Jean Paul Marat, renowned as the staunchest of French patriots, was not originally a Frenchman at all. In fact, he did not even begin life as a Marat. His name at birth was Jean Paul Mara; he added the “t” to his surname later, after he moved to France. Some hostile commentators have depicted this as an indication of Marat’s duplicity, but it had no moral significance. It was not uncommon for people in eighteenth-century France to alter the spelling of their names.
Marat was born on May 24, 1743, not in France and not of French parents. His birthplace was Boudry, a town in the principality of Neuchâtel, which is now in Switzerland. At that time, however, Neuchâtel was a possession of the Prussian King, Frederick the Great. His father, Jean Mara, was born in Caglieri, Sardinia, in 1703; his first languages were Spanish and Italian. In 1740 Jean Mara moved to Geneva and married sixteen-year-old Louise Cabrol, a native of Geneva who was descended from French Huguenots. Jean Paul was the first of the Maras’ six children. Although his primary language was French, contemporaries report that even in adulthood he spoke French with a somewhat foreign-sounding accent.1 The first two of Marat’s siblings, Henri and Marie, were born in 1745 and 1746. Then, after a ten-year hiatus, David was born in 1756, Albertine in 1760, and Jean Pierre in 1767.2
The Maras were city-dwellers of modest means; the head of the household was well educated but did not have a stable profession. There are indications, however, that their social status improved over time. When Jean Paul was baptized in 1743 he had no godfather, suggesting that the family was socially isolated, whereas the three younger children born between 1756 and 1767 all had godparents, some of whom were substantial citizens. At the age of 16, Jean Paul left home to seek his fortune. Authors anxious to portray him in a bad light have speculated that his father banished him from the family home, but again there is no evidence to support that claim. On the contrary, by all accounts his relations with his family were excellent. In 1776 he returned home for a visit, about which he wrote, “I couldn’t deny myself the pleasure of spending some time with my folks.”3 After Marat’s assassination, three of his siblings publicly proclaimed their appreciation to Simonne Évrard, his widow, for her devotion to their brother.4
Marat’s mother and father died in 1782 and 1783, respectively. Shortly before his own death, Marat wrote very warmly of them. He credited his mother with developing his social conscience, and his father with instilling a love of learning in him. An autobiographical sketch that he published in 1793 said that he felt “exceptionally fortunate to have had the advantage of receiving a very careful education in my paternal home. I was able to avoid all the nasty habits of childhood that overstimulate and degrade a man.”5 In addition to wanting posterity to know that as a boy he had abstained from masturbation, he also stressed his rectitude in sexual matters in general: “I was able to avoid the temptations of adolescence and reached manhood without ever giving in to tempestuous passions. I was still a virgin at the age of 21 and had long since devoted myself to studious meditation.”
Although Marat’s outlook evidently included a strong puritanical streak, the main reason he alluded to his sexual abstinence was to emphasize how deeply serious he had been even as a child. But more important to his future evolution into a tribune of revolution was the abhorrence of oppression and injustice that his mother had imparted to him early on: “I had already developed a sense of morality by the time I was eight years old. At that age, I couldn’t bear to see other people treated badly; the sight of cruelty filled me with anger and witnessing an injustice made my heart race as if I myself were the victim.”
When the teenaged Marat left home he headed for France to seek an education. His precise path is uncertain, but it seems that after brief stays in Toulouse and Montpellier he was attracted to Bordeaux, an intellectual center that had been home to Montesquieu, whom Marat later claimed as a primary intellectual influence. He settled there, attending classes at the university of Bordeaux and paying for them out of the wages he earned as a tutor.
Bordeaux was a commercial center as well, and Marat was hired to teach the children of one of its leading citizens, Paul Nairac. Nairac was a wealthy ship-owner and sugar merchant whose fortune derived from colonial commerce, including slave trading. In 1786, on the eve of the Revolution, the Nairac family would officially join the aristocratic class, having purchased the necessary credentials. Marat’s association with the Nairacs most likely allowed him to meet powerful people who would later be instrumental in advancing his career.
