JEAN-PAUL MARAT was one of the most extreme of the French revolutionaries who seized power in Paris in 1789. He was renowned for his ferocious, relentless and uncompromising hostility to anyone he considered to be an opponent of the French Revolution. A leader of the Club des Cordeliers, Marat became a key figure. To him, the Revolution could never go far enough.
Marat never personally killed anyone; yet he inspired and encouraged the Paris mob to denounce its perceived enemies and helped encourage and inspire a spiral of increasing political violence that threatened to engulf the very Revolution itself.
Born on 24 May 1743, in Boudry, in the Prussian principality of Neuchâtel, Marat was the second son of nine children born to Louise Cabrol, a French Huguenot refugee from Castres in Languedoc and Giovanni Mara, a Sardinian from Cagliari. By the age of 16 Marat had reached his full adult height of precisely five feet and he was slight of build to boot. Jean-Paul had a nose like the beak of a hawk, was cross-eyed, had a mouth to match his nose and a shock of red hair that would make him instantly recognisable in the years ahead.
Marat left home and found employment as a private tutor to the wealthy Nairac family in Bordeaux. After two years he moved on to Paris and studied medicine, moving to London in 1765. Although he had no formal qualifications from his time in Paris, Marat worked as a doctor. He soon became a fixture of the émigré Italian and French intelligentsia and began to write about philosophy.
By 1770, Marat had moved to Newcastle upon Tyne, and found work as a veterinarian. His first published work was Chains of Slavery in 1773. Marat recalled, somewhat improbably, that he lived on black coffee for three months while writing, sleeping only two hours a night after which he claimed to have slept for 13 consecutive days thereafter. The rather cumbersome subtitle, A work in which the clandestine and villainous attempts of Princes to ruin Liberty are pointed out, and the dreadful scenes of Despotism disclosed showed Marat’s radicalism and gained him honorary membership of the patriotic societies of Newcastle, Berwick and Carlisle. In 1773 he also wrote the Philosophical Essay on Man, attacking the view of the philosopher Helvetius that science was unnecessary for a philosopher. An essay on curing a friend of gonorrhea helped him secure an honorary medical degree from St Andrews University in June 1775. On his return to London, he further enhanced his reputation with the publication of an Enquiry into the Nature, Cause, and Cure of a Singular Disease of the Eyes.
In 1776, Marat returned to Paris where his growing medical reputation and the patronage of the Marquis de l’Aubespine, the husband of a patient, secured his appointment, in 1777, as physician to the bodyguard of the Comte d’Artois, youngest brother of King Louis XVI’s and the future King Charles X.
Marat was soon in great demand as a court doctor and he used his newfound wealth to set up a laboratory in the Marquise de l’Aubespine’s house. He began a series of scientific experiments and explorations into heat, fire, light and electricity, becoming increasingly famous in academic circles. However, his frequent applications to join the Académie des Sciences were rejected. Members were horrified by his disagreements with tghe revered Sir Isaac Newton. Goethe described his rejection by the academy as a blatant example of scientific despotism.
In 1780, Marat published the Plan de législation criminelle in which he argued for the necessity of 12-man juries to ensure fair trials and a common death penalty for all without heed to social class. In April 1786, Marat resigned his court appointment and devoted his energies full-time to scientific research, publishing a translation of Newton’s Opticks a year later. His inquisitive mind later led to a collection of experimental essays including one on the impact of light on soap bubbles. However, most of his work came to naught and he sank into despair, even composing his last will and testament, believing he could not go on.
As the French Revolution approached, Marat put his medical and scientific career aside and focused almost exclusively on radical politics. In 1788, the Parlement of Paris and other Notables advised the assembly of the Estates-General for the first time in 175 years. When they met a year later in July he published La Constitution and on 16 September 1789, Marat began his own paper, L’Ami du Peuple (Friend of the People) where he showed his suspicion of those in power, and declared them ‘enemies of the people’. Although he never actually joined a faction during the French Revolution, he criticised several groups, denouncing their alleged disloyalties until he was proven wrong or they were proven guilty.
Throughout the summer of 1789, Marat, unkindly nicknamed by some the ‘terrible dwarf’ would be seen standing on a barrel in Paris haranguing crowds with his impassioned oratory. Often dirty and unkempt, he was very theatrical and would cross his arms with seemingly simmering resentment when he had nothing more to say. While some people laughed or were disgusted by his appearance and rhetoric, many others listened and became convinced by the quality and conviction in Marat’s ferocious arguments.
