Jean-Paul Marat

Jean-Paul Marat
File:IH189029.jpg
Born	24 May 1743 (1743-05-24) Boudry, Neuchâtel, Switzerland
Died	13 July 1793 (1793-07-14) Paris
Nationality	Unclear (born in a Prussian principality)
Education	Largely self-taught
Occupation(s)	Journalist, Politician, Physician,Scientist
Title	Doctor
Spouse	Simonne Evrard
Children	None
Parent(s)	Jean Mara, Louise Cabrol

Jean-Paul Marat (24 May 1743 – 13 July 1793), was a Swiss-born physician, political theorist and scientist better known as a radical journalist and politician from the French Revolution. His journalism was renowned for its fiery character and uncompromising stance towards the new government, "enemies of the revolution" and basic reforms for the poorest members of society. His constant persecution, consistent voice and uncanny prophetic powers brought him the trust of the people and made him their unofficial link to the radical Jacobin group that came to power in June 1793. For the two months leading up to the downfall of the Girondin faction in June, he was one of the three most important men in France, alongside Georges Danton and Maximilien Robespierre. He was murdered in his bathtub by Charlotte Corday, a Girondin sympathizer.

Scientist and physician

Jean-Paul Marat was born in Boudry in the Prussian principality of Neuchâtel, now part of Switzerland, on 24 May 1743. He was the second of nine children born to Jean Mara (Giovanni Mara), a native of Cagliari, Sardinia, and Louise Cabrol, a French Huguenot from Castres. His father was a Mercedarian "commendator" and religious refugee who converted to Calvinism in Geneva. At the age of 16, Marat left home and set off in search of fame and fortune, aware of the limited opportunities for outsiders. His highly educated father had been turned down for several secondary teaching posts. His first post was as a private tutor to the wealthy Nairac family in Bordeaux. After two years there he moved on to Paris where he studied medicine without gaining any formal qualifications. Moving to London around 1765, for fear of being "drawn into dissipation", he set himself up informally as a doctor, befriended the Royal Academician artist Angelika Kauffmann, and began to hang out with Italian artists and architects in the coffee houses around Soho. Highly ambitious, but without patronage or qualifications, he set about imposing himself into the intellectual scene with essays on philosophy ("A philosophical Essay on Man", published 1773) and political theory ("Chains of Slavery", published 1774).

These first works were written in English – Marat was multilingual – and demonstrated an extensive knowledge of English, French, German, Italian and Spanish philosophers. In it, he attacked the materialist philosopher Helvétius, who had reduced all Man's faculties to physical sensation alone and his actions as motivated by self-interest, in his De l'Esprit ("On the Mind", 1758). Marat refuted his argument that philosophy had no need for science, by showing that a knowledge of physiology could help to solve the eternal problem of the location of the soul, which he argued was found in the meninges. Voltaire's sharp critique in defense of his friend Helvétius brought the young Marat to wider attention for the first time and reinforced his growing sense of the wide division between the materialists, grouped around Voltaire on one hand, and their opponents, grouped around Rousseau on the other.

Around 1770, Marat moved to Newcastle upon Tyne, possibly gaining employment as a vetinarian. His first political work Chains of Slavery, inspired by the activities of the MP and Mayor John Wilkes, was most probably compiled in the central library here. By Marat's own colourful account, he lived off black coffee for three months, during its composition, sleeping only two hours a night - and had then slept soundly for 13 days in a row! He gave it the 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". It earned him honorary membership of the patriotic societies of Berwick, Carlisle and Newcastle. The Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society Library possesses a copy, and Tyne and Wear Archives Service holds three presented to the various Newcastle guilds.

A published essay on curing a friend of gleets (gonorrhea) probably helped him to secure his referees for an honorary medical degree from the 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 moved to Paris following a brief stopover in Geneva to visit his family. Here his growing reputation as a highly effective doctor, along with the patronage of the Marquis de l'Aubespine, the husband of one of his patients, secured his appointment, in 1777, as physician to the bodyguard of the comte d'Artois, Louis XVI's brother and later Charles X. The position paid 2,000 livres a year plus allowances.

