September 1792 to July 1793
In early September Marat’s attention was not focused on the prison massacres, but on the elections to the Convention, scheduled to begin on September 3. He published four placards on the subject, two of which specified which candidates the People’s Friend supported and which he opposed.1
Brissot and Condorcet headed the list of 35 candidates identified as “enemies of liberty,” which also included a number of popular journalists and publishers such as Jean Louis Carra, Antoine Joseph Gorsas, Pierre Jean Audouin, Nicolas Bonneville, and Jean Baptiste Louvet. On the positive side of the ledger were the 22 candidates the People’s Friend endorsed as “men deserving of the Nation’s greatest esteem,” among whom were Robespierre, Danton, Desmoulins, and Fréron.2 The last of Marat’s endorsements was for his alter ego:
My friends, I’ll finish by reminding you of the People’s Friend. You know what he’s done for the Nation; perhaps you don’t know what he will continue to do for your happiness. The glory of being the foremost martyr of liberty is enough for him; if you overlook him—well, that’s your misfortune.3
The election results demonstrated that Marat was in harmony with the Parisian electorate. None of those whom he opposed won election as the city’s delegates to the Convention, although many of them were chosen to represent other parts of France. On the other side, 12 of those he supported, including himself, were among the 24 elected for Paris.
Marat found the procedures governing the Convention elections preferable to those of the past, but because they continued to include a two-stage system of balloting, he felt they were still not democratic enough. A first round of voting created electoral assemblies and then the electoral assemblies chose the Convention delegates. The latter process took several days to complete. The Parisian assembly’s first choice, on September 5, was Robespierre, and the following day Danton was elected. By the fourth day Desmoulins and several more had joined the ranks of the winners.
Marat was not chosen until the fifth day. Although he was supported by a strong contingent of devoted followers, his reputation had also alienated a significant number of the assembly members. He might not have been elected at all had he not received Robespierre’s endorsement. Robespierre did not mention Marat by name, but no one misunderstood his meaning when he urged them to vote for “the man who, in order to combat Lafayette and the court, had to keep himself hidden in cellars for a year.”4 On that same day, September 9, Marat was elected to the Convention with 420 out of 758 votes.5
Marat’s election was a qualitative turning point in his political career. He did not cease his journalistic activities—in fact, his daily journal appeared more regularly than ever—but his effort and attention were from then on directed less toward the editor’s desk and more toward the podium of the national parliament.
Marat was only one of 749 delegates to the Convention. He held no special title or position, and was at first deeply isolated from the vast majority of his fellow delegates. In spite of all that, he and his agenda soon became the central focus of the Convention’s concerns. He did not dominate it in the sense of being able to dictate its policies, but he did dominate its consciousness. A few months later a hostile delegate groused: “Do you remember our first sessions? Hardly a member would even sit next to him. Now he gets the floor endlessly.”6
MARAT GOES TO THE MOUNTAIN
A dramatic change in Marat’s political approach and public persona accompanied his rise to the national political stage. Previously he had been agitating for the overthrow of a reactionary government. Now he was putting all his effort toward upholding a revolutionary regime.
Marat did not try to disguise the transformation. To the contrary, he wanted it known far and wide that he had embarked on a nouvelle marche—a “new course.” To emphasize it he changed the name of his journal from Ami du peuple to Journal de la République Française (JRF). The final issue of Ami du peuple appeared on September 21, 1792, and the first with the new masthead came off the presses four days later.
In layout and design JRF appeared virtually identical to its predecessor, as if the name were the only thing that was new about it. Its political content, however, had undergone a sharp change of direction. Whereas the final issue of Ami du peuple had attacked the new Convention and called upon the people to rise up and overthrow it (even though he was in it), the first issue of JRF recognized the legitimacy of part of the Convention and declared that the People’s Friend would subordinate himself to its leadership. “I am ready to follow the road that the defenders of the people believe most effective,” he wrote, “I must march alongside them.”7
The part of the Convention that Marat vowed to follow was its left wing, known as the Mountain because its members sat in banks of seats elevated above those of the other delegates. The 24 Parisian deputies constituted the Mountain’s central core, but they had the solid support of 50 or 60 other members. When the Convention first met, the Montagnards—men of the Mountain—represented only about 10 percent of its voting strength.
At the other end of the political spectrum, the Convention’s right wing was made up of politicians who had previously adhered to Brissot’s faction. Brissot was still among them, but his leadership had been eclipsed by others, so the term “Brissotin” had become outdated. Marat called them “Roland’s faction” or, sarcastically, “the statesmen.” Historians retrospectively dubbed them the Girondins. The Girondins were not a sharply defined group of delegates, but they nonetheless constituted a relatively stable right wing with approximately twice the voting strength of the Montagnards.
The left- and right-wing groupings together comprised less than 30 percent of the Convention’s delegates, which meant that more than 70 percent constituted a centrist majority crucial to the outcome of any particular vote. With no political principles or policies of their own, the centrists—known as “the Plain” (or less charitably, “the Swamp”)—could not lead the Convention, but could only throw their weight behind initiatives proposed by the Montagnards or the Girondins. The Convention thus became a political battlefield in a war over the votes of the Plain.
Marat vowed to “march alongside” the Mountain, but that is not to say that he was a Montagnard. He considered himself independent of them—an outsider willing to collaborate with them, but an outsider nonetheless. He didn’t rule out the possibility, however, that he might at some future time actually join the Mountain. Marat believed that unity among the revolutionary forces was the foremost necessity of the moment, and to accomplish it would require him to advocate polices of moderation that did not come naturally for him. Not one to do anything halfway, however, once he made his decision he carried it through to the end.
Collaboration with the Mountain meant that Marat would have to become an active participant at the Jacobin Club, where the Montagnards hashed out their strategy and tactics before doing battle on the floor of the Convention. After the tumultuous events of August 10, membership in the Jacobin Club became more accessible to less affluent patriots. Then in October Brissot and his allies were forced out. On the very day of Brissot’s expulsion Marat made his first appearance there,8 and within a few months had become one of the Jacobins’ most prominent leaders.
The coming together of Marat and the Mountain can be better understood as a merger between two political currents rather than as an individual joining a political organization. Prior to the insurrection of August 10 Marat had always functioned as a solo act in the political field. Although he was a freelancer with no political party at his command, he nonetheless had a significant following that was quite distinct from the segment of the population that looked to the Mountain for leadership.
The social composition of the Jacobins hardly differed at all from that of the Girondins. Robespierre and his cothinkers were radical democrats who sympathized with the sans-culottes, but they were not the political representatives of the urban poor. Marat, by contrast, had won the admiration and trust of the sans-culottes after three years of championing their cause as the intrepid People’s Friend. He now believed that the urban poor and the radical democrats needed to combine their strength in order to consolidate and advance the Revolution. A few months earlier he had provided the theoretical basis for that conclusion by appealing to historical experience:
Pushed to despair by excesses of tyranny, peoples have tried a hundred times to break their chains.
They are always successful when an entire nation revolts against despotism. Such a case is extremely rare; it is much more common to see a nation split into two parties, one for and the other against the despot.
When each of these parties is made up of a variety of social classes, the one that is against the despotism succeeds rather easily in crushing it, because in that case there are more advantages for the attackers in overthrowing it than there are for the defenders in maintaining it. Such was the case with the Swiss, the Dutch, the English, and the Americans.