In pre-revolutionary France the clergy made up the first estate, noblemen the second and the masses the third. It was this last group that Marat appealed to. On 8 October his calls for insurrection did not amuse the authorities and they forced him into hiding. Marat did not hesitate to attack and lambast even the most influential and powerful groups in Paris, including the Constituent Assembly, Ministers, and the Cour du Châtelet. In January 1790, he joined the radical Club des Cordeliers, then under the leadership of the lawyer Danton and was nearly arrested for lambasting Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de la Fayette.
On 22 January the tribunal of the Châtelet issued a warrant for Marat’s arrest and despite the support of the Cordeliers’ district which was in uproar in support of him. He fled once more to England and while in London penned the Dénonciation contre Necker, an attack on Jacques Necker who was Louis XVI’s finance minister. In May, he returned to Paris to continue the publication of L’Ami du Peuple, and continued his attacks on many of France’s most powerful citizens. Fearing reprisal, Marat went into hiding in the Paris sewers, where he almost certainly aggravated a debilitating chronic skin disease, dermatitis herpetiformis.
During this period, Marat made regular attacks on the more conservative revolutionary leaders. In a pamphlet from 26 July 1790, entitled C’en est fait de nous, he wrote:
Five or six hundred heads would have guaranteed your freedom and happiness but a false humanity restrained your arms and stopped your blows. If you don’t strike now, millions of your brothers will die, your enemies will triumph and your blood will flood the streets. They’ll slit your throats without mercy and disembowel your wives. And their bloody hands will rip out your children’s entrails to erase your love of liberty forever.
This led to Assembly Deputy for Riom, Pierre Victor Malouet to urge Marat’s arrest for ‘having incited the fury of the people’. As a precaution, Marat left for England once again.
Despite being exiled, Marat still fulminated from afar against what he considered to be perceived injustice and the exploitation of the masses by a parasitic aristocracy and on 22 August 1790 called for a purging of the army’s aristocratic officers. Even after returning from exile, for much of the period from 1790 to 1792, Marat frequently had to go into hiding.
On 7 March Marat denounced Queen Marie Antoinette for scheming with her brother, the Emperor of Austria, when she called for him to invade France and overthrow the Revolution. Marat heightened the public frenzy by warning of aristocratic plots to murder the republicans and all true citizens in their beds. He demanded that: ‘20,000 heads should be cut off to ensure public order’. The hysteria provoked and stoked by Marat led to massacres in which thousands of innocent people ranging from members of aristocratic families to occupants of hospitals, asylums and jails were indiscriminately slaughtered.
On New Year’s Day 1791 Marat became engaged to Simonne Evrard, the 26-year-old sister-in-law of his typographer, Jean-Antoine Corne, who had in the past financially supported him and given him shelter on a number of occasions. They were married in April of the following year.
Marat only emerged publicly on the day of the 10th of August insurrection, when the Tuileries Palace was attacked by the mob and the royal family forced to shelter within the Legislative Assembly. The spark for this uprising was Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick-Luneburg’s proclamation from Coblenz, calling for the crushing of the Revolution. This helped inflame popular outrage in Paris among the sans-culottes (those without silk knee-breeches) the radical lower-class revolutionaries comprised mostly of urban labourers who were the hard core of the revolutionary left.
As Marat called for ‘people’s justice’, a euphemism for summary execution, the mob slaughtered 24 priests being transported to the revolutionary prison, the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, then mutilated the bodies, ‘with circumstances of barbarity too shocking to describe’ according to the British diplomatic dispatch. On 2 September 150 priests in the convent of Carmelites were massacred, mostly by sans-culottes and in the following five days mobs broke into other Paris prisons and murdered more prisoners, whom they believed to be counter-revolutionaries. Summary trials took place in all the Paris prisons and almost 1,400 prisoners were executed, including more than 200 priests, almost 100 Swiss guards and many political prisoners and aristocrats. The crowds butchered the Princesse de Lamballe, a friend of Marie Antoinette and the Duc d’Orleans’ sister-in-law, mutilating her body. Her head was then mounted on a pike in full view of the terrified queen.
Marat’s goal was to eliminate all the people closely related to the king. He talked about his wish to see a new dictatorship installed where the true values of the Revolution would be implemented. His extremist ideas led to him being accused of having been directly involved in the massacres.
Arousing passion, particularly envy, fear and loathing of his enemies and the utopian society the Revolution was supposed to create, Marat became the darling of the masses and his biting, defiant and always provocative oratory could work them into frenzied hysteria. He was called ‘Friend of the People’ a title he enjoyed. Carrying a dagger, to the mob he was their advocate, doctor and inspiration.
