Jean-Paul Marat

French journalist and revolutionary

• Born: May 24, 1743
• Birthplace: Boudry, Switzerland
• Died: July 13, 1793
• Place of death: Paris, France

Marat was a leader of the Jacobins against the Girondists during the French Revolution. As a journalist and a deputy to the national convention, Marat was notorious for his support of popular violence and his advocacy of dictatorship.

Early Life

Jean-Paul Marat (zhahn-pawl mah-rah) was born into a Swiss Calvinist family of modest circumstances. Following a home education by his parents, Marat, at the age of sixteen, went to France to study medicine. Settling in London, he obtained a medical degree and established a fairly successful practice. Returning to France in 1777, he served as personal physician to wealthy clients until 1783, after which he worked full-time in scientific research and writing.

A man interested in many fields, Marat was the author of numerous books about the natural sciences, government, and philosophy. His Chains of Slavery (1774) attacked despotism and defended the concepts of liberty and popular sovereignty, and his Plan de législation criminelle (1780; Plan of Criminal Legislation) advocated a more humane criminal code, especially for the benefit of the poor. Although he acquired his liberal and democratic views from a variety of Enlightenment writers, he was especially influenced by the egalitarian ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

As a writer of scientific works, Marat was a failure. When he attacked the established theories of Sir Isaac Newton and others, he was ridiculed as a charlatan. Marat thought that he should be recognized as an important scientist, and he began to show indications of a growing persecution complex. When he was not admitted to the Academy of Sciences, he blamed a conspiracy of academicians, and he never forgave Voltaire and others who criticized his works. The French Revolution would provide him with an outlet for his frustrations and social resentments.

Life’s Work

At the beginning of the revolution in 1789, Marat appeared extremely optimistic about the possibility of constitutional reform, and he explained his ideas for reform in many pamphlets. Until the violent summer of 1789, he remained more of a moderate reformer than a radical revolutionary. Influenced by Montesquieu, he advocated the establishment of a constitutional monarchy, a system of separation of powers, and a declaration of human rights that would include freedom of the press. Recognizing the idea of popular sovereignty, he wanted the Third Estate, which represented the vast majority of the people, to play the dominant role. Emphasizing the need for equality, Marat advocated an end to the special privileges enjoyed by the nobility, such as their traditional tax exemptions and special hunting rights.

Throughout the dramatic events of 1789, Marat was primarily an observer and commentator, although he later claimed to have played a role in the fall of the Bastille on July 14. During the upheaval of the Great Fear, his views rapidly became more and more extreme, and he soon became dissatisfied with the moderation of the national assembly. He was especially critical of Jean Mounier’s constitutional committee, which proposed a system of government similar to that of Great Britain, and he published an alternative model for a new constitution in August. Marat’s proposal included a unicameral legislature based on universal male suffrage, and he urged that the king should not have the power to veto laws or dissolve the legislature. In addition, Marat wrote passionately about the need for greater social justice and for less inequality of wealth. He stated that because society owes a means of subsistence to all citizens, the government should confiscate part of the property of the wealthy and use it to benefit the poor and working classes.

On September 12, 1789, Marat began to publish a newspaper, L’Ami du Peuple (friend of the people). Early in October, Marat began to fear a counterrevolutionary plot by royalists and monarchists, and in response, he called for direct action by the Parisian sansculottes, members of the lower classes who did not wear the knee breeches of the aristocracy. Marat was a leading voice in inciting the insurrection of October 5-6, when a large angry crowd forced the royal family to move from Versailles to Paris. Because of his outspoken advocacy of sedition, the royalist police court ordered his arrest, and he went into hiding for the first of many times. Early in 1790, he sought refuge in England for three months. By then, Marat was not only denouncing royalists but also bitterly attacking moderates such as the Marquis de Lafayette.

