I have long been wary of authors who claim to have discovered some startlingly important aspect of history that all previous authors had somehow overlooked. Now I find myself reluctantly having to make a claim almost (but not quite) like that.
Jean Paul Marat was a key leader of what was arguably the most important of all social revolutions. And yet there have been virtually no adequate biographies of Marat published in the English language. Why not?
I am hard pressed to answer that question. The reason that I am not claiming to be the only adequate biographer of Marat is contained in the qualifying phrase “in the English language.” Numerous fine biographies have appeared in French—my personal favorites are Jean Massin’s and Olivier Coquard’s1—but none have been published in English translation. The present volume is intended to remedy that glaring omission in the literature on the French Revolution.
As for previous English-language biographies of Marat, there have been a grand total of two published in the past hundred years. One was by the distinguished historian Louis Gottschalk and the other was by me.2 Gottschalk’s, which was originally published in 1927 and reissued, unchanged, in 1967, is not simply out of date, but in my opinion is also seriously flawed in its interpretation of Marat’s role in the Revolution.
Gottschalk portrayed Marat as an accidental figure on the stage of history—an ultraradical demagogue who gained immense notoriety but should not be counted among the authentic leaders of the Revolution. In 1997 I published a biography of Marat to challenge that notion. Au contraire, I argued, Marat was a highly effective leader of the French Revolution who earned his influence through the consistency and principled nature of his leadership.
My 1997 biography of Marat is not out of date, but I felt it would now be useful to write another one with a different focus. Although the earlier book did not ignore Marat’s revolutionary activity, it put more emphasis on his much longer career as a scientist. That was an aspect of his life that had not previously been treated adequately even by French biographers.
The volume you now hold in your hands, however, centers its attention squarely on Marat’s political career as journalist, agitator, and leader of the French Revolution during the last four years of his life, 1789–93. That, after all, is the basis of his historical importance and what he is rightfully remembered for. Without Marat, the French Revolution may well not have resulted in the social transformation of France, Europe, and the world.
Marat’s pre-Revolutionary careers as a medical doctor and an experimental physicist are not irrelevant to his later development, however. To fully come to grips with this enigmatic figure, it is necessary to take that formative part of his life into account. For that reason, I have created a website devoted primarily to an exposition of Marat’s medical and scientific work during the years 1765 through 1789, which I invite readers of this volume to peruse (www.MaratScience.com).
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The French Revolution dealt the death blow to the traditional social structure not only in France but throughout Europe. The old regime had been founded on the principle of natural inequality: that some people were by birth superior to others and thereby entitled to special privileges. The Revolution produced a social order based on the opposite premise of human equality, from which derived the rights to equality before the law, representative government, and guarantees of civil liberties.
But to Marat these gains, however important, did not go nearly far enough. They amounted to a great leap forward in political equality but not economic equality. The rich and poor gained equal rights to sleep under the bridges of Paris, but the wretched of the earth remained mired in their wretchedness. What set Marat apart from all other major figures of the Revolution—from Mirabeau to Brissot to Danton to Robespierre—was his total identification with the struggle of the propertyless classes for full social equality.
The ever-deepening gulf between the billionaires and the slumdogs in today’s world testifies to the continuing relevance of Marat’s revolutionary perspective. Properly understood, the triumphs and failures of his career shed light on some timeless and universal aspects of the revolutionary process that can benefit—and perhaps inspire—participants in the current struggles for social change. May they triumph, and the sooner the better.
Clifford D. Conner
November 2011