The French Revolution divided France and eventually all of Europe with a line of blood. The loyalties and hatreds to which it gave birth have endured to the present day. Jean Paul Marat, more than any other individual, has for over two centuries remained the focus of the passionate emotions unleashed by that great social upheaval.
Marat’s celebrity derived first of all from his role as the most influential of the Revolution’s journalists and agitators. Of the hundreds of competing journals that appeared when censorship collapsed at the onset of the Revolution, it was his Ami du peuple—The People’s Friend—that most thoroughly expressed the aspirations and focused the fury of the Parisian poor.
Many decades later Victor Hugo recognized Marat as a timeless symbol of social revolution. “As long as there are misérables,” wrote the author of Les Misérables, “there will be a cloud on the horizon that can become a phantom and a phantom that can become Marat.”1 Fear of this powerful phantom, and of its reappearance, has made a dispassionate evaluation of the historic Marat all but impossible. It has led innumerable authors to consciously or subconsciously distort their portrayals of him. In general, conservative and liberal historians alike have detested Marat; the conservatives because he was a threat to the status quo, and the liberals because of the extremism and calls to violence that characterized his agitational style.
In the 1950s, with the Cold War at its peak, a group of British and American historians issued a “revisionist” challenge to the Marxist interpretation that had dominated the study of the French Revolution during the first half of the twentieth century. Their primary target was Georges Lefebvre’s masterful synthesis that had become the standard account of the Revolution.2
The revisionist history downplayed the Revolution’s significance as a cause of social change and denied that its most radical phase from September 1793 through July 1794 contributed anything of value to future generations. From this it followed that Marat’s role in the Revolution was likewise of little value. The present biography reflects the more traditional view, held by Marxists and non-Marxists alike, that the French Revolution was a watershed event in the development of modern society, and seeks to establish that Marat’s historic contribution to it was indispensable.
The historians’ fear and loathing of the revolutionary phantom has led them to portray Marat as a villain with no redeeming qualities. According to their collective portrait, his character was that of a common criminal. He was a psychopath, a sociopath, a quack, and a charlatan. Even his physical appearance was repulsive.
Consistency has not been the strong suit of Marat’s critics, however. The descriptions portraying him as horribly ugly do not square with the charge against his character that he frequently seduced the beautiful wives of his friends and patrons. One author, for example, depicted Marat as a “sallow man with pockpitted countenance, black flat hair, blood-shotten blinking eyes and spasmodically twitching mouth—the incarnation of the repulsive,” while also alleging that he seduced the famous artist Angelica Kauffmann and the Marquise de l’Aubespine.3
The frequent claims that Marat was a criminal, a psychopath, and a charlatan are obviously more important than whether he was ugly or not. Each of these allegations merits particular consideration.
WAS MARAT A COMMON CRIMINAL?
The meager material conditions in which Marat lived when his political influence was at its peak support his claim to have been, like Robespierre, incorruptible. A number of important historians, however, accepted as true, or at least plausible, a long-standing rumor that Marat had committed a museum robbery in England in 1776. British historian Sidney L. Phipson analyzed the supporting evidence at book length and concluded that Marat had indeed been a common thief. Phipson claimed that he had examined the charges against Marat very carefully and had presented the evidence “without, at least, any conscious bias.”4
To Phipson the moral lesson of this felonious deed was very clear:
Jean Paul Marat was by no means the irreproachable figure he is so often depicted, but belongs, rather ... to that more questionable class of politicians who qualified for revolutionary triumphs by early infractions of the criminal law. But nations have never been saved, although thrones may be overturned, by patriots of this stamp.5
The essence of Phipson’s case was that Marat, using the alias “Jean Pierre Le Maître,” stole some rare coins from an Oxford University museum, was caught and sentenced to prison, but escaped and fled to France. The occurrence of the museum theft is undisputed; at issue is whether Le Maître was in fact Marat. A circumstance that Phipson felt could not be coincidental was that Le Maître was also known to have used the name “Mara,” and Marat’s original family name had been “Mara.”
The claim that they were one and the same person originated in an English publication in 1793 and was thereafter buttressed by “eyewitness testimony,” which Phipson evaluated and deemed probably true. By systematically accepting all of the rumor material and rejecting all conflicting evidence, he produced a believable narrative leading to the conclusion that Marat was the coin thief.
The main obstacle that Phipson faced in pleading this case was the fact that Marat was undeniably back in France, and in respectable circumstances, just three months after Le Maître had been sentenced to five years hard labor in England. One month after Le Maître’s conviction, however, six convicts broke out of the prison and escaped. The names of the escapees are not known, but Phipson’s case depends on his assumption that Le Maître was one of the six.6
The most significant piece of counterevidence that Phipson considered but rejected was a letter written by Marat datelined “Douvres, 11 avril 1776,” in which he says he is leaving England.7 That date falls between February 1776, when Le Maître was arrested, and March 1777, when he was on trial. Phipson conceded that Le Maître was in prison at that time, but he speculated that Marat deliberately wrote the letter after the fact to cover up his criminal past. There is no evidence, however, that Marat was ever aware of being suspected of any robbery.
Phipson’s case is based entirely on circumstantial evidence. It depends upon a long chain of implicit links to Marat that he judges to be “probable” or “not impossible.” Nonetheless, it was deemed to be at least plausible by other historians who, like Phipson, perhaps felt a need to believe the worst about Marat.8
Fortunately this issue was put to rest in 1966 when Robert Darnton discovered a document in the archives of the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel. It was a letter from Marat to F. S. Ostervald, one of the Société’s founders.9 The letter is dated May 14, 1776, and proves that Marat was then in Geneva. It can therefore now be said without a doubt that Marat did not rob the museum. The episode reveals nothing about Marat, but a great deal about how historians allow their social prejudices to affect their judgment.
