how to die.” 72 Another Girondin, Jean Baptiste Louvet, stated the only regret he had in Corday’s martyrdom was that she had made the “mistake of killing Marat instead of Robespierre.” 73 Even with the negative impact made by her act, Louvet referred to her as “Saint Charlotte” and directed his prayers for his missing wife to her. 74

For an act done with the sole purpose of ending the internal strife present in

France, Corday’s act had quickened the act of the turn to Terror. Her act was viewed by men as a “legitimate act of war” and any who went against the established order as

Corday had needed to be dealt with speedily and without mercy. 75 The falling of Marat’s blood announced the beginning, not of the freedom and peace that Corday had hoped, but of the beginning of the Reign of Terror. The Jacobins insisted that a turn to terror was necessary in order to crush all conspiracy and to set up stability for the government.

Robespierre had started the action of moving toward terror at Marat’s funeral. Though the cult that had formed around Marat disgusted Robespierre, he used it to his advantage to

71 Ferenc Fehér, The French Revolution and the Birth of Modernity , (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 88.

72 Fife, 10.

73 J.M. Thompson, 108.

74 Ibid.

75 Gelbart, 18.

“forge a ‘rallying cry’ to divert popular rage into government channels.”76 He stated that there was a war going on and that not only did Corday need to suffer the blow of the guillotine, but “all the other perpetrators of tyranny, all the infidel representatives of the people who encouraged revolt and intended to kill the true patriots one by one.” 77 He rallied the Jacobin supporters around him and pushed forward the terror with the cry that,

“The blood of these monsters be taken to avenge their victims, whose blood had been shed for liberty.” 78 Corday had helped Robespierre eliminate not only someone he saw a nuisance in his independence and thought, but provided him a valid reason to push forward the act of purifying the government and society.

Corday’s act intensified the rift present between men and women in society, with considerable impact to the view of women by the Jacobin party. The Jacobin men viewed intellectual women involved in politics as “the supreme enemy of the family, ruinous to man’s self-confidence, and destructive of women’s real vocation.” 79 The Jacobins saw that a woman could not be both the ideal Jacobin domestic woman and be involved in the intellectual domain, including writing and involvement in politics. The assassination had been purely a political act for Corday with no ideals relating to gender equality driving her; her concern was for the future of France and not for changes in natural, civil, or political rights. 80 Men could not separate her gender from the act, which lead, quickly, to

76 Mayer, 195.

77 Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution, (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2006), 275.

78 Scurr, 275.

79 Corazzo, 34.

80 Weston, 143.

the suppression of women as a whole. Female writing and publications, especially of a politicized and engaged context, dropped dramatically after 1793; writing that was published glorified the domestic role and related it to the makings of an orderly society. 81

The new independent woman that Corday represented proved far too unsettling for most men to be able to accept living equally with in society. This new woman proved she did not need a man in her life for economic and emotional support and instead could take on the role of a man if she desired. To the Jacobins, the women of the SSRW were new independent women and were seen as dangerous in their ability to think and act in the public sphere. In September, a male revolutionary society labeled the women of the

SSRW with the names of powerful and public women, “the Medicis, Elizabeth of

England, and Antoinette, a Charlotte Corday.” 82 The SSRW faced increased opposition after they forceful rejected their association with the negative images of historical public women. They sealed their fate when they claimed that the men in society were oppressing women as they had in the past. To counter the women’s act of insolence, the Jacobins mobilized the market women of Les Halles against the radical SSRW. The market women, too, were not happy about some of the laws put into effect by the SSRW members. On the urging of the Jacobins, thousands of market women attacked the headquarters of the SSRW. The act of women against a female oriented club gave the impression that women were calling for the end of women’s clubs and societies. 83

81 Desan, “Women’s Experience,” 24.

82 Weston, 144.

83 Ibid.

As a result of the violence perpetrated by the women in the streets, women lost their ability to exist in the public sphere alongside men. All female oriented political clubs were disbanded by the Convention on October 30, 1793. Deputy Jean-Baptiste

Amar, a member of the Committee of Public Safety reasoned that a woman could not devote herself to the “useful and difficult” tasks of politics because women “will be obliged to sacrifice more important concerns to which nature summons them. Private tasks for which women are destined by nature itself are part of the general order of society; this order is the result of the differences existing between men and women . . .” 84

For the women who had been labeled by the Jacobin men as “new Cordays,” death came not only politically, but also physically. Soon after Corday lost her head, many Jacobin women, including the president of the SSRW, Clare Lacomb, suffered the same fate. It did not stop at the level of the Jacobin women, but all independent and powerful women were a danger to the political aspirations of the male Jacobins; the feminist and monarchist Olympe de Gouges, and the Girondin Madame Roland too suffered for the lack of tolerance set off by the actions of the sole feminine assassin. 85 The condition of women worsened with their exclusion from the ability to watch from the public galleries of all clubs and assemblies.

Acts of violence and attempted assassination increased in 1794 with Corday’s successful assassination serving as an model. On May 23, an attempt was made on the life of a member of the Committee of Public Safety, Jean-Marie Collot d'Herbois. A disgruntled citizen, Henri Admirat, fired at him with two pistols while on the staircase of

84 Weston, 146.

85 Craciun, 193-194.

his apartment; both misfired allowing for d’Herbois to escape and Admirat to be caught, tried, and executed by guillotine. The most impacting, though, was the attempt by Aimée-

Cécile Renault on the life of Robespierre. The young seamstress had been asking for directions to the house of Robespierre and upon arriving at his door she had called out that she would like to see what a tyrant looked like. Upon arrest, she was found to have had two small knives in her basket that would have been used for her work as a seamstress. No plot was ever proved, but Renault went to the her death for her supposed crime and its harkening back to the crime of Corday. She did not suffer alone;

Robespierre had her father, her aunt, and one of her brothers arrested, dressed in the red shirt of parricide, and executed with her by guillotine. 86 As a result, the Convention passed a decree which, argued by Couthon, stated that political crimes had far greater consequences than those of common crimes because only individuals were harmed in the common, while “the existence of free society [was] threatened” with the political. 87 It established that anyone found “slandering patriotism, seeking to inspire discouragement, spreading false news or even depraving morals, corrupting the public conscience and impairing the purity and energy of the revolutionary government’” would be tried before the Revolutionary Tribunal. In those trials, the accused would either to be acquitted or sentenced to death by guillotine. 88 Though not all in the Convention agreed, the decree was passed leading to an increase in executions from an average of five a day between

March 21 and April 20 to twenty-six a day between June 19 and July 19. 89 The act of

86 John Morley, Robespierre: An Essay , (Wildside Press LLC, 2007), 106.

87 Schama, 836.

88 Schama, 837.

89 Schama, 837.

consolidation of power started because of women’s violence progressed to its ultimate goal on October 1794; the Jacobins, after passing acts to eliminate their rivals through the guillotine, succeeded in closing all political clubs by making it illegal for clubs to

“affiliate, correspond, or petition.” 90 Corday’s act, unknowingly and unwittingly, put the control of the government in the hands of the ‘monsters’ she intended to destroy.

90 Todd, 84.

CHAPTER 2: VERA ZASULICH

“. . .Through [Vera Zasulich’s] suffering, her actions would be redeemed, even

hallowed. . . .martyrdom would crown her triumph. Through Vera’s suffering

and possible death, Russians would be moved by the spectacle of her heroism.

Terror and martyrdom would be joined in one perfect, enduring act of violence.”

-Ana Siljak, Angel of Vengeance 91

When the conservative Alexander II came to power in 1855, the nature of the state had been one of extreme oppression leaving the intellectuals of the population feeling great dissatisfaction with their roles in life. The majority of the Russian population was tied to the land as serfs and lived in conditions of poverty and starvation.

Russia’s humiliating defeat in the Crimean War, 1853-1856, forced the tsar to rethink the structure of both society and the government. Out of a need to create a better army,

Alexander II, ‘the tsar liberator,’ established a set of reforms in 1864 that would change the very backbone of Russian society.

The reforms that Alexander II instituted proved to be a step in the right direction to calm the unstable society. He released the serfs from bondage, reformed the judicial system, relaxed censorship and expanded education, including education to women.

These reforms were supposed to bring the government, especially the Tsar, closer to the people. The largest change that came about from these reforms related to the judicial system. The new jury system put in place was based off those found in Europe and the

91 Ana Siljak, Angel of Vengeance: The "Girl Assassin," the Governor of St. Petersburg, and Russia's Revolutionary World , (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2008), 212-213.

United States. These legal systems provided the Russians not only with a model, but established the idea of “legality.” 92 Both judges and defense attorneys were free from any form of government control, and trials were conducted in view of the public. Because of this need for the public’s involvement, the media was provided with an openness

(g lasnost ) that allowed for a greater representation of public opinion in the press. Trials were now publicized, which ensured a sense of fairness in the proceedings and established a faith in the court system. 93 This reform faced issues relating to the fact that the Russian people did not understand the concept that all are equal before the law and to have legal rights and duties. 94 This legality would be established in the trials of the revolutionaries in the 1870s, especially in relation to the trials of radical intelligentsia.

The radicals that emerged in the 1860s took on the label of nihilist, a term that came from Ivan Turganev’s famous novel, Fathers and Sons . Sergei Kravchinskii, an activist in the 1870s, defined nihilism as “negation in the name of individual liberty, negation of the obligations imposed upon the individual. Nihilism was a powerful and passionate reaction, not against the political despotism, but against the moral despotism that weighs upon the private and inner life of the individual.”95 In order to solve the problems they saw in society they believed the destruction of the old order had to occur first. In 1873 and 1874, thousands of young people and students started the populist movement. The movement was based on the idea that a just society can be formed

92 Siljak, Angel of Vengeance , 193.

93 Ibid

94 Vera Broido, Apostles into Terrorists: Women and the Revolutionary Movement in the Russia of Alexander II, (New York: The Viking Press, 1977), 148.

95 Barbara Alpen Engel, Mothers and Daughters: Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth- Century Russia , (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 63.

through increased education for all Russian people. These youths traveled to Russian villages in an attempt to enlighten and educate the peasants in order to prepare them for the revolution they saw coming. The peasants were suspicious of the students, especially with their strong belief in the tsar as the ‘little father’ who served as their protector. The peasants would often turn in the strangers to the local authorities. The “going to the people movement” ended in failure, but the revolutionaries learned that usefulness of propaganda was limited under the current administration and that they must keep their plans a secret in order to avoid further arrests.

The Land and Freedom organization evolved out of the failed populist movement and became its own organization in 1876. In December, the organization called together a demonstration of over 200 people to protest outside the Kazan Cathedral in St.

Petersburg. The police successfully broke up the demonstrations through the use of a mob of merchants and janitors. The organization later split into two factions over the nature of how to go about the creation of the new society. One faction believed that peaceful propaganda would bring about the wanted change, while the other saw that only the violent overthrow of the regime could make real and permanent changes.

The Role of Women

The role of women in the male dominated Russian society had for centuries been based on tradition and religion. Russian law provided the male almost unlimited authority within his family. Female peasants had tasks that were vital to the running of the family household. Not only did they make sure the family was well fed and clothed, they worked

out in the fields with their husbands. During times of harvest, the woman’s labor was needed in order to harvest the crop on time.

With the impact of industrialization and urbanization, much of the peasant population moved from the countryside into towns or cities. At first, the trend had been for males to go to the city and make money through working while leaving their family behind in their villages. The majority of the women that moved to cities and decided to remain were unattached. More women joined their husbands when living conditions in the cities improved and supported a family’s needs. The ability to move into cities provided peasant women the chance to improve their lots in life. They could move away from families and go to work in factories. Though, the patriarch of the family no longer held reign over her, the female was still subservient to male factory owners.

The education of women reinforced the idea of women as good wives and mothers in the 1850s. Schools emphasized that a woman is a “delicate creature who is naturally dependent on others, her destiny is the family. She should learn that her fate is to submit to her husband, and not to command. She can only ensure her happiness and acquire love and respect of others. . .by strictly fulfilling her family duties.” 96 To teach women the knowledge that men learned in the institutes, the government believed, would only breed discontent for their station in life because they could not act on such ideas.

