Jean-Paul Marat

Jean-Paul Marat (May 24, 1743 – July 13, 1793), was a Swiss-born French scientist and physician who made much of his career in the United Kingdom, but is best known as an activist in the French Revolution. A fiery journalist, an advocate of such violent measures as the September 1792 massacres of jailed "enemies of the Revolution," and a member of the radical Jacobin faction during the French Revolution, he helped launch the Reign of Terror and compiled "death lists." He was stabbed to death in his bathtub by Charlotte Corday.

Scientist and physician

The eldest child of Jean Paul Marat, (Giovanni Marra), a native of Cagliari in Sardinia, and Louise Cabrol of Geneva, Marat was born at Boudry, in the principality of Neuchâtel, on May 24, 1743. His father and mother were Protestants. Upon his mother's death in 1759, Marat set out on his travels and spent two years at Bordeaux in the study of medicine. He eventually settled in Paris, where he made use of his knowledge of his two favorite sciences, optics and electricity, to alleviate disease of the eyes. After some years in Paris he went to Holland, and then on to London, where he practiced his profession.

His first published work, written in English and only later translated and published in his native French, was a Philosophical Essay on Man (1773), which demonstrates extensive knowledge of English, French, German, Italian and Spanish philosophers. The essay directly attacks Helvetius, who had in his De l'esprit declared knowledge of science unnecessary for a philosopher; Marat declares that physiology alone can solve the problems of the connection between soul and body. Voltaire's sharp attack on the Essay, after a French-language translation was printed in Amsterdam in 1775 only served to make the young author more conspicuous.Marat, Jean-Paul, Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, 1911. Accessed online 2 July 2006.

In 1774 he published The Chains of Slavery, urging constituencies to reject the (British) king's friends as candidates for Parliament; according to Marat, this essay earned him honorary memberships in the patriotic societies of Carlisle, Berwick-upon-Tweed and Newcastle.

A 1775 essay on gleets (gonorrhea) led to recognition as an M.D. of St. Andrews. On his return to London he published an Enquiry into the Nature, Cause, and Cure of a Singular Disease of the Eyes. Despite his anti-royalist writing, his reputation as a clever doctor won him, in 1777, a position as physician to the guards of the comte d'Artois, afterwards Charles X of France, with 2,000 livres a year and allowances.

Marat was soon in great demand as a court doctor among the aristocracy; and even Brissot, in his Mémoires, admits his influence in the scientific world of Paris. His scientific researches continued, studying heat, light and electricity, on which he presented memoirs to the Académie des Sciences, but failed to be accepted as a member: the academicians were horrified at his temerity in differing from Newton. His experiments greatly interested Benjamin Franklin, who used to visit him, and Goethe always regarded his rejection by the academy as a glaring instance of scientific despotism.

In 1780 he had published at Neuchâtel a Plan de législation criminelle, founded on the principles of Beccaria. In April 1786 he resigned his court appointment and, over the next few years, completed a new translation of Newton's Opticks (1787) and Mémoires académiques, ou nouvelles découvertes sur la lumière. ("Academic memoirs, or new discoveries about light," 1788)

Advocate of revolutionary violence

On the eve of the French Revolution, Marat placed his career as a scientist and philosopher entirely behind him. After 1788, when the Parlement of Paris and other Notables advised the assembling of the Estates-General for the first time in over 150 years, Marat devoted himself entirely to politics."His scientific life was now over, his political life was to begin; in the notoriety of that political life his great scientific and philosophical knowledge was to be forgotten…" Marat, Jean-Paul, Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, 1911. Accessed online 2 July 2006. His pamphlet Offrande à la patrie ("Offering to the Fatherland") 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, he published June 1789 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 vices 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 Monitor"), changed four days later to Publiciste parisien ("Parisian Publicity Agent"), and finally named L'Ami du peuple ("The Friend of the People"). From this position, he expressed suspicion of all 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). Such declarations earned him the title Wrath of the People.

Marat often attacked the most influential and powerful groups in France, including the Corps Municipal, the Constituent Assembly, the ministers, and the Court of the Chatelet. This resulted in his imprisonment from October 8 to November 5, 1789. In January 1790, he was again nearly arrested for his aggressive campaign against the Marquis de La Fayette, and escaped by fleeing to London, where he wrote Denonciation contre Necker ("Denunciation of Jacques Necker," an attack against the minister of Louis XVI). 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 contracted a debilitating chronic skin disease; among his few allies at this time was Simone Évrard.

