July 1791 to September 1792
Louis XVI’s failed attempt to flee revolutionary Paris dramatically altered the political landscape. The monarchy lost all credibility and its days appeared to be numbered. Meanwhile, Marat’s popularity skyrocketed.
One might expect Marat to have been elated, but he was not. He was pleased that naïve illusions of peaceful social reconciliation had at last been demolished, but his assessment of the general political situation left him as depressed as ever. In his view, the people had not yet fully awakened, but were sleepwalking, wandering in confusion, far, far from achieving the political clarity that would be necessary to consolidate the Revolution. He would remain gloomy for yet another year, until August 1792 when another great insurrection would at last transform revolutionary potential into revolutionary reality.
THE CHAMP DE MARS MASSACRE
The shocking revelation that the King had conspired against the Revolution prompted widespread demands to strip him of his powers. Illness during the first weeks of July 1791 hampered Marat’s ability to participate in organizing the movement, although the uninterrupted appearance of Ami du peuple kept his opinions before the public. Meanwhile, his Cordeliers Club allies took the lead in issuing a call for a mass mobilization on July 17 at the Champ de Mars (where the Eiffel Tower stands today).
The plan was to construct a large platform to be called the “Altar of the Nation” in the middle of the open field where throngs of demonstrators could converge to sign a protest petition. The petition that was drawn up for the event called for the ouster of Louis XVI, but did not demand the abolition of the monarchy. As people began to stream into the Champ de Mars on the morning of July 17, however, a nasty confrontation developed when two men were discovered hiding under the Altar of the Nation. Some historians have speculated that they may have been hapless voyeurs hoping for a peek up the ladies’ skirts, but an aroused crowd believed them to be government spies and killed them on the spot. In response, Mayor Bailly declared martial law and called upon Lafayette’s National Guard to disperse the demonstrators.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of people had continued to enter the Champ de Mars, unaware of the earlier disturbance and the order to disperse. It was a lovely summer day. Families had brought their children and the mood was festive. Suddenly National Guardsmen opened fire on them, killing about 50 and wounding many more.
The authorities succeeded in driving the crowd from the field, but the episode immediately entered the annals of history as the Champ de Mars Massacre. It represented another watershed event—the first time the new “revolutionary” regime had turned its guns against the people. With Bailly and Lafayette widely perceived as responsible for the slaughter of peaceful demonstrators, Marat’s denunciations of the two moved from the radical fringe to the mainstream. Bailly’s tenure as mayor would last only two more months and Lafayette’s as National Guard commander would end shortly thereafter.
Marat was unrestrained in condemning the perpetrators of the massacre. “If only the People’s Friend could rally two thousand determined men,” he raged, he would lead them to rip Lafayette’s heart out, burn down the royal palace with the King and his ministers inside, and impale the National Assembly deputies in their seats.1 That rant resulted in the arrest of the printer who printed it, but Marat himself was as usual able to avoid capture. Other printers were sufficiently intimidated, however, to make publication of Ami du peuple difficult; only two issues would appear over the following two weeks.
If Marat had expected the Champ de Mars Massacre to trigger an immediate upsurge in the fighting spirit of the people, he was disappointed. The repression may not have succeeded in intimidating the Parisian public but it certainly left it in a daze of confusion and demoralization. Revolutionary ardor declined and social peace returned, but the tranquility was deceptive. Beneath the surface, a sullen anger festered and spread.
By September Marat’s despair had intensified, and he put it on public view in the pages of Ami du peuple. “The People’s Friend,” he declared in the September 8 issue, “is ready to renounce the foolish enterprise of sacrificing himself for the public welfare.”2 As if deteriorating health, mounting financial difficulties, and the depressing political situation were not enough, Marat had also been drawn into a lurid domestic scandal. His underground existence obliged him to frequently change hiding places, one of which had been at the residence of a Monsieur Maquet. Maquet had a housekeeper, Mademoiselle Fouaisse, who also happened to be his mistress.
One day, returning from a business trip, Maquet discovered that Marat and Mlle. Fouaisse were gone and some of his furniture was missing. Maquet publicly accused Marat of stealing his wife and his furniture, and brought criminal charges against him. Scandal-mongering journalists gave the allegations wide circulation, and Marat’s enemies sought to use them to damage him. One of Maquet’s friends denounced Marat at the Jacobin Club.
Marat responded to the charges in Ami du peuple. First of all, he explained, Mlle. Fouaisse was not Maquet’s wife, but a servant whom he had kept in virtual slavery. Furthermore, he had witnessed Maquet physically abusing her. The young woman, a good patriot, had asked the People’s Friend for guidance, and he advised her to liberate herself immediately. She did so and took with her certain pieces of furniture that she considered to be her own.3 This rejoinder must have embarrassed Maquet into silence, because the scandal simply faded away, and seems not to have caused lasting damage to Marat’s reputation for moral probity.
