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Jean-Paul Marat (May 24, 1743
- July 13, 1793), was a Swiss-born scientist and physician, who made much of his career in England, but is
best known as a French Revolutionary. A member of the radical
Jacobin faction during the French Revolution, he helped to launch the Reign
of Terror. He was assassinated in his bathtub by Charlotte
Corday.
From a relatively early date, Marat advocated doing away with the monarchy and
raged against more moderate revolutionary leaders. In July 1790 he wrote "Five or six
hundred heads cut off would have assured your repose, freedom and happiness. A false humanity has held your arms and suspended
your blows; because of this millions of your brothers will lose their lives". He approved of the September 1792 massacres of jailed "enemies of the Revolution" and
established the "Committee of Surveillance" whose role was to root out antirevolutionaries. Marat composed the
death lists from which the innocent and the guilty alike were executed.
He was killed in his bathtub by Charlotte Corday in 1793. Madame
Corday was a Girondin and her action provoked reprisals in which thousands of
enemies of the Jacobins -- royalists and Girondins alike -- were executed on
supposed charges of treason. Corday herself was guillotined on July 17, 1793 for the murder.
Life
Childhood and education
The eldest child of Jean Paul Marat, a native of Cagliari in Sardinia, and Louise Cabrol of Geneva, Marat was
born at Boudry, in the principality of
Neuchâtel, on May 24, 1743. His father was a designer, who had abandoned his country and his religion; his mother was a
Swiss Protestant. On his mother's death in 1759 Marat set out on his travels,
and spent two years at Bordeaux in the study of medicine, whence be moved to
Paris, where he made use of his knowledge of his two favorite sciences, optics and electricity, to subdue an
obstinate disease of the eyes. After some years in Paris he went to Holland,
and then on to London, where he practised his profession.
Scientist and physician
In 1773 he made his first appearance as an author with a Philosophical Essay on
Man. The book shows a wonderful knowledge of English, French, German, Italian and Spanish philosophers, and directly attacks Helvetius, who had in his
De l'esprit declared a knowledge of science unnecessary for a philosopher. Marat declares that physiology alone can solve the problems of the connection between soul and body, and
proposes the existence of a nervous fluid as the true solution. In 1774 he published
The Chains of Slavery, which was intended to influence constituencies to return popular members, and reject the
(British) king's friends. Its author declared later that it procured him an honorary membership of the patriotic societies of
Carlisle, Berwick and Newcastle.
He remained devoted to his profession, and in 1775 published in London a little essay on
Gleets, and in Amsterdam a French translation of the first two
volumes of his Essay on Man. In this year he visited Edinburgh, and on
the recommendation of certain Edinburgh physicians was made an M.D. of St. Andrews. On his return to London he published an Enquiry into the Nature, Cause, and Cure of a Singular
Disease of the Eyes, with a dedication to the Royal Society. In the
same year there appeared the third volume of the French edition of the Essay on Man, which reached Ferney, and, by its onslaught on Helvetius, exasperated [[Voltaire] into a sharp attack which
only made the young author more conspicuous.
His fame as a clever doctor was now great, and on June 24, 1777, the comte d'Artois, afterwards Charles X
of France, made him, by brevet, physician to his guards with 2000 livres a year and allowances.
Marat was soon in great request as a court doctor among the aristocracy; and even Brissot, in his Memoires, admits his influence in the scientific world of Paris. The next years were much
occupied with scientific work, especially the study of heat, light and electricity, on which he presented memoirs to the
Academie des
Sciences, but the academicians were horrified at his temerity in differing from Newton, and, though acknowledging his industry, would not receive him among them. His experiments greatly
interested Benjamin Franklin, who used to visit him, and Goethe always regarded his rejection by the academy as a glaring instance of scientific
despotism.
In 1780 he had published at Neuchatel a Plan de legislation criminelle, founded
on the principles of Beccaria. In April 1786 he resigned his court
appointment. The results of his leisure were in 1787 a new translation of Newton's
Opticks and in 1788 his Memoires acadmiques, ou nouvelles dcouvertes sur
la lumiere.
Marat enters politics
His scientific life was now over, his political life was to begin. In the notoriety of that political life his great
scientific and philosophical knowledge was to be forgotten, the high position he had given up denied, and he himself scoffed at
as an ignorant charlatan, who had sold quack medicines about the streets of Paris,
and been glad to earn a few sous in the stables of the comte d'Artois.