But that never happens when the plebeians—that is, the lower classes of the nation—are alone in the struggle against the upper classes.9
Marat’s “new course” aimed at avoiding the social isolation of the sans-culottes that would inevitably lead to their defeat. It was designed to create and solidify an alliance uniting the urban poor with the radical democrats of the Jacobin Club. Marat’s unique place in the history of the French Revolution arose from his ability to play a leadership role in those two distinct but critically important political arenas, and to bring them together.
The more timid among the Jacobins were hesitant at first to look favorably upon Marat’s overtures. Fearful of his reputation as a wild-eyed firebrand, they felt that association with him would alienate the Plain and make it impossible for the Mountain to win crucial votes in the Convention. In December a motion for Marat’s expulsion from the Jacobin Club, although ultimately rejected, was greeted with both cheers and jeers from the membership.10 But during the early months of 1793 it became increasingly evident to the Jacobin leaders that their struggle to preserve the fragile new Republic could not succeed without the ardent support of the sans-culottes. Marat’s value in their eyes rose in proportion with their desire to strengthen their alliance with the urban poor.
MARAT ADDRESSES THE CONVENTION
The inaugural session of the Convention was held on September 20, 1792. Two days later it proclaimed the existence of the first French Republic and the official abolition of the monarchy.
Marat’s arrival at the Convention caused a sensation. Most of the delegates, especially those from the provinces, had only heard of him, and what they had heard was not favorable. Some expected to see a monster; others were surprised to find out that the People’s Friend was not a fictional character, like Hébert’s Père Duchesne. Now the fire-breathing apostle of revolutionary violence was among them, in the flesh—an elected representative of the Nation with status equal to their own.
Marat, like most of the regular deputies, lay low and said nothing during the first few sessions. On September 25, however, the Girondins forced him into the spotlight by launching an attack against him. The idea was to make a bogeyman of Marat as a way to frighten the Plain into their own arms. Marat, they asserted, was a stalking horse for Danton’s and Robespierre’s plans to create a revolutionary dictatorship. Trying to demonize Marat, however, was a strategy that would end in disaster for the Gironde.
Danton tried to appease the Girondins by virtually disowning Marat. Robespierre was not as conciliatory as Danton, but he also failed to come to Marat’s defense. It was left to Marat to stand up for himself, setting the stage for one of the most dramatic parliamentary debuts of any time or country. When the People’s Friend approached the podium, he was greeted by a boisterous chant orchestrated by the Girondins: “Sit down! Sit down!” He had been given the floor, however, so he simply waited for the commotion to subside. At the first opportunity, he declared: “I have a great number of personal enemies in this assembly.”11
“All of us! All of us!” came the reply.
“Have you no shame?” Marat said above the din. “Listen to me for a moment and I won’t abuse your patience.” The assembly quieted and Marat was able to continue. Danton and Robespierre should not be blamed for advocating a revolutionary dictatorship, he told them; they rejected the idea. That was unfortunate, he added, because he continued to believe it was necessary.12
Apparently surprised that the man addressing them did not fit the description of the dreadful fiend they had been led to expect, the assembly heard Marat out. The Girondins attempted to regain the momentum by calling Marat an outlaw and pointing out that there were still outstanding warrants for his arrest. Some of the Mountain delegates countered that the arrest warrants had been issued by former officials who had since been thoroughly discredited—above all, Lafayette.
But the Girondins believed they held a trump card. One of them held up a copy of the final issue of Ami du peuple and read from it Marat’s call for a new insurrection to overthrow the Convention. Having swung the majority of the delegates back to their side, the Girondins made a motion to arrest Marat on the spot and charge him with sedition. Two bailiffs took up positions alongside Marat, ready to arrest him if the motion passed.
This was a pivotal moment. If the vote had gone against him and he had been tried and found guilty of sedition, he could have been executed. He demanded the right to speak in his own defense, and was again given the floor. He began by expressing pride in the arrest decrees previously brought against him by the traitors of the National Assembly and the Legislative Assembly. All of those indictments, he declared, had been rendered null and void by the people when they elected him to the Convention.
As for the call for a new insurrection that had appeared in his journal a week earlier, yes, he had written it; and yes, he had meant every word of it. But in the meantime it had become outdated, and it no longer represented his point of view. To prove it, he pulled out a copy of the first issue of his new periodical, the JRF, which had appeared that very day, and read the editorial proclaiming his new course. This was designed to assure the Plain that he posed no threat to them, and to show the Mountain that he was intent on not embarrassing them.13
The tension in the assembly hall diminished and the moment of danger for Marat passed. Although it is unlikely that one speech won him the trust of the majority, it sufficed to demonstrate that he was not the phantasmagorical monster the Girondins had made him out to be. What saved Marat was that the Plain no longer feared him enough to establish the precedent of indicting an elected member of the Convention.
Before returning to his seat, the ever-dramatic People’s Friend could not resist indulging in a bit of political theater. Pulling a pistol from his waistband and putting it to his head, he exclaimed: “If you had passed an arrest decree against me, this gun would have removed me from the rage of my persecutors—I would have blown my brains out at this very podium!”14 A man with a reputation for wildness wielding a pistol in a crowded assembly hall might seem to be a recipe for chaos, but the delegates did not panic. The handguns of that era were not terribly threatening. Marat’s firearm was capable of but a single inaccurate shot without reloading, but it would have been good enough to take his own life. The main result of the spectacle was that Marat had once again stolen the spotlight and focused it on himself.
The apparently inconsistent way the Convention delegates treated Marat calls for explanation. Why would they shout him down at one moment and listen quietly the next? For one thing, a great deal of the response was organized by the Girondins, and although they would generally be howling at him, there were times when they wanted him to be heard, hoping he would make some outlandish statement that would discredit himself and the Mountain. More important, however, was Marat’s ability to command the respect of an initially hostile audience by remaining perfectly calm at the center of a maelstrom and projecting an air of supreme self-confidence. Almost every commentator marveled at Marat’s sang-froid—a preternatural coolness under fire.
Another crucial reason for Marat’s success at the podium arose from the fact that the Convention delegates were not deliberating in a vacuum. The assembly hall included public galleries filled with Parisian sans-culottes supportive of the People’s Friend. Although the observers could not officially participate in the proceedings, their vociferous expressions of agreement or displeasure often made a profound impression on the vacillating delegates of the Plain.
The divisions between the left and right wings of the Convention were geographically based. The Mountain’s delegates were mostly representatives of Parisian districts, where the Jacobin Club had controlled the electoral assemblies. The Girondins had likewise dominated the electoral machinery in certain other parts of France, and the delegates of the Plain also hailed from the provinces. The Girondins therefore sought to turn the political struggle between left and right into a territorial war between Paris and the provinces.
Portraying themselves as defenders of the whole nation’s interests against the selfish desires of Parisian radicals, the Girondins called upon the provinces to resist the extension of centralized power emanating from the capital city. In response, the Mountain denounced the Girondins as “federalists” who were trying to destroy the unity of the one and indivisible Nation. A Girondin motion to move the Convention out of the capital (and therefore out of reach of the sans-culottes’ intimidation) was condemned by the Mountain as a conspiracy to organize the provinces for a military strike against Paris.
The Girondins saw Marat as a splendid symbol of Parisian radicalism that could be used to reinforce provincial prejudices against the “rabble” of France’s great metropolis. By incessantly citing his earlier writings, they depicted Marat as the evangel of anarchy, sedition, and civil war, and tarred the Mountain with guilt by association.