The education of noblewomen differed in that they did not have to learn the domestic qualities that other women did; instead, their education was one of a ‘decorative’ nature,

96 Engel , 24.

such as learning various languages, like French. 97 Though the education different from men, girls attending school increased from 2,007 in 1802 to 4,864 in 1834. 98

In the 1860s, a movement for the equal rights of women developed for access to education and jobs. Women of the educated elite started the movement in an attempt to improve the lives of the needy. These women engaged in philanthropic work and organizations, which focused on the improvement of women in society. In an 1860 article published in Contemporary Mikhail Mikhailo stated that “all flaws in the female character were socially conditioned not innate, and could be eradicated simply by granting women the same rights as men to education and work.” 99 In stating such, he showed that the freeing of women to work would not destroy the family system and instead would strengthen the family by making women equal to men. These discussions allowed urban women to experiment with their positions in life.

The greater freedoms granted to women in family life activated in a number of women a desire to participation in the public sphere. When women struggled for personal freedoms and a break from domesticity, conservative members of society met them with opposition. The men of society saw this as an attack on the social and political order and tried to suppression women through fear. Some women bowed to the pressure and returned to their feminine normal roles in society. Others joined with the nihilists in an attempt to change not only their lot in life, but society as a whole; they wished to

“restructure their lives according to new and more rational principles.”100 The family

97 Engel, 25.

98 Engel, 27.

99 Engel, 53.

100 Engel, 63.

tried to reign in the girls and prevent them from dressing in certain clothing related to the nihilist group and disapproved of the girls walking through the streets unescorted. By law, a women could not run away from her family until she turned twenty-one, or she married; at the time of marriage, the husband would receive the right to authority over his wife. 101

The tsarist government did not support the women’s movement to the extent the women would have liked. In a report, a member of the Third Section provided the reason for the government’s disapproval for the new independent woman. The member condemned the movement because it “undermined everything sacred to women, the family, religion, and femininity itself, replacing them with the ‘emancipated women,’ with her cropped hair, blue glasses, and sloppy dress, who refused to use a comb or soap, and who lived in ‘common law married with a subject of the opposite sex, or with several of them.” 102 Parts of society, especially the conservative, shared these sentiments. These beliefs caused the male radicals to push woman to fight for their own causes because any rebellion against the repressive state would help establish a new order.

Women took the advice and pushed for further educational developments, which they received in 1870 when women were permitted to take courses taught by university professors. Though this pleased some women, most women wanted the ability to gain a university education. They continued to pressure the government until they were provided with higher courses of study in Moscow in 1872. 103 Other courses opened later

101 Engel , 70-71.

102 Engel, 101.

103 Waldron, 74.

in other institutions across Russia and drew in many women from the gentry; the enrollment in 1881 was over 900 students. 104 The increase in education further the radicalization of many women, not only through increased knowledge, but the independence they gained being outside of the patriarchal family environment.

In the late nineteenth century, women turned to revolutionary groups, which provided them with options in life that were unimaginable in traditional society. The women that made up the group of intellectual revolutionaries was a small number ; noblewoman avoided reform efforts and focused on their families. The only profession that seemingly offered women with equality to men was that of a revolutionary; this vocation “[allowed] her talents to fully unfold, and [permitted] her to rise to the top; there her energies, character, and skills were unlocked and put to use.”105 The women who did get involved did not focus on gender equality, instead they “aspired to ‘serve society,’ to be ‘useful to the people.’” 106 The need to feel useful to society allowed many women to break with the roles established to them by their parents and the male dominated society.

To these women, the ‘cause’ of improving the lives of those around them, especially the peasants, came before their own self-interests. These women were concerned with a system based on equality; in such a system they believed all women would gain freedom and made equal with men. The female participation in populist movements in the 1860s reached about 65 of the 2000 radicals and by the 1870s women made up 15-20% of the

104 Waldron, 74.

105 Richard Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism 1860-1930 , (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 153.

106 Engel, 86.

revolutionaries. 107 When the movement went underground as a result of pressures from the government and an attempt at repression, male leaders of the revolutionary organizations increased recruitment of women. Few beyond the male leaders knew the organizations plans allowing for members of the organization to be tricked and used, especially in the case of naïve women who wanted nothing else but to ‘be useful.’ Many women faced arrest, long prison sentences, exile, and even death for their eagerness to please.

The ability to think politically on a level closer to that of men allowed women to gain a better understanding of the struggles facing the peasants and urban workers. In understanding the issues better, women started to meet in purely female groups. The focus of these groups returned to the question of a women’s role in society. Essentially, these women were “trying to liberate themselves from the stagnant past and all tradition, from the family and from the marital authority that had enslaved them, and prevented them from entering the broad path of development and work for the good of society.” 108

The separate groups allowed for women to develop a stronger feeling of consciousness with their personal female cause and gave them greater confidence when they joined back with the male groups. The women saw that their individual issues with society could only be worked out through complete social equality. The goal for women remained the recreation of society in a manner that would allow everyone greater equality and freedom; they, like the men in their ranks, would result to any means to reach this goal.

107 John M. Thompson, A Vision Unfulfilled: Russia and the Soviet Union in the Twentieth Century , (Lexington, MA: D.C. Health and Company, 1996), 49.

108 Engel, 113.

The Woman and Her Deed

Vera Zasulich was born the third of four daughters to an impoverished noble family in Mikhaylovka, Russia on August 8, 1849. At the age of three, her father passed away leaving her mother with a small estate and little money. She sent Zasulich to live in

Biakolovo with her rich relatives, the Mikulich family, who provided her with an education. By the age of fifteen, she read Schiller, Ryleev, Lermontov, and Nekrasov; these writers sent her into a state of “social daydreaming” where she longed to perform great deeds. 109 At sixteen, she traveled to Moscow to attend a private boarding school and at the age of seventeen, she “considered herself a socialist.” 110 Soon after, she moved to

St. Petersburg where she found a job as a clerk, a weaver in a collective, and was active in educating workers through literary classes conducted at night. The scene she entered when she moved to St. Petersburg was radically different from that which she had left. St.

Petersburg had become a center for the spread of radical ideas and beliefs.

Zasulich received her first taste for the growing revolutionary movement in St.

Petersburg. In the 1869 student riots, she first met the energetic, cunning, charismatic leader of an underground revolutionary group, Sergei Nechaev; the group in reality did not exist. 111 Zasulich’s relationship with Nechaev marked her as one of the prime suspects in Nechaev’s revolutionary actions; she was just one in a large number of women who had been used by Nechaev in the name of ‘the cause.’ She vehemently denied ever having been in any conspiracy with Nechaev, “I never even considered

109 Stites, 144.

110 Stites, 144.

111 Joseph Frank and Mary Petrusewicz, Dostoevsky: A Writer in his Time , (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 629.

plotting against the sacred person of the tsar.” 112 Her sisters, too, had fallen under

Nechaev’s spell. He kept the women ignorant of his plans for a ‘people’s revolt.’ In most of the cases that went before the court, the women were found innocent in their ignorance and released from prison; Vera Zasulich and two other women were not so lucky and were sentenced for their involvement. Zasulich received a sentence of four years imprisonment in one of Petersburg’s worst prisons, “The Lithuanian Castle.” 113 Zasulich never knew while in prison what crimes had been charged against her. She spent thirteen months in solitary confinement before being transferred to the “Russian Bastille,” the

Peter and Paul Fortress. 114 With no evidence to prove her connection in the notable

Nechaev Affair, Zasulich was released from prison after two years and sent into exile to

Soligalich for an additional two years. 115

The time Zasulich spent in exile served to strengthen her conviction to the revolutionary movement. The unjust sufferings she endured while in prison, and now in exile, pushed her in the direction of further revolutionary action. When she was released from exile in September 1875, she traveled to Kiev where she joined the revolutionary circle known as the Southern Rebels ( Iuzhnye Buntari ). 116 She stayed with the group for a little over a year and in that time helped them develop a successful prison break. She

112 Barbara Alpen Engel and Clifford N. Rosenthal, eds., Five sisters: Women Against the Tsar. The Memoirs of Five Young Anarchist Women of the 1870's , (New York: Routledge, 1987), 99.

113 Siljak, Angel of Vengeance , 115; Engel and Rosenthal, 61.

114 Siljak, Angel of Vengeance , 117.

115 Engel and Rosenthal, 78.

116 Jay Bergman, Vera Zasulich: A Biography , (Stanford, California: Stanford U. P., 1983), 23.

returned to St. Petersburg in 1876 and in late July 1877 Zasulich first read a brief article about the flogging of Arkhip Bogolyubov in The Voice (Golos ).

Bogolyubov had been a student at the St. Petersburg University and a participant in revolutionary activities. On December 6, 1876 Bogolyubov was arrested for participating in a demonstration at the Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg. He was tried in court and sentenced to fifteen years hard labor. He appealed the sentence and was placed in the House of Detention until his appeal. On July 13, 1877, General Fedor Trepov visited the prison to perform an inspection. Trepov was the former chief of police in

Warsaw, the current municipal Governor of St. Petersburg, and a personal friend of Tsar

Alexander II. When Trepov passed Bogolyubov and another prisoner in the prison courtyard and Bogolyubov failed to tip his hat in respect, Trepov became enraged and demanded to be shown respect. In the next instant, the hat had flown off Bogolyubov’s head; the prisoners in the cells that were watching thought that Trepov had hit

Bogolyubov and the force of the hit dislodged the hat. It was not clear if Trepov had struck him, but the fact it looked like Bogolyubov had been abused inspired the prisoners to riot. Trepov, in response, ordered that Bogolyubov be flogged. Unbeknownst to most, the action took place only after requesting and receiving permission to go through with the act from the Minister of Justice, Count Konstantin Pahlen. 117

The nature of corporal punishment in previous years would not have drawn the kind of attention or outrage that it did when Bogolyubov was flogged. In the past, flogging and other forms of corporal punishment had been allowed in prisons. Under the

Judicial Reforms of 1864, a prisoner could only be flogged in special cases; convicts who

117 Bergman, Vera Zasulich: A Biography , 36.

“committed a breach of discipline” could be legally flogged. 118 Corporal punishment was especially degrading to educated individuals, such as students, and high-ranking noblemen. The rarity of corporal punishment made Bogolyubov’s flogging grotesque and served as a representation of a “retrograde, hardened, and ultimately bloodthirsty regime.” 119 This incident and the exaggerated and prominent nature the press gave the story set off revolutionary circles on the road to avenge Bogolyubov. The Zemlia i Volia in Kiev, along with Zasulich, set into action separate plans to avenge not only the dignity of one of their own, but to destroy the state, the “monster” that was “large, armed, [and used] violent force that conspired against the radicals at every turn.” 120

The decision to turn to terror had not been an easy for Vera Zasulich. She was torn between her moral conscience and her social and political beliefs. In her trail, she would state that “it is terrible to raise one’s hand against a fellow man. . .but I decided that this is what I had to do.”121 Grigorii Gradovskii of The Voice stated after the trial

Zasulich felt she needed to turn to terror because society stood silent in the face of atrocities; society had “forced her to raise her hand against another.” 122 Through this act of terror, Zasulich took a stand against the government, throwing off the passivity known not only to her as a woman, but as a servant to an oppressive state.

118 Broido, 144; Bergman, 35.

119 Siljak, Angel of Vengeance , 183.

120 Siljak, Angel of Vengeance , 188.

121 Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1818 , (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 374.

122 Siljak, Angel of Vengeance , 243.

In the morning of January 24, 1878, Zasulich left her apartment and went to

Trepov’s office under the guise of petitioning for a certificate of conduct, which would grant her the ability to become a private tutor. 123 Zasulich believed that her gender would allow for the perfect cover, especially if she looked like a woman of society going to the office of a powerful man for help and guidance.124 The general belief among men in society was in the weakness of the female gender and their inability to handle difficult and violent tasks associated with revolution. This belief would allow her the perfect cover along with the ability to get close without suspicion. The company of other petitioners also helped to keep suspicion from arising because no one would notice one anxious woman among an anxious crowd. She presented herself under the assumed name

Elizaveta Kozlova and was dressed in a plain, but respectable dress and hat along with a large gray shawl, under which she hid her pistol. At the point she entered the office with the other petitioners, Zasulich had remained calm and collected. She was briefly shaken up when she realized she would be called on first to present her petition; her plan had called for her to shoot Trepov when he approached the first petitioner. She regained her composure as he approached, and handed him her petition. When he turned to the next petitioner, Zasulich pulled her revolver from under her shawl and pulled the trigger twice.

The first shot misfired while the second hit Trepov in the lower pelvis. She dropped the gun and waited to be arrested. Immediately, she was surrounded, seized, beaten and arrested.