Marat was soon in great demand as a court doctor among the aristocracy and he used his new-found wealth to set up a laboratory in the Marquise's (suggested to be his mistress) house. Soon he was publishing works on fire & heat, electricity and light. In his Mémoires, his later enemy Brissot admitted Marat's growing influence in Parisian scientific circles. However, when Marat presented his scientific researches to the Académie des Sciences, they were not approved and he was rejected as a member several times. In particular, the academicians were appalled by his temerity in disagreeing with the (hitherto uncriticized) Newton. Benjamin Franklin visited him on several occasions and Goethe described his rejection by the Academy as a glaring example of scientific despotism. In 1780 Marat published his "favourite work", a "Plan de législation criminelle. Inspired by Rousseau and Beccaria, his polemic for judicial reform argued for a common death penalty for all regardless of social class and the necessity for a 12-man jury to ensure fair trials.

In April 1786 he resigned his court appointment and devoted his energies full-time to scientific research. He published a well-received translation of Newton's Opticks (1787), and later a collection of experimental essays including a study on the effect of light on soap bubbles in his Mémoires académiques, ou nouvelles découvertes sur la lumière ("Academic memoirs, or new discoveries on light", 1788).

The Friend of the People

On the eve of the French Revolution, Marat placed his career as a scientist and doctor behind him and took up his pen on behalf of the Third Estate. After 1788, when the Parlement of Paris and other Notables advised the assembling of the Estates-General for the first time in 175 years, Marat devoted himself entirely to politics. His Offrande à la patrie ("Offering to the Nation") dwelt on much the same points as the Abbé Sieyès' famous "Qu'est-ce que le Tiers État?" ("What is the Third Estate?") When the Estates-General met, in June 1789, he published a supplement to his Offrande, followed in July by La constitution ("The Constitution") and in September by the Tableau des vices de la constitution d'Angleterre ("Tableau of the flaws of the English constitution") intended to influence the structure of a constitution for France. The latter work was presented to the National Constituent Assembly and was an anti-oligarchic dissent from the anglomania that was gripping that body.

In September 1789, Marat began his own paper, which was at first called Moniteur patriote ("Patriotic Watch"), changed four days later to Publiciste parisien, and then finally L'Ami du peuple ("The Friend of the People"). From this position, he expressed suspicion of those in power, and dubbed them "enemies of the people". Although Marat never joined a specific faction during the Revolution, he condemned several sides in his L'Ami du peuple, and reported their alleged disloyalties (until he was proven wrong or they were proven guilty).

Marat often attacked the most influential and powerful groups in France, including the Corps Municipal, the Constituent Assembly, the ministers, and the Cour du Châtelet. In January 1790, he moved to the radical Cordeliers section, then under the leadership of the up-and-coming lawyer Danton, and was nearly arrested for his aggressive campaign against the Marquis de La Fayette, and was forced to flee to London, where he wrote his Denonciation contre Necker ("Denunciation of Jacques Necker"), an attack on Louis XVI's popular Finance Minister. In May he returned to Paris to continue the publication of L'Ami du peuple, and attacked many of France's most powerful citizens. Fearing reprisal, Marat was forced to hide in the Catacombs, 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" ("We're done for!"), he wrote:

Five or six hundred heads would have guaranteed your freedom and happiness but a false humanity has 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.

Events

From 1790–92 Marat frequently had to go into hiding. In April 1792, he married the 26-year-old Simonne Évrard on his return from exile in London, having promised his love to her back in January. She was the sister-in-law of his typographer, Jean-Antoine Corne, and had previously lent him money and sheltered him on several occasions.

Marat was not able to fully emerge publicly until The 10 August Insurrection, when the Tuileries Palace was besieged 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 provocative proclamation, which called for the crushing of the Revolution and helped to inflame popular feeling in Paris.

The National Convention

Although still without party affiliation, Marat was elected to the National Convention in September 1792 as one of 26 Paris deputies. When France was declared a Republic on 22 September, Marat stopped printing L'Ami du peuple, and, three days later, began the Journal de la république française ("Journal of the French Republic"). Much like L’Ami du peuple, it criticized many of France's political figures, and made Marat unpopular with his fellow members of the Convention.

"Marat's Triumph": a popular engraving of Marat borne away by a joyous crowd following his acquittal.