In the short term, however, the incident compromised Marat’s security by putting a spotlight on the methods he used to hide himself. With his cover blown, he said, he had no choice but to go into exile.4 On September 21 he published a “Final Farewell of the People’s Friend to the Nation” that declared he had given up hope for France and had departed for England the previous week.5 He had arranged with Cordeliers comrades for the continued publication of Ami du peuple, and the next three issues were datelined Clermont, Breteuil, and Amiens as he headed toward the coast.6
But a week later he was back in Paris, relating a peculiar cloak-and-dagger story in his September 27 issue. He said that en route to England he had become aware of some suspicious characters trailing him whom he feared might be assassins. They almost nabbed him in Beauvais, but he got away and then decided to return to Paris.7 The truth of this mysterious episode is impossible to ascertain. He may have actually been in Clermont, Breteuil, Amiens and various other places as he claimed, or he may never have left Paris at all. The whole story could well have been a misdirection maneuver to deceive the police into looking for him elsewhere.
THE LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY
Wherever Marat had been during the previous two weeks, when he officially resurfaced in Paris at the end of September the Revolution was entering a new phase. On October 1 a new parliamentary body, the Legislative Assembly, made its debut. The National Assembly had fulfilled its original mandate of producing a new constitution for France and, after calling elections for the new legislature, dissolved itself. The new political arrangements included a role for Louis XVI, who would be allowed to remain King if he would swear allegiance to the new constitution. With that, France would officially become a constitutional monarchy.
The politicians of the National Assembly, collectively tainted by their involvement in the debacle of the flight to Varennes, had to concede that the new Legislative Assembly would be entirely made up of people other than themselves. All members of the National Assembly were explicitly barred as candidates for the Legislative Assembly. That gave Marat a measure of hope that the new legislative body might be an improvement over its predecessor, which he had utterly loathed.
Marat had been nominated as a candidate for the Legislative Assembly, but despite the powerful impact of his journalism on certain occasions, in September 1791 his chances of being elected were virtually nil. His name was listed on only a single ballot, on which only two of the 733 electors voted for him.8 Marat’s lack of electoral appeal was not a function of his popularity, but of the class bias of the electoral system. Only “active citizens,” as defined by a property qualification, were eligible to vote, which excluded the poorest third of the Parisian population.
The elections, reflecting a rise in republicanism after the King’s escape attempt, produced a legislative body with a left wing significantly larger than the one Robespierre had led in the National Assembly. The most influential left-wing leader in the Legislative Assembly, however, was Marat’s former friend Brissot, whom he had since come to regard as a corrupt and unprincipled scoundrel. In Marat’s eyes, one Robespierre was worth more than a hundred Brissots. When in its third session the Legislative Assembly ratified the constitution produced by the National Assembly, Marat concluded that “the new deputies are worth no more than the old ones.”9
Brissot’s faction at first dominated the Legislative Assembly’s left wing. Known alternatively as the “Brissotins” and the “Girondins” (because several of its other leaders represented the Gironde department of southwestern France), within the course of a few months they had become its right wing. As one historian observed, they started out as stalwart republicans but soon became “alarmed at the social consequences of their own actions” and “drew back in defence of the monarchy.”10
In March 1792 the Brissotins were appointed by the King to head the government. Marat denounced the new ministry as worse than its predecessors:
Never did our former tyrants give us as much cause for complaint as our own barbarous delegates are giving us today ... We are farther from liberty than ever. Not only are we slaves; we’re slaves legally ... Take a look at the ‘theater of State’—the decorations have changed, but the same actors are there, and the same masks and the same plots.11
THE DRIVE TOWARD WAR
Although Louis XVI remained on the throne, monarchists within France and throughout Europe were infuriated by the humiliation to which he and his family had been subjected after his capture at Varennes. Believing he was being held as a virtual prisoner in his Parisian palace, they determined to step up efforts to “rescue” him. In August 1791 the rulers of Austria and Prussia met and issued a call for other European monarchs to join them in a military alliance against the French Revolution. Their Declaration of Pillnitz, though diplomatically formulated, was transparent enough to be perceived by French patriots as a mortal threat. War appeared to be inevitable.
Brissot and his colleagues, as the leaders of the Legislative Assembly, responded to the challenge with radically revolutionary defiance. Revolutionary France, they proclaimed, should immediately declare war against the major European powers. To simply wait for their enemies to carry out their threats of aggression would be suicidal.
The Brissotins’ proclamation was an inspirational call for international revolutionary solidarity—an appeal not only to defend the Revolution in France, but to extend it throughout Europe. It urged oppressed people everywhere to rise up in arms against their oppressors and promised that France’s revolutionary army would be there to support them.