In 1788 the Notables had met, and advised the assembling of the States-General. The elections were the cause of a flood of
pamphlets, of which one, Offrande a la patrie, was by Marat, and, though now forgotten, dwelt on much the same points as
the famous brochure of the Abbé Sieyès: "Qu'est-ce que le Tiers État?"
("What is the Third Estate?") When the States-General met, Marat's interest
was as great as ever, and in June 1789 he published a supplement to his Offrande,
followed in July by La constitution, in which he embodies his idea of a constitution for France, and in September by his Tableau des vices de la constitution d'Angleterre,
which he presented to the National
Constituent Assembly. The Assembly was at this time full of anglomaniacs, who desired to establish in France a constitution
similar to that of England. Marat had seen that England was at this time being ruled by an oligarchy using the forms of liberty, which, while pretending to represent the country, was really being
gradually mastered by the royal power. His heart was now all in politics; and he decided to start a paper. At first appeared a
single number of the Moniteur patriote, followed on September 12
by the first number of the Publiciste parisien, which on September
16 took the title of L'Ami du peuple ("The Friend of the People") and which he edited, with some interruptions,
until the September 21, 1792.
"The People's Friend"
The life of Marat now becomes part of the history of the French Revolution. From the beginning to the end he stood alone. He
was never attached to any party; the tone of his mind was to suspect whoever was in power. About his paper, the incarnation of
himself, the first thing to be said is that the man always meant what he said; no poverty, no misery or persecution, could keep
him quiet; he was perpetually crying, Nous sommes trahis. Whoever suspected any one had only to denounce him to the
Ami du peuple, and the denounced was never let alone till he was proved innocent or guilty.
Marat began by attacking the most powerful bodies in Paris: the Constituent Assembly, the ministers, the corps
municipal, and the court of the Chatelet. Denounced and arrested, he was
imprisoned from October 8 to November 5, 1789. In January 1790 second time, owing to his violent campaign against Lafayette, he narrowly escaped arrest and had to flee to London. There be wrote his Denonciation contre
Necker, and in May dared to return to Paris and continue the
Ami du peuple. He was embittered by persecution, and continued his vehement attacks against all in power, and at last,
after the day of the
Champ-de-Mars (July 17, 1791), against king Louis XVI king himself.
All this time he was in hiding in cellars and sewers, where he was attacked by a horrible skin disease, tended only by the
woman Simonne Evrard, who
remained true to him. The end of the Constituent Assembly he heard of with joy and with bright hopes for the future, soon dashed
by the behaviour of the Legislative
Assembly. When almost despairing, in December 1791, he fled once more to London, where he wrote his Ecole du
citoyen. In April 1792, summoned again by the Cordeliers Club, he returned
to Paris, and published No. 627 of the Ami. The first of the French Revolutionary Wars was now the question, and Marat saw clearly that it was to serve the
purposes of the Royalists and the Girondins, who thought of themselves alone.
Again denounced, Marat had to remain in hiding until the insurrection of the 10th of August. The early days of the war being unsuccessful, the
proclamation of the duke of Brunswick excited all hearts; who could go to save France on the
frontiers and leave Paris in the hands of his enemies? Marat, like Danton, foresaw the September Massacres.
After the events of August 10 he took his seat at the Commune, and demanded a tribunal to
try the Royalists in prison. No tribunal was formed and the massacres in the prisons were the inevitable result.
The National Convention
In the elections to the National Convention, Marat was
elected seventh out of the twenty-four deputies for Paris, and for the first time took his seat in an assembly of the nation. At
the declaration of the republic, he closed his Ami du peuple, and
commenced, on September 25, a new paper, the Journal de la république
française, which was to contain his sentiments as its predecessor had done, and to be always on the watch. In the Assembly
Marat had no party: he would always suspect and oppose the powerful, and refuse power for himself. After the battle of Valmy, Dumouriez was the greatest man in France; he could almost have restored the monarchy; yet Marat did not fear to denounce him in placards as a traitor.