His stance during the trial of the deposed king Louis XVI was unique. He declared it unfair to accuse Louis for anything before his acceptance of the French Constitution of 1791, and, although implacably believing that the monarch's death would be good for the people, he did not allow Guillaume-Chrétien de Lamoignon de Malesherbes, the king's counsel, to be attacked in his paper, and spoke of him as a "sage et respectable vieillard" ("wise and respected old man").

On 21 January 1793, King Louis was guillotined, which caused political turmoil. From January to May, Marat fought bitterly with the Girondins, whom he believed to be covert enemies of republicanism. The Girondins won the first round when the Convention ordered that Marat should be tried before the Revolutionary Tribunal. However, their plans were scuppered when Marat was acquitted with much popular support and was carried back to the Convention in triumph with a greatly enhanced public profile.

Marat's death

See also: Charlotte Corday

The Death of Marat by Jacques-Louis David (1793)

The fall of the Girondins on 2 June, provoked by the actions of François Hanriot, became one of Marat's last achievements. His letters to the Convention received no attention now that the Montagnards no longer needed his support against the Girondins. Marat had all but vanished from the political scene after his victory and Robespierre and other political leaders began to separate themselves from him now that he seemed to have outlived his usefulness, and accordingly, his influence. His skin disease was worsening, and his last resort for alleviating the discomfort was to soak in a medicinal bath. Marat was in his bathtub on 13 July 1793, when a young woman, Charlotte Corday, claiming to be a messenger from Caen (where escaped Girondins were trying to gain a Normandy base) asked to be admitted to his quarters.

When she entered, he asked her to name offending deputies, and after recording their names said "They shall all be guillotined." Corday then drew a knife, purchased earlier that day at a shop, and stabbed him in the chest. He called out, "À moi, ma chère amie!" ("Help me, my dear friend!"), and died. Corday was a Girondin. She came from a royalist family — her brothers were émigrés who had left to fight with the exiled French princes. From her own account, and those of witnesses, it is clear that she had been inspired by Girondin speeches to hatred of the Montagnards by their excesses. Marat's assassination provoked reprisals in which thousands of the Jacobins' adversaries – both royalists and Girondins – were executed on supposed charges of treason. She was guillotined on 17 July 1793 for the murder. During her four-day trial, she had testified that she had carried out the assassination alone, saying "I killed one man to save 100,000."

Marat's memory in the Revolution

Marat's assassination led to his apotheosis. The painter Jacques-Louis David was called in to organize a grand funeral. David took up the task of immortalizing Marat, beautifying the skin that was discoloured and scabbed from his chronic skin disease in an attempt to create antique virtue. The entire National Convention attended Marat's funeral and he was buried in the Couvent des Cordeliers. On his tomb it said "'Unité. Et Indivisibilité, De La République. Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité Ou La Mort'." His heart was embalmed separately and placed in an urn on the ceiling of the Cordeliers Club. His remains were transferred to the Panthéon on 25 November 1793 and his near messianic role in the Revolution was confirmed with the 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. His eulogy was written by the Marquis de Sade, then a left-wing member of the National Convention and a Jacobin. De Sade would later resign as member of the Convention and other public posts due to his disgust with the Reign of Terror.

On the 19 of November, the town of Le Hâvre de Grâce changed its name to Hâvre de Marat and then Hâvre-Marat. When the Jacobins started their Dechristianisation 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 often replaced crucifixes in the former churches of Paris.

By early 1795, however, Marat's memory had become tarnished. On 13 January 1795, Hâvre-Marat became simply Le Havre, the name it bears today. In February, his coffin was removed from the Panthéon and his busts and sculptures were destroyed. His final resting place is the cemetery of the Church Saint-Étienne-du-Mont.

His memory lived on in the Soviet Union. Marat became a common name and the Russian battleship Petropavlovsk was renamed Marat in 1921. A street in the centre of Sevastopol was named after Marat on 3 January 1921, shortly after the Soviets took over the city.

Marat's skin disease

Described during his time as a man "short in stature, deformed in person, and hideous in face," Marat has long been noted for physical irregularities. The nature of Marat's debilitating skin disease in particular has been an object of ongoing medical interest. Dr. Josef E Jelinek noted that his skin disease was intensely itchy, blistering, began in the perianal region, and was associated with weight loss leading to emaciation. He was sick with it for the three years prior to his assassination, and spent most of this time in his bathtub. Jelinek's diagnosis is dermatitis herpetiformis.