The call for a French-led war of liberation against the crowned heads of Europe was greeted in Paris with widespread jubilation. The sans-culottes were suddenly re-energized. Hébert’s Père Duchesne spoke for almost all revolutionary-minded patriots in expressing enthusiasm for the proposed revolutionary crusade. But amidst the chorus of joyous hosannas there was one loud, discordant note. Marat, too, might have been expected to welcome a call to revolutionary war, but he did not. From the moment the Brissotins launched their prowar campaign, Marat denounced it with all the energy he could muster.12 Brissot, he thundered, was a traitor for advocating a war that could only lead the Revolution to disaster.13
It was the height of absurdity, Marat believed, to think that a war of liberation could be led by aristocratic generals who passionately hated the Revolution. For one example, consider Bouillé, who had massacred the patriotic soldiers at Nancy. Bouillé, it was true, was no longer on the scene, because he had fled the country after his attempt to engineer the King’s escape ended in the debacle at Varennes. But who had replaced Bouillé? His cousin, Lafayette! The same Lafayette so discredited by the Champ de Mars Massacre that he had to give up his command of the Parisian National Guard was nonetheless appointed leader of one of France’s four main armies.
Marat was convinced that Lafayette and his ilk would deliberately sabotage the war effort as a way to undermine the Revolution. They would send patriotic soldiers into battle, figuratively speaking, with their hands tied behind their backs. And if the generals’ perfidy succeeded in handing victory to the aristocratic émigrés, they would then all march on Paris, slaughter its inhabitants, and reestablish the autocratic monarchy. No wonder the Brissotins’ war-mongering had been so warmly received by the most reactionary aristocrats and the royal court!
When reinstated in September, Louis XVI had publicly embraced the constitution, but privately he was far from reconciled to his role as constitutional monarch. He and his generals were advocating a war that they had every intention of losing. Marat smelled a conspiracy in the King’s appointment of the saber-rattling Brissotins as his top ministers.
Marat perceived Brissot’s ultraleft demagogy as endangering the Revolution by diverting the people’s attention toward external enemies and away from the “traitors” at home. It perverted the honest patriotism of the sans-culottes into a reactionary form of aggressive nationalism.
The People’s Friend and the moods of the people were in direct opposition on this issue. Marat’s lonely stance provides insight into two qualities that were essential to his development into an effective revolutionary leader. First, the clarity and foresight of his analysis reveal his exceptional capability as a revolutionary strategist. In contrast with most of his contemporaries, his outlook was not derived from momentary enthusiasms, wishful thinking, or symbolic posturing, but was based on political and material realities. Second, his immunity to the popular war fever is evidence of an ability to resist the temptations of political opportunism.
Throughout the month of November, as circulation of Ami du peuple declined sharply, Marat once again seemed to grow discouraged. In December, however, his isolation on the war issue began to ease as Robespierre, for much the same reasons as Marat, also declared opposition to the Brissotins’ bellicosity. Danton and other Cordeliers Club militants followed suit. Nevertheless, on December 14 Marat issued yet another “final farewell,” and after its December 15 issue Ami du peuple did not appear again for four months.14
A TWO-MONTH DISAPPEARANCE
Marat’s on-again, off-again retirements are an indication that he was on a rather active emotional rollercoaster. That his ups and downs were perfectly synchronized with the rises and falls of the mass movement, however, suggests that his depression was not fundamentally a psychological problem. His periodic retreats were probably to some degree prompted by sheer physical exhaustion. The amount of energy required to publish Ami du peuple on a daily basis must have been draining, especially given the fragile state of his health.
His earlier “retirement” in September had lasted only two weeks. This time he disappeared from public view for two months, from late December 1791 through the end of February 1792. He so successfully covered his tracks that virtually nothing is known about where he was or what he was doing. There is no evidence to corroborate his claim to have been in England, but there is no reason to doubt it, either. Wherever he was, it can be inferred that he was busy with some major editorial projects for which he was seeking publishers as soon as he reappeared in Paris. One was to collect his articles from Ami du peuple and publish them in two 400-page volumes under the title The School for Citizens.
His two-month absence had evidently not been a retirement, but a period of reflection and reorientation that led him to take a longer view of the Revolution’s prospects. Instead of expecting an imminent uprising, for which a daily agitational journal was an appropriate tool, his renewed perspective pointed toward a more prolonged struggle. That would be better served by more comprehensive works, such as School for Citizens, to educate the people politically and prepare them for revolutionary opportunities in the future.