Marat was elected to the National Convention in September 1792 as one of 26 Paris deputies. He sat with the Montagnards (mountain men) so called because they sat on the highest benches in the assembly. This group was distinguished mostly by hatred of the Girondins, so named because their leading figures, Jaques Brissot, Étienne Clavierre and Jean-Marie Roland emanated from that region. The 100 or so Montagnards tended to be men of action and strident defenders of the lower classes. When France declared itself a republic on 22 September, Marat promptly renamed his L’Ami du Peuple as Le Journal de la République Française. His stance during the trial of the deposed King Louis XVI was a surprising one as he expressed the view that the king should not be accused of having broken any laws prior to his agreement to accept the French Constitution of 1791. Nevertheless, he fully supported the king’s execution in January 1793.
Marat’s allies, the Jacobins, were named after a former Jacobin Dominican convent in which they gathered for meetings. Their policies were extreme but well-prepared, printed and circulated. By 1792 Maximilien Robespierre was in control of them with Marat one of his keenest supporters and collaborators.
Once elected, Marat began to mastermind the defeat of the Girondin faction who were more moderate than the Jacobins and took power in the Convention, the republican assembly that governed France from September 1792. The Girondins had embroiled France in a series of costly and unpopular wars that had gone badly for France. To Marat, no one was above suspicion in his hunt for enemies of the Revolution. Despite the Revolution being saved by a great victory over the Prussians on 20 September, on 16 October Marat denounced Colonel Charles Dumuriez as a traitor for demanding the punishment of volunteers who had executed French émigré prisoners. Marat was ignored and Dumouriez backed by the Convention.
Marat was himself denounced by Baron Jean Cloots who called him a ‘dangerous anarchist’ and demanded the guillotine for Danton, Marat and Robespierre – a fate that eventually befell Cloots on 24 March 1794.
Marat showed that he was not afraid to take unpopular decisions, even when completely isolated politically. For example, opposing ‘conquest’ on 27 November 1792 he was the only deputy of the Convention to vote against the annexation of Savoy by France.
On 21 January 1793, Louis XVI was guillotined four days after a vote carried by a majority of 53, causing massive political upheaval. Marat had been one of those who voted for the king’s execution for ‘conspiring against the liberty of the nation and the security of the state.’
From January to May, Marat fought bitterly with the Girondins whom he believed to be covert enemies of the republic, ‘disguised royalists’ as he put it.
In April a Committee of Public Safety was established with the task of protecting the newly established republic against foreign attacks and internal rebellion. Marat was elected President of the Jacobins Club, demanding the arrest of ‘suspects’ and ‘counter-revolutionaries’ while urging the expulsion of Girondist deputies from the Convention. The Girondins won the first round when the Convention ordered that Marat should be tried before the Revolutionary Tribunal. Their plans were wrecked when Marat was acquitted and with much popular support he was carried back to the Convention in triumph with a greatly enhanced public profile.
After Marat called for an uprising against the Girondists on 26 May, the mob finally lost patience with the Girondins and expelled them from power on 2 June. The fall of the Girondins was one of Marat’s last achievements. Forced to retire from the Convention as a result of his worsening skin disease, he continued to work from home where he was almost continually immersed in a copper-lined bath containing medicinal waters. Now that the Montagnards no longer needed Marat’s support in the struggle against the Girondins, Robespierre and other leading Montagnards began to separate themselves from him while the Convention largely ignored his letters.
Taking power, the Jacobins then launched ‘The Terror’, in which 20 former Girondin ministers were guillotined. Marat soon became jealous of another revolutionary, Jacques Roux, a renegade priest who led a group called the Enragés dedicated to ending social inequality. Marat, who in February had incited the Paris mob to sack shops in a frenzied attack on ‘hoarders and speculators’, now denounced Roux for opposing this and encouraging price fixing. To Marat, with the Jacobins in power, Roux was a ‘false patriot, leading good citizens astray with irresponsible acts that encouraged counter revolution.’ Changed days! Marat was more likely annoyed that Roux was even more radical than he was.
On 9 July 1793, Charlotte Corday d’Armont, an impoverished 25-year-old noblewoman with Girondist sympathies travelled to Paris from Caen to assassinate Marat. She failed to track him down at the National Assembly and on 13 July arrived at his home in Rue des Cordeliers claiming to have knowledge of a Girondist plot in Caen but was not allowed to see him. She came back in the evening and Marat agreed to interview her, despite his wife’s protests. The interview lasted around 15 minutes. She read out the list of Girondist Deputies who she claimed were involved in the plot which he wrote down having a board across his bath as a makeshift desk. After he had finished writing, Corday rose from her chair and suddenly drew from her bodice a six-inch kitchen knife and brought the blade down hard into Marat’s chest, where it pierced the carotid artery close to his heart. He bled to death in a few moments, crying out to his wife, ‘Aidezmoi, ma chère amie!’ Miss Corday was found standing impassively at the bathroom window, satisfied that the deed was done.