The People’s Friend, however, was an experienced polemicist and fully capable of returning their fire. In his journal as well as on the Convention floor he blasted them as traitors and villains. His approach, however, was not simply one-dimensional all-out attack. In accord with his new course, he advised the impatient sans-culottes to remain calm and not rise up immediately to wipe out the Girondins. Those who failed to heed his counsel and continued to agitate for a new insurrection found themselves denounced by the People’s Friend as agents provocateurs.
He cautioned his readers against provocations that the Girondins could turn to their advantage to mobilize the provinces against Paris. “Parisians will prevent that disaster by their moderation,” he wrote.
It’s the people’s friend—always depicted by the traitors as a fire-breathing extremist—who is asking you to be moderate in the name of the public well-being. Just a few more days and the infernal clique will be completely unmasked; so the Convention will open its eyes, and only then will it be able to work to save the Republic.15
Marat obviously believed a showdown with the right-wing faction was imminent and inevitable.
THE DUMOURIEZ AFFAIR
The “traitors” Marat tirelessly condemned included not only the Girondin politicians, but also the aristocratic military leaders, with Dumouriez at the head of the list. On November 29 an astonishing prophecy appeared in JRF that proved to be one of his most accurate. “A hundred to one,” he wagered, “that Dumouriez will defect before the end of next March.”16
Dumouriez in fact did not go over to the Austrians until April 2, 1793, so Marat would have lost that bet. Missing the exact date by only two days, however, confirmed the acuity of Marat’s political insight. At the time Marat made his prophecy, no one else would have imagined that Dumouriez could do what Lafayette had done. On the very day that the Convention opened, September 20, Dumouriez defeated the Prussians at Valmy, raising his prestige among the revolutionary public to new heights. Marat’s prediction that the “hero of Valmy” would soon betray the Revolution was audacious, to say the least.
Marat’s prophecy, however, was not a lucky guess. His distrust of Dumouriez had been aroused by an incident that had come to his attention at the beginning of October. Further information that dissident soldiers subsequently supplied to the People’s Friend confirmed his suspicions. The incident involved the execution of four men by soldiers under Dumouriez’s command. Dumouriez condemned the executions as unjustified and punished the two battalions he held responsible for them. In the Convention, the Girondins echoed Dumouriez’s claim that the four men had been Prussian deserters who should not have been mistreated, much less executed, after surrendering peacefully to French forces.
Marat, on the other hand, suspected that rank-and-file Parisian volunteers were being falsely accused as part of the effort to discredit revolutionary Paris. The nub of the issue was the identity of the four men who had been executed. Had they really been Prussian deserters, as Dumouriez said, or were they, as Marat’s sources told him, French émigrés who had been caught in the act of espionage? If they were counterrevolutionary spies, Marat said, the Parisian battalions who executed them deserved praise, not punishment.
Marat’s journal of course expressed strong support for the soldiers, but now he was in a position to do more than editorialize. As a Convention delegate, he could make a parliamentary issue of it. In another manifestation of his new course, rather than acting in an individual capacity he sought the support of the Jacobin Club before taking the fight to the floor of the Convention. His first visit to the Jacobins was on October 12.17 Two days later, Dumouriez himself appeared at the Jacobin Club, receiving a rousing ovation and high praise from Danton.18 Then the following day, October 15, Marat asked that they conduct an investigation into the “Prussian deserters” incident, and his request was granted. The Jacobins appointed a three-member commission of inquiry, which included Marat.19
A gala social event honoring Dumouriez was held on October 16 at the home of a famous actor named François-Joseph Talma. It was supposed to be simply an opportunity for Parisian high society to rub elbows with the hero of Valmy, but the People’s Friend had other ideas. He thought it would be a perfect time to ask Dumouriez a few questions, so he led his commission of inquiry to Talma’s house with the party in full swing.
Talma’s guests watched in astonishment as Marat and his two co-inquisitors marched up to the guest of honor and pressed an unwelcome interview upon him. Although Talma must have resented the intrusion, he could not have helped but appreciate the theatricality of the moment. The costumes alone were enough to lay bare the class nature of the political confrontation: Marat in the scruffy plebeian garb of the sans-culottes surrounded by Girondins, all aghast in their finest formal attire.
The testy interview ended with Dumouriez turning his back on the three Jacobins.20 As soon as Marat and his colleagues had departed, one of Talma’s fellow actors, Dugazon, ostentatiously squirted perfume throughout the hall in a doubly symbolic gesture. In addition to purifying the air that Marat’s revolutionary politics had polluted, it protected the sensitive nostrils of the beautiful people from the unpleasant aromas of the lower classes.
Although the interview itself produced nothing of value, the disdain with which the general treated the commission of inquiry convinced Marat more than ever of his treasonous intentions. The following day Marat asked for and received an order from the Convention’s Committee of Surveillance allowing his commission access to Ministry of War documents concerning the disputed incident at the front. At the Convention on October 18, Marat demanded Dumouriez’s arrest.21 He could not have had a realistic expectation of his motion’s passing; among the delegates he was almost totally isolated, and especially on this issue. Over the following two months, however, he was able to arrange the Parisian soldiers’ release from prison and to win official rehabilitation for their two battalions.
All the while, the Girondins continued to rail against Marat on the floor of the Convention, and still the Mountain made no effort to defend him. His former friend and pupil Barbaroux bitterly assailed him in a placard that was signed by all of the delegates from Marseilles. Many of the fédérés from that city who revered the People’s Friend were perplexed by Barbaroux’s attack. When Marat met with some of them in an effort to give them his side of the story, Barbaroux rose in the Convention to charge Marat with trying to foment civil war. Once again, a chorus of calls for Marat’s arrest filled the assembly hall.
Marat tried to respond but was unable to make himself heard above the din. He simply stood at the podium, waiting, until eventually the uproar subsided. Although almost every phrase he uttered elicited angry shouts from his audience, he continued nonetheless: “You’re always talking about factions. Sure, there’s a faction here; it’s the one that’s lined up against me! As for me, I stand alone, since not a single one among you [he turned to face the Mountain] has the courage to speak in my defense.”22 Once again Marat’s sang-froid prevailed. The delegates settled down and he was able to proceed. After he ridiculed Barbaroux’s accusations, the Convention effectively disposed of them by assigning them to a committee for “further study.” The Girondins were infuriated at having been foiled again.
Barbaroux escalated his attack by organizing right-wing soldiers to march in the streets against Marat and burn him in effigy. Marat was incredulous: “Who would believe that only three months ago” this man was proclaiming eternal friendship?23 On the last day of October Barbaroux’s thugs gathered around Marat’s residence and threatened to burn it down, prompting Marat to go back into hiding for the first time since he had emerged from the underground. On November 3 a demonstration of several hundred soldiers went further by demanding not only Marat’s head but Robespierre’s and Danton’s as well.
This new display of military backing encouraged the Girondins to continue their efforts to have Marat arrested. In hiding and prevented from attending the Convention, Marat called on the Jacobins and the Mountain to stand up for him. Their response was slow to materialize. Danton again attempted to appease the Girondins by acknowledging that Marat was an offensive character and promising that he would not escape justice if found guilty of any crimes. Robespierre, however, was more farsighted and courageous than Danton. He knew that the ultimate target of the right-wing faction was not Marat but the Mountain, and himself in particular. Defending Marat had thus become a matter of self-preservation for Robespierre, so he rallied the Mountain to combat the anti-Marat campaign.