The young man was apparently too restless to remain in the provinces for long, however, so after only two years in Bordeaux, in 1762 he did what any ambitious youth with dreams of glory would do—he left for Paris. Marat’s activities during his first stay in Paris are not recorded, but he seems to have pursued his education in an informal way that was typical of the era. Rather than enrolling in a particular institution and pursuing a specific diploma, he attended classes in various places and read voraciously. The curriculum he set for himself included medicine, physics, philosophy, politics, and literature.
It may have been during these early days in Paris that Marat first attempted to become a writer. He produced a 600-page manuscript of a romantic historical novel set during a Polish civil war, The Adventures of the Young Count Potowski. If he attempted to publish it, he did not succeed, but he kept the manuscript and more than a half century after his death it was published as a curiosity.6
A statement he made later provides some insight into the course of his early intellectual development. “I had hardly reached the age of 18,” he wrote, “when the so-called philosophes made various attempts to attract me to their party.”7 The philosophers of the French Enlightenment were divided into rival camps. On one side was the central current represented by Voltaire, Diderot, and D’Alembert, and on the other was the countercurrent represented by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The young Marat was drawn toward Rousseau’s “party.” Rousseau’s radical critique of science and society appealed to Marat no less than it did to an entire generation of young rebels.
After only three years in Paris, however, Marat had apparently had his fill of the metropolis. In order to “avoid the dangers of dissipation,” he says, in 1765 he left Paris, moved to England, and became an author. His first work “was aimed at combating materialism,”8 by which he meant a sterile form of rationalism that he associated with Voltaire and with Newtonianism. His Essay on the Human Soul was a monograph of about a hundred pages, written in English, which was published in 1772. The following year he expanded it to two volumes and republished it as A Philosophical Essay on Man. Then in 1775 it appeared as De l’homme, an even larger French edition published in three volumes by Marc Michel Rey in Amsterdam. Rey, as a major publisher of Rousseau’s works, was among the most influential figures of the Enlightenment. Marat had made his debut in the major leagues, so to speak, of French intellectual life.
The neophyte had launched himself into the factional literary politics of the Enlightenment. He must have been thrilled when De l’homme provoked a caustic rejoinder from Voltaire9 and a milder criticism from Diderot.10 Many years later, during the Revolution, Marat remarked that being the target of Voltaire’s sarcasm had put him in good company, because Voltaire “had taken the same liberty with Montesquieu and Rousseau.”11
ELEVEN YEARS ABROAD
Following his departure for England in 1765, Marat would remain abroad for eleven years. He was based in London for most of those years, but also spent time in Edinburgh, lived in Dublin for a year, and then in Holland for another year before returning to Paris in 1776.12
In London, Marat set up a medical practice, and by all indications had soon become a moderately successful professional. He was attracted to the London café scene, where he was befriended by a group of talented artists, including Angelica Kauffmann, later a renowned painter, with whom Marat is alleged to have had an amorous liaison. The evidence supporting that allegation, however, is not compelling.13
Marat’s new circle of acquaintances was primarily composed of foreigners like himself. He seems to have spoken Italian rather than French with a number of them, including Antonio Zucchi, a Venetian artist; Joseph Bonomi, an architect; and Kauffmann, who was not Italian but had lived in Italy for many years.
After writing his Philosophical Essay on Man, he sought out prominent scholars and other influential people to seek their support in promoting it. He found at least three who were willing to write testimonials praising the work: Charles Collignon, a professor of physiology at Cambridge University; a French diplomat named La Rochette; and Lord George Lyttleton.14 Lyttleton also offered to introduce Marat to other important people. A further sign of Marat’s rising social status in London was his induction into a Masonic lodge in the fashionable Soho district on July 15, 1774.