At her trial, Corday claimed that he told her in reference to enemies unnamed that, ‘Their heads will fall within a fortnight’, a statement she altered later to, ‘Soon I shall have them all guillotined in Paris.’ This was improbable, for although Marat incited people, he did not have the authority to have anyone guillotined. Corday first declared that she had originally planned to kill Marat on 14 July, the fourth anniversary of the storming of the Bastille prison which had sparked the Revolution on the Camps de Mars to make the killing more symbolic. Only when the festivities were cancelled did she determine to go to Marat’s home. Having then tried to plead insanity, her plea was rejected and she was executed on 17 July 1793. During her four-day trial, she testified that she had carried out the assassination alone, saying ‘I killed one man to save one hundred thousand.’
Marat’s killing contributed to the mounting suspicion which fed the growing terror now engulfing France; a terror in which thousands of the Jacobins’ adversaries – both real and imagined, royalists and Girondins – were executed for treason. After the assassination the painter Jacques-Louis David, a member of the Committee of General Security, was asked to organise the funeral. He immortalised Marat in his famous painting The Death of Marat, showing him slumped over the side of his bath with flawless skin that in reality was discoloured and scabbed from his chronic skin disease, in an attempt to show the 50-year-old in rude health at the time of his death.
The entire National Convention attended Marat’s elaborate state funeral and he was buried under a weeping willow in the garden of the former Club des Cordeliers. On his tomb, a plaque bore the inscription: ‘Unité, Indivisibilité de la République, Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité ou la mort’ with the phrase ‘Here sleeps Marat, the friend of the people who was killed by the enemies of the people on July 13th, 1793’. His heart was embalmed separately and placed in an urn in an altar erected to his memory at the Cordeliers.
All Paris went into mourning for Marat. Public buildings were draped with black and his portrait was displayed in the Panthéon. A pension for life was bestowed upon his widow and lavish resolutions of gratitude were laid at her feet in loving token for all she had done to support a hero of the Revolution.
He was declared an ‘Immortel’ and his remains were transferred to the Panthéon on 25 November 1793 and his central role in the French Revolution was confirmed with the fulsome elegy, ‘Like Jesus, Marat loved ardently the people, and only them. Like Jesus Marat hated kings, nobles, priests, rogues and like Jesus he never stopped fighting against these plagues of the people.’ The eulogy was given by the Marquis de Sade, delegate of the Section Piques, the Place Vendôme sans-culottes who took their name from their favourite weapon, the pike and an ally of Marat’s in the National Convention, although there is a suggestion that Marat had fallen out with de Sade and was arranging for him to be arrested. De Sade was increasingly appalled with the excesses of the Reign of Terror and was removed from office and imprisoned for ‘moderatism’ on the fifth of December.
On 19 November 1793, the port city of Le Havre-de-Grâce changed its name to Le Havre-de-Marat and subsequently Le Havre-Marat. When the Jacobins started their de-christianisation campaign to set up the Cult of Reason of Hébert and Chaumette and Cult of the Supreme Being of Robespierre, Marat was made a quasi-saint and his bust sometimes replaced crucifixes in the churches of Paris, now devoid of priests following the anti-clerical violence of the Revolution. However, by early 1795, Marat’s memory had become tarnished and on 13 January 1795, Le Havre-Marat became simply Le Havre, the name it bears today. In February, his coffin was removed from the Panthéon and his busts and sculptures destroyed. His final resting place was the cemetery of the church of SaintÉtienne-du-Mont.
Described during his time as a man ‘short in stature, deformed in person, and hideous in face’, Marat was never considered attractive to behold. His unusual skin disease led to constant inflammation and blistering. He was sick for the three years prior to his assassination, bathing often to help ease the pain caused by his debilitating disease. The bandana that is seen wrapped around his head at his time of death in the David painting was soaked in vinegar to ease his suffering.
Later generations of radicals revered Marat and in the Soviet Union, streets were given his name. The Russian tennis player Marat Safin is named after him. The Marquis de Sade wrote an admiring eulogy for Marat. Plays, songs, films and even the Opera Il Piccolo Marat by Pietro Mascagni and Giovacchino Forzano were written in his honour. Marat/Sade, a 1963 play by Peter Weiss, first performed in German was recently revived in London’s West End.
Marat may never have personally killed anyone. The ferocity of his oratory in setting aflame the mob and his constant haranguing and denounciation of opponents both in public and in print raised the stakes and the temperature of the mob, leading to frenzied outbreaks of violence looting and murder. In Marat’s case his pen and speech inspired the sword, which is why he is cast among our rogues gallery of ‘killer doctors’.