Marat’s martyrdom triggered a massive outpouring of public grief throughout France, and especially in the capital. David painted his famous tribute to his friend1 and organized a spectacular funeral pageant in Paris. The torch-lit procession wound through the streets for six hours, punctuated every five minutes by the window-rattling boom of a cannon.
The People’s Friend became the object of a quasi-religious cult that compared Marat to Jesus. Portraits, busts, and medallions bearing his likeness proliferated, as did songs, poems, plays, and pageants commemorating his life and death. Newborns were named after him and Parisian streets and squares were renamed in his honor. Montmartre became Mont Marat.
Ironically, at the time of his assassination Marat had all but disappeared from the political stage. Charlotte Corday’s act had revived his influence and raised it to unprecedented heights. A struggle developed over who would wield that influence as Marat’s heir. The Enragés were the first to step forward. The final issue of Marat’s Publiciste de la République Française was number 242; three days after the assassination Jacques Roux published a number 243 and attributed it to “Marat’s ghost.”2 On July 20 Leclerc started up a new series of Ami du peuple.3 Roux and Leclerc were both well aware that Marat had harshly attacked them only days before his death, but it should not be assumed that their attempt to claim his legacy was hypocritical. They no doubt sincerely believed that they alone were the only real revolutionaries capable of defending Marat’s ideals, whether Marat himself had recognized that or not.
Père Duchesne, Hébert’s journalistic alter ego, declared that Marat had appeared to him in a dream and had conferred the succession on him.4 Hébert’s claim was not without merit; aside from Robespierre no other political figure was more highly regarded by the sans-culottes. The Cordeliers Club likewise had a legitimate claim as Marat’s heirs. His embalmed heart adorned the ceiling of their meeting hall, and they made genuine efforts to publish some of his previously unpublished writings. They, too, tried to resurrect his journal, but without success.
Danton’s attempt to usurp Marat’s political authority was more blatantly opportunistic. He cited his long record of support for Marat, which was not untruthful, but he neglected to mention his more recent attempts at distancing himself from the People’s Friend. The most legitimate—and the most successful—attempt to turn Marat’s memory to political advantage was that of Robespierre and the central Montagnard leaders. At the time of his assassination, Marat had indeed been solidly in their camp. At first Robespierre feared that the apotheosis of Marat might redound to the advantage of the Enragés, but their martyred comrade’s posthumous influence proved too politically potent to ignore. Robespierre found it very useful in battling opponents from both the left and the right.
With regard to the threat from the right, Marat’s martyrdom played a major role in the Mountain’s triumph over the Girondins. The Jacobins had no difficulty implicating their right-wing rivals in the assassination of the great patriot, and making them appear to be destabilizers and fomenters of civil war. Whether Corday had been a direct Girondin agent or not hardly mattered because the assassination had obviously been a consequence of the Girondins’ relentless anti-Marat campaign.
After annihilating the Girondins, Robespierre and the Jacobin leaders turned their attention to threats from the left. Left-wing agitation posed a threat to the coalition Marat had helped to forge between the sans-culottes and the Mountain. On August 8 Robespierre arranged for Simonne Évrard to address the Convention as “the widow Marat.” She condemned the Enragés for trying to highjack her late husband’s memory, denouncing them as “scoundrels” whose false claims to speak in Marat’s name “outrage his memory and mislead the people.”5 Simonne’s rebuke helped isolate the Enragés and contributed to their marginalization. Later in the month Jacques Roux was arrested and in January 1794 would take his own life in prison. Leclerc’s Ami du peuple ceased publication and he would fade into obscurity.
With all of their external challengers on both the left and the right defeated, Jacobin rule apparently faced no further obstacles. Because deep social problems remained unresolved, however, the political battles between left and right soon reproduced themselves within the Jacobin ranks. Robespierre found himself confronted on the right by a grouping—known as the Indulgents—led by Danton, and on the left by a faction headed by Hébert. The Indulgents drew their support from the moderates in the Convention who had formerly supported the Girondins, while Hébert’s base was in the radicalized Parisian sections and the Commune.6 Despite the discord, however, Robespierre retained tenuous control.
THE COMMITTEE OF PUBLIC SAFETY AND THE TERROR
The revolutionary regime faced a deepening crisis as internal and external threats continued to mount. Royalist rebellions were spreading in the provinces and the counterrevolutionary armies of the European Coalition drew ever closer. The climax of the Revolution was imminent. On September 5, yet another popular insurrection in Paris transformed the Committee of Public Safety, headed by Robespierre, into the de facto executive power of revolutionary France.