Robespierre could not silence Marat’s enemies, but he at least created enough space for the People’s Friend to resume an above-ground existence. His journal reappeared after having been shut down for five days. Although Marat continued to complain, and justifiably so, that the Mountain’s efforts to protect him had been insufficient, that was beginning to change. As the Mountain began to accept him not only as a legitimate member of the Convention but as a spokesman for their faction, his virtual isolation within the legislative body came to an end.
THE TRIAL AND EXECUTION OF LOUIS XVI
Another reason that the campaign against Marat eased up was that the Girondins found themselves on the defensive with regard to the most pressing political problem of the moment: whether or not the deposed monarch, Louis XVI—thenceforth simply “Louis Capet”—should be executed as a traitor. The Girondins were nominally republicans, but they had become dependent upon the support of royalists and constitutional monarchists who saw them as a “lesser evil” than the Jacobins, and who expected them to save the former King’s life. On the other hand, the Girondins couldn’t openly defend his innocence without making themselves vulnerable to a charge of treason.
Marat compounded the Girondins’ problems by proposing, and winning, a very significant procedural ruling. He took the floor of the Convention on December 6 and demanded, “Let the death of the tyrant be voted upon by voice roll-call vote, and let the vote be taken publicly.”24 The vote for or against executing Louis Capet would then become a litmus test of devotion to the Revolution, and eliminating the secret ballot meant that delegates could not hide their vote. All four of the crucial votes were taken according to Marat’s motion.
First, on January 15, 1793, came the vote on Louis’s guilt or innocence. There was no room for doubt that he was guilty, because on November 20 a cache of letters proving his collusion with the Revolution’s mortal enemies had been discovered hidden in the palace walls. All but 26 of the 719 delegates present voted “Guilty.”
But should the guilty traitor be executed or not? The Girondins made a motion for a national referendum on the question—an “appeal to the people”—that would relieve the Convention of responsibility for making the fateful decision. It was presented as an exercise in direct democracy, but many delegates saw the wisdom in Marat’s depiction of the motion as a perfect formula for igniting a civil war. It was defeated 424 to 283.
The following day, January 16, the third vote—the historic one on the death penalty—was taken. It was a time-consuming process because delegates were allowed to make statements for the record to explain their votes. Marat cast his with these words:
In the firm conviction that Louis was the principal author of the crimes that led to so much bloodshed on August 10, and of all the massacres that have soiled France during the Revolution, I vote that the tyrant be put to death within twenty-four hours.25
When they were tallied, there were 361 votes definitely in favor of the death penalty, 334 definitely against, and 26 that were ambiguous. Even if the unclear votes had been added to the “nays,” the decision to execute the former monarch would have passed by a single vote.
A fourth vote, on January 18, resulted from a final desperate attempt by the Girondins to reverse the momentous decision. A motion to postpone the execution was voted down 380 to 310. On January 21, 1793, the issue was settled when a guillotine blade ended the life of Louis Capet, formerly Louis XVI. Two days later Marat wrote: “The tyrant’s head has just fallen beneath the sword of the law. That blow has overturned the foundations of the monarchy among us. Now I finally believe in the Republic!”26
Marat’s assessment was correct. Guillotining the King was powerful testimony to the irreversibility of the Revolution. It was a slap-in-the-face challenge to the crowned heads of Europe as well as to the royalist forces within France. In the months following the execution, the military coalition arrayed against the Revolution would be joined by England, Spain, and Holland, and a counterrevolutionary revolt would break out in the Vendée in western France. The Revolution found itself besieged on all sides. When Louis was put to death, all hope of peaceful compromise died with him.
The day after the execution, a deputy who had voted for the death penalty was assassinated in a café. Although the assassin, a royalist, was apprehended, swiftly tried, and guillotined, his deed had significant political consequences. To defend itself, the Mountain felt compelled to deepen its ties with Marat and the social forces he spoke for. The alliance between the People’s Friend and the Mountain was a thoroughgoing merger that transformed both partners. Marat thus emerged as a legitimate political leader, both at the Jacobin Club and at the Convention.
A CHALLENGE FROM THE LEFT
While the King’s trial was dominating the consciousness of the political class, the rapidly rising price of bread was creating hunger and turmoil among the poorer classes. The most radicalized of the Parisian sans-culottes began to be attracted to a new group of militant agitators such as Jacques Roux, Jean Varlet, and Théophile Leclerc. They were called Enragés, which literally meant “madmen,” but they accepted the name with pride. The Enragés stood for direct democracy and called on the government to enforce price maximums on necessary commodities, starting with bread. Because rampaging inflation of the paper money, the assignat, was driving the poor ever deeper into misery, the Enragés demanded that the government bring the assignat under control by enforcing the stability of its value.
The Enragés venerated the People’s Friend and believed they were following in his footsteps. Jacques Roux, who in December had become a member of the municipal government, called himself “the Marat of the Commune.” Marat, however, did not return their admiration. On February 12 the Enragés led a delegation representing Paris’s 48 sections to the bar of the Convention to demand that speculators in wheat be punished. They undoubtedly assumed Marat would support them, but he did not. They aimed their fiery oratory against the Convention as a whole, including the Mountain, and Marat now considered himself a Montagnard.
Marat advised the Enragé spokesmen to calm down, but when they refused to tone down their confrontational assault he responded in kind. He characterized their demands as “excessive, bizarre, and subversive of all good order,” and demanded that “those who have wasted the Convention’s time in this manner be prosecuted for disturbing the peace.”27 No one had expected that. The People’s Friend was calling on the police to suppress ultraradicals! As an indication of how topsy-turvy this must have appeared to those unaware of Marat’s “new course,” the Girondin leader Buzot commended Marat’s contribution to the debate.28 The Enragé delegation won almost no support from the Convention.
What was the meaning of this astonishing turnabout? Had Marat forsaken his principles and “sold out”? On the surface it would seem that what Marat was now saying was sharply opposed to his previous stance. In fact, many of the Enragés’ statements that he condemned as counterrevolutionary were verbatim quotations from his own writings. But Marat was not being erratic or hypocritical. There had been a fundamental change in the political context, and he had altered his tactics to take the new situation into account. The essential goal remained unchanged: completion of the social revolution.
When the Enragés quoted Marat’s 1792 denunciations of the Legislative Assembly and claimed that the same applied to the Convention, Marat adamantly disagreed. In his eyes the Legislative Assembly had been completely hopeless, but the Convention was not, despite its weaknesses due to the Girondin element. The Girondins, he believed, could be disposed of and then the Convention would be a powerful instrument of social revolution.
Marat feared that the ultraleftist agitation of the Enragés would mislead or confuse the sans-culottes and thereby sabotage his attempt to ally them with the Mountain. Moreover, both Marat and the Mountain were aware that ultraradical actions in Paris would isolate the capital from the rest of France and give the counterrevolution an easy victory. Marat had not begun to preach moderation because he had suddenly become conservative, but because he believed the Enragés’ ultraleft antics posed a grave danger to the Revolution.29
The People’s Friend had earlier responded to a reader who asked how long his new policy of moderation would last by saying, “Until the tyrant is gone and the Roland faction is defeated.”30 The first of those two tasks had been accomplished, but the second remained. Time, Marat believed, favored the Mountain. The Girondins were on the verge of being exposed as the counterrevolutionaries they really were, and then all good patriots throughout France—not just Parisian radicals alone—would drive them from power.