From at least October 1774 through February 1775 Marat was in Holland, most likely for the purpose of promoting Philosophical Essay on Man. It was during that time that he met Marc Michel Rey and arranged for the publication of the French version. But Marat may have had an additional motive for absenting himself from England. His first political book, Chains of Slavery, had just been published in London and its dissident views may have attracted some unwelcome attention from the police.
MARAT’S CHAINS OF SLAVERY
The earliest exposition of Marat’s political thought, Chains of Slavery, testifies to the fundamental consistency of his outlook over the final 20 years of his life. It reveals a strong element of continuity between the dapper young London medical practitioner and the People’s Friend of revolutionary France.
Chains of Slavery was inspired by the “Wilkes-and-Liberty” movement in England, a grassroots movement from 1763 to 1774 of partisans of John Wilkes, a popular politician. As an admirer of Montesquieu, Marat had originally admired England as a bastion of freedom in contrast with despotic France. But when he arrived in 1765 he discovered that the grass of English liberties was less green than it had appeared from afar.
Although parliamentary rule had been established for more than a century in England, corruption was widespread and a monarchical party was making a strong effort to recentralize political power in the hands of King George III. In April 1763, Wilkes, a journalist and Member of Parliament, criticized the King. For doing so, he was imprisoned and removed from his seat in the House of Commons. Widespread outrage led to the rapid rise of a boisterous movement demanding Wilkes’ reinstatement and freedom of the press. Wilkes did not remain in prison long, but when released he went into exile for four years.
Upon his return to London in 1768, Wilkes ran for parliament and was reelected. Once again, however, he was arrested and his election was invalidated. On May 10, 1768, a demonstration outside the prison where he was being held was fired upon by the government troops, and protestors were killed. Marat later claimed to have been an eyewitness to this event, which is immortalized in British history as “the Massacre of St. George’s Fields.” Wilkes ran again in the next elections, won a landslide victory, but was again disqualified by the authorities. Then he ran yet again and after another landslide saw the losing candidate declared the winner. In 1774 Wilkes became Lord Mayor of London and was finally allowed to take his seat in the House of Commons. Meanwhile, his often-cheated constituents had become a large and rowdy extra-parliamentary protest movement.
Marat’s main contribution to the Wilkes-and-Liberty movement was his Chains of Slavery, which appeared in May 1774. It was a verbal assault aimed at tyrannical government in general and at the current British regime of Lord North in particular. The tone of Marat’s polemic is evident in its subtitle: “A Work Wherein the Clandestine and Villainous Attempts of Princes to Ruin Liberty Are Pointed out, and the Dreadful Scenes of Despotism Disclosed.” Although the book had little impact on the course of English history, it is valuable for what it reveals about Marat’s ideological development a decade and a half before the French Revolution.
As with everything concerning Marat, how later commentators have evaluated Chains of Slavery has varied widely. In Louis Gottschalk’s view, for example, it was an unoriginal book with a few radical passages that are only conspicuous as a result of Marat’s later notoriety.15 Jean Massin, on the other hand, described it as “the first modern treatise on insurrection.”16 Chains of Slavery was not entirely original, but it is not surprising that a self-proclaimed disciple of Rousseau would draw upon his master’s works.17 Nevertheless, there were, as Massin pointed out, important aspects of Marat’s book that were unprecedented. While Dr. Marat’s diagnosis of the degenerative social illnesses he witnessed echoed Rousseau, the therapy he prescribed was considerably more radical. In the book, Marat identified monarchs as the primary oppressors, but also condemned parliaments as their corrupt accomplices. “Who are the friends to the poor,” he asked, “in a senate composed of rich men only?”18
Marat was certainly not the only author of his era to deplore the extreme gulf separating the wealthy few and the impoverished multitude. Some, such as Mably, Morelly, and Restif de la Bretonne, had proposed very radical communistic solutions. What set Marat apart was his political understanding of the practical measures that would be required to really solve the problems of inequality and despotism. “Liberty,” he declared, “constantly springs up out of the fires of sedition.”19 “Has a people ever took arms but to secure their liberty, to oppose the pernicious designs of ambitious men, and to free themselves from oppression?”20
Marat did not believe small, violent groups of dedicated revolutionaries could overthrow repressive regimes by their own efforts alone. When the people embark upon an insurrection “their rising avails little, unless it be general.”21 On the other hand, a small cadre of revolutionaries is absolutely necessary to carry out the propaganda and agitational tasks that can organize “the multitude” for insurrectionary action:
As a continual attention to public affairs is above the reach of the multitude; in a state jealous of its liberty, there should never be wanting some men to watch the transactions of the ministers, unveil their ambitious projects, give an alarm at the approach of the storm, rouse the people from their lethargy, disclose the abyss open before them, and point out those on whom the public indignation ought to fall.22
This is a remarkably precise description of how Marat would come to see his own role when confronted with a revolutionary situation in France 15 years later. Several chapters of Chains of Slavery provide detailed instructions for agitational journalists, demonstrating a clear continuity between his words of 1774 and his deeds after 1789.