With the Revolution under siege, the Committee of Public Safety implemented the harsh policies that have become known to history as the Reign of Terror. The Jacobins, channeling the power of the sans-culottes and the rebellious peasants, dealt the final, mortal blows to the old regime and consolidated the Jacobin Republic.
Because it resulted in the guillotining of significant numbers of people for sabotage and treason—many of whom, no doubt, had been unjustly accused—moralizing conservatives have long pointed to the Reign of Terror as “Exhibit A” in their campaign to discredit the French Revolution as a whole. Robespierre and his fellow members of the Committee of Public Safety have frequently been portrayed as bloodthirsty paranoiacs who used wholesale executions to eliminate their opponents and intimidate the masses. The grave dangers confronting the Revolution, however, were not paranoid fantasies. Marat’s assassination was a vivid reminder of the reality of the deadly conspiracies threatening revolutionary France.
But although the Terror can be justified, in a general sense, as a defensive measure necessary for the survival of the Revolution, it also gave rise to a fratricidal struggle among the revolutionaries themselves. A bitter, divisive struggle erupted between Danton’s Indulgents and the Hébertistes. Danton made a bloc with Robespierre that succeeded in defeating the Hébertistes, but as soon as the latter were removed from the scene, Robespierre turned on the Indulgents and eliminated them, too. Hébert and his lieutenants were executed on March 24, 1794; Danton and his colleagues, including Camille Desmoulins, followed them to the guillotine less than two weeks later.
The extreme need for unity and security in the face of war and counterrevolution impelled Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety to subdue the turbulent radical movement in Paris. But they could not impose control over the sans-culottes without suppressing the revolutionary energy that sustained their own existence. The guillotining of Hébert and other popular left-wing leaders was especially disorienting and demoralizing. The Jacobins thus paved the way for their own downfall. They could no longer take the support of the sans-culottes for granted. The coalition that Marat had fostered fell apart.
THERMIDOR: RESURGENCE OF THE RIGHT
The primary justification for the Reign of Terror was the widespread fear that Paris would be annihilated and the Revolution brutally crushed by its internal and external foes. By mid-1794 the military situation of the revolutionary armies had markedly improved. With the danger of defeat far less imminent, the extreme measures of the Terror no longer seemed necessary, eroding the raison d’être of the Jacobin dictatorship. The moderate wing of the Convention, reinvigorated, was able to isolate Robespierre and send him and his closest colleagues to the guillotine. The Jacobins’ diehard supporters once again raised the call to insurrection, but they, too, were now isolated, and the demoralized sans-culottes failed to respond. The Jacobin leaders were executed on July 27, which on the new calendar created by the Revolution was 9 Thermidor. The downfall of the Jacobin Republic has thus been immortalized as Thermidor.
Thermidor led to a major resurgence of the right-wing elements—the remnants of the Girondins and the constitutional monarchists—who had been lying low since Marat’s assassination. Seeking revenge, they unleashed a retaliatory White Terror that was far more bloody and cruel than Robespierre’s.7 But because “history is written by the victors,” the White Terror has been virtually forgotten and the Jacobin Terror has come to symbolize the horrors of revolution.
“The issue of violence and terror has divided reformers and revolutionaries, as well as historians, ever since 1789,” observed historian Arno Mayer. The “battle lines,” he added, “hold to this day.”8 Although Marat was no longer alive at the time of the Reign of Terror, his frequent calls to revolutionary violence have often been blamed for creating the climate in which it unfolded.
Marat, however, did not relish violence for its own sake; he saw it first of all as a natural response of oppressed peoples to “the violence of the status quo,”9 and secondly as the only possible means of defense against the violence of the counterrevolution. In the following century, Mark Twain would eloquently describe the violence of the status quo by comparing what he called the “two Reigns of Terror” in French history. “The one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions,” he wrote.
A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.10
The Thermidorian reaction initially disguised its real nature with professions of revolutionary patriotism, and—irony of ironies—utilized the cult of Marat to do so. The revolutionary saint Marat was counterposed to the disgraced “dictator” Robespierre. That is why on September 21, 1794, with the Thermidorian reaction already well under way, the entire Convention marched in procession to install Marat’s ashes in the Pantheon. This cynical manipulation of revolutionary symbolism succeeded in its aim of further confusing and demobilizing the sans-culottes.