Marat knew full well, however, that the grievances expressed by the Enragés at the Convention were genuine. Food shortages and skyrocketing food prices were driving poor Parisians below the subsistence level. The analysis and conclusions Marat put forth in the February 25 issue of his journal were as radical as anything the Enragés had said:
It is undeniable that the capitalists, the speculators, the monopolists, the luxury merchants, etc., etc., are all, to one degree or another, supporters of the old regime who miss their old profitable scams by which they enriched themselves at the public’s expense. How could they, then, concur in good faith with the establishment of the reign of freedom and equality? Given the impossibility of changing their hearts, and having no hope of seeing the legislature take strong measures to force such a change, I see the total destruction of that accursed race as the only way to establish tranquility in the State.
Today they redouble their zeal to reduce the people to misery by the exorbitant rise in the price of staple foods and the fear of famine. The Nation, fed up with these disgusting troubles, will itself take on the responsibility of purging the earth of that criminal race, which cowardly elected officials encourage to crime with impunity. No one should find it odd that the people, pushed to despair, impose their own justice. In all countries where the rights of the people are more than empty words ... the looting of a few stores, at the door of which the monopolists are hanged, soon puts an end to the embezzlement that reduces millions of people to despair and has caused millions to perish in poverty.31
On the day this article was published—but before it actually appeared on the streets—a semi-spontaneous “fair price” movement began to spread through Paris. Organized groups of sans-culottes invaded grocery stores and rather than simply looting the goods they found there, they set prices they considered fair for sugar, soap, and other necessary commodities, and paid for them. The shop owners, needless to say, considered this to be simply another form of looting. Marat’s article could not have initiated this movement, but it may well have encouraged its continuance.
Marat had not advocated lynching and looting—he had predicted those consequences if the government failed to act. His article had in fact proposed a specific way to render lynchings unnecessary through the creation of a revolutionary tribunal with the power to prosecute criminal speculators. But if the government failed in its duty to protect the people, then the people would have no choice but to act in self-defense.
Although it was a case of blaming the messenger for bad news, the Girondins nevertheless accused Marat of provoking the food riots and again demanded his arrest. Marat in turn attacked the Girondins by charging that the riots had been fomented by their agents as part of their plot to turn the provinces against Paris. The Mountain came to Marat’s defense this time and the attack was repelled.
Meanwhile, in early March the Coalition’s armies invaded Belgium, and when the news reached Paris that General Dumouriez had left Belgium unprotected, it almost triggered another insurrection. By March 10 the city was inundated with protests calling for his arrest and for the removal of the Girondins from the Convention. Given Marat’s longstanding denunciations of Dumouriez and the Girondins, his response was again not what might have been expected. He was strongly opposed to an insurrectionary movement forcing these demands upon the Convention at that moment. Timing was of the utmost importance.
Robespierre and Marat both knew that they could easily mobilize the Parisian sans-culottes to march upon the Convention and impose their will upon it, but that would appear to the provinces as a naked power grab. The Girondins could then unite the rest of France to defeat an isolated Paris and reverse the course of the Revolution. If they were patient, however, the military crisis would soon make it obvious to the public opinion of the provinces that Dumouriez and the Girondins were in cahoots with France’s enemies and should be eliminated.
A delegation heavily influenced by the Enragés went to the Convention on March 12 and demanded that Dumouriez be arrested immediately. Marat’s polemics against that proposal seemed especially paradoxical, as he appeared to be defending Dumouriez. An attack on Dumouriez at this moment, Marat said, was an attack on the military defenses of the Revolution.32 The Enragé delegation was therefore abetting a counterrevolutionary conspiracy. The Girondins again unexpectedly found themselves applauding Marat.33
THE DENOUEMENT OF THE DUMOURIEZ AFFAIR
The following week, however, Dumouriez’s communiqués to the Convention took on an obviously threatening tone, prompting Marat to return to an all-out offensive against him. Unnerved by the general’s aggressiveness, the Convention leaders appointed Danton to lead a commission to the front to assess his intentions. This kowtowing was unacceptable to Marat, who published a harsh diatribe against Dumouriez in the March 20 issue of his journal.34
The following day, March 21, Parisians learned of Dumouriez’s critical defeat at Neerwinden and the recapture of Brussels by the Austrians. Dumouriez had the bad grace to blame the fiasco on his soldiers. Marat immediately went on the attack against the general, but the rest of the Mountain vacillated. Danton, who had previously favored a conciliatory approach, had returned from his meeting with Dumouriez and seemed hesitant to share his findings with the Convention. Marat at first appeared totally isolated, but Robespierre and his faction soon enlisted in his campaign against Dumouriez. Marat was no longer following the Mountain; the Mountain was following Marat.
The reports of the military debacle in Belgium were accompanied by more bad news. A major counterrevolutionary uprising had erupted in western France, in the Vendée region. The simultaneous internal and external threats to the Revolution apparently led Marat to decide that a new insurrection in Paris was now on the agenda. On March 27 he sounded the warning at the Jacobin Club: “I ask that all the sections of Paris assemble to challenge the Convention: Does it have the means to save the Nation? If it doesn’t, then the people must declare that they are ready to save the Nation themselves.”35
Marat was still perturbed, however, by the continuing indecisiveness of the Mountain, whose leadership he believed was of crucial importance. He was especially annoyed at Danton’s procrastination with regard to his report on Dumouriez. He did not think Danton was conspiring with Dumouriez, but felt he had deluded himself into thinking that conciliation was possible. On March 29 Marat demanded that Danton stop stalling and give his report.36
Finally, on March 30, Danton presented his account of the meeting with Dumouriez, but it was vague and uninformative.37 On March 31, at the Jacobin Club, Marat challenged Danton to “swear with me an oath to die to save the Nation!”38 After Danton complied, Marat received a virtually unanimous ovation from the Jacobins’ membership when he called upon them to arm the people and organize them for action.
By this time Dumouriez had openly threatened to lead his army to Paris to rid the Convention of Marat, Robespierre, and their supporters.39 That gave the Mountain all the motive it needed to stiffen its backbone and take action against Dumouriez and his Girondin allies. The Jacobins were ready to fight, but on April 1 Marat told them: “We’ll have to strike great blows, but the moment hasn’t arrived yet; I’ll let you know when it’s time.”40 Marat sensed that the threat to march on Paris was a bluff. When Dumouriez, like Lafayette before him, found that his troops would not follow him on a counterrevolutionary mission, he too defected to the Austrians. When the shocking news of his betrayal reached Paris on April 3, Marat’s reputation as a prophet reached its apogee.
Marat’s newfound influence was further confirmed by the advent of two institutions that he had long campaigned for: the Revolutionary Tribunal and the Committee of Public Safety. On March 9 the Convention established the Revolutionary Tribunal, a special court to try cases involving counterrevolutionary activity. Then, on April 5, the creation of the Committee of Public Safety fulfilled Marat’s incessant demand for a special commission with extraordinary powers to investigate and prosecute treasonous conspiracies. Both were prompted by Parisians’ mounting fears over the military crisis. The Committee of Public Safety would later become the center of power in the Jacobin Republic.
PRESIDENCY OF THE JACOBIN CLUB
In early April Marat was elected president of the Jacobin Club for the first and only time. The office was largely symbolic and its term was only ten sessions, but what it symbolized was the rise of Marat’s credibility in the eyes of the Jacobin membership and the definitive end of his political isolation.