123 Bergman, Vera Zasulich: A Biography , 39; Siljak, Angel of Vengeance , 2.

124 Siljak, Angel of Vengeance, 212.

Reaction and Trial

The unbelievable nature of the case brought on immense interest of the press. The novelty of Zasulich as a female assassin interested the public, especially when it came to her appearance and character. Articles in Russia and Europe detailed her appearance and made assumptions on her mental state during the assassination attempt. Some played up the idea of her cold-blooded nature after the completion of the crime and during questioning. Articles remarked that she was not pretty woman, but she possessed an air about her that drew attention. She was described as “striking,” “attractive,” “modest and unpretentious,” and a woman with a great sense of femininity and innocence.125 Various newspapers printed images of Zasulich. Hand drawn images depicted her as a “wilting Figure 2 : Vera Zasulich in her early twenties heroine,” while pictures from her youth showed her as more attractive, and strikingly more feminine and innocent.126 In The

Voice , Gradovskii asked the question “Where is the accused?” because in his opinion he saw “young, pleasant looking girl. . . [with] intelligent. . . eyes [that glowed] with warmth, goodness. Her remarkable soul sparkles in that gave. . .her face [bears] the traces

125 Siljak, Angel of Vengeance , 282;

126 Ibid.

of spiritual travail and physical sufferings.” 127 With the media painting her in such a light, the reader could see beyond her being an assassin, and look to the traditional and ideal femininity Zasulich possessed. The depictions separated her from the violent nature of her crime and showed that one as saintly as she could not rightly have committed such an act out of revenge alone; she must have been driven by something greater.

The press romanticized Vera Zasulich’s story by transforming her into the ideal traditional woman forced to action by passion. Her story became that of the victim; she was depicted as an innocent oppressed young woman fighting against a sadistic government who unjustly forced her to spend years “in a dungeon,” and upon release continued to suffer police persecution.128 The New Times (Novoe vretnia ) labeled

Zasulich as one led to action by “genuine patriotism.” 129 Both the French and English press compared her, in an instance of romanticism, to Charlotte Corday of the French

Revolution and Joan of Arc. 130 Comparisons drawn between Trepov and Zasulich provided the public with a view of the positive morality behind her crime. They argued the point that it was only moral to favor the character of the pure and innocent assassin over the vile ‘victim.’ The Obshchina , a revolutionary journal published in Geneva, presented Zasulich as a symbol for “the human condition and the sanctity of a heroic exploit;” in contrast, Trepov was depicted as the “law, authority, power, cowardice, and falsehood” that she had to fight against for self-preservation along with the survival of

127 Siljak, Angel of Vengeance , 234.

128 Siljak, Angel of Vengeance , 234.

129 Effie Ambler, Russian Journalism and Politics, 1861-1881 the Career of Aleksei S. Suvorin, (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1972), 163.

130 Bergman, Vera Zasulich: A Biography , 43-44; Siljak, Angel of Vengeance , 299.

Russian society. 131 Articles based on rumors about the ill character of Trepov furthered

Zasulich’s femininity. One such rumor accused Trepov, or someone who Trepov turned a

“blind eye” to, of inappropriately touching and violating Zasulich’s “female dignity.” 132

Along those lines, Zasulich’s act was treated as one done out of female passion for a lost love. In London, The Times revealed to its readers that Zasulich was supposedly

Bogolyubov’s mistress and that the assassination attempt was an act of revenge for the man she loved. 133 The New York Times in this article, THE TRUE STORY OF THE ST.

PETERSBURG AFFAIR, stated that Vera had worked as a governess to a noble family.

In 1875, she supposedly met and fell in love with Trepov, but he abandoned her. With her honor taken from her, Zasulich turned to her former lover, Bogolyubov, who went to

Warsaw and attacked Trepov in public. The resulting actions of Bogolyubov being thrown into prison, flogged, and sent into exile were all because of a “woman scorned.” 134

Investigation into the case took a month and resulted in the trial of the case by a jury in the St. Petersburg District Court. A criminal act such as the one Zasulich committed would have fallen in the jurisdiction of the District Court, except the police uncovered her revolutionary background. Because she was a revolutionary, her crime was deemed political in nature. According to the Judicial Reforms put in place by Alexander

II, her trial should take place in “exceptional court,” instead of in front of a jury of her

131 Bergman, Vera Zasulich: A Biography , 54.

132 Siljak, Angel of Vengeance , 281.

133 Bergman, Vera Zasulich: A Biography , 43.

134 Siljak, Angel of Vengeance , 283.

peers. 135 High-ranking officials, including Pahlen, A. A. Lopukhin, and possibly the tsar himself, wished for her to be tried by a jury of her peers in the St. Petersburg District

Court. Pahlen was confident that the jury could not look at the evidence against Zasulich and find her innocent. In his opinion, the feelings of the general Russian public had turned against revolutionaries after their failures and that the consensus would be a disapproval of any terrorist act, especially those against government officials. 136 He believed the punishment Zasulich would receive would show other revolutionaries that

“heroic exploit” would be punished. 137

As President of the Court, Anatolii Koni would preside over the trial, which commenced on March 31. The state accused her of premeditation in her attempt to kill

Trepov; they believed she would have been successful if her gun had not misfired. P.A.

Aleksandrov, Zasulich’s attorney, chose clerks, lower civil servants, and members of the intelligentsia to fill the jury; he avoided merchants and large landowners because of their conservative views. 138 Trepov was not present at the trial as he had claimed that he was too ill to attend even though he was healthy enough to make daily drives. The attorney hired to represent the state’s case was the ill equipped K. I. Kessel. He did not have the gift of oratory that Aleksandrov possessed. In court, Kessel presented the material evidence and eyewitness statements, emphasizing that the act of any form of attempted murder not only went against legal law, but any moral norms that society established.

135 Bergman, Vera Zasulich: A Biography , 40.

136 Bergman, Vera Zasulich: A Biography , 40-41.

137 Bergman, Vera Zasulich: A Biography , 40.

138 Alexander Polunov, Thomas C. Owen, and Larissa G. Zakharova, Russia in the Nineteenth Century: Autocracy, Reform, and Social Change, 1814-1914 , (Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2005), 123.

Zasulich had openly confessed that she had shot Trepov, but had added that she had no plan for the outcome of the attack. Her goal, she stated, was to avenge the wrong done to

Bogolyubov.139

Aleksandrov faced an uphill battle in his defense of Zasulich. His client had tied his hands through her threat that if he changed any of the events so that her actions appeared in a good light she would immediately dismiss him. 140 In order to win the case, he spoke of her past hardships as both a woman and a servant to the state, including her unjust jail sentence and the poverty she suffered. He asserted that her time spent in jail led her to feel compassion and outrage for all those that suffered unfair treatment and were given an unjust fate by the government. 141 He asserted that as a prisoner, she had never known “friendship, love, and genuine contact with the world” and in that time she learned and eventually possessed “a selfless love for everyone who, like herself, had to bear the miserable existence of a political suspect.” 142 He went on to state that whoever this person was, whether she knew them or not, they would become “a dear friend to her, the companion of her youth, the comrade-in-learning.” 143 He summed up his argument by stating that what was considered a crime against society today could be seen later as a

“respectable act of civic courage” and that such crimes were reforms that came too soon

139 Girish N. Bhat, "The Moralization of Guilt in Late Imperial Russian Trial by Jury: The Early Reform Era," Law and History Review 15, no. 1 (1997): 111, accessed September 20, 2011, http://www.jstor.org/stable/827706

140 Bergman, Vera Zasulich: A Biography , 42.

141 Bhat, 111.

142 Bergman, Vera Zasulich: A Biography , 21.

143 Ibid.

and into a time not yet ready to receive them. 144 When Aleksandrov concluded his argument, those present in the courtroom openly applauded him.

As judge, Koni informed the jury that they should make their judgment based not on personal emotion and only on the evidence and facts presented; he emphasized that the only time pity and emotion should be brought in would be during sentencing. The jurors were then led out of the room for deliberations. No matter their decision, according to

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Zasulich was destined to become a heroine of the Russian people.

If convicted, she would become a martyr; if acquitted, society would be shown that her act was met not only with approval but with “legal sanction,” and undermined the tsar’s authority.145 Within thirty minutes, the jury returned with a verdict of not guilty. As the verdict was read, the courtroom burst into applause, including the high government officials present. The people present believed that the jury system had succeeded.

Zasulich, alone, remained sitting in a state of shock; she had prepared herself to be executed at the conclusion of the trial. Koni advised that she be released from the side door in the House of Detention. The police ignored Koni’s request, possibly on orders from their superiors, and she was released out the front door into the awaiting crowd. She was greeted with cries of ‘Long live Zasulich’ as she was lifted onto the shoulders of a man and carried through the streets. 146

When a carriage had been found for her, the crowd continued to escort her through the streets. Police surrounded her carriage claiming that they were going to

144 Siljak, Angel of Vengeance , 237.

145 Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 375.

146 Bergman, Vera Zasulich: A Biography , 51.

transfer her from one carriage to another for her protection, but the crowd, fearing the police was going to arrest her, moved closer to the carriage to protect her. Three shots were fired into the crowd leaving one man wounded and another dead. The shots were fired by the mortally wounded individual, G. P. Sidoratskii, a student as the St.

Petersburg Medical Academy. 147 This incident only increased the chaos of the scene, which in and of itself, helped Zasulich to escape and avoided the Tsar’s orders for her re- arrest.

The Impact

The acquittal of Vera Zasulich served to sharpen the struggle waged between the revolutionaries and the government. According to those in favor of the acquittal, the judgment had not been made in favor of the innocence of one young woman, but was passed on the whole of Russian society. Grigorii Gradovskii emphasized this point in his recount of the trial in the April 2 edition of The Voice. He felt within the courtroom the

“moral storm” had finally been revealed to the Russian people and it “[demanded] that we evaluate everything this is good and bad within us, throwing open the doors of your soul and bringing it to an impartial, merciless court.” 148 The time had come for Russians to look within themselves and at their society, to see the problems, and to change the problems that needed to be addressed.

The main voice of opposition in Russia against Zasulich, her acquittal and the radical intelligentsia as a whole was that of Mikhail Katkov reflected in his paper, the

147 Bergman, Vera Zasulich: A Biography , 52.

148 Siljak, Angel of Vengeance , 222.

Moscow News (Moskovskie vedmosti ) . Even before the trial, Katkov held feelings of general revulsion against the intelligentsia. After the jury proclaimed her innocent, he was convinced that “sedition was at large” and worse than ever before. 149 He went so far as to state that the intelligentsia was a “plague” upon society that must be eliminated and the only way to do such was through a “salutary fear before the legal authority” where that authority would enforce “stern measures” which will be received by the people as

“acts of beneficence.” 150 There were many in the population that agreed with his sentiments, especially those in government positions. He blamed the open trial system for allowing the revolutionaries to spread their propaganda to the masses through “seditious speeches.” 151 When the liberal and radical newspapers such as The Voice and the

Northern Courier (Severnyi vestnik ) announced the acquittal to be “a triumph of moral conscience,” Katkov argued that it was a “scandal” and a “disgrace.” 152 To him, those who supported and followed Zasulich were “effete liberal intellectuals, lacking the common sense of ordinary Russians;” he included the liberal press in this category. 153 Katkov believed that they ignored every facet of moral and legal law in overlooking the crime of murder of a high ranking public official.

Eventually, Vera Zasulich’s name vanished from the headlines, but her trial and the issues it brought to the foreground remained. There was a belief that the trial had not

149 Karel Durman, The Time of the Thunderer: Mikhail Katkov, Russian Nationalist Extremism and the Failure of the Bismarckian System, 1871-1887, (Boulder: Columbia University Press, 1988), 262.

150 Durman, 262-263.

151 Polunov, 122.

152 Bergman, Vera Zasulich: A Biography , 43.

153 Siljak, Angel of Vengeance, 260.

truly been about her, but about the social issues that forced her hand. Soon, the implications of not only her act and her acquittal, but how she was depicted in the press, would bring about a drastic change to the face of Russian society. Intellectuals, such as

Leo Tolstoy, seemed to predict the coming change in his statement, “The Zasulich Affair is not a joke but rather like a harbinger of revolution.” 154

The Zasulich affair and the presses coverage of it only furthered to widen the gap between the autocratic regime that became more insufferable daily and the radical revolutionaries who were prepared and willing to respond with armed resistance. Both conservative and liberal Russians were pleased by the successful use of a “truly civilized,

European-style legality” brought to Russia through the trial system; they admired it for its ability to push forward their own morals, ideas and desires. 155 This unity diminished upon the tsar’s open disapproval over the verdict, but it did not stop public opinion from developing. Through the public’s ability to read the accounts of Zasulich and other revolutionaries and the treatment the state unfairly thrust upon them, public opinion turned in the favor of sympathy for the radicals and their cause.