Less than five months after carrying Marat’s ashes to the Pantheon, the Convention made an about-face and had them removed. Hostile sources allege that the ashes were then thrown into the sewer. Whether that is true or not, the tale illustrates that by February 1795 the Thermidorians no longer needed to pretend that they were extending the Revolution. The cult of Marat was discarded and replaced by the légende noire of Marat the bloodthirsty monster.
The Thermidorian reaction became ever more openly reactionary. Young men from the privileged classes roamed the streets in bands called the jeunesse dorée (“gilded youth”), stalking and beating up left-wing activists, and destroying images of Marat. In another strange historical twist, a primary leader of these proto-fascistic gangs was a man previously known as Marat’s disciple, Fréron, whose political trajectory had taken him from the extreme left to the extreme right.11
The rewriting of the Revolution’s history was accomplished by Thermidorian scholars who drew heavily on Girondin sources. In their interpretation, Marat was a thoroughly villainous character with no redeeming qualities. It became virtually illegal, for many years, to portray Marat in a positive light. In 1847 and 1848 Constant Hilbey was jailed for republishing Marat’s works, and Alfred Bougeart spent four months in prison for publishing a biography of Marat in 1865.
Although its ideological roots have long been obvious, the Thermidorian anti-Marat campaign has never ceased to influence how the People’s Friend is remembered in France and elsewhere. Mainstream historians continue, to the present day, to present his story as a cautionary tale demonstrating the horrors of radicalism and the futility of social revolution. Later generations of revolutionaries, however, from Babeuf to Blanqui to Raspail, and from the Paris Commune of 1871 to the Russian Revolution of 1917, looked to Marat as a hero and guiding spirit.
Oddly enough, even Karl Marx and Frederick Engels seem to have allowed themselves to be influenced by the Thermidorian distortions. In The Holy Family (1844) they cite the Enragés, Babeuf, and Buonarroti as revolutionary antecedents, but neglect to mention Marat. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852), Marx hails Danton, Desmoulins, Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Napoleon as “heroes” of the Revolution, again omitting Marat. Engels acknowledged, after Marx’s death, that it was not until the 1865 publication of Bougeart’s biography that they had come to appreciate Marat’s role in the Revolution.12
Marat’s memory was lovingly upheld by his widow and his younger sister, Albertine. After the assassination Albertine left her Geneva home and moved to Paris, where she and Simonne would share an apartment and an impoverished existence in the shadow of the légende noire until Simonne’s death three decades later. Albertine would then continue the lonely vigil for another 17 years, outliving her illustrious sibling by almost half a century.
ASSESSING MARAT’S HISTORICAL IMPORTANCE
Many historians have dismissed Marat’s contributions to the French Revolution as essentially irrelevant. His fame, in this interpretation, was more a matter of image than substance. The narrative presented in this biography indicates, to the contrary, that he was an effective political leader whose actions drove the Revolution forward.
His first and most consistent role was that of journalist. The products of his pen did not simply reflect the current moods of the masses. His political positions were always in advance of his readership, and he was obliged to continually win it over to his opinions at every stage of the revolutionary process. Although changes in mass political consciousness rarely occurred at a pace fast enough to satisfy Marat, his main audience, the Parisian sans-culottes, eventually followed his lead throughout his career.
As a political strategist and tactician, Marat showed himself to be the equal of any of history’s most effective revolutionary leaders. He consistently and accurately identified the central issues of the moment, as well as the main line of the Revolution’s development, and tirelessly hammered them into his readers’ consciousness. His early recognition of the reactionary essence of the Girondins’ appeal for an international military crusade is a prime example. Marat’s most significant strategic move was the “new course” he embarked upon after the insurrection of August 10, 1792, which aimed at constructing an alliance of Jacobins and sans-culottes. That coalition was essential to the process of consolidating the Revolution’s gains, and no one was more important in bringing it into being than Marat.
Marat’s tactical acumen—his sense of what to do next at every moment during the upheavals of a revolutionary situation—was repeatedly demonstrated by his uncanny ability to provoke the authorities while evading arrest. That he was able to stay a step ahead of the police of successive regimes for several years means that his success cannot be attributed to good luck. And when the time came that he no longer had to evade the authorities, his tactical prowess remained evident in his ability to continuously force the Convention onto the grounds of his agenda.
Marat’s tactical masterpiece was the conversion of his own trial into a decisive triumph over his Girondin prosecutors. His decision to evade arrest until a formal indictment had been brought against him was a critical one. Had he allowed himself to be imprisoned on the initial vague decree of accusation, the Girondins could have stalled and left him to rot in jail. If they had succeeded in that, they could well have regained the political momentum they needed to block the consolidation of the Jacobin Republic.