WAS MARAT CLINICALLY INSANE?
To readers today, Marat’s political polemics often appear harsh and unduly violent. But that is largely because they are usually presented apart from their political context—namely, Paris in the throes of rebellion from 1789 to 1793. His writings appear less “extremist” in nature when the extreme circumstances in which he was operating are taken into account.
When a bitter opponent of the Revolution such as Hippolyte Taine portrayed Marat as a violence-obsessed madman, his greater purpose was to condemn by proxy the demands and aspirations of plebeian Parisians—which he called “the mob”—as irrational and insane. A more recent author offered this typical appraisal: “Jean Paul Marat was a fanatic; he was sincere; he was violent and bloodthirsty; he was enthusiastically and lyrically devoted to the Revolution; and he was probably insane.”10
Marat may well have been eccentric, moody, difficult to get along with, or suspicious by nature, but that is not the issue. Is there any evidence that he was a certifiable psychopath? A prominent American neurologist and psychologist, Charles W. Burr, M.D., advanced the claim that Marat’s deeds and writings prove he was psychotic and clinically insane.11 Burr’s 1919 article has frequently been cited by later authors.12 It is difficult to understand how the historians who have echoed his opinion could have missed the blatant class bias that underpinned his psychoanalysis of Marat. Marat’s “creed was simple—all that the rich own belongs to the poor because they stole it from the poor,” Burr wrote. “He belongs then among the insane, and is an example of paranoia of the political type.”13
Dr. Burr wrote this article two years after the triumph of the Russian Revolution, in which he must have perceived Marat’s phantom. The political component of his definition of insanity is undisguised:
The gentlemen who regard [Marat] as a political genius, e.g., the sincere members of the Bolshevik party of today, not only in this country, are themselves mentally abnormal. He is not the only lunatic in history who has had a following during life and after death.14
Burr’s diagnosis of Marat’s mental problems reveals that his own social fears extended from communism to feminism, reflected the generation gap that alienated youth from their parents, and included an element of xenophobia:
Mentally, in his earlier life in many ways he resembled the sentimental sympathizers with Bolshevism who are today making so much noise in America. It is noteworthy that almost all the Americans born among them have led shielded lives, have never been in contact with the realities of life, have never had to work (their fathers did that for them); the women advocates have failed in woman’s first and natural function. Among the foreign born are internationalists, parasites, and those who left the countries of their birth for their countries’ good.15
Burr’s analysis goes beyond bias to bigotry and serves as an extreme example of the fatuity of seeking a scientific basis for judging a revolutionary leader insane. Marat and the Parisian poor whose mental state he reflected were not crazy; they were angry, and their anger was not at all irrational. Marat’s psychological health is impossible to evaluate with precision, but there is no indication that he crossed the line into psychosis.
Historians have pointed to Marat’s frequent allegations of plots against his life as evidence of paranoia. Whether or not his suspicions and accusations were exaggerated, they were certainly not totally unfounded. His perception of being persecuted by his political enemies was not imaginary. He was repeatedly arrested, hounded into hiding and exile, and ultimately assassinated.
WAS MARAT A CHARLATAN?
For more than two centuries the general attitude of historians toward Marat’s medical and scientific practice has been unrelentingly hostile. L. F. Maury’s interpretation is typical: “Marat, that charlatan, that bloodthirsty fool, who threw himself into revolutionary excesses out of an insensate pride and a hatred of his betters, imagined himself to be a physicist capable of dethroning Newton.”16
Some recent studies have offered a more objective reassessment of Marat’s scientific work. The traditional view that dismissed it as charlatanism or pseudoscience, however, was part of the larger ideological campaign against the revolutionary phantom. If Marat’s scientific ideas were simply fraudulent, why should anything more be expected of his political ideas? On the other hand, if Marat were to be recognized as a legitimate scientist, that would give him credit for at least some degree of intellectual prowess. And if that were the case, then his rise to prominence during the Revolution could not be written off as a mere accident of history, as his detractors have maintained.
Marat’s critics have repeatedly depicted his scientific activities and ideas as unimpressive at best and ridiculous at worst. But to make their case, they have had to take them out of their eighteenth-century context and measure them against the criteria of twentieth- or twenty-first-century science. Small wonder that on that scale Marat has failed to measure up as a scientist. The only legitimate way to assess any scientist’s accomplishments is to evaluate them in the context of the science of his or her contemporaries.
By that standard, Marat was in no sense a charlatan or a quack. His scientific practice was fully legitimate in the sense in which science was understood in the 1780s. Marat was not on the “fringes” of science in the eyes of his contemporaries, but was at the heart of it. It could be argued that he was on the fringes of the elite science establishment, as represented by the Parisian Academy of Sciences, but that is quite a different matter. Throughout the ages, many important scientific contributions have been made by men and women whom the scientific elite tried to marginalize.17
WAS MARAT A REVOLUTIONARY LEADER?
Establishing that Marat was not a thief, a lunatic, or a quack does not tell us what he was, and why his life was historically important. All historians acknowledge that he was a revolutionary, and none would deny that he attained a great deal of popularity. Beyond those two points, however, agreement is rare. Some have argued that Marat’s revolutionary role was more image than substance—all sound and fury, signifying nothing.18
The central theme of this biography is that Marat was not simply an icon of radicalism or a notorious demagogue, but one of the authentic leaders whose presence was crucial to the success of the French Revolution. Chapters 1 and 2 present a brief account of Marat’s life prior to the pivotal insurrection at the Bastille in 1789, and Chapters 3 through 5 offer a narrative of Marat’s activities from 1789 to the end of his life. A conscientious examination of those activities demonstrates that he was not an opportunist devoted primarily to advancing his own interests, but a principled leader continuously seeking to advance the Revolution.