It so happened that he presided over only a single meeting of the Jacobins, on April 5, and his participation lasted only a few minutes. It was not an important session, but it turned out to have significant consequences for Marat. He arrived late, thanked the members for honoring him with the presidency, recognized a speaker, signed a paper, and left early to attend a committee meeting at the Convention.41 Marat did not read the paper he had been handed to sign; he simply affixed his signature in his capacity as president. It was a declaration, formulated by one of the Club’s committees, to be sent out to Jacobin organizations in the provinces. It read in part: “Brothers and friends, your greatest dangers are in your midst ... Yes, the counterrevolution is in the government, in the National Convention. That’s where it has to be smashed! Arise, republicans!42
In the political context of that moment it was not a particularly radical manifesto. It demanded that the Girondins be expelled from the Convention, but did not go as far as the Enragés, who called for their arrest and execution. Its call for patriots in the provinces to arm themselves and come to Paris, however, was sufficiently provocative to serve as a new pretext for an attack on Marat at the Convention.
MARAT ON TRIAL
Dumouriez’s defection angered revolutionary Paris, but the removal of his threat to sack the city led to a momentary decrease in political tension. That and the fact that a significant percentage of the Montagnard delegates were off “on mission” (away from Paris on official Convention business), made the Girondin leaders think it would be a good time to go on the offensive. On April 12 Guadet read from the document Marat had signed at the Jacobin Club a week earlier, and a motion was made to arrest him for sedition.43
With some difficulty Marat managed to get to the podium to respond. He ridiculed the accusation, explaining that his signature on the manifesto had only been a formality. He nonetheless defended its contents, saying that when Dumouriez threatened military action on behalf of the Girondins, he had clearly implicated them as accomplices in his treason. He then proposed that both he and the Girondin leaders be tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal, so all of the charges could be heard and justice could take its course. But because of the Girondins’ temporary majority due to the absence of the Montagnards on mission, only the decree of accusation against Marat passed.
When the Convention’s bailiffs went to take Marat into custody, however, he refused to surrender. The arrest decree was not valid, he said, because it had not been signed by the proper authorities. That small technicality could not have prevented his arrest had he not been spirited out of harm’s way by a large contingent of supporters from the Mountain and the public galleries. Once outside the assembly hall, Marat disappeared into the crowd and went into hiding. It would be the last time he would have to go underground.
Although being a fugitive temporarily prevented him from participating in Convention sessions, it enhanced his status as a martyr-hero in the eyes of revolutionary Paris. That same evening the membership of the Jacobin Club angrily remonstrated against the attack on their president and Robespierre expressed strong support for Marat.44 As an indication of how dramatically Marat’s relationship with the municipal authorities had changed, on April 15 the mayor of Paris, J. N. Pache, went before the Convention to protest the arrest decree.
This time Marat’s underground existence was not as onerous as it had been on previous occasions. He stayed in his own home with Simonne and was able to continue producing his journal with no difficulty. The efforts of the police to apprehend him were minimal. They went to his residence on two occasions and simply left when Simonne told them he was not there.
The motion to arrest Marat was only the Girondins’ first step. The next day, April 13, they sought to formally indict him. During the ensuing debate, when the infamous document Marat had signed was placed into evidence, 96 delegates marched to the front of the hall and added their signatures to it in solidarity with the People’s Friend.45 Robespierre declared that the attack on Marat was an attack on the Mountain as a whole. Nonetheless, with 80 Montagnards absent on mission the passage of the motion to indict was assured. With that, Marat completed a unique historical trifecta: he was the only person ordered to prison by the National Assembly, the Legislative Assembly, and the Convention.
Once again Marat actively avoided having an arrest warrant served on him, but this time there was a difference. Not wanting to unnecessarily alienate public opinion in the provinces, his response was more politically astute. Instead of denouncing the indictment and saying he would wipe his feet on it, he said he welcomed the opportunity to be heard by the Revolutionary Tribunal, and would gladly go before its judges just as soon as the official indictment was presented to him.46
That would not be easy for the Girondins to accomplish. Although they had succeeded in having Marat indicted in principle, the task of formulating the indictment—stating specific sedition charges based on evidence that would stand up in court—proved to be highly problematic. They did a slapdash job of it, but the depleted Convention approved the indictment anyway and on April 22 it was presented to the Revolutionary Tribunal.47
On April 23 Marat kept his word and turned himself in as soon as the public prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville, notified him of the indictment. That evening the People’s Friend, accompanied by a crowd of supporters that included Convention deputies, National Guard officers, municipal officials, commissioners of Parisian sections, and representatives of patriotic societies, marched off to prison. He had been allowed to choose his jail and he decided upon the Conciergerie.48
The following morning the same throng of supporters reassembled at the Conciergerie to escort him to the Revolutionary Tribunal. When he entered the courtroom it was already packed with his fervent partisans. Restif de la Bretonne, a well-known chronicler of the French Revolution, recorded the scene for posterity: “The accused arrived surrounded by guards; women known for their patriotism covered him with flowers and escorted him into the courtroom. There, Marat sat down where he pleased, answered as he pleased; he even questioned the judges.”49
From the start of the proceedings when he was introduced as “the People’s Friend” there could be no doubt that this was Marat’s show. He was in charge and no one tried to stop him. He spoke in his own defense, and there was no prosecuting attorney. He addressed the judges without bothering to ask for the floor. The spectators were so enthusiastic in their support that Marat twice had to ask them to tone it down.50
Marat had no trouble demonstrating the absurdity of the charges in the hastily prepared indictment. One, for example, was based on a report in Brissot’s journal that fear of Marat becoming dictator had caused a young Englishman named William Johnson to commit suicide. Marat called the best possible rebuttal witness to the stand: William Johnson! Not only was he very much alive, he also testified that he knew nothing about Marat aside from what he had read in the Girondin press.
William Johnson’s famous roommate, Thomas Paine, was also called to testify.51 Paine, one of only two foreigners elected to the Convention, was held in high regard in revolutionary France due to his outstanding role in the American Revolution and his book The Rights of Man, a rebuttal of Edmund Burke’s condemnation of the French Revolution.52 Unable to speak or read French, however, Paine had fallen under the sway of Girondin intellectuals. That and his strong opposition to the execution of Louis XVI had led him into conflict with Marat’s political outlook. Despite his intentions, his testimony, given through translators, did not help the Girondins. According to one of Paine’s biographers, after the trial he and Marat “appear to have been on neutral terms” until Marat’s assassination.53
The trial concluded with Marat making a long speech condemning the Girondins for their treasonous complicity with Dumouriez. When he finished, the courtroom exploded in cheers. The jury unanimously acquitted “the fearless protector of the people’s rights” of all charges, and a giddy celebration began.54 Well-wishers carried him out of the courtroom on their shoulders, into the streets where a large crowd had awaited the verdict. Thousands of jubilant Parisians paraded him triumphantly through the streets as thousands more lined the streets and joined in chanting their support for Marat and the Mountain. The scene was recorded in numerous paintings and prints as “The Triumph of Marat.”55
The Convention was in session when the spontaneous demonstration reached the assembly hall, so the crowd carried Marat through the doors and down the aisles, passing the chair of the president, who happened to be the Girondin Lasource. Marat took the floor and briefly addressed the delegates and the crowd, calling his acquittal a victory for the Convention as a whole.56
Pushing for Marat to be arrested and tried was a fatal political miscalculation on the part of the Girondins. Marat’s defense provided a rallying point around which his broad and deep support could crystallize. In rallying to his side, the hostility of the city’s population to the Girondins mounted to new heights.