The ambitious School for Citizens project would never be realized, but Marat put a great deal of effort into promoting it. He asked the Cordeliers Club for help, and their response was ardently supportive. On March 12 the Club appointed a special committee to promote School for Citizens to the fraternal societies and other revolutionary-minded organizations, not only in Paris but throughout France. More significant, however, was a motion the Club passed on April 5 urging Marat to resume publication of Ami du peuple, lamenting its absence as “a real public calamity.”15
Marat responded. Ami du peuple started up again on April 12, 1792, and for all practical purposes served as the primary organ of the Cordeliers Club. The timing could hardly have been better. Marat’s journal made its reappearance just one week before the war question—still at the center of public discourse—would cease to be an abstraction. On April 20 France declared war against Austria.
SIMONNE ÉVRARD
Marat’s decision to return to revolutionary journalism in April 1792 was also influenced by a remarkable woman he had met. Sometime in 1790 he had been introduced to the Évrard sisters, Catherine, Étiennette, and Simonne—working girls from Bourgogne who had moved to Paris to find jobs. Catherine’s husband-to-be was a typographer who had set type for Ami du peuple and knew Marat personally. Through this connection Marat came to know the Évrard sisters, all three of whom were fervent partisans of the Revolution. He asked for their help in eluding the police and was invited to stay at the residence they shared at 243 St. Honoré Street.
One of the sisters, Simonne, became Marat’s lover and, though without benefit of clergy or civil ceremony, his wife. Their relationship would last until Marat’s death; following his assassination she would be known as “the widow Marat.” After 31 years of steadfastly defending the memory of the People’s Friend through the difficult times of the Thermidorian reaction, the Napoleonic Empire, and the Bourbon Restoration, she died in poverty in 1824.
When Marat met Simonne he was 47 and she was 26. Her first attraction was not to Jean Paul Marat but to the celebrated People’s Friend. Their relationship grew out of close political collaboration. The rebirth of Ami du peuple in April 1792 would most likely not have been possible without the modest but essential financial support provided by her savings and wages.
MARAT MEETS ROBESPIERRE
The two luminaries of the French Revolution’s radical phase most familiar both to their peers and to posterity were Marat and Maximilien Robespierre. Strange as it may seem in retrospect, the two men met face to face on only one occasion, although they certainly knew each other well by reputation. Both later wrote of their sole encounter, but neither said exactly when it took place. It is clear that the meeting occurred during the latter stages of the debate on the war question, which would place it between Marat’s reappearance in Paris in early 1792 and April 20, when the war actually began.
Robespierre and Marat by that time were on the same side of the debate, and both had been subjected to harsh political attacks by Brissot and his allies. The Brissotin ministry tried to tarnish Robespierre’s reputation in the eyes of moderate Assembly deputies by alleging a secret bond between him and the incendiary People’s Friend. They claimed that Robespierre was financing—perhaps even writing—Marat’s violence-laced antiwar rants, and that Marat’s calls for a dictator had Robespierre in mind.
Marat was indignant at the implication that he was simply a mouthpiece for Robespierre, and responded at length in Ami du peuple. His account of their relationship makes clear that although he was in close agreement with Robespierre on many key issues, their respective approaches to revolutionary politics were far from identical:
For those citizens who are too little enlightened to sense the absurdity of this accusation, I declare that not only does Robespierre not control my pen ... but that I have never received so much as a note from him; that I have never had any direct or indirect relations with him whatsoever; that I have only seen him once in my entire life...
The first words that Robespierre addressed to me were a reproach for having partially destroyed my journal’s immense revolutionary influence by dipping my pen in the blood of the enemies of freedom, by speaking of hangmen’s nooses and daggers.
‘Listen,’ I told him straight off, ‘my journal’s influence didn’t come from methodical analyses of the despicable decrees of the National Assembly. It came from the horrific scandal it spread through the public by unmasking the conspiracies against public liberty that are continuously hatched by the nation’s enemies—including the monarch, the legislators, and the other authorities—and by not beating around the bush about it! It came from audacity ... from the outpouring of my soul, from the enthusiasm of my heart, from my violent denunciations of oppression, from my impetuous outbursts against the oppressors ... You can be sure that after the massacre at the Champ de Mars, if I could have found 2,000 men who shared my feelings I would have led them to execute the general [Lafayette] in the midst of his battalions of brigands, burn the despot in his palace, and impale our atrocious representatives in their seats, just as I said I would at the time.’