Marat's bathtub

After Marat's death, Simone Évrard, Marat's wife, may have sold his bathtub to her journalist neighbour, as it was included in an inventory of his possessions after his own death. The royalist de Sainte-Hilaire bought the tub, taking it to Sarzeau, Morbihan in Brittany. His daughter, Capriole de Sainte-Hilaire inherited it when he died in 1805 and she passed it on to the Sarzeau curé when she died in 1862.

A journalist for Le Figaro tracked down the tub in 1885. The curé then discovered that selling the tub could earn money for the parish, yet the Musée Carnavalet turned it down due to its lack of provenance as well as the high price. The curé approached Madame Tussaud's waxworks, who agreed to purchase Marat's bathtub for 100,000 francs; however, the curé's acceptance was lost in the mail. After rejecting other offers, including one from Phineas Barnum, the curé sold the tub for 5,000 francs to the Musée Grévin, where it remains today.

Marat's works

Besides the works mentioned above, Marat wrote:

• Recherches physiques sur l'électricité, &c. (1782)
• Recherches sur l'électricité médicale (1783)
• Notions élémentaires d'optique (1784)
• Lettres de l'observateur Bon Sens a M. de M sur la fatale catastrophe des infortunés Pilatre de Rozier et Ronzain, les aéronautes et l'aérostation (1785)
• Observations de M. l'amateur Avec a M. labb Sans . . . &c., (1785)
• Éloge de Montesquieu (1785), published 1883 by M. de Bresetz
• Les Charlatans modernes, on lettres sur le charlatanisme académique (1791)
• Les Aventures du comte Potowski (published in 1847 by Paul Lacroix, the bibliophile Jacob)
• Lettres polonaises (published in English only; disputed by French authorities)

Artistic and theatrical representations

• The Marquis de Sade wrote an admiring eulogy for Marat.
• The Death of Marat is a famous painting by Jacques-Louis David.
• Peter Weiss wrote a play titled The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat, as performed by the inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the direction of the Marquis de Sade, (1963) also known as Marat/Sade. A motion picture based on Weiss' play was produced in 1964 (US 1966) under the direction of Peter Brook, and featured performances by the Royal Shakespeare Company.
• A fictional book by A. Dima, Marat's Son, features a retelling of Marat's life.
• In Victor Hugo's book, Quatrevingt-treize, he is featured in one chapter, where he quarrels with Robespierre and Danton.
• The opera Il piccolo Marat by Pietro Mascagni and Giovacchino Forzano (1921) features the main character who poses as a revolutionary dedicated to Marat's principles, and is dubbed "Little Marat."
• "The Palace of Versailles", a song about the French Revolution from Al Stewart's 1978 album Time Passages, includes the line "Marat, your days are numbered."
• Rock group R.E.M.'s song "We Walk" from their 1983 album Murmur features a lyrical reference to "Marat's bathing."
• He appears as a minor though somewhat frightening character in Hilary Mantel's "A Place of Greater Safety".
• "Marat/Sade" is a Richard Peaslee composition featured on the Judy Collins album, "In My Life."
• He appears in "The Gods are Thirsty" by Tanith Lee (1996), a historical novel about the French Revolution.

Quotations

• "Nothing superfluous can belong to us legitimately so long as others lack necessities."

• “To form a truly free constitution, that’s to say, truly just and wise, the first point, the main point, the capital point, is that all the laws be agreed on by the people, after considered reflection, and especially having taken time to see what’s at stake…”

• “But what can one expect from an egotistic people that acts only from self-interest, lets its passions dictate to it and responds only to vanity? Let us not deceive ourselves: a nation without understanding, without moeurs, without vertus, is not made for liberty… you are further from happiness than ever.”

• “They write on all sides that this sheet is causing much scandal. The patrie’s enemies cry blasphemy and the timid citizens who disapprove of my vigorous love of liberty and the delirium of virtue pale while reading it. You admit that I am right to attack the corrupt faction that dominates the national assembly yet you would like me to do so more moderately. That’s like trying a soldier for fighting too hard against his treacherous enemies… I know what to expect from the crowd of mischief-makers that I will raise against me but my fear of it will have no effect on my soul for I am devoted to the patrie and I am ready to shed my blood for her.”