To the tsar and his regime, the acquittal of a known assassin and revolutionary proved a humiliating strike against them. The tsar saw the judicial reforms he had instated in 1864 as flawed and having led to the lenient verdicts passed down not only to

Zasulich, but to other radicals before her. These laws gradually destroyed the traditional hierarchy of the state, diminishing its power and influence instead of the convictions of the radical intelligentsia. Many had put faith in the new trial system and had come up

154 Bergman, Vera Zasulich: A Biography , 54.

155 Broido, 151.

with it failing them. Koni did not believe that the system had failed in the case of

Zasulich, but that the verdict had been wrong because “one could morally excuse the act but could not legally condone it.” 156 It was because of the ‘incorrect’ outcome of the trial,

Pahlen proposed to the State Council that military tribunal should try any cases that involved an armed attack against the state. At first, his proposal was rejected. Instead, on

May 9, 1878 the government passed a law that made it so that cases involving violence against officials could not be tried by jury. After an increase in terrorist attacks against the state, the proposal was adopted on August 9, 1878. Further decrees were instated that restricted the power of the courts to an even greater degree.

The regime had noted the amount of influence the press had on the public both during and after the trial. The majority of articles presented Zasulich as a martyr who had done no wrong in her attack against the state. These same articles presented the state in an unfavorable light that only caused greater resentment to grow among the radical population. The regime concluded that public opinion had turned away from tradition and toward lawlessness because of the press had been given too much freedom and openness in the reforms. Numerous papers after the trial received warnings from the Ministry of

Internal Affairs, such as The Voice for Gradovskii’s animated article in favor of the jury’s decision.157 To prevent journals from openly supporting the defendants and their cause, censorship was heightened; after 1881, trial proceedings were no longer reported.

The tsar felt he needed to limit the amount of articles critical to his regime, especially when it was clear that the chaos could soon lead to a full-blown revolution.

156 Ibid.

157 Bergman, Vera Zasulich: A Biography , 54.

The reinstallation of censorship, along with the tsar’s unwillingness to allow dissenting opinions, provided the Third Section, the Russian secret police, with the responsibility to find and punish any who held views that were sympathetic to ‘the cause’ or to Vera

Zasulich. The radicals attempted to appeal to the moderates in society that political freedom was central to Russian society as a whole an censorship took away that freedom.

One such paper, the Northern Courier , printed a statement of defiance from Zasulich and the following day, April 6, the publication was shut down by the Minister of the

Interior. 158

The increase in censorship did not stop the influx of new ideas and revolutionary views from making their way to the public, but it decreased the value that written propaganda held in the eyes of the revolutionaries. Illegal pamphlets began to surface in the larger Russian cities, such as Moscow and St. Petersburg. Each claimed that

Zasulich’s actions were just the beginning. A new radical journal came into existence called The Beginning. One of their articles described the coming of revolution: “Out of the silence of these quiet streets terrible demons will appear demanding an accounting for all the spilt blood. Woe, woe to those murderers who live to see the day of judgment.” 159

Zasulich’s actions and the presses ability to raise her to martyrdom even though convicted showed that actions spoke louder than words and in the end, terrorism paid. 160

The favorable accounts in the press, along with her acquittal, convinced many of the revolutionaries that the majority of Russia saw Zasulich as a dedicated and

158 Bergman, Vera Zasulich: A Biography , 56.

159 Siljak, Angel of Vengeance , 263.

160 Siljak, Angel of Vengeance , 261.

courageous martyr and her crime justifiable. In the Russian Free Press (Vol’naia russkaia tipografia ), the reporters praised her act, remarking that this girl, with a

“heroine’s soul” did not turn away from the thought of performing an “awful bloody deed” that would result in “her own ruin. . .for the defense of the rights of man.” 161 The St

Petersburg Register concluded that the reason Zasulich was acquitted was on account that the government had put itself outside of the law because they never followed it, “he who lives by the sword dies by the sword.” 162 Other papers stated that her acquittal had come from the people; a people who were finally tired of the oppression put on them from the state and ready for a change. The sensational nature of the case reported by the press of a lone woman changing the world with a single shot resulted in the shift toward terror. In her later life, Zasulich looked to “individual terror as an aberration” and became a key member of the non-terrorist organizations, Black Repartition and Liberation of

Labor. 163 The presses misrepresented of Zasulich’s motives for the crime resulted in a wider misinterpretation in the rest of society.

With some influence from public sentiment, Populists and other radicals were driven to further action by the government’s disregard for the reforms and procedures sanctioned by law. In March 1879, an attempt was made to assassinate the head of the

Third Section, Aleksandr Drentel’n. Terrorists succeeded in killing a number of key political figures. A month later, Aleksandr Solov’ev took five shots at the tsar and missed; he was tried and executed within eight weeks. In August, Land and Liberty made

161 Bergman, Vera Zasulich: A Biography , 43.

162 Siljak, Angel of Vengeance , 254.

163 Stites, 144-145.

the assassination of Alexander II their primary goal; this decision broke apart Land and

Liberty into the Black Repartition, who still believed in revolution from below, and the

People’s Will, who turned to terror as the means for revolution. 164 The People’s Will believed that through killing the peasants ‘little father’ they would see the “baselessness of their belief in him and develop a consciousness of their power to forge a populist utopia.” 165 The radicals were driven on by the arrest of their fellow members by the secret police; Sofiya Perovskaia remained free and organized the fatal attempt on the tsar. She argued that her party, The People’s Will, was not formed around the need for vengeance because “Vengeance is a personal affair, something that might. . .explain those acts of terror carried out by the personal will and initiative of separate individuals – but not those of an organized party. But such acts, except those done in self-defense, are almost unknown in our revolutionary history. A political party cannot be formed around the banner of revenge, especially if it attracts the public sympathy that ours undoubtedly enjoys. The first shot – Zasulich’s – was fired not in revenge, but as retribution for an insult to human dignity.” 166 After six failed attempts, the People’s Will successfully assassinated Alexander II with a bomb on March 1, 1881. Within less than a month, the six assassins involved in the plot were arrested, tried, and received the death penalty; the death penalty was altered for one of the pregnant assassins.

Only the most radical in the intelligentsia condoned the assassination allowing for the reassertion of autocracy and a movement for repressive, reactive counter-reform by

164 Laura Engelstein, Slavophile Empire: Imperial Russia's Illiberal Path, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 62.

165 Nina Tumarkin, Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia , (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 16.

166 Stites, 147.

Tsar Alexander III. His counter-reform further aggravated relations between a society wanting to progress and the government, which appeared to be trying to turn back to tradition. In the summer of 1881, “Temporary Regulations” were enacted that allowed officials to arrest, imprison, exile, and conduct court-martial trials of any suspected revolutionary; the regulations resulted in the demise of The People’s Will along with a decline in terrorist activities. 167 These regulations helped to reestablish order and tradition in a chaotic society under the autocracy regime.

Alexander III’s view of women in a traditional, conservative sense resulted in the hindrance to women’s abilities in the public sphere. He and others in the government strongly opposed women’s education resulting in a drastic reduction of a woman’s ability to receive higher education by 1884. By reducing the ability for a women to receive an education, the percentage of women radicals decreased; the women of the radical intelligentsia had been provided good to excellent educations. Their superior education and broad literature base allowed them to perceive the social injustices within society.

One of the Alexander III’s advisors, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, stated that women should not be involved in medicine, professions, and especially kept out of politics. 168

Along with the reduction in education, the government tried to deter women from the public sphere through the increased punishments against women in the 1870s and 1880s.

Before Perovskaya, all death sentences for women had been commuted; after her death, numerous female revolutionaries were sent to the gallows or died in front of the firing squad. Imprisonment increased along with the punishment of hard labor in Siberia. The

167 Nicholas V. Riasanovksy, Russian Identities: A Historical Survey, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 183.

168 Stites, 158.

prison literature of the time spoke of the occasional brutality that female prisoners faced through “rape, forcible stripping, physical violence, and verbal abuse.” 169 The fear of political ideas breeding another Zasulich or Perovskaya compelled the government to forcibly return women as close to their traditional, domestic role as possible.

169 Stites, 153.

CHAPTER 3: SHI JIANQIAO

"[Shi Jianqiao’s] deserved to be lionized as a woman of distinguished

and virtuous valor: 'During a period when morality is worsening daily,

human lust runs amuck, and ethics are dying, Shi, a mere frail woman,

is still able to give up her husband and children to fulfill her filial duty.

Is she not a moral exemplar?'"

- Xiao Yu, 1936 170

Women who grew up in China in the early twentieth-century were faced with various and always changing ideas of the importance and status of women in a clearly male dominated society. Each area within China had its own history of the rise and fall of women, but all provinces of China had at least the shared history of women gaining a closer equality to men only to have it taken away far too soon. The May Fourth movement opened the minds of many of the young and educated population to see the notions of equality and modernity as something concrete and worth fighting. 171 As the younger generation matured into the China of the 1930s, many individuals still held the same beliefs and want, yet fear, for change. It was because of this fear and yet admiration of the ‘New Woman’ that still existed within the culture of China that Shi Jianqiao’s assassination of the warlord Sun Chuanfang became a public spectacle that impacted the lives of all in China.

170 Eugenia Lean, Public Passions. The Trial of Shi Jianqiao and the Rise of Popular Sympathy in Republican China , (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 100

171 Peter Zarrow, China in War and Revolution, 1895-1949, ( New York: Rutledge, 2005), 164.

In the early 1900's, China was in a state of turmoil as the nation underwent numerous changes in politics and society due to the turnover of government rule between various parties. With the failure of the 1901 Boxer Rebellion and its attempt to drive out all foreigners and restore China to isolation, it became clear that politically China was in need of serious reform. A group made of primarily students and military revolutionaries called the Revolutionary Alliance overthrew the Ch’ing dynasty in 1911. In the place of the monarchy, the group established a republican form of government on January 1,

1912. As the new president, Sun Yat-sen pushed forward a three-point program focused on democracy and elected government officials, the propagation of nationalism over imperialism, and adapting Western industrial and agricultural methods to improve the lives of the people. Sun Yat-sen possessed no military power of his own and had to relinquish his political power to militarist Yuan Shikai. On August 25, 1912, Song

Jiaoren and Sun Yat-sen established the Kuomintang by the merging the Revolutionary

Alliance with five smaller pro-revolution parties.172 Fear within the Kuomintang that

Yuan might try to gain too much power resulted in the creation of the National Assembly.

Those fears were justified when Yuan began to ignore parliament. To try to regain power from Yuan, Sun Yat-sen led the KMT in a revolution in 1913. The revolution failed and allowed Yan to proclaim himself emperor in December 1915.

Yuan’s death in 1916 threw China into a state of complete disorder and confusion.

Yuan had failed to build a strong political center and lasting government system, which

172 David Strand, "Citizens in the Audience and at the Podium,” in Changing Meanings of Citizenship in Modern China, eds. Merle Goldman and Elizabeth J. Perry (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002), 59–60. http://books.google.com/books?id=YF- ftHbw59sC&lpg=PA389&dq=1911%20huguang%20beijing&pg=PA59#v=onepage&q=huguang&f=false.

resulted in a divided China. 173 With his death, a power vacuum opened allowing for military commanders to fight for control of territories. Each of these warlords had control of their own army along with their own administrative bureaucracies allowing them to interact with each other like rulers of independent states. 174 Skirmishes between warlords over desires for larger territories broke out amongst the different warlords resulting in massive chaos, death, and economic expenditure. Individuals within warlord ruled territories lived a life marked by “economic exploitation, social oppression, and political feudalism.” 175 The money collected did not go toward economic or social reform, but paid for military expenses. Warlords focused on increasing their own power and wealth, leaving those within their lands to fend for themselves.

The public campaign of the Nationalist party during the Nanjing period focused on a fight against the warlords that held powerful positions in China’s provinces. The leader of the Nationalist party Jiang Jieshi, a former militarist himself, established that the campaign against warlords would include only those in “Northern China under de facto Japanese militarist rule.” 176 This distinction kept his enemies from attempting to gain the upper hand by emphasizing his militarist past. During the 1930s, the Japanese occupied parts of China with the support of some of the former warlords. 177 The Japanese

173 Sidney H. Chang and Ramon H. Myers, eds. The Storm Clouds Clear Over China. The Memoir of Ch'en Li-fu, 1900-1993, ( Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1994), xiii.