Robespierre listened to me, frightened; his face turned pale and he kept silent for a while. That conversation confirmed me in the opinion I had always had of him; that in him were combined the intelligence of a wise senator, the integrity of a genuinely good man, and the zeal of a true patriot, but that he lacked both the outlook and the audacity to become a real national leader.16
Robespierre’s comments on their one encounter corroborate Marat’s account in its essentials:
I told him ... that he himself had placed an obstacle to the good that the useful truths developed in his writings could accomplish. By insisting on dwelling upon certain absurd and violent proposals, he had disgusted the friends of liberty as much as the partisans of the aristocracy. But he defended his opinions and I persisted in mine.17
As a politician, Robespierre was of course afraid that Marat’s violent diatribes would drive away potential allies, but his concern was not merely about political expediency. The disgust he expressed at Marat’s calls to physically liquidate the Revolution’s internal enemies seems to have been genuine. Ironically, less than two years later Robespierre himself would be carrying out just such a program of extermination—the Terror—and defending it as necessary for the survival of the Revolution.
In spite of great differences in temperament, Marat and Robespierre continued to respect each other. More importantly, they were solidly in agreement on the two major issues of the day: Both favored abolishing the monarchy and both were opposed to France launching a preemptive war.
By the time Marat resumed publishing Ami du peuple on April 12, 1792, the war issue had deeply polarized the Jacobin Club, which almost from the beginning of the Revolution had functioned as a virtual center of government. Political decisions were often hashed out at the Jacobin Club before being ratified by official governmental bodies. Robespierre headed the antiwar faction, but it represented the minority within the Club. The prowar faction led by Brissot enjoyed the considerable advantage of ministerial power. On March 15 the King had appointed Brissot’s colleagues Roland, Dumouriez, Servan, and Clavière to manage the affairs of state.
Dumouriez, the Minister of Foreign Affairs as well as a top general, frequently expressed his devotion to France and to the Revolution at the Jacobin Club podium. The April 13 issue of Ami du peuple credited Dumouriez with “the appearance of an excellent patriot,” but expressed reservations about his roles as military commander and minister of state. “Even if he were an angel,” Marat wrote, “I would continue to say again and again that the first duty of all good citizens is to remain vigilant.”18 Before long the People’s Friend would be directly accusing Dumouriez of treasonous intentions, and the denunciations would prove to be accurate.
THE WAR BEGINS
On April 19 Marat’s journal once again warned that only the Revolution’s worst enemies wanted to see France engage in a ruinous foreign war. The royalists would sabotage it at every opportunity. Lafayette or one of his fellow generals would use it as a pretext for imposing a military dictatorship. The expense would destroy the national economy and push the poor to the brink of starvation. But far worse than the monetary cost would be the human cost, measured in the numbers of young revolutionaries who would lose their lives.
Marat’s vision of how the war would unfold did not assume that the French armies would be totally defeated. His forecast was sober and prescient:
However valiant the defenders of our liberty may be, it doesn’t take a genius to predict that our armies will be crushed in their first campaign. I concede that the second might be less disastrous and that the third might even end in victory ... But to win a decisive victory over our enemies, a long and disastrous war would be necessary.19
The day after this article appeared the war was launched by a French attack on the Austrian Netherlands. As Marat had foreseen, the first campaigns ended in abysmal failure. On the other hand, his predictions that the French armies would get better with time and that the whole process would be “long and disastrous” were also borne out. The war would continue, off and on, for more than 20 years, until Bonaparte’s final defeat at Waterloo.
The April 20 declaration of war no doubt increased the pressure to rally behind the patriotic crusade, but Marat responded by stepping up his denunciations, even going so far as asserting that French losses would be preferable to victories. “If we’re lucky,” he wrote, “our troops will be often beaten but never completely defeated. There’s a real danger that one of our own generals might win a victory and, manipulating the drunken joy of the soldiers and the population, might lead his victorious army against Paris to reestablish the King’s power.”20 Both Lafayette and Dumouriez would soon boost Marat’s reputation for clairvoyance by attempting to fulfill that prophecy.
“It would be even better,” Marat continued, if our soldiers “would wake up in time and finally drown all of their officers in their own blood!”21 But with most of his readers now consumed by chauvinistic war fever, Marat was more out of step with public opinion than ever. Within days, however, Marat’s grasp of the real dynamics of the Revolution was dramatically revealed when General Théobald Dillon was slain by mutinous troops who suspected him of treason. Marat hailed such acts as the highest expression of revolutionary patriotism.22
Marat’s audacity enraged the Brissotin ministry. Fearful of the effect his seditious appeals might have on rank-and-file soldiers, the Legislative Assembly on May 3 ordered that Marat be arrested.23 This was the first police action against Marat taken by the new “leftist” government, but it followed a familiar pattern. The printshop where Ami du peuple had most recently been printed was raided, but the People’s Friend could not be apprehended because the authorities had no idea where to find him.
With police pursuit more intense than ever, Marat left the comforts of the Évrard sisters’ home and went deeper into hiding. Publishing Ami du peuple also became more difficult, but he nevertheless was able to put out three or four issues a week throughout the month of May and the first half of June. During the three weeks from June 15 though July 7, however, the journal did not appear at all.