As for the Convention, Marat’s trial and triumph had rendered it more polarized than ever. All hope of reconciliation had passed; the disputes between the left and right wings could only be settled by the elimination of one by the other. By sending an elected Convention member to be tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal on capital charges the Girondins had set a precedent they would soon regret.
THE FINAL CONFRONTATION
Throughout the month of May the struggle continued to intensify, but the Convention was paralyzed as neither the Girondins nor the Mountain were able to completely prevail over the other. A leading representative of the Plain, Bertrand Barère, engineered the establishment of a Commission of Twelve empowered to investigate and take action against any “illegalities” committed by the Paris Commune. The Mountain was adamantly opposed to this Girondin-dominated body but was unable to block its creation. The stage was thus set for a head-on collision between the Convention, still tenuously controlled by the Girondins, and the Parisian municipal government, which was in Jacobin hands.
Compounding the blunder they had made by putting Marat on trial, the Girondins had their Commission of Twelve imprison several leading Parisian agitators, including Jacques Hébert, who had become an official of the Commune, and the Enragé Jean Varlet. The arrests were met by a new upsurge of popular resistance. Marat accused the Girondins of trying to provoke the sans-culottes to violence. If so, they were playing a lethally dangerous game.
On May 25 a delegation of Parisian sections presented a petition to the Convention demanding the abolition of the Commission of Twelve and the arrest of its members for treason. The president of the assembly, Maximin Isnard, unwisely responded by warning: “I declare, in the name of all of France, that Paris will be obliterated.” Marat jumped from his seat and shouted, “Get down from the chair, president; you’re dishonoring this assembly!” But Isnard would not yield. The city would be so thoroughly destroyed, he threatened, that “soon it will be necessary to search the banks of the Seine to see if Paris had ever existed!”57 These ominous words echoed the Brunswick Manifesto, and had a similar effect. Rather than intimidating the Mountain and the sans-culottes, it strengthened their determination to defend the Revolution by annihilating the Girondins.
The day after Isnard’s threat, Marat went to the Jacobin Club to address its members. A month earlier he had advised them to be patient, saying “The moment hasn’t arrived yet; I’ll let you know when it’s time.” Now, he said, the time had come to rise up in arms and put a decisive end to the Commission of Twelve. Robespierre’s response was hesitant, but he did not attempt to counter Marat’s appeal.58 Although Marat had apparently surpassed Robespierre in popularity among the Jacobin ranks, Robespierre nonetheless continued to hold the reins of organization in his hands.
On May 27, Marat took the floor at the Convention to demand the abolition of the Commission of Twelve as an enemy of liberty and an affront to the people of Paris. No longer holding his tempestuous nature in check, he seemed virtually indistinguishable from the Enragés, but he nevertheless presented his case in defensive formulations. You—he was addressing the Girondins—are responsible for the intolerable rise in the price of bread. “If the patriots are driven to insurrection, it will be your doing!”59
Marat went to a meeting at the Évêché on the evening of May 30 where representatives of 33 Parisian sections were forming a Revolutionary Central Committee to call and lead an insurrection. What Marat did at the meeting is not known with certainty, but he reportedly called on the people to rise in arms, surround the Convention, and compel it to send the Girondin leaders before the Revolutionary Tribunal.60 One account claims that Marat personally sounded the tocsin at City Hall in the predawn hours of May 31. Whether that is factually accurate or not, it is symbolically appropriate. Marat’s political influence had certainly reached the point where he could call the people to insurrection and they would respond.
Many historians have portrayed Marat as essentially an egomaniac motivated only by a craving for personal glory, but in fact he took pains—for political reasons—to avoid credit for the key role he played in these events. He was concerned with how the Parisian uprising would be perceived by people in the rest of France, without whose support the insurrection could not succeed. He knew that he was not a popular figure in the provinces, so to allow the uprising to be depicted as his creation would play into the hands of the Revolution’s enemies.
On May 31, in a morning session, the Convention was presented with a demand from a Paris Commune delegation, supported by Robespierre, that the Girondin leaders be indicted. At the same time the assembly hall was being surrounded by a massive crowd of Parisians. A showdown seemed imminent, but nothing happened.
The tension continued to mount. On the morning of June 1 the Convention received the news that the most prominent Girondin, Jean-Marie Roland, had fled and that his wife, a top Girondin leader in her own right, had been arrested. Marat warned the assembly that the anger of the people had reached the boiling point and could not be restrained if the dithering Convention failed to bring the traitorous Girondins to justice. Then he left the hall and immediately found himself surrounded by a boisterous throng who protested the Mountain’s shillyshallying and chanted, “Marat, save us!”61
With insurrectionary fever running especially high at City Hall, the Committee of Public Safety asked Marat to go there to try to calm down the situation. When he arrived, the president of the Commune’s municipal assembly introduced him, apparently expecting him to advise the people to cool off and let their elected officials take care of the problems. Marat had other ideas, however. Instead, he declared that the elected officials had betrayed them and added:
Rise up, then, sovereign people! Go to the Convention, speak your piece, and don’t let yourselves be turned away until you get a definite response. After that, take action in accordance with your laws and in defense of your interests! That’s my advice to you.62
Marat then decided that rather than going to the Évêché where the Revolutionary Central Committee was preparing the insurrection, he would go back to the Convention. There, in the evening, with only about a hundred delegates in attendance, a petition from the Commune was read. It demanded the indictment of 25 Girondin leaders. Marat declared his support for the demand.63
The insurrection seemed to be developing in slow motion, but it finally came to a head on June 2. A crowd estimated at 80,000, made up of sans-culottes and entire units of the National Guard, surrounded the Convention hall and blocked its exits. More than a hundred cannons were brought into position. As the well-organized uprising was developing outside, inside the hall the conciliatory Barère urged the Girondins to resign. Marat declared that their resignation was not an option; they had to be arrested. If Dumouriez’s co-conspirators were simply allowed to leave, they would spread out across France posing as martyrs and raising the provinces against Paris. Only patriots had the right to resign, he said, and for emphasis he declared that he himself would resign just as soon as the Girondins had been brought to justice.64
Meanwhile, the delegates became aware of the threat that was building up outside the hall. When it became known that National Guardsmen were taking up positions to block the exits, a large majority of the delegates decided to leave. To avoid the appearance of panic, they would go out together in an orderly manner. Almost all—including many Montagnards as well as Girondin and Plain deputies—began to exit the hall, leaving only Marat, Robespierre, and 20 or so others behind. They only got as far as the gardens outside the hall, however, before being stopped by soldiers, and a tense confrontation ensured.
Marat could see great potential danger in this situation. The rest of France would never recognize the authority of a rump legislature composed only of Robespierre, himself, and a few Jacobin extremists. And what if some harebrained delegate outside in the Tuileries Gardens were to provoke a bunch of Enragés into touching off a bloody massacre of Convention representatives? To avoid such a disaster (he later wrote) he hurried out into the gardens and urged those who had walked out to go back inside.65
Some of the delegates immediately returned to their seats, and the others soon followed. At that point, the paraplegic Georges Couthon, one of Robespierre’s lieutenants, was carried to the podium. Couthon moved that the Girondin leaders be arrested and his motion passed.66 The Girondins were finished and the insurrection had triumphed.