The most spectacular example of Marat’s tactical genius, however, was his intervention in the events that resulted in the insurrection of May 31–June 2. At the beginning of April he had warned the overzealous sans-culottes against prematurely rising in revolt. At the end of May, when he felt the time had come, he embarked upon a whirlwind of agitational activity—at the Hôtel de Ville, at the Convention, and in the streets—injecting an element of clarity into an otherwise confused mass movement.
The balance sheet of Marat’s political leadership, however, has one significant entry on the deficit side. He did not organize his followers into a political party. Both Robespierre and Brissot, by contrast, created solid, loyal, organized followings they could count on to follow their lead in crucial situations. Marat showed that he recognized the need for cadre political formations, but he did not create any himself. Although hailed as “father of the fraternal societies,” it was strictly an honorary title; none actually looked to him directly for leadership. The difference between Marat and Robespierre in this regard is best exemplified by the fact that Marat might well not have been elected to the Convention at all had Robespierre not instructed the Jacobins under his command to vote for the People’s Friend.
Marat’s failure to create a party owed to his conviction that being at the head of a party would compromise his political independence. When the Girondins accused the Mountain of being controlled by a “Maratiste party,” Marat angrily avowed that no such party had ever existed. His only “party,” he declared, was “the people.”13 By the time he decided to subordinate himself to the Mountain, however, he may well have come to regret the lack of a Maratiste party, but it was too late—the parties of the Revolution had already been formed.
That Marat’s role in the Revolution was not as central as Robespierre’s is evidenced by the fact that the Revolution continued to deepen in the wake of Marat’s assassination, while Robespierre’s defeat and execution immediately resulted in its definitive reversal.
CONTRAFACTUAL MUSINGS
What if Marat had not been assassinated? Would the Revolution have had a different outcome? What if he had lived to experience the Reign of Terror? Would he have supported it?
The first of these hypothetical problems offers but one realistic solution: No, it is virtually unimaginable that Marat’s continued presence on the scene could have significantly altered the course of the Revolution. Even if his debilitating illness had miraculously ceased to afflict him, the tide of counterrevolution in 1794 was too powerful for any individual leader, no matter how talented, to withstand. At most, he might have helped sustain the Jacobin–sans-culotte coalition a little longer, which could possibly have postponed the triumph of the reaction to a month other than Thermidor.
On the other hand, it is also easy to imagine Marat being guillotined with Hébert and the other partisans of the sans-culottes in March 1794, or escaping that fate by once again disappearing into the underground. Unfortunately for Marat, the kind of social revolution he sought—elimination of the immense gulf between rich and poor—was an impossible dream in the late eighteenth century. The fall of Robespierre, the failure of Babeuf’s Conspiracy of Equals, the rise of Bonaparte, and the Bourbon Restoration all testify to that. After the insurrection of May 31–June 2, there was no further role for Marat to play. Charlotte Corday unwittingly helped him exit the stage with the best timing he could have hoped for.
As for how Marat would have reacted to the Reign of Terror, the traditional view assumes that he would have enthusiastically supported it, but that is based on the fallacy of the légende noire. Marat had consistently advocated a provisional revolutionary dictatorship of the kind embodied by the Committee of Public Safety, and there can be little doubt that he would have approved of Robespierre heading it up, but beyond that the picture is far less clear. It is safe to assume that he would have joined the fight against the Indulgents, but not that he would have acquiesced in the guillotining of Danton and Desmoulins. It is almost unthinkable that he would have supported the liquidation of the Hébertistes and the Cordeliers leaders who had been his closest collaborators. Exactly how Marat would have reacted to these events, and how they would have affected his personal fate, is of course unknowable.
And finally, what if Marat were to return today? What would he think of the state of our planet in the second decade of the twenty-first century? He could read in the history books that the Great French Revolution—his Revolution—is recognized as the watershed event in the making of the modern world.
“But what did it accomplish?” he might ask.
“It rid France of a parasitic class whose right to rule was based upon aristocratic birthright and traditional privilege.”
“Is that all?”
“It established legal and political equality, which then spread throughout much of Europe and the world.”
“Legal and political equality? What about economic and social equality?”
“No, the situation in that regard is even worse than you remember it. Today, despite two centuries of mind-boggling technological progress, a handful of billionaires control most of the Earth’s resources while billions of people remain mired in hunger, disease, oppression, and grinding poverty.”
Marat would surely be shocked and dismayed to learn that after more than 200 years his struggle for social revolution had lost none of its relevance and urgency. Where is the People’s Friend now, when we need him?