Two politically significant events occurred in that critical three-week period. On June 20 a remarkable mobilization took place in Paris with all—or almost all—the characteristics of an insurrectionary action. A massive protest march of the people in arms was moving along in front of the royal palace when a side door was found to be unlocked. Whether that was accidental or whether the protestors had an accomplice inside the palace, demonstrators found their way to Louis XVI’s private chambers. Lo and behold—there he was, completely unprotected. For many hours, thousands upon thousands of armed marchers filed past the monarch, all the while giving him an earful of their grievances. The procession continued until late in the evening, and while no physical harm befell the King, all he could do was sit and endure a considerable amount of verbal abuse. Wearing a revolutionary cap forced upon him by the demonstrators, he remained outwardly calm and wore a beneficent smile throughout the ordeal.
This was a stunning piece of revolutionary theater, but nothing came of it and Marat was completely unimpressed. The King had dismissed Roland and other Brissotins from the government on June 13, and the June 20 demonstration had been called to protest their removal. Marat saw it as a Brissotin affair from beginning to end—nothing more than a display of fake militancy.
Of far greater importance was an attempt a week later by Lafayette to militarily subdue the Revolution. He had left his army at the front and returned to Paris, where on June 28 he addressed the Legislative Assembly and demanded that the Jacobin Club be outlawed. Although the Assembly was not unsympathetic to Lafayette, when it vacillated he decided to take action on his own. He had not attempted to bring his troops to Paris with him (and it cannot be assumed that they would have followed him), so he attempted to mobilize the Parisian National Guard he had formerly commanded. He issued a call for the Guardsmen to march against the Jacobin Club and eradicate it as a center of political power, but few—at most a hundred—responded. The fiasco earned him ridicule as a would-be Julius Caesar and he returned, humiliated, to the front.
Although Marat would not have wanted to see Lafayette’s attempted putsch succeed, he was not at all happy with the way the affair ended. The National Guard and other patriots had merely ignored Lafayette, but if they had had any gumption, Marat believed, they would have risen against him and put an end to him once and for all. That Lafayette could attempt an overt military attack on the Revolution and then simply resume command of one of the armies charged with defense of the Revolution seemed to him beyond comprehension. The lack of a massive public response to this absurdity renewed the People’s Friend’s grave doubts about the people’s seriousness, and several weeks later the July 22 Ami du peuple announced yet another retirement.
FÉDÉRÉS TO THE RESCUE
The timing of this gloomy statement was peculiar because when it appeared it was completely at odds with Marat’s behavior. He was clearly not withdrawing from the scene, but to the contrary was as active and energetic as ever. A week and a half earlier he had written a spirited appeal to the provincial National Guardsmen, the fédérés, who once again were converging on Paris for the annual July 14 celebration. He urged them to break open the arsenals and completely arm the people.24
Why, when he had been recharged with enthusiasm by the arrival of the fédérés, would he have issued such a despondent farewell on July 22? The most plausible answer is that his retirement announcement must have been sent to a printshop earlier, during the three-week period when he was unable to have anything printed, and then published on July 22 at the printer’s initiative rather than Marat’s.
Armed fédérés continued to stream into Paris from the provinces well after the Bastille Day celebration on July 14. The most famous contingent was a battalion from Marseilles, whose entrance into the capital on July 30 singing the Marseillaise gave the French Republic its national anthem. But the militiamen from Marseilles were to serve the Revolution in an even more important way by their crucial role in the great insurrection that would create the First Republic.
Marat had close connections with one of the key leaders of the Guardsmen from Marseilles, Charles Barbaroux. Before the Revolution Barbaroux had been a devoted follower of Marat’s physics courses, and Marat had reestablished contact with him earlier that year. They would later become bitter political enemies, but in a letter of August 8, 1792, Barbaroux addressed Marat as “my dear teacher” and asked his forgiveness for not visiting him sooner.25
THE “SECOND REVOLUTION” OF AUGUST 1792
Marat was in especially good spirits in early August. The tense military situation had deepened the radicalization. The people were awakening!
On July 30 a Coalition of Prussia and Austria had launched an invasion of France with the objective of occupying Paris. Two days later the infamous Brunswick Manifesto became known to the city’s inhabitants. The commander of the Coalition army, the Duke of Brunswick, had threatened to destroy the city and massacre its inhabitants if any harm were to come to the King and his family. Far from intimidating Parisians, however, the Brunswick Manifesto had the opposite effect. It infuriated them and drove them into the arms of Marat, who for months had been loudly advocating that Louis XVI and his family be taken hostage and “held responsible for whatever happens.”26
Marat was still in deep hiding, his movements concealed not only from the police but from historians of the Revolution. The details of his involvement in planning the great insurrection that erupted on August 10 are therefore unknown. It can be said, however, that the principal organizers were Cordeliers Club allies of the People’s Friend such as Étienne Jean Panis, Étienne François Garin, François Héron, and Antoine Joseph Santerre. Marat was meeting with them and with groups of fédérés, and his published calls to insurrection were at last getting the response he had always hoped for.