His unpopularity in the Assembly was extreme, yet he insisted on speaking on the question of the king's trial, declared it
unfair to accuse Louis for anything anterior to his acceptance of the constitution, and though implacable towards the king, as
the one man who must die for the peoples good, he would not allow Malesherbes,
the king's counsel, to be attacked in his paper, and speaks of him as a sage et respectable vieillard.
The king dead, the months from January to May 1793 were spent in an unrelenting struggle between Marat and the Girondins.
Marat despised the ruling party because they had suffered nothing for the republic, because they talked too much of their
feelings and their antique virtue, because they had for their own virtues plunged the country into war; while the Girondins hated
Marat as representative of that rough red republicanism which would not yield itself to a Roman republic, with themselves for
tribunes, orators and generals. The Girondins conquered at first in the Convention, and ordered that Marat should be tried before
the Revolutionary
Tribunal. But their victory ruined them, for on April 24 Marat was acquitted,
and returned to the Convention with the people at his back.
The fall of the Girondins on May 31, 1793 was a triumph for Marat. But it was his
last. The skin disease he had contracted in the subterranean haunts was rapidly closing his life; he could only ease his pain by
sitting in a warm bath, where he wrote his journal, and accused the Girondins, who were trying to raise France against Paris.
Sitting thus on July 13 he heard in the evening a young woman begging to be admitted
to see him, saying that she brought news from Caen, where the escaped Girondins were trying
to rouse Normandy. He ordered her to be admitted, asked her the names of the
deputies then at Caen, and, after writing their names, said, "They shall be soon guillotined", when the young girl, Charlotte
Corday, stabbed him to the heart.
His death caused a great commotion at Paris. The Convention attended his funeral, and placed his bust in the hall where it
held its sessions. Jacques-Louis David painted Marat
Assassinated, and a veritable cult was rendered to the Friend of the People, whose ashes were transferred to the Pantheon with great pomp September
21, 1794 to be cast out again in virtue of the decree of the February 8,
1795.
Views of Marat
The 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica writes,
"Marat's name was long an object of execration on account of his insistence on the death penalty. He stands in history as a
bloodthirsty monster, yet in judging him one must remember the persecutions he endured and the terrible disease from which he
suffered."
Artistic and theatrical representations
The Marquis de Sade, even though detesting the Reign of Terror,
wrote an admiring eulogy for Marat.
The Death of Marat is a famous painting by Jacques-Louis David.
Peter Weiss wrote a play titled
The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat, as performed by the inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the
direction of the Marquis de Sade, also known as Marat/Sade. A motion picture based on Weiss' play and entitled Marat/Sade was produced in 1964 (US
1966) under the direction of Peter Brook with performances by the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Marat's Works
Besides the works mentioned above, Marat wrote:
- Recherches physiques sur electricitè, &c. (1782)
- Recherches sur electricitè medicate (1783)
- Notions elementaires d'optique (1764)
- Lettres de l'observateur Bon Sens a M. de M sur la fatale catastrophe des infortunes Pilatre de Rozier et Ronzain, les
aeronautes et l'arostation (1785)
- Observations de M. l'amateur Avec a M. labb Sans . . . &c., (1785)
- Eloge de Montesquieu (1785), published 1883 by M. de
Bresetz
- Les Charlatans modernes, on lettres sur le charlatanisme academique (1791)
Les Aventures du comte Potowski (published in 1847 by Paul
Lacroix, the bibliophile Jacob) Lettres polonaises (unpublished).
Marat's works were published by A. Vermorel, Olig;Euvres de J. P. Marat, l'ami du peuple, recueillies et annotes
(1869). Two of his tracts, (1) "On Gleets", (2) "A Disease of the Eyes", were reprinted, ed. J. B. Bailey, in 1891.
References
This article incorporates text from the public domain 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica. Please update as needed.
The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, in turn, gives the following references:
- A. Vermorel, Jean Paul Marat (1880)
- François Chevremont, Marat: esprit politique, accomp. de sa vie (2 vols., 1880)
- Auguste Cabans, Marat inconnu (1891)
- A. Bougeart, Marat, l'ami du peuple (2 vols., 1865)
- M. Tourneux, Bibliographie de l'histoire de Paris pendant la revolution francaise (vol. ii., 1894; vol. iv.,
1906)
- E. B. Bax, J. P. Marat (1900).
- The Correspondance de Marat has been edited with notes by C. Villay (1908).
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