174 Hung-Mao Tien, Government and Politics in Kuomintang China, 1927-1937, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1972), 9.

175 Tien, 10.

176 Lean, 29.

177 Roger B. Jeans Jr., Democracy and Socialism in Republican China: The Politics of Zhang Junmai (Carsun Chang), 1906-1941, ( New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1997), 1.

wanted to see these provinces become autonomous states and they needed the help of the

Chinese warlords to do such. 178 One of these powerful warlords was Sun Chaunfang whose defeat of the Fengtian forces under the command of Zhang Zuolin’s in 1924 resulted in him becoming the commander-in-chief of the Five Allied Southeastern

Provinces: Anhui, Jiangxi, Fujian, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang. His command over these areas resulted in greater disconnect between provinces and decentralization of power.

Upon seeing the breakdown of China not only geographically but also socially, revolutionaries saw a major need for reforms that would unify China into a strong, centralized state. In 1919, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was founded and Li Ta- chao proclaimed its leader. In the same year, Sun Yat-sen re-established his party calling it the Chinese Kuomintang (KMT), or the Chinese Nationalist Party. 179 The CCP joined with the KMT to destroy the regional warlords. It was not until 1926 that the Nationalists successfully took up arms against the warlords in their Northern Expedition. Sun

Chaunfang had gained control of several jurisdictions of Shanghai along with much of the southeast. The result of the Northern Expedition that occurred between September

1926 and March 1927 was supposed unification of China with the destruction of numerous warlords in the eastern coastal provinces, including Sun Chuanfang.180 This unification, though, was not complete with militarists still popular with parts of population. With mistrust growing between the KMT and CCP, Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the KMT who took over after the death of Sun Yat-sen on March 12, 1925,

178 Lean, 30

179 Chang, xiii.

180 Lean, 28-29; Chang, xiii.

ordered the elimination of the CCP in April 1927. 181 Anyone suspected of being a

Communist was arrested and executed; this massive extermination resulted in the killing and wounding of 400 workers in Shanghai, along with the official execution of 300

Communists. Members of the CCP that could escape went out to the country or left China altogether. With the elimination of their rival power, the Nationalists established their new government in Nanking on April 18, 1927. The KMT’s Organization Department organized an Investigation Section in order to monitor the activities of any remaining

Communists and remove them permanently from “political life.” 182

Even with the establishment of a central government, China still suffered from crisis during the 1930s. The KMT began to fracture over ideological differences in how the government should rule China. Some believed that the KMT should continue ruling absolutely, while others believed that it was time to “establish a constitutional government and allow political parties to compete.” 183 The division in the KMT started numerous rebellions across China. At the time, the CCP came back with greater strength forcing the country into a civil war through their guerilla activities. To make matters worse, on September 18, 1931, the Japanese Kwantung Army blew up part of the South

Manchurian Railway located in northeast China. The Japanese blamed the Chinese for the attack, which justified their invasion and eventual annexation of Manchuria. 184 All three situations greatly weakened the KMT government and left China as a whole in a state of crisis.

181 Tien, 10; Chang, xiii.

182 Chang, xvii

183 Chang, xviii.

184 Chang, xviii-xix.

The Role of Women

Throughout Chinese history “women’s issues have been subordinated to developmental interests and their relative importance has changed over the years to accommodate China’s development.” 185 In the early twentieth century, Sun Yat-sen supported women’s suffrage and stated that if opponents towards women’s suffrage appeared that he would “intervene on [their] behalf” because he recognized and respected their objectives. 186 Under the rule of Yuan Shikai’s and the parliament, the Women’s

Suffrage Alliance hoped to gain lawful recognition of the rights of women through the

Provisional Constitution, but the government ignored their letters. This disregard for the feelings of the women caused riots to break out on March 19, 1912; women broke into the chambers of the Nanjing parliament. When the topic of women’s suffrage came up, the women jeered and yelled to the point that the proceedings could not continue. When parliament tried to reconvene, the women prevented the delegates from re-entering the building. One of the delegates gave a detailed speech on the women’s suffrage movement in Europe and concluded, “one absolutely did not find such barbarous and illegal behavior on the part of women in civilized countries.” 187 The next day, parliament was prepared and guards kept women out; some women broke windows and others kicked,

185 Kyung Ae Park, "Women and Revolution in China: The sources of Constraints on Women's Emancipation" in Women and Revolution in Africa, Asia, and the New World , ed. Mary Ann Tétreault, (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1994), 143.

186 Ono Kazuko, Chinese Women in a Century of Revolution, 1850-1950, ed. Joshua A. Fogel, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), 80.

187 Kazuko, 83.

shoved, and beat the guards preventing them entrance. A third invasion occurred the next day, but tighter security prevented women from entering the main hall.

Women had taken on a violent role in order to underscore the importance new freedoms and equality meant to them. They had long supported the struggle to establish the republic in hopes that they would become equal to a man in the public sphere. The violence caused some men withdraw their support for women and their struggle for equality. Their struggle was put on the back burner until the 1919 May Fourth Movement in which women once again began to demand rights such as the right to own property, receive an education, a choice in who they married, suffrage, and the ability to run for elected office. 188 To many during this time it was the family that prevented individual rights and kept China from becoming modern. This movement remained confined to small groups around China that did little to change the everyday lives of women.

Through the establishment of the Chinese Communist party in 1921 the influence of women increased. The CCP guaranteed their female members various rights along with their own special bureau within the party. Though these women of the CCP were a part of the party, rarely did women become full formal members in the patriarchal hierarchical system.

The women’s movement effectively came into its own with the May 30

Movement of 1925 and lasted until the end of the 1927 Revolution. This movement was formed through the merger of political action with “anarchists, the left-wing Kuomintang, the Communists, the student, labor and peasant activities.” 189 During this time, unions

188 Park, 140.

189 Helen Foster Snow, Women in Modern China, (Paris: Mouton & Co., 1967), 20.

came about that served as marriage and divorce bureaus; their main purpose was to protect the rights of women and children. These women had effectively changed the balance of power not only in their homes, but in their society as a whole. Men saw the leaders of the women’s unions as the cause for chaos and crisis in their society. Leaders such as Madame Liao Chung-k’ai had organized ten provinces of a million and a half women behind the cause of increased political and social freedoms for women. It did not take long for the Kuomintang to start a counterrevolution against this movement. The counterrevolution resulted in the torture, mistreatment, and murder of many women; woman of the Kuomintang were not safe from being killed and often times suffered beatings and deaths “more savagely, as their activities had touched closer to home.” 190

It would not be until the Nationalist government felt secure in their power between 1928 and 1931 that women would be allowed another chance at political freedom. The KMT in 1930 guaranteed women equal inheritance rights and in 1933 changed the laws to make it so women could marry freely with the illegality of polygamy recognized by law. 191 With the changes in laws, many men feared a loss in their status quo. This fear was deeply felt by peasant men who often times purchased their wives as they would any other piece of property. Any freedom guaranteed to these peasant women were effectively prevented by their husbands impact on the government, especially when it came to the CCP’s need for the backing of the peasant population. 192

With the Communists once again gaining power and with a popular ideology, the

190 Snow, 137.

191 Park, 140.

192 Park, 142.

Nationalist Party under the leadership of Kai-chek and his wife Soong May-ling stepped in repress them. The New Life Movement of 1934 succeeded in preventing any of these new codes from being enforced. The New Life Movement called for “a revival of

Confucian values” and a re-feminization of women, effectively making the new laws null-and-void. The government turned back to the four principles of Li (rules of conduct),

I (righteousness), Lien (honesty) and Ch'ih (conscientiousness) in order to prevent further disorder within society. Of the four principles, Li was the most harmful to women in that it “kept women prisoners in the patriarchal family system.” 193

The Woman and Her Deed

Shi Jianqiao started out life by the name of Shi Gulan. She was born to a privileged family in 1906 in the city of Tongcheng in the Anhui province of China. 194 She was the second of six children; she had one older brother, three younger brothers, and a younger sister. Coming from a privileged family, Shi Jianqiao received an education not only in the “proper womanly arts, including lyrical poetry,” but was also educated in the more modern type of education including the study of national and classical literature, such as the Confucian classics. 195 She was brought up in a household based around

Confucian beliefs where her father taught her and her siblings how to be good human beings through not being “idle or wanton,” never abandoning others, being “industrious and thrifty” and to benefit society as a whole by “[curbing] your self.”196 As a good

193 Snow, 163.

194 Lean, 27, 37.

195 Lean, 27.

196 Lean, 32-33.

daughter, she helped to take care of her siblings and tutored them alongside her older male cousin. During the ever-changing conditions of society for women in the 1920s, Shi

Jianqiao was content with her position in society. She, like other middle- and upper-class women were content to be “’good wives and wise mothers’ without directly challenging the patriarchal system.” 197 In 1928, Shi married a fellow Anhui-native with the same surname, Shi Jinggong, and soon after had two sons with him, Jinren and Yuyao. 198

The privileged status of her family came from her father’s status as a decorated soldier. After many years and hard work, Shi Congbin received the honor of becoming a brigade commander to Zhang Zongchang in 1925 during the Second Fengtian-Zhili war. 199 On October 3, 1925 Sun Chuanfang’s Zhili troops surrounded and slaughtered his brigade of four thousand soldiers as they attempted to capture Guzhen, Shandong. Shi

Congbin was taken prisoner and under the command of Sun Chuanfang was beheaded; his head was then impaled on a stick and put out for all to see at a Bangbu, Anhui, train station. By beheading Shi Jianqiao’s father, Sun Chuanfang violated the ”fundamental principle of modern international warfare that the enemy’s commander was never to be harmed.” 200 With the political chaos occurring in the 1920s, there existed no authorities who could rightfully punish Sun Chuanfang for the deed. The state, in the eyes of Shi

Jianqiao, had failed to provide her father with just revenge.

The news of her father’s untimely and dishonorable death hit Shi Jinqiao and the rest of her family hard. Their lives became more difficult financially, especially with four

197 Zarrow, 223.

198 Lean, 27.

199 Ibid.

200 Lean, 31-32.

of the six children in the family too young to support themselves. According to Chinese tradition, “dutiful daughters” and “chaste wives” were expected to commit suicide after the unjust death of the father or husband. 201 Shi Jianqiao later stated that she had not committed suicide because her mother was ill, her family needed a caretaker, and someone had to avenge her father’s dishonorable death. Showing her dutiful nature not only to her family, but to tradition, she stated, “Although all I wanted to do was die, my elderly mother’s illness gave me the will to live.” 202 Though Shi felt a need to help support her family, she felt a deeper need to gain revenge for her father.

Filial piety ( xiao ), or respect for one’s parents or ancestors, is a virtue held above all others of the Confucian ideals. The meaning of filial piety can be interpreted in different ways depending on other Confucian virtues, the situation and overall could be

“shaped by local circumstances of history, economics, social organization, and demography and by personal circumstances of wealth, gender, and family configuration.” 203 In general terms, filial piety meant not only to respectful and take care of one’s parents, but also to show sorrow for their sickness and death along with carrying out the sacrifices after their death. A passage in the Gongyang Commentary to the Spring and Autumn Annals states that, “when one’s father has not undergone [a proper or just] execution, the son may take revenge on his behalf. But if the father has been

[legitimately] executed, and the son then takes revenge [anyway], this is the way of [the]

201 Lean, 34.

202 Ibid.

203 Charlotte Ikels, “Introduction,” in Filial Piety: Practice and Discourse in Contemporary East Asia , ed. Charlotte Ikels, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press: 2004), 2.

trusting sword, which cannot remove the danger.” 204 Shi Jianqiao’s lawyers would later rephrase this passage to better fit her act of assassination, “when one’s father has undergone a [legitimate] execution, one cannot seek revenge. When one’s father has not undergone a [just] execution, one can seek revenge.” 205

With Shi Congbin having been executed unjustly, his murder could be avenged through the ideal of filial piety. As a woman, Shi Jianqiao had no right to avenge her father according to the Confucian ideal because it was the son’s responsibility. She could only take over the role if all males in the house were unwilling or failed in their attempts.