• “From the bank onto which I was thrown during the storm, where I lie naked, frozen and covered in bruises, exhausted by my efforts and dying with fatigue, I turn my petrified gaze upon this stormy sea on which my fellow citizens blindly drift; I shiver with horror at the dangers which threaten them… I respect the truth, I adore justice and I only want what’s best; but I am not infallible and this can sometimes bring dire consequences.”

• “Can I be accused of being cruel, I who cannot bear to see an insect suffer? But when I think that, in order to spare a few drops of blood, we expose ourselves to spilling it in great waves, I get indignant, despite myself, at our false principles of humanity.”

• “A single rigorous act deployed from the beginning would have dispensed with any need for further actions. So let us dare to show ourselves and all our enemies will take to their heels: they will not know how to oppose us with force since trickery is their only resource.”

• “O French people! Must you always suffer when your implacable enemies treat you like idiots and children…”

• “My blood boils in my veins against the so-called fathers of the country, those men without feelings, without decency, who have lavished millions on the king’s brothers, dangerous enemies of the country… yet who have not restored one farthing to the poor to whom it all belongs… Form yourselves into an armed body, present yourselves at the National Assembly, and demand that you immediately be given some means of subsistence from the national wealth, which belongs much more rightly to you than to those blood-suckers of the state… you must, in your turn take whatever measure is required, for it is a hundred times better that the whole kingdom be upturned than that ten million men be reduced to death by hunger.”

• “No, it is not on the frontiers, but in the capital that we must rain down our blows on the enemy. Stop wasting time imagining different means of defence; there is but one that remains to you. That which I have recommended so many times: a general insurrection accompanied by popular executions… Six months ago, five or six hundred heads would have been enough to pull you back from the abyss. Today because you have stupidly let your implacable enemies conspire among themselves and gather strength, perhaps we will have to cut off five or six thousand; but even if we need to cut off 20,000, there is no time for hesitation.”

• “One cannot learn from medical school the genius of Asclepius (Greek god of medicine), but one does acquire the vital knowledge which stops one from acting blindly and recklessly. Under the watchful eyes of a master, pupils learn how to use this knowledge, an understanding which is lost on the empirically minded.”

• “People, praise the gods, your most formidable enemy has perished. Riquetti (nickname for Mirabeau) is no more. He dies a victim of his countless treacheries…”

• “Plots and conspiracies are multiplying at an alarming rate. Scarcely a week goes by without another explosion. This is hardly surprising, however. Ever since the foolish People became content with breaking up the conspirators instead of executing them… I am tired of repeating it, but as long as the conspirators remain alive, the conspiracies will not end. By constantly hatching new plots against liberty, they will eventually succeed in destroying it … even today these aristocratic conspirators are working to overthrow the Revolution. They do this by filling the administrative bodies and the courts with their own kind, by hiring reactionaries from the old regime, by enlisting the services of bureaucrats and by corrupting the poor through bribing armies of informers, cutthroats, and bandits… For a long time now, the ministers, and their provincial agents have been attracting to the capital a large number of the destitute, the dregs of the army and the scum from every city in the kingdom.”

• “All is lost, my good friend, the rubber-necks are only fit for slavery. They can hardly wait to get into their chains. Their extravagant displays over Mirabeau’s death have made the friends of liberty lose their last shred of hope. We are on the brink of catastrophe and the only thing left for us to do is flee to a foreign land… So it's true that men can never be happy, and life is just a jumble of pain and hardship… But what am I doing here preaching to you. To hell with my job! Why should I care anymore? When will you return? It’s now three months since we had been led to expect your arrival… If you have found a buyer for my box and my watch, or either, could you please pass on the proceeds to Monsieur Arnold senior so he can pass them… An unfaithful person, by whom I have been cruelly deceived, was intending to write to you in order to remove these effects under the pretence of returning them to me. I do not know if her letter has arrived but as I do not expect her to abuse my confidence any more, nor that she abuses yours, please dispose of these effects for their value as I already indicated… I believe, my good friend, that taking everything into consideration, you could do worse than think of staying more permanently in England. Arts and science have had it in France; there wont be anything happening here for at least 20 years. I am sure that you will only have to make a good marriage and secure the partnership of M. Arnold and you will make your own fortune. As for your old friend, he no longer has anything to hope for, other than to languish in obscurity. He embraces you and awaits your reply at the address of your confidant, who has recently fallen from grace, whom I only know as Monsieur Jean.”