This was the watershed moment of the French Revolution. The insurrection of May 31–June 2 cleared the way for the birth of the Jacobin Republic. The beginning of June 1793 marked the critical point at which the gains of 1789 and 1792 were consolidated and made irreversible. With the Girondins removed, between June 13 and July 17 the Convention passed a series of measures canceling all of the peasants’ obligations without compensation—the decisive act of the revolutionary transformation from feudalism to capitalism. It put a definitive end to feudalistic restrictions on the peasants’ mobility, paving the way for their transformation into a modern working class.
What the liberation of the peasantry meant for human freedom was certainly its most morally uplifting consequence, but its economic impact was even more significant in the long run. An essential prerequisite to the development of a capitalist economy is the existence of a free labor force—a pool of propertyless people who in order to survive are forced to become wageworkers. As long as the vast majority of the population is unable to leave the land, no such labor force is possible and capitalist development is sharply restricted. That was the accomplishment of the Jacobin Republic, and Marat’s importance to history was his indispensable leadership in bringing the Jacobin Republic into being.
THE PROPHET IGNORED
On June 3, the day after the insurrection’s triumph, Marat retired from active politics, as he had promised. In a letter to the Convention’s president he announced that he was resigning so that the Girondins would not be able to use him as a bogeyman with which to stir up the provinces against the renewed Convention.67 His resignation was never officially accepted by the Convention, but he simply ceased to carry out his official functions.
The political rationale he gave was sufficient motive for his resignation, but even aside from that, his illness would surely have forced him out of activity very soon. He was so sick that from June 3 until his death he only rarely left his apartment. In addition to the chronic skin condition that kept him either in bed or immersed in a medicated tub, he suffered from a debilitating lung ailment.
Despite his illness, however, he continued to publish his journal on a daily basis, but he was doing less writing and more editing. Its pages were now mostly filled with reprinted documents and letters from readers. He also continued to receive visitors on a regular basis, even while sitting in his tub. The tub was shaped like a giant shoe with a board across the top that served as writing surface. The board also protected his modesty when visitors were present, although he wore a robe while soaking in the tub.
From his tub, Marat tried to continue to play an advisory role by means of letters to the Committee of Public Safety and to the president of the Convention. To his great dismay, he found that his opinions were ignored. One week earlier his had been the most powerful voice at the Convention and now his letters were being totally disregarded.68 He had wrongly assumed that the “purified” legislature would welcome his opinions, but with the Girondins gone, the Montagnards no longer needed him. Some of the Mountain’s leaders, especially Danton, were resentful at previously having needed Marat. Marat still had friends and followers among them, but most seemed happy to be rid of him.
Two weeks after retiring, with great effort Marat hauled himself out of his tub and his apartment and headed back to the Convention floor. He felt that otherwise his voice would not be heeded. He participated in the sessions of June 17 and 18, but it was too much for him. His comeback ended after two days and he never left his apartment again.
Marat’s real influence on the course of events had reached its pinnacle on May 31–June 2, 1793, after which it rapidly declined to the vanishing point. Nevertheless, his aura continued to haunt the Convention. Even while he was still living, the People’s Friend was being turned into a harmless icon—the symbolic representation of revolutionary virtue—by the very men who were scornfully ignoring his advice. After his assassination, Danton declared that the People’s Friend in death would be more useful than he had been when alive. The Mountain found the authority of Marat’s ghost especially valuable in fighting opponents from their left.
Marat assisted them in that effort by launching a final assault against the Enragés before his death. On July 4 he published a harsh denunciation of Roux, Varlet, and Leclerc as “false patriots who are more dangerous than the aristocrats and the royalists.”69 Frustration over his own diminished physical state no doubt played a role in stoking his anger, but Marat had a legitimate political point to make. In his eyes, the Enragés were irresponsible ultraleftists raising ultimatistic demands to mobilize the sans-culottes against the newborn, fragile Jacobin Republic.
Marat believed the Enragés were playing into the hands of the counterrevolution, and that, in his eyes, was intolerable. He knew, however, that they were giving voice to the sans-culottes’ justifiable anger at skyrocketing food prices, which he blamed primarily on “the rapacity of the monopolists and the greed of the merchants, who are pushing the people to desperation.”70 Secondary blame would fall to the Convention if it refused to immediately take action to reduce the prices of bread and other necessary commodities. But it would be nonetheless inexcusable if the Enragés were to undermine the will of the people to defend the Revolution.
THE ASSASSINATION
Marat’s skin condition was aggravated by a terrible heat wave in Paris during the second week of July. As a result, he was spending even more time than usual immersed in his tub. People bearing information for the journal continued to visit, but Simonne screened them, more to protect him from exhaustion than from assassins. But on the early afternoon of July 13, it was an assassin who came calling.
Charlotte Corday, a young woman from Caen, knocked on the door and asked to speak to the People’s Friend. Simonne said no, he was too ill to see anyone, so Corday left but returned a bit later with a written message for Marat, which he received without seeing her. The persistent Corday returned a third time at about 8:00 p.m. and was about to be turned away again when Marat told Simonne to let her enter. He had read her message, which indicated she had information for him regarding treasonous activities in Caen. Because Barbaroux, Guadet, Buzot, and other Girondins had set up their headquarters in Caen, Marat no doubt wanted to hear what the woman had to say.
Her story was a ruse. As soon as she was alone with Marat she drew a dagger from her blouse and stabbed him in the chest. Fatally wounded, Marat screamed for Simonne, who rushed into the room with several other people. Corday tried to flee but was quickly caught and held. An irate crowd almost lynched her on the spot, but cooler heads prevailed. She had to be questioned to determine whether she was the agent of a larger conspiracy against the Revolution.
Some documents discovered in her possession showed that she had indeed been in communication with Barbaroux and other Girondins. The papers did not prove that they conspired in, or even knew about, her plan to murder Marat. The political context of the moment, however, made it all too easy to believe that the evil deed had been ordered by the Girondin chiefs.71
Corday was swiftly tried and found guilty. On July 17, four days after the assassination, she was executed on the guillotine. If her purpose in killing Marat had been to further the Girondins’ cause, she could hardly have been more self-deluded. A wave of public indignation inundated the Girondins and sealed their fate. The seemingly somnambulant Jacobins, whom Marat could not arouse when he was alive, suddenly sprang into life. Three months later 21 Girondins, including Brissot and Vergniaud, were sentenced to death by the Revolutionary Tribunal and were guillotined on October 30.72 During the following months Barbaroux, Guadet and others were also captured and executed. Marat’s assassination had triggered a cycle of violence that culminated in the Terror.
One of Marat’s most oft-repeated prophecies—that his life would end by an assassin’s hand—had come to pass. How had he been spending his final moments before the dagger struck? Appropriately, he had been editing the next day’s issue of his journal, which appeared on schedule.
Despite his weakened physical state, Marat had lost none of his political acumen. His final article was a critique of the Committee of Public Safety, which Marat supported in principle, but whose personnel, aside from Louis Antoine Saint-Just, he deeply distrusted. In particular, he singled out Barère as “the most dangerous enemy of the Nation.”73 As it turned out, the opportunistic Barère would fully validate Marat’s last prophecy by his role in undermining the Jacobin Republic and bringing about the Thermidorian reaction.
The date on the masthead of that final issue, number 242 of the Publiciste de la République Française, was July 14, 1793, the fourth anniversary of the original Bastille Day. Marat’s life had ended at the age of 50. The official police inventory of his possessions listed his total monetary wealth as two foreign coins and a single assignat with a face value of 25 sous.74