Convinced that only popular justice could prevent counterrevolutionary plots, Marat emerged as the most prominent advocate for mass executions. On January 30, 1791, he wrote in L’Ami du Peuple that it was perhaps necessary to cut off 100,000 heads for the freedom of the many, and on May 27, he suggested that even 500,000 executions might be required. On July 17, Marat became outraged when the national assembly ordered the national guard to disperse the republican demonstration on the Field of Mars, resulting in about fifty deaths. When Marat’s editorials advocated reprisals for the act, the assembly on August 2 decreed that Marat was guilty of seditious libel. He continued to publish his newspaper in hiding.

Despite his radicalism, Marat was slow to abandon the idea of limited monarchy in favor of republicanism. After King Louis XVI’s attempted flight and capture at Varennes on June 21, 1791, Marat demanded his execution and the establishment of a regency. Only later did he gradually accept the necessity of a republic.

In hiding at the time, Marat played only a minor role in the insurrection of August 10, 1792, when a mob forced the assembly to suspend the king and to hold elections for a national convention. Just before this “second revolution,” Marat’s editorials had called for the taking of the royal family as hostages. Therefore, he defended the insurrection as a model of popular democracy in action. On August 19, Marat appealed to the people to “rise and let the blood of traitors flow again.” On September 2, he was appointed a member of the Committee of Public Safety of the Paris Commune, which became notorious for ordering the arrest of suspected traitors. Marat always appeared proud of the encouragement he gave to the massacres of September 2-7, in which frenzied mobs killed approximately fifteen hundred prisoners in Paris jails. Although most politicians and writers repudiated the massacres, Marat enthusiastically endorsed them as the righteous indignation of the oppressed masses.

On September 9, 1792, Marat was elected to the national convention as one of the deputies from Paris. When the convention opened on September 22, he probably voted for the establishment of a republic and, thereafter, defended republicanism. As a radical deputy, he was associated with the Jacobins who were seated on the left, a location called the Mountain because of its elevated seats. Marat quickly became the major object of attacks from the more moderate Girondins, who were seated on the right. He was a strong advocate for the speedy trial and execution of Louis XVI. When several Girondins defended leniency, Marat accused them of counterrevolutionary obstructionism. In turn, the Girondins pointed to Marat as one of the chief instigators of the September massacres as well as the 1793 food riots of Paris. On April 5, 1793, Marat became president of the Jacobin Club, and the next day he signed a declaration accusing the Girondins of counterrevolutionary intrigue. On April 13, the convention voted to send Marat before the Revolutionary Tribunal on charges of preaching pillage and advocating dictatorship. When acquitted by the tribunal, he was cheered as “the people’s friend” at demonstrations led by enthusiastic Parisian sansculottes.

Marat obtained revenge on the Girondins in the insurrection of May 31-June 2, 1793. Just before the event, Marat had exhorted revolutionary groups to arm for a final conflict with the Girondins. According to legend, Marat himself rang the tocsin that called out the Parisian sansculottes to surround the convention on June 2. Among the deputies, Marat was the most outspoken in calling for the expulsion and arrest of the leading Girondins. By this time, Marat had come to believe that Parisian supporters of the revolution were more representative of “the people” than were the elected representatives of the convention.

About the time that the Girondins were expelled, Marat’s skin and lung diseases forced him to curtail most of his political activities, although the convention failed to accept his offer of resignation. To relieve his pain and irritation, Marat spent several hours each day immersed in a bathtub.

Despite his bad health, Marat continued his vigorous opposition to all enemies of the Mountain, whether on the left or the right. Although having much in common with Jacques Roux and other Enragés of the extreme left, he disagreed with several of this group’s economic ideas. Rather than imposing a “maximum” or strictly regulating prices, Marat preferred to use the death penalty against food profiteers and monopolists. On July 4, 1793, he charged that the Enragés, in attacking the Mountain, were guilty of treason to the revolution. Marat’s last efforts in the convention were devoted to trying to strengthen the Committee of Public Safety, which he criticized for its timidity and moderation. Apparently, he believed that the committee had the potential to exercise the kind of revolutionary dictatorship that he had long supported.