• “We are at war with the enemies of the revolution… concern for the salvation of the nation and of our own safety therefore makes it imperative that we treat them as traitors and exterminate them as base conspirators.”

• “No, liberty is not made for us: we are too ignorant, too vain, too presumptious, too cowardly, too vile, too corrupt too attached to rest and to pleasure, too much slaves to fortune to ever know the true price of liberty. We boast of being free! To show how much we have become slaves, it is enough just to cast a glance on the capital and examine the morals of its inhabitants.”

• “The people are dead since the Champs de Mars massacre. I have tried in vain to wake them; so I have given up trying and probably forever. But I can still amuse myself by playing the prophet.”

• "Let it be known that if, after the massacre of the Champ de Mars, I had found two thousand men burning with the thoughts that filled my breast, I would have marched at their head to stab the general (Lafayette) amidst his battalions of brigands, to burn the despot in his palace, and to impale our atrocious deputies to their seats, as I told them at the time. Robespierre listened to me in fear, paled and remained silent for a while. That interview confirmed me in my opinion that I have always had of him; that he combines with the enlightenment of a wise senator, the integrity of an upright man and the zeal of a true patriot; but that he lacks both the vision and the audacity of a statesman… The influence that my paper has had on the revolution did not derive, as you can imagine, from closely reasoned arguments… but from the horror that it aroused among its readers when I boldly tore aside the veil covering the perpetual plots being hatched against our liberties by the country’s enemies, in league with the King… and from the courage with which I crushed every slanderous critic underfoot".

• “On our Nation’s stage, only the scenery has changed. The cast, intrigue and machinations remain the same… today, the principal actors hide behind the curtain where they manipulate with ease those who act the parts before your eyes. Most of these actors have already disappeared, so new ones have appeared to play the same roles. [The revolution will never succeed] … when the lower classes are left alone to struggle against the upper classes. Sure, at the moment of insurrection, the people will smash everything down by sheer numbers; but whatever advantage they may gain at first, they will always end up by caving in for since they find themselves bereft of intelligence, culture, wealth, arms, leaders and strategies, they have no means of defence against those magicians full of cunning, craft and artifice. If the educated men, the well off, and the crafty ones of the lower classes, first sided against the despot, it was only to turn against the people after they had wormed their way into their confidence and used the people’s strength to set themselves up in the place of the privileged orders that they proscribed. Thus it is that the revolution has been made and sustained by the lowest classes of society –the workers, the artisans, the little tradesmen, the farmers, by those unfortunates whom the shameless rich call scum and whom Roman insolence called proletarians. But who would ever have imagined that it would only end up helping small landowners, lawyers and con men… Today, after three years of endless speeches from patriotic societies and a deluge of writings… the people are even further from knowing what they should do to resist their oppressors than they were on the very first day of the revolution. At that time they followed their instincts… Now, look at them, chained in the name of the law and tyrannized in the name of justice, they have become constitutional slaves!"

• “How could liberty ever have established itself amongst us? Apart from several tragic scenes, the revolution has been nothing but a web of farcical scenes… But it is in the nation’s Senate that the most grotesque parades have taken place”.

• “He [Marat] predicted that your armies would be led to the slaughter by their perfidious generals… He predicted that the corrupt majority of the national Assembly would always betray the patrie… The glorious day of the tenth of August may be decisive for the triumph of liberty if you know how to use your strength… I therefore propose that you kill one in every ten of the counterrevolutionary members of the municipality, the courts, the Departments and the Assembly”.