Ami du peuple did not appear during the last week of July and the first week of August, but it resurfaced on August 7 with another appeal “to the Fédérés of 83 Departments.” On the night of August 9 the tocsin sounded the call to insurrection and the next morning the well-organized uprising was under way. The people of Paris, together with contingents of fédérés, assembled at the royal palace. The armed, well-disciplined crowd of about 20,000 easily overwhelmed the 1,200 or so troops defending the King, who sought refuge with the Legislative Assembly. The Assembly, however, having lost its moral authority among Parisians, was itself besieged and forced to submit to the command of a thoroughly reorganized Paris Commune. Louis XVI was relieved of his powers and imprisoned. The French monarchy ceased to exist.
The uprising of August 10 brought about the kind of social revolution that Marat had long been calling for. The new municipal government of Paris was formed by representatives of the 48 sections who were elected with no distinction between “active” and “passive” citizens. With the formerly passive citizens passive no longer, the Brissotins and other conservative politicians lost their artificial electoral advantage and political power passed to the radical Jacobin and Cordeliers leaders. The sans-culottes for the first time had begun to exercise political power.
The leaders of the insurrection held de facto power through their control of the Paris Commune, but to consolidate the new stage of the Revolution throughout France would require the formation of a legitimate national government. With that in mind, they called for elections to create a new governing body, the National Convention, to replace the Legislative Assembly. The elections were to be held on the basis of universal suffrage, which would make the Convention far more democratic than any of its predecessors. In fact, however, the suffrage was less than universal because the idea that women should have the right to vote was one whose time had not yet come.27
The new elections took time, so the first meeting of the Convention did not occur until September 20. Meanwhile, in the six weeks between August 10 and September 20 the Legislative Assembly, though largely discredited, continued to exist and to claim its legitimacy as the national government. A duality of power thus existed with the Legislative Assembly holding the official reins of government and the Paris Commune actually in command. The conflict played out in an interim six-member Council of Ministers that pitted Danton as Minister of Justice against Roland, the Brissotin leader who now held the post of Minister of the Interior.
MARAT EMERGES FROM THE UNDERGROUND
Marat’s circumstances were dramatically altered by the events of August 10. From that day forward he was no longer a hunted outlaw and was able to come out of hiding for good.28 He had become a folk hero of sorts and could function openly as a political leader. He proclaimed his return to legality in a placard that appeared on the evening of August 10. It began dramatically: “A man who has been anathema for a long time escaped today from his underground hideout to try to consolidate the victory in your hands.”29
The placard noted that the People’s Friend’s predictions about betrayals by the Legislative Assembly and the generals had all come true. It warned the people to not be complacent and proposed an action program to solidify their victory:
• Above all else, take the King and his wife and son hostage ... Make it plain to him that the Austrians and Prussians have two weeks to permanently retreat to a line twenty miles beyond the border or his head will roll.
• Seize all of the ex-ministers and lock them up.
• Execute all the counterrevolutionary members of the Parisian General Staff.
• Expel all the antipatriotic officers from their battalions.
• Disarm the infected battalions.
• Arm all patriotic citizens and generously supply them with ammunition.
• Demand the convocation of a National Convention to put the King on trial and to reform the constitution; above all, its members must not be chosen by an electoral assembly but by the direct vote of the people.30
Previously these proposals would have brought more charges of sedition down on Marat’s head, but now he and the new Commune leaders were of like mind, as his proposal for a democratically elected Convention illustrates. Furthermore, with his allies now in power and his proposals more likely to be taken seriously, Marat’s rhetoric had become considerably less violent and more “responsible.” Rather than demanding that all enemies of the Revolution be put to death, he merely called for the former ministers and the counterrevolutionary officers to be imprisoned or dismissed from the army. The only exception was for traitors at the highest level of the military command, whose execution he continued to demand. That would include, above all, Lafayette.
Lafayette announced his intention to march on Paris but once again found his troops unwilling to follow, so on the night of August 19–20 he deserted his post and fled to Austria. Marat (who habitually called Lafayette by his family name) had long predicted that “the traitor Motier” would defect to the enemy, so Lafayette’s departure gave fresh support once again to Marat’s reputation as a prophet. Nonetheless, however gratified Marat may have felt to see his prediction come true, he was furious that Lafayette had been “allowed to escape.”31 The unfortunate general, however, did not find the reception he had hoped for in Austria. He was imprisoned and remained behind bars until 1796.