At first, Shi attempted to have her older brother, Zhongling, commit the act of assassination, but he did not have the skill and “lacked proper disposition to execute revenge.” 206 Next, she asked her male cousin who had thought of her father like his own.

When he failed to take on the act of revenge, she turned to her husband. Later, she stated that she had married Shi Jinggong for the purpose of him taking on the role of the son and avenging Shi Congbin; he, too, failed. She waited ten years before she decided to commit the act herself by justifying that “[rather than] ask others I might as well ask myself.” 207 If she had not gone through the process of asking all her male relatives and making sure they failed in the revenge she would not have been permitted to step out of her gender role and commit the assassination.

Shi Jianqiao firmly decided at the beginning of 1935 to take on the role of the

‘son.’ She spent the whole of the next year planning the assassination. In January of that

204 Lean, 120.

205 Ibid.

206 Lean, 44.

207 Ibid.

year, she enrolled one of her sons into the same elementary school that Sun Chuanfang’s daughter attended. Through acting like the traditional doting and attentive mother, she learned where Sun lived by accompanying her son to school each day. She decided at that point to secure a weapon in order to commit the deed. She bought a Browning handgun and six bullets from a retired soldier. 208 In July Shi returned to where Sun lived, but found he had moved. Never once did her resolve diminish upon learning of this unfortunate dead end. With a little bit of research, she learned that Sun’s daughter had transferred to the Glorious China School in the British Concession. Through her niece’s enrollment at the school she learned once again the general area where Sun Chuanfang lived through his license plate number.

As if by fate, at the memorial service of her father on September 17, 1935, Shi

Jianqiao got the last of the information needed to accomplish her plans. The monk at her father’s service mentioned that Sun regularly attended the Qingxiu lay-Buddhist society on Nanma road. She later learned that Sun had founded the society with another ex- militarist and had become a leading member. Under the pretext of wanting to join the society, Shi befriended a fellow woman that was already a member, which would keep members from paying her extra attention or viewing her with suspicion. With this connection along with the adaptation of the Buddhist name Dong Hui, she was now able to observer congregations without looking suspicious. She soon figured out Sun

Chuanfang’s schedule and the days in which he lead sutra recreation. 209

208 Lean, 107.

209 Lean, 44.

Shi Jianqiao went through with the murder on the morning of November 13,

1935. Leaving her Browning pistol at home, Shi traveled to Qingxiu lay-Buddhist society early in the morning to make sure that Sun was attending and leading his morning sutra- recreation session. The heavy rain caused Sun to arrive later than normal. Upon seeing him arrive in his car, Shi took a taxi back to her home to get the pistol. The following day the event would be described in immense detail in Tiangin's Dagongbao ’s article, “Blood

Splatters Buddhist Shrine!!” as follows: “At 3:15, as the devout were in mid-prayer, a woman devotee sitting behind Sun [Chuanfang] pulled a gun out of her sleeve and shot

Sun in the back of the head. The first bullet went through the back of his skull to exit through his forehead. His brains were blown everywhere, yet Sun was still upright.

Another shot was fired and the bullet entered his right temple, exiting his left forehead.

The third bullet was shot at his waist and exited through his chest. Sun died immediately.” 210 After the act, Shi distributed a lyrical poem she had written for the occasion relating the passion she was filled with over her filial duty. Along with the poem, she handed out a piece of paper that stated her intent along with her Gao guoren shu (A letter to inform my countrymen ). The paper simply put forth her side of the story through her four points of intent:

"Gentlemen take note: 1. Today, Shi Jianqiao (given name Shi Gulan) has killed Sun Chuanfang in order to avenge the death of her father Shi Congbin. 2. For concrete details of the situation, please refer to Gao guoren shu. 3. I have accomplished the great revenge, and am immediately turning myself in to the courts. 4. As for splattering blood onto the walls of the Buddhist hall and shocking everyone, my deepest apologies." Female Avenger, Chi Jianqiao" 211

210 Lean, 2.

211 Lean, 22.

These materials ensured that Shi Jinqiao would get credit for the assassination as an act of a loyal daughter murdering a man with “the heart of a demon” in a case of filial piety. 212 The papers she passed out soon made their way into the major newspapers. After making her intent known, she turned to the worshippers, now witnesses, and asked the society's janitor to call the police. When the authorities arrived, she handed over the gun with its three remaining bullets in a further sign of her immediate and peaceful surrendered.

Reaction and Trial

Overnight, Shi Jianqiao became a popular celebrity featured in every major newspaper. In the 1930s, murderesses gained immense attention for their violation of the gender norms, which, in turn, disturbed the social order. To the public she became “the classic martial arts maiden and archetypal filial daughter” combined. 213 She represented a woman forced to take on the role of her father’s son in order to avenge his unjust death.

Debates existed in the press over the equation of “whether the female avenger’s sentiment-based revenge should be praised as a public act of virtue morally beneficial to the nation or castigated as a private vendetta no modern society should ever condone.” 214

The debate tended to be more one sided with major support for assassins driven by filial piety. Three years previous, Zheng Jicheng killed the northern warlord Zhang Zongchang in order to avenge the death of his uncle. He shot the militarist in a crowded train station

212 Lean, 31.

213 Frederic Wakeman Jr., Spymaster: Dai Li and the Chinese Secret Service , (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 227.

214 Lean, 78.

in Jinan, the capital city of Shandong. Zhang Zongchang’s bodyguard shot Zheng Jicheng three times; he died in the provincial hospital. 215 The press sensationalized the male’s filial action and stirred the public to support his violent, but justified, crime. The

Nationalist regime learned from his case that they could use the sensationalized nature of such cases to their advantage. Through the government’s official pardon of Zheng

Jicheng crime, the government started on a path toward a return to Confucian virtue.

Shi’s case presented the Nationalist regime with another way to forward their political desires; a woman committing an act of filial piety backed their Confucian program. The regime gauged their actions based on the public sentiment and paid keen attention to the daily press coverage.

With Sun Chuanfang having been a former militarist, Shi’s lawyers found that through the public’s ill view for warlords and their overall frustration with the government and society it was easy to turn these feelings into ones of public sympathy for Shi Jianqiao. The belief by many that Sun Chuanfang deserved not only to die, but to die a violent death helped to establish Shi Jianqiao as a hero in the cause against warlords. As the militarist ruler of the Shanghai area from 1925 to 1927, he had taken violent action to suppress labor strikes in the area. 216 These statements made it into the local papers alongside the stories of the dutiful daughter defending her father’s honor. Shi

Jianqiao played up her father’s name in the press stating that he had been under the orders of Zhang Zongshang and the government and because of such was not a bad warlord like

Sun Chuanfang. She vilified Sun by stating in the same article that he “single-handedly

215 Lean, 145-146.

216 Lean, 30.

[kept] China weak and divided by unilaterally declaring himself the head of the Five

Allied Southern Provinces in 1926 just when the northern powers had begun to erect a legitimate national government.” 217 In playing the public images of the military leaders against each other, Shi Jianqiao established her father as an obedient servant of the government, while Sun Chuanfang had been and still was at the time of his death a traitor not only to the legitimate government, but to China as a nation.

The rumors that abounded in the press served to further the public’s interest and support. One account stated that Shi Jianqiao was one of Dai Li’s top agents in the

Military Statistics Bureau, and had been acting under orders when she had killed Sun

Chuanfang. 218 This statement proved to be unfounded. Other unfounded rumors served to demonize Sun by stating that months before his assassination he had been in the process of getting back into politics and was working with the Japanese. He was also accused of selling opium in various editorials. 219 In life Sun Chuanfang claimed all these rumors to be false and just an attempt to discredit him. After his death, the rumors reappeared marking him as a criminal deserving of his fate.

The press paid significant attention to fact that Shi Jianqiao was female. This case was especially true for women journalists in China. Journalists with an agenda based on gender equality praised her and her act in that they saw it as a step toward China’s modernity, especially in the case of the promotion of women and their rights. These writers avoided labeling Shi Jianqiao as “a passionate New Woman,” but kept her

217 Lean, 32.

218 Wakeman Jr. 227, 477n34.

219 Lean, 31.

“starkly desexualized” in their portrayal of her as a “virtuous, female hero of the nation.” 220 In Europe, a woman committing crimes of passion were viewed as having their rational judgment clouded based on these passions. These women, more often than not, received acquittal in European courts. On the other hand, in China, “’love-crazed’ women who let their passions get the better of themselves” faced criticism in the press as having acted out of purely selfish motives. 221

Unlike in European history, love and passion could not “mitigate one’s moral and judicial culpability” because those who killed based on love committed a selfish act that only served to harm society. 222 Shi Jianqiao, though, was a woman driven not just by passion, but also by filial piety, righteous anger, and virtue; the majority of society saw her act as forgivable because of the addition Figure 3 : Shi Jianqiao in jail, 1936 of the moral sentiment.

While some of the press exaggerated her physical frailty in order to exemplify the importance, power, and strength of the nonphysical virtues on which she had acted, Shi

Jianqiao presented herself with a position of strength to help other less fortunate women.

220 Lean, 98.

221 Haiyan Lee, Revolution of the Heart. A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900-1950, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 318n7.

222 Lee, 154.

She portrayed her act of assassination as a way of liberating herself from the traditional role assigned to her at birth and reinforced through her education. In an interview she stated, "Although in my youth my education was the Three Followings and Four Virtues, the typical education of a proper gentry woman, in the end I have turned out to [embody] the opposite, and today I can avenge the death of my father.' 223 She provided a sense of strength and hope to other women that they could step out of their traditional roles and make their lives better.

Through public statements and interviews given to the press along with her appearances in court, Shi Jianqiao established herself as both ideals of the female under of the Nationalists government: “Nationalists-as-reformers wanted to masculinize China with the respectable but active daughter-wife-mother helping to strengthen the nation.

But the Nationalists-as-conservatives wanted women to be more passive, home-based support for their men.” 224 In her public statement right after the murderer, Shi Jianqiao appeared overcome with emotion giving her a feminine air about her. She appeared a strong woman, but capable of showing emotions; though she committed a masculine act of violence, her femininity managed to shine through her showing of emotions. At one point, she gave the police her will to make sure her mother and her children would be taken care of seeing there was no doubt that she was to be found guilty and probably executed for her crime. The act of giving the normally private document to the police

223 Lean, 127.

224 Zarrow, 262.

allowed it to be circulated openly. The thought put into the care of her mother further emphasized her role of eldest sister with the responsibility of taking care of her family. 225

From the very beginning, her trial turned out to be a public spectacle. A crowd of over one hundred gathered before the courthouse the day before the opening sessions; the crowd doubled in size the first day of the trial. 226 Trials in the Republican judicial system were modeled after Germany’s trial system in that there was no jury; instead, a panel of judges decided the verdict.227 Kong Jiazhang and Ye Dejing served as the judges in Shi

Jianqiao’s case. The charges brought against her were the possession of “a gun with intent to use," a crime that mandated a punishment of imprisonment for not more than five years, along with the homicide, where most are punished with "death or imprisonment for life or for not less than ten years." 228 The defense had a difficult challenge before them in their attempt to gain leniency for Shi Jianqiao. Her family managed to hire the high caliber trial lawyers Hu Xuequin and Yu Qichang. Not only were there materials proving her guilt such as the gun and the papers she passed out to witnesses, she had openly taken credit for the murder of Sun Chuanfang. Her defense avoided the interpretation of the laws and instead focused on the “ethical motive behind the revenge” in an attempt to get the public to sympathize with the act. 229 Her lawyers argued for leniency on the ancient grounds of filial piety and righteous anger along with her voluntary surrender. On the other hand, the prosecution led by attorneys Sun Guanche

225 Lean, 23-24.

226 Lean, 114.

227 Lean, 113.

228 Lean, 107.

229 Lean, 116.

and Zhang Shaozeng argued that Shi Congbin’s death was a casualty of war and had no grounds for revenge. They further asserted that under modern law and code, voluntary surrender should not be considered a special condition for leniency in murder cases. They backed up their statements with evidence from published laws and proved through the evidence that Shi Jianqiao was guilty of the act.