Successful insurrections, Marat insisted, do not occur spontaneously. For an unorganized multitude to be united into a fighting force with the necessary decisiveness, it must subordinate itself to a centralized leadership. Creating that leadership and establishing its authority are the most crucial elements of the art of insurrection.
Chains of Slavery appeared in print just a few months before John Wilkes was at last permitted to take his seat in Parliament in late 1774, after which the Wilkes-and-Liberty movement rapidly disbanded. In the context of widespread political complacency, even if Marat’s manual of insurrection had been widely known it could not have been put to practical use. The ideas it proposed would remain abstractions until 1789, when an opportunity arose in France to put them to the test.23
RETURNING TO FRANCE
In April 1776, about a year after he returned to England from his sojourn in Holland, Marat took a brief trip to Geneva to visit his parents and then moved back to Paris for good. Although theorizing about insurrections was no more likely to attract a big readership in Paris than in London at that time, Marat did not entirely abandon his political interests. He must have participated with gusto in debating the issues of the day in the Parisian cafés. It was probably then that he and his future political enemy, Jacques Pierre Brissot, became close friends.
Marat spent much of 1777 and 1778 writing a book-length essay for a contest sponsored by the Economic Society of Berne, which had offered a prize for the best detailed proposal for reforming the criminal justice system. Marat’s entry, entitled Plan of Criminal Legislation, did not win the prize, but it was published at Neuchâtel in 1780, and then Brissot republished it in 1782. In 1790, in the wake of the great uprising that initiated the French Revolution, Marat extensively revised it and had it published again.24 He judged this to be the “least imperfect” of all his published works.25
The Plan of Criminal Legislation testified to the empathy with the poor that would later characterize Marat’s revolutionary journalism. He argued, for example, that stealing food for survival is not immoral and therefore should not be illegal. The moral content of this sentiment may today seem commonplace, but criminal law in England at that time prescribed death by hanging for theft of property valued at more than one shilling. Grisly public executions designed to strike terror in the hearts of onlookers were common in both England and France.
Marat began his Plan of Criminal Legislation with the observation that the existing laws were simply the arbitrary commands of a dominant power structure that served the interests of the few at the expense of the many.26 Laws against theft, he wrote, are based on the idea of private property, which is also an arbitrary notion: There is no basis in nature for any individual to own a portion of the Earth’s surface. “The right to possess,” Marat argued,
flows from the right to live. Therefore, all that which is indispensable to our existence belongs to us, and anything more than that cannot legitimately be considered ours as long as others are in need. That is the legitimate basis of property, both in the state of society and in the state of nature.27
The Plan of Criminal Legislation is the last indication of any interest on Marat’s part in political or social affairs before 1789. Whatever passion remained from his involvement with the Wilkes-and-Liberty movement seems to have been sublimated into controversies with medical and scientific institutions. Throughout the decade of political quiescence preceding the Great Revolution, Marat’s attention was focused on his careers as physician and physicist.