The new Paris Commune favored Marat and his fellow radical journalists by giving them printing presses that had been confiscated from the royal printshops. Marat received four presses, perhaps to make up for all the times in the past that the police had carted away his own presses. The decision was made by the Committee of Surveillance, the de facto executive committee of the Commune, a leadership body to which Marat himself was soon to be co-opted. He and Simonne Évrard moved into a new place at 30 Cordeliers Street and set up the presses there. Once again, Marat had become his own publisher.
Ami du peuple made its reappearance just three days after the insurrection, on August 13, but the journal had changed considerably in tone and content. Instead of denouncing the men in power, the People’s Friend had joined their ranks. Rather than scolding the people for their lack of seriousness, he declared great confidence in them.
Now that he could finally avail himself of genuine freedom of the press, he felt less need to use it. In the following month only four issues of Ami du peuple and a few placards came off his presses. He hinted again that he might retire, but this time it was not out of discouragement but because his journal had accomplished its mission. Most of his attention was directed toward new responsibilities as a leader of the Commune, and toward preparations for the forthcoming elections to the Convention.
THREATS OF WAR AND COUNTERREVOLUTION
Marat’s retirement would have to wait, however; his newfound optimism proved to be premature. Far from being consolidated, the Revolution faced mounting threats from without and within. The enemies’ armies had entered France and were steadily advancing toward Paris. At the same time, a major counterrevolutionary insurgency in the Vendée had begun to take shape.
On August 23 Longwy fell to the Prussians, removing the last obstacle blocking their march to the capital. By September 2 they had taken Verdun, less than 200 miles away. With Brunswick apparently about to make good on his threat to sack Paris, the city was in a state of panic.
The Commune called for volunteers to go to the front, and this time Marat was fully supportive. The war effort was no longer an irresponsible adventure; it was a defensive battle for survival. From Marat’s point of view, the insurrection of August 10 had transformed France into a revolutionary nation worth defending. A placard he published on August 26 featured a theme that was a first for Marat: a call for social unity! He exhorted Parisians to “suspend for the moment all our hatreds, put aside all our dissension, and silence all our petty emotions in order to unite against our common enemy.”32 But two days later his earlier anxiety over traitors at home came to the fore again in a placard blasting the Legislative Assembly and the Brissotins.33
THE SEPTEMBER MASSACRES
The vast majority of the Parisian population shared Marat’s fear that counterrevolutionary elements in their midst could sabotage their defenses and leave the city helpless to stop Brunswick’s troops from slaughtering them. On September 2 when news reached Paris that Verdun had fallen, panic gave rise to feverish action. Groups of several hundred armed sans-culottes converged upon jails where counterrevolutionaries were being held and over the next four days proceeded to kill more than a thousand inmates of nine prisons. A considerable number of the victims were not counterrevolutionaries, however, but simply petty criminals or people awaiting trial.
Although this vigilante action degenerated into an orgy of gratuitous violence, it had begun with a clear and rational purpose. The volunteers who were about to leave for the front lines were afraid that in their absence the counterrevolutionaries would escape from jail or be released by traitors. The women, children, and elderly who were left behind would be defenseless against them. This was not an unreasonable fear—it was a real danger that they thought had to be eliminated before they could march off to fight the Prussians.
At first, ad hoc tribunals attempted to distinguish between dangerous counterrevolutionaries and ordinary convicts, and about half the prisoners who were “tried” were spared. It was rough justice at best, and in the heat of the moment the process got out of hand. As the enemy armies drew nearer, impatience and frustration gained the upper hand and the executions became indiscriminate. The episode would become infamous as the September Massacres and would for good reason be condemned by future generations.
In the aftermath of the Revolution, during the period of the Thermidorian reaction, blame for organizing and directing the September Massacres began to be retrospectively attributed to Marat. No conscientious historian would give credence to that charge, but the myth of Marat’s responsibility lives on in popular accounts of the French Revolution. The accusation is based on the fact that Marat had been a member of the Commune’s leading council, the Committee of Surveillance, when the September Massacres took place. It was only on September 2, however, the day the prison executions began, that the Committee expanded from four to ten members, and Marat was among the six newcomers. Whatever the extent of his influence within the Committee may have been, he clearly did not have power of command over it.
Marat later defended the prison executions in principle and refused to condemn those who had carried them out, but he characterized them as “disastrous events” and expressed regret over the killing of petty criminals. The excesses, from his point of view, amounted to an unfortunate error rather than a crime.34
The insurrection of August 10 gave rise to a great leap forward in the revolutionary process, but the changes it brought about had only begun to unfold. Marat had moved to center stage, but bigger battles were yet to come.