On December 17, 1935, the Tianjin District Court sentenced Shi Jianqiao to ten years; the length of the sentence was based on leniency on the grounds that she had voluntarily surrendered. The judges denied “the admissibility of the defense’s argument that the circumstances of Shi Jianqiao’s filial vengeance deserved judicial compassion.” 230 Both the prosecution and the defense were unhappy with the court’s decision and appealed the sentence. The trial was appealed to the Hebei Superior Court in

Beiping and took place on February 6, 1936. The trial last six days and resulted with the judges Mao Yaode and Jing Xingzhen reversing the decision made by the lower court based on the lower court not recognizing that the righteousness of the defendant’s revenge deserved judicial compassion. This decision reduced her sentence from ten to seven years. Still unhappy, both sides appealed to the Supreme Court of Nanjing. The

Supreme Court upheld the decision made by the Superior Court of seven years based on the fact that they too be found the “mitigating circumstances [deserved] judicial compassion.” 231 After spending eleven months in prison, the State agreed with the sympathies of the public and pardoned her, as they had the male assassin Zheng Jicheng, on October 14, 1936.

230 Lean, 108.

231 Ibid.

The Impact

The State’s pardon of Shi Jianqiao served to reinforce the idea the government established that China was finally on the right path to establishing a new, moral and

‘better’ nation. The State established the New Life movement in order to remake China; the movement placed special emphasis on Confucian moral propriety. The State promoted ideals of womanhood such as “chase femininity, upright womanly behavior, and pure and classic female virtue.” 232 Shi Jianqiao’s defense during her trial had stated that in China “morality is on the wave; it is a period that neglects filial piety. [Shi

Jianqiao’s] sacrifice and exemplary behavior, however, are enough to set the moral trends of this era back on track. We should encourage this custom, and we should rule with leniency.” 233 Many of Shi Jianqiao’s supporters believed that through the upholding of the beliefs that Shi Jianqiao had herself upheld, one could collectively save the nation of

China from falling back into and continuing the legacy of its “decadent and degenerate” past. 234

Many saw the State’s pardon as an undermining of modernity through the disregard of National laws and legal foundations. A commentator for the weekly published Qinghua zhoukan believed that Shi had been released because of her

232 Lean, 99.

233 Lean, 124.

234 Zarrow, 167.

connections. The writer stated that, “It’s foolish to hope that the cat will release the rat.

However, if in the cat’s mouth is its own kitten, then for sure it’ll let its prey go;” the cat, being the Nanjing government, had released the kitten, Shi Jianqiao, because she unintentionally provided the government with public support for their return to tradition and Confucianism campaign. 235 The prosecution in the case argued, “failure to privilege the rule of law over the rule of sympathy would lead to social unrest” and would “render

National law useless and slowly erode societal peace.” 236 By overruling in favor of public sentiment and traditional values, governmental laws lost their power and weight. A supposedly ‘modern’ government had chosen to support revenge through violence over the merits found within their own legal system. The pardon appeared to have been an attempt to resolve tensions that had come to the surface after the assassination. In reality, the pardon only increased the appearance and intensity of such tensions. Through the pardoning of a guilty party in this case and others like it, the balance of power shifted away from the courts and back toward traditional acts. The pardon asserted that the New

Life regime did not hold legitimacy based on legal means, but also on “ethical authority and martial heroism.” 237

However, the act of pardoning individuals involved in violent acts proved to be a double-edged sword. The central government lost influence with parts of the population allowing for groups both within and outside China to get a foothold in society: “Civic groups used the pardons as a chance to assert their own institutional influence. Individual

235 Lean, 170.

236 Lean, 131.

237 Lean, 173.

politicians grabbed the opportunity to create space for their own pursuits, even as they mouthed deference to Nanjing.” 238 The Nationalist government desired to crush the remains of the violence from the warlord period, but through their pardoning of violent acts, they ultimately supported ethical revenge over the pursuit of justice through the court system.

The perspective of some women, specifically writers, on Shi Jianqiao’s state pardon was negative in that it would harm the women’s movement. These women saw that through her release based on Confucian values women would once again face a life of imprisoned within domesticity; the values that pushed women back into domesticity were those of loyalty, filial piety, chastity and righteousness. They saw “filial piety as fraught with patriarchal and authoritarian prejudices and would thus require radical reformulation if it were to contribute to the development of Chinese culture.” 239 Women writers tended to draw the conclusion that Shi elevated her family’s interests above those of the nation and through her personal gain, she had led to the defeat of the women’s movement and a step backward for Chinese culture. 240 In the November 1936 issue of

Women’s Monthly, Tang Pingseng commented after the release of Shi Jianqiao that, “The bizarre behavior of Shi Jianqiao only suggests the retrogression of society. Shi's action is anachronistic and despicable.” 241 She went on to state that the government had used the

238 Lean, 174.

239 Alan Kam-leung Chan and Sor-hoon Tan, eds., Filial Piety in Chinese Thought and History , (New York: RoutledgeCurzon: 2004), accessed November 10, 2011, http://books.google.com/books?id=VRWSJWB2tAAC&lpg=PP1&dq=filial%20piety&pg=PR4#v=onepag e&q&f=false, 2.

240 Yuxin Ma, Women Journalists and Feminism in China, 1898-1937, ( Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2010), 291-292.

241 Ma, 293.

pardon of Shi to imprison and limit women. After this case, women did have a harder time engaging in social and political activism because of the traditional constraints placed upon them by both the government and their own families. Prominent men in society supported the “good wives and wise mothers” womanhood promoted by the release of

Shi Jianqiao. These men were against women being involved in politics, where politically active women were “the worst scoundrels in their sex.” 242 The famous writer Lin Yutang wrote in a 1936 issue of Women’s Weekly that “Women in the limelight are bad characters. Good women do not expose themselves in public. They stay at home, raise their children, and fulfill their natural duties. How noble it is for women to be ‘good wives and wise mothers!’” 243

The CCP woman were against the ideas behind the “good wives and wise mothers” womanhood promoted by the GMD. While the GMD woman supported nationalism and accepted state policy, they struggled for representation and legal equality in the public sphere. The CCP women writers brought to the foreground the needs of working-class women along with proposing a change in the social structure in order to solve the problems that existed for all women in society. Luo Qiong argued in Women’s

Lives that in the growing capitalistic society women were becoming an important part of the work force because of mass production; she believed that women should turn away from the type of womanhood promoted by the GMD and participate in production. 244 He

Hua in 1935 argued that if women left the home to work that no only would “children

242 Ma, 300.

243 Ma, 300.

244 Ma, 311.

lose their mothers,” but the nation would suffer because “women were the center of families and families the centers of the nation.” 245 Liberal women writers attempted to combine the issues brought up by both the GMD and CCP journalists in their defense of education, careers and property rights for women while emphasizing the class, gender, and status prejudices brought against women based on the thought process of the government and society.

The start of Japan’s military threat to North China coincided with Shi’s release from prison and served to shift focus away from women’s issues to national interests. A writer for the October 1936 issue of Women's Lives stated her dissatisfaction with the release of an assassin when many Chinese fighting in the war were put in prison for anti-

Japanese activity. In her opinion, the imprisoned Chinese had done nothing wrong in their patriotic attempt to “avenge the national humiliation.” 246 She concluded that the state of society through the promotion of Confucian family values over patriotic virtues was making it “easier to love one's family than one's country, to be a filial daughter than to be a loyal citizen.” 247 She showed that through this pardon that there was the greater possibility of a rift in society between the family and the state. The Chinese government, on the other hand, used Shi Jianqiao and others who committed acts of “righteous revenge” through self-sacrifice to promote Chinese patriotism in the war against Japan.

Women became an important feature in the war against Japan through their ability to generate patriotism and lift the morale of fellow citizens. Shi Jianqiao was involved in

245 Ma, 312.

246 Ma, 293.

247 Ibid.

the mobilization of women for resistance activities. Women’s involvement was unified under the central government through Song Meiling, Jiang Jieshi’s wife, who, on May

20, 1938, shifted the ideas behind the New Life movement to provide for a greater female role. She stated that women were “to play a supportive but vital role in the war against

Japan” through operations that related back to traditional female roles, such as “caring for war orphans, providing medical care, and staffing relief agencies” along with “[securing] provisions and supplies for the Chinese armed forces, [helping] ensure female productivity in factories, as well as [training] and [teaching] the nation’s rural citizens about their duties in rural organizations.” 248 Women, too, were supposed to help in the reconstruction of China as a nation. As a result, Song established the Chinese Women’s

Advisory Committee of the New Life movement. This Committee emphasized the ideology of “Good Wife, Wise Mother” in order to keep women from stepping out into the public sphere and attempting to change society through public activities. The

Committee established that a woman’s public role was just an extension of her private, domestic life. Women in these organizations went out to other females in the community and taught them how to properly raise children, keep their homes clean, and think along more rational and scientific grounds instead of basing their thought process on superstition. 249

Shi Jianqiao’s filial revenge promoted the mobilization of both men and women through a type of patriotism that called for revenge on the Japanese who were bombing

China in the 1940s based off righteous anger. The Japanese bombing of cities throughout

248 Lean, 183-184.

249 Lean, 184.

China was intended to weaken the moral of the population and their support for the government. The population was upset by the random bombings and united behind the idea to avenge those harmed in the immoral acts. The siblings founded the Hechuan campaign to raise money for planes to help in the war effort. Shi Jianqiao’s brother, Shi

Zefan, stated, “We feel toward our enemy that it should be a ‘tooth for a tooth’ and a

‘punch should return a punch.’ Give the Japanese bombers a bomb in return!. . . This is true patriotism.” 250 The nature of patriotism leant itself to one’s ability to hate the

Japanese, but to love the Chinese with such passion, as all true patriots, such as Shi, had done throughout time. Other women joined in the effort to raise public sympathy and patriotism. Female students in Hechuan’s Number Two Girl’s Middle School were inspired by Shi Jianqiao’s example and were taught to “study diligently, love their country, and engage in acts of patriotic resistance.” 251 The example that Shi provided the

Chinese population helped to form a wartime patriotism that rallied support to the

Nationalist government and their agenda.

250 Lean, 189.

251 Lean, 192-193.

CONCLUSION

Women have struggled throughout history to raise their place in society and achieve a level of equality with the male gender, especially in the public sphere.

Revolutions provides an equal ground where new ideas and opportunities are circulated throughout society offering all the perceived chance at a change for the betterment of their lot in life. Through the act of assassination, the three women just examined were able to accomplish a change in society that affected more than just their immediate lives.

In a speech to the House of Commons in May 1865, British Prime Minister Benjamin

Disraeli optimistically asserted, “Assassination never changed the history of the world.” 252 His statement implies that assassinations never achieve the aims assassins set out to make with their violent political act. In the cases I have examined, the society in which the women lived did change because of the violent act, but in ways the women never intended when planning and committing the act. The gender of the criminals provided an emphasis on violence, which, in turn, brought out the government’s belief

252 Michael Confino, Russia before the ‘Radiant Future’: Essays in Modern History, Culture, and Society , (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011), accessed on November 25 2011, http://books.google.com/books?id=x35Ym1DoP0EC&lpg=PA206&dq=benjamin%20disraeli%20assassina tion%20history%20of%20the%20world&pg=PA208#v=onepage&q=benjamin%20disraeli%20assassinatio n%20history%20of%20the%20world&f=false, 206.

that they needed to reverse the advances women had made in order to attempt to return to a stable, male dominated world. The attempts by the government did not always stop others from following the example the assassin set and in certain circumstances made the radical population more violent. Michael Confino argued that the extent of change brought about through the act of assassination depends largely on “’who’ is assassinated, and ‘when’ it occurred.” 253 I propose that while theories which argue that an assassination has the ability to change society are accurately based on the idea that a change will only occur if the victim held a high degree of importance in society and the period it took place in provided a split in political forces based on ideology, they also need to take into account the impact the gender of the assassin had on men in the society that predisposed the necessity of an equally dramatic change for a return to patriarchal ‘stability.’

I have examined the revolutionary climate of France in the late eighteenth century, Russia in the late nineteenth century, and China in the early twentieth century to explain facts that allowed women to step out of their traditional roles and take on a different view of public life. I have used as examples Charlotte Corday, Vera Zasulich, and Shi Jianqiao in the hope of shedding light on the motivations behind assassination attempts and the reactions they stir up in the governments and societies of different countries and time periods. Though these women existed in completely different times, they each struggled to stand equal to men in their communities and in each case doing so provided their crimes with greater meaning than what they initially intended. The nature of the patriarchy’s view on women put a special emphasis on their crimes that resulted in unintended effects on society. Their overreaction, be it out of fear in the case of Corday

253 Confino, 207.

and Zasulich, or admiration as in the case of Shi Jianqiao, allowed the crimes to become more than a personal statement; they resulted in a change to the country and population, including, the forceful submission of women back into domesticity.