With civil war raging in many provinces, supporters of the Girondins looked upon Marat as the epitome of evil. In Normandy, Charlotte Corday (Marie-Anne-Charlotte Corday d’Armont), at the age of twenty-four, was so shocked by the persecution of the Girondins that she decided to go to Paris to rid France of the tyrant. Claiming to know of plots against the revolution, she gained an audience with Marat while he was in his bath on the evening of July 13, and she stabbed him to death with a knife. She was quickly captured and was guillotined four days later. In the last edition of Marat’s paper, which appeared on July 14, Marat called on the Committee of Public Safety to adopt more vigorous policies.

Contrary to Corday’s intentions, the death of Marat hastened the executions of the Girondins, and it promoted the establishment of the Reign of Terror under the direction of the Committee of Public Safety. To his supporters, Marat was a martyr for a just cause, and he was venerated in a popular cult. Although Marat’s body remained in the Pantheon for less than a year, Jacques-Louis David’s portrait of the deceased Marat remains the most famous symbol of the radical phase of the French Revolution.

Significance

From the days of the revolution, those on the left and right have strongly disagreed about Marat’s ideas and character. Leftists have usually admired him as the “people’s friend” and been impressed by his devotion to the revolutionary cause, his militant attacks on economic injustices, and his outspoken defense of popular violence. Conservatives and moderates, in contrast, have usually detested him as a vengeful fanatic partly responsible for the Reign of Terror.

Marat anticipated later socialist thought in at least three ways: his insistence that the wealthy were exploiting the poorer classes, his conviction that government should promote the interests of the poor, and his call for a dictatorship of a revolutionary elite. One of his devoted admirers, Gracchus (François Noël) Babeuf, found inspiration in his legacy when he led the Conspiracy of Equals of 1797. In contrast to Babeuf’s communist uprising, however, Marat never advocated the communal ownership of property and never formulated any concrete plans for a group dictatorship.

Bibliography

Bax, Ernest. Jean-Paul Marat: The People’s Friend. London: Grant Richards, 1900. A dated but interesting work that portrays Marat as a great humanitarian statesman with a clear political philosophy.

Censor, Jack. Prelude to Power: The Parisian Radical Press, 1789-1791. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. A scholarly study of left-wing journalists and newspapers during the French Revolution, with several interesting pages on Marat.

Conner, Clifford. Jean-Paul Marat: Scientist and Revolutionary. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1997. This study of Marat benefits from materials that previously were unavailable to researchers.

Durant, Will, and Ariel Durant. The Age of Napoleon. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975. A well-written history of the period from 1789 to 1815, with interesting descriptions of significant individuals such as Marat.

Germani, Ian. Jean-Paul Marat: Hero and Anti-Hero of the French Revolution. Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellen Press, 1992. Examines how Marat’s image was manipulated during and after the French Revolution by studying funeral orations, newspapers, song sheets, paintings, historical works, and other items from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Describes Marat’s symbolic importance to the political struggles of France.

Gottschalk, Louis R. Jean-Paul Marat: A Study in Radicalism. 1927. Reprint. New York: Greenberg, 1966. Although excessively pro-Marat, this book is a fascinating and scholarly biography with an excellent analysis of Marat’s ideas. Highly recommended for both the scholar and the general reader.

Miller, Stephen. Three Deaths and Enlightenment Thought: Hume, Johnson, Marat. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2001. Examines the cult of the deathbed scene in eighteenth century France and England to focus on the philosophies of Marat, David Hume, and Samuel Johnson.

Spearing, Joseph. The Angel of Assassination: Marie Charlotte de Corday d’Armont. New York: H. Smith, 1935. Although dated and wordy, this is the best English-language biography about the woman who assassinated Marat.

Thompson, James M. Leaders of the French Revolution. 1929. Reprint. New York: D. Appleton, 1988. Includes an excellent twenty-page summary of Marat’s ideas and activities from a critical point of view.