• “The Paris Commune hastens to inform its brothers in all the Departments of France that a group of ferocious conspirators detained in its prisons have been put to death by the people. Acts of justice which seemed essential in order to terrorize the legions of traitors, hidden behind its walls, at the very moment when they were about to march on the enemy. Doubtless, the whole nation, after this series of treacherous acts which brought the country to the brink of the precipice, will hasten to adopt these methods so vital to the public safety, and all the French people will cry out like the Parisians: ‘We are marching to the enemy, but we will not leave these brigands behind us to cut the throats of our wives and children’.”

• “Gentleman, I have in this Assembly a large number of personal enemies [Three quarters of the assembly rise to their feet crying ‘We all are!’] I have in this Assembly a great number of personal enemies. I remind them of their shame; it is not by great dins, threats and insults that that you prove an accused man to be guilty; it is not by shouting down a defender of the people that you show that he is a criminal… I believe I am the first political writer, and perhaps the only one in France since the revolution began, who has proposed a dictatorship or military tribune as the only means of destroying the traitors and conspirators. If this opinion is reprehensible I alone am guilty. If it is criminal, the vengeance of the nation should fall on my head alone… I have just been accused of being a traitor and a schemer… he told you that I wanted to overturn the state, to throw it into chaos and confusion and to cut the throats of the national Convention. This untrustworthy commentary has only one goal: to mislead the Convention and to raise it against me. Who are the authors of this atrocious plot? Perverted men whom I have denounced for some time as the most mortal enemies of the nation – members of the Brissotin faction. There they are in front of me, smirking while their acolytes make their frenzied cries; and they dare me to settle this now… Do not doubt that if the decree for my arrest had been issued, I would have escaped my persecutors’ rage by blowing my brains out before your very eyes [here, he placed his pistol against his forehead]".

• “[A patriotic journalist must]… be ready to spill his blood, drop by drop, and expose himself to a miserable death on the scaffold, for the salvation of an ignorant and misguided people, who too often disdain him, sometimes outrage him, and by whom he is nearly always misunderstood”.

• "The constitution states that the person of the King is inviolable and sacred… But gentlemen, if you were ever to lend an ear to the sophistries of those who wish to spare his life while subjecting him to the rule of law, concern for public safety alone should force you to reject any penalty short of death. For as long as the former monarch draws breath and an unforeseen event may free him, he will be the focus of all the conspiracies of France's enemies… That the former monarch must be judged, that is beyond doubt; but by whom?… He can only be judged by the national Convention which represents the nation itself… To grant a pardon would therefore not only be weakness, but treason, villainy, and treachery too. Gentlemen, the safety of France and the establishment of the Republic depend on the course you choose. I conclude that the tyrant be judged by the Convention and that his punishment be death”.

References

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Marat, Jean-Paul". [[Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition|Encyclopædia Britannica]] (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. {{cite encyclopedia}}: URL–wikilink conflict (help)

The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, in turn, gives the following references:

• • A. Vermorel, Jean Paul Marat (1880)
  • François Chèvremont, Marat: esprit politique, accomp. de sa vie (2 vols., 1880)
  • Auguste Cabanès, Marat inconnu (1891)
  • A. Bougeart, Marat, l'ami du peuple (2 vols., 1865)
  • Jean Maurice Tourneux, Bibliographie de l'histoire de Paris pendant la revolution francaise (vol. ii., 1894; vol. iv., 1906)
  • Ernest Belfort Bax, J. P. Marat (1900)

• The Correspondance de Marat has been edited with notes by C. Vellay (2006)

Edited by Pôle Nord - Brussels:

1) 1989-1995 : Jean-Paul Marat, Œuvres Politiques (ten volumes 1789-1793 - Text: 6.600 p. - Guide: 2.200 p.)

2) Collection "Chantiers Marat":

1997: Conner, Clifford D., "Jean Paul Marat: Scientist and Revolutionary" (Humanity Books)

2001: "Marat en famille - La saga des Mara(t)" (2 volumes) - New approach of Marat's family.

2006: "Plume de Marat - Plumes sur Marat" (2 volumes) : Bibliography (3.000 references of books and articles of and on Marat)

See also

• Marat
• Marat (name)

External links

• http://www.metavolution.org/modx/les-publications-sur-jean-paul-marat.html Summaries of the princeps edition's 10 volumes.
• http://www.revolution-francaise.net
• Jean-Paul Marat in German, French and Italian in the online Historical Dictionary of Switzerland.

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