Although it is impossible to predict when a woman might step out of her prescribed gender role and commit an act of violence in the hope of bettering society, the three examples I examined in this thesis make it seem that there are particular scenarios and qualities that were shared, to some extent, by all three women and their times that provided the women with the ability and drive to turn away from traditional ideals. The particulars relating to the time and county include a government comprised of a patriarchy that mains women in a domestic role, a revolutionary climate that allowed for changes in women’s presence in politics, increased educational and vocational opportunities for all women, sensationalizing by the media that shaped public opinion, and a general underestimation for women and their abilities. The qualities shared between the women each include a higher than normal education for their social backgrounds, a lack of the ‘ideal’ family life and an example of ‘traditional domesticity’ in their immediate lives, a tendency to live according to personal convictions that made it so they could not act otherwise, and a willingness for personal sacrifice in order to be ‘useful’ to and better society. The combination of these factors provided the women with the ability to understand themselves as equal to the men in society through participation in the public sphere and politics. These liberating ideas would ultimately lead to their submission back into traditional roles.

This study may only serve as a preliminary examination of the relationship between the gender factor among females who attempt assassination, the reaction by

society and the patriarchal government, and the implication of the gender question in the violent deeds reshaping the destiny of the country and culture. My study was limited in that I only examined three examples, and those examples only included countries shaken up by revolution where the majority of society held customary beliefs in relation to the roles and abilities of women. Future studies may benefit from examining other examples of females committing acts of political violence in which society does not have strongly prescribed notions for the positions of females. Looking at more examples would provide the ability to determine whether my conclusion carries across the board. Additionally, a broader range of journalists and their newspapers and journals should be examined in terms of their opinion for the actions of the women and the role they played in the creation of public opinion for the woman, and, ultimately, the impact the media might have had on the changes in culture and politics. Regardless of what other studies may find after further investigation, my thesis suggests a connection between the importance of gender in the act of assassination in times of revolution and the impact, intentional or not, the deed has on the future of the culture.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ambler, Effie. Russian Journalism and Politics, 1861-1881 the Career of Aleksei S. Suvorin. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1972.

Badinter, Elisabeth. The Unopposite Sex: The End of the Gender Battle. Translated by Barbara Wright. New York: Harper & Row, 1986.

Bax, Ernest Belfort. Jean-Paul Marat: The People's Friend . London: Grant Richards, 1900.

Bergman, Jay. Vera Zasulich: A Biography . Stanford, California: Stanford U. P., 1983.

---. “Vera Zasulich, the Shooting of Trepov and the Growth of Political Terrorism in Russia, 1878-1881.” In Terrorism: The First or Anarchist Wave. Edited by David C. Rapoport, 215-236. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Bhat, Girish N. "The Moralization of Guilt in Late Imperial Russian Trial by Jury: The Early Reform Era." Law and History Review 15, no. 1 (1997): 77-113. Accessed September 20, 2011. http://www.jstor.org/stable/827706.

Billington, James H. Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith. New York: Basic Books, 1980.

Blakemore, Steven. Crisis in Representation: Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Helen Maria Williams, and the Rewriting of the French Revolution. London: Associated University Presses, 1997.

Blanc, Olivier. Last Letters: Prisons and Prisoners of the French Revolution, 1793- 1794. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: André Deutsch Limited, 1987.

Bonavia, David. China's Warlords . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Brinton, Crane . The Anatomy of Revolution . New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965.

Broido, Vera. Apostles into Terrorists : Women and the Revolutionary Movement in the Russia of Alexander II. New York: The Viking Press, 1977.

Cahm, Caroline. Kropotkin: And the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism, 1872-1886. Cambridge: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, 1989.

Chan, Alan Kam-leung and Sor-hoon Tan, eds. Filial Piety in Chinese Thought and History . New York: RoutledgeCurzon: 2004. Accessed November 10, 2011. http://books.google.com/books?id=VRWSJWB2tAAC&lpg=PP1&dq=filial%20p iety&pg=PR4#v=onepage&q&f=false, 2.

Chang, Sidney H., and Ramon H. Myers, eds. The Storm Clouds Clear Over China. The Memoir of Ch'en Li-fu, 1900-1993. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1994.

Cher, Marie. Charlotte Corday and Certain Men of the Revolutionary Torment . New York: AMS Press, 1970.

Confino, Michael. Russia before the ‘Radiant Future’: Essays in Modern History, Culture, and Society . New York: Berghahn Books, 2011. Accessed November 25, 2011. http://books.google.com/books?id=x35Ym1DoP0EC&lpg=PA206&dq=benjamin %20disraeli%20assassination%20history%20of%20the%20world&pg=PA208#v =onepage&q=benjamin%20disraeli%20assassination%20history%20of%20the%2 0world&f=false.

Corazzo, Nina and Catherine R. Montfort. “Charlotte Corday: femme-homme. ” In Literate Women and the French Revolution of 1789 . Edited by Catherine Montfort-Howard, 3-18. Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications, Inc., 1994.

Corday, Michel. Charlotte Corday . Translated by E. F. Buckley. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., INC., 1931.

Craciun, Adriana. "The New Cordays: Helen Craik and British Representations of Charlotte Corday, 1793-1800.” In Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution . Edited by Adriana Craciun and Kari E. Lokke, 193-232. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001.

Crankshaw, Edward. The Shadow of the Winter Palace: Russia's Drift to Revolution 1825-1917. . New York: The Viking Press, 1976.

Davies, Peter. The French Revolution: A Beginners Guide. Oxford: Oneworld, 2009.

Dillon, Nara and Jean C. OI, ed. At the Crossroads of Empires. Middlemen, Social Network, and State-Building in Republican Shanghai . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008.

Desan, Suzanne. The Family on Trial in Revolutionary F rance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

Desan, Suzanne. “Women’s Experience of the French Revolution: An Historical Overview.” In Literate Women and the French Revolution of 1789 . Edited by

Catherine Montfort-Howard, 19-32. Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications, Inc., 1994.

Durman, Karel. The Time of the Thunderer: Mikhail Katkov, Russian Nationalist Extremism and the Failure of the Bismarckian System, 1871-1887 . Boulder: Columbia University Press, 1988.

Engel, Barbara Alpen. Mothers and Daughters: Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth-Century Russia . New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Engel, Barbara Alpen, and Clifford N. Rosenthal. eds. Five sisters: Women Against the Tsar. The Memoirs of Five Young Anarchist Women of the 1870's . New York: Routledge, 1987.

Engelstein, Laura. Slavophile Empire: Imperial Russia's Illiberal Path . Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009.

Fehér, Ferenc. The French Revolution and the Birth of Modernity . Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990.

Fetherling, George. The Book of Assassins: A Biographical Dictionary from Ancient Times to the Present . New York, NY: Wiley, 2001.

Fife, Graeme. The Terror. The Shadow of the Guillotine: France 1792-1794. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2004.

Frank, Joseph. Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1818 . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.

Frank, Joseph and Mary Petrusewicz. Dostoevsky: A Writer in his Time. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.

Fuchs, Rachel G. Gender and Poverty in Nineteenth-Century Europe. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Gelbart, Nina Rattner. “Death in the Bathtub: Charlotte Corday and Jean-Paul Marat.” In The Human Tradition in Modern France . Edited by Vincent, K. Steven, and Alison Klairmont-Lingo, 17-32.Wilmington, Delaware: A Scholarly Resources Inc., 2000.

Hosking, Geoffrey. Russia and Russians: A History . Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003.

Ikels, Charlotte. “Introduction.” In Filial Piety: Practice and Discourse in Contemporary East Asia . Edited by Charlotte Ikels, 1-15. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press: 2004.

Jeans Jr., Roger B. Democracy and Socialism in Republican China: The Politics of Zhang Junmai (Carsun Chang), 1906-1941. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1997.

Kadish, Doris Y. Politicizing Gender: Narrative Strategies in the Aftermath of the French Revolution . New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991.

Kazuko, Ono. Chinese Women in a Century of Revolution, 1850-1950. Edited by Joshua A. Fogel. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989.

Kennedy, Emmet. A Cultural History of the French Revolution . London: Yale University Press, 1989.

Kucherov, Samuel. "The Case of Vera Zasulich." The Russian Review 11, no. 2 (1952): 89-96. http://www.jstor.org/stable/125658. Accessed September 19, 2011.

Lean, Eugenia. Public Passions. The Trial of Shi Jianqiao and the Rise of Popular Sympathy in Republican China . Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

Lee, Haiyan. Revolution of the Heart. A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900- 1950. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007.

Lever, Maurice. Sade: A Biography. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993.

Ma, Yuxin. Women Journalists and Feminism in China, 1898-1937. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2010.

Mason, David S. Revolutionary Europe, 1789-1989. Liberty, Equality, Solidarity. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, INC., 2005.

Mayer, Arno J. The Furies. Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.

McMillan, James F. France and Women 1789-1914. Gender, Society and Politics. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Montfort, Catherine R. and Jenene J. Allison. “Women’s Voices and the French Revolution.” In Literate Women and the French Revolution of 1789 . Edited by Catherine Montfort-Howard, 3-18. Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications, Inc., 1994.

Morley, John. Robespierre: An Essay . Wildside Press LLC, 2007.

Outram, Dorinda. The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class and Political Culture. London: Yale University Press, 1989.

Park, Kyung Ae. "Women and Revolution in China: The sources of Constraints on Women's Emancipation" In Women and Revolution in Africa, Asia, and the New World . Edited by Mary Ann Tétreault, 137-160. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1994.

Polunov, Alexander, Thomas C. Owen, and Larissa G. Zakharova. Russia in the Nineteenth Century: Autocracy, Reform, and Social Change, 1814-1914 . Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2005.

Popkin, Jeremy D. Revolutionary News: The Press in France, 1789-1799. London: Duke University Press, 1990.

Radzinsky, E]dvard S.. Alexander II: The Last Great Tsar . New York City: Free Press, 2005.

Riasanovksy, Nicholas V. Russian Identities: A Historical Survey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Schama, Simon. Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution . New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989.

Scurr, Ruth. Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution . New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2006.

Shieh, Milton J. T. The Kuomintang: Selected Historical Documents, 1894-1969. Queens, NY: St. John's University, 1970.

Siljak, Ana. Angel of Vengeance: The "Girl Assassin," the Governor of St. Petersburg, and Russia's Revolutionary World . New York: St. Martin's Press, 2008.

---. “The Trial of Vera Zasulich.” In Russian and Soviet History: From the Time of Troubles to the Collapse of the Soviet Union . Edited by Steven A. Usitalo and William Benton Whisenhunt, 147-161. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2008.

Snow, Helen Foster. Women in Modern China . Paris: Mouton & Co., 1967.

Stewart, Charles J., Craig Allen Smith and Robert E. Denton Jr. Persuasion and Social Movements . Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1989.

Stites, Richard. The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism 1860-1930 . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978.

Strand, David. "Citizens in the Audience and at the Podium.” In Changing Meanings of Citizenship in Modern China. Edited by Merle Goldman and Elizabeth J. Perry, 44-69. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002. http://books.google.com/books?id=YF-

ftHbw59sC&lpg=PA389&dq=1911%20huguang%20beijing&pg=PA59#v=onepa ge&q=huguang&f=false.

Tétreault, Mary Ann, ed. Women and Revolution in Africa, Asia, and the New World . Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1994.

Thompson, J.M. The French Revolution . London: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1985.

Thompson, John M. A Vision Unfulfilled: Russia and the Soviet Union in the Twentieth Century . Lexington, MA: D.C. Health and Company, 1996.

Tien, Hung-Mao. Government and Politics in Kuomintang China, 1927-1937. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1972.

Tumarkin, Nina. Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.

Todd, Allan. Revolutions, 1789-1917. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Van Alstine, Jeannette. Charlotte Corday. London: W. H. Allen & co., 1890. Google eBook Edition.

Vaughn, William and Helen Weston. “Introduction.” In David’s The Death of Marat. Edited by William Vaughn and Helen Weston, 1-33. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Wakeman Jr., Frederic. Spymaster: Dai Li and the Chinese Secret Service . Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Waldron, Peter. The End of Imperial Russia, 1855-1917 . New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.

Weston, Helen. “The Corday-Marat Affair. No Place for a Woman.” In David’s The Death of Marat. Edited by William Vaughn and Helen Weston, 128-152. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Zarrow, Peter. China in War and Revolution, 1895-1949. New York: Rutledge, 2005.