Marat, long a supporter of the abolition of the Bourbon Monarchy, subsequently attacked more moderate revolutionary leaders. In July 1790, he wrote:

Insurrection

Marat placed his hopes in the Constituent Assembly, but lost faith in the actions of the Legislative Assembly. In December 1791, he again fled to London and wrote another book École du citoyen ("School of the Citizen"). In April 1792, he returned to Paris after being summoned by the Cordeliers Club, which provided a political base for him to work.

During this time, Marat was frequently criticized, and went into hiding until The August 10 Insurrection, when the Tuileries Palace was besieged and the Royal Family sheltered with the Legislative Assembly. This provoked the Duke of Brunswick Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand to issue a proclamation which called for the crushing of the Revolution, and served to inflame sentiments in Paris.

Subsequently, Marat took his seat at the Paris Commune, and demanded a trial be held to judge the royalists in prison. When no trial was convened, he advocated the September Massacres in which thousands of political prisoners were murdered, and established the Committee of Surveillance, whose declared role was to root out counter-Revolutionaries (Marat composed the death lists from which those suspected of political crimes). One of his victims may have been the chemist Antoine Lavoisier.

The National Convention

Alhough still without party affiliation, Marat was elected to the National Convention in September 1792 to represent the people of France. When France was declared a Republic on September 22, 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 almost uniquely unpopular with his fellow members of the Convention.

His stance during the trial of the deposed king Louis XVI was also unique. He declared it unfair to accuse Louis for anything anterior to his acceptance of the French Constitution, and, although implacably committed to his idea of securing the people's good through the monarch's death, he would 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 respectable old man). "

On January 21, 1793, King Louis was guillotined, an episode which created political turmoil; from January to May, Marat fought bitterly with the moderate Girondins, whom he believed to be covert enemies of republicanism, and led his public in a violent confrontation with them. The Girondins won the first round: the Convention ordered that Marat should be tried before the Revolutionary Tribunal; the plan was overturned when Marat was acquitted and returned to the Convention with enhanced popular support.

Marat's death

The fall of the Girondins on May 31, provoked by the actions of François Hanriot, became one of Marat's last achievements. His skin disease was having negative effects on his life, and his last resort for alleviating the discomfort was to soak in a hot bath. Marat was in his bathtub on July 13 1793, when a woman claiming to be a messenger from Caen (where escaped Girondins were trying to gain a Normandy base) begged to be admitted to his quarters.

He ordered her in, asked her the names of the offending deputies, and after recording their names said "They shall all be guillotined." The young woman, Charlotte Corday, then drew a knife, purchased minutes before at a shop across the street, and stabbed him in the chest. He called out, "À moi, ma chère amie!" ("To me, my dear friend"), and died. Corday was a Girondin, and her action provoked reprisals in which thousands of the Jacobins' adversaries – both royalists and Girondins – were executed on supposed charges of treason. She herself was guillotined on July 17 1793 for the murder of Marat. 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."

The entire National Convention attended Marat's funeral, and his ashes were placed in the Hall of Spectacles, where the sessions took place. When the Jacobins started their Deist Dechristianisation campaigns (as the competing Cult of Reason and Maximilien Robespierre's Cult of the Supreme Being), Marat was made a quasi-saint, and his bust often replaced crucifixes in the former churches of Paris.

Marat's skin disease

The nature of Marat's debilitating skin disease has been an object of ongoing medical interest. Jelinek noted that " (h)is skin disease was intensely pruritic, 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 herpetiformisJelinek, J.E., "Jean-Paul Marat: The differential diagnosis of his skin disease", American Journal of Dermatopathology (1979) 1:251-2. PMID 396805.

Marat's works

Besides the works mentioned above, Marat wrote:

Recherches physiques sur electricité, &c. (1782)
Recherches sur electricité medicate (1783)
Notions elementaires d'optique (1764)
Lettres de l'observateur Bon Sens a M. de M sur la fatale catastrophe des infortunes Pilatre de Rozier et Ronzain, les aeronautes et l'arostation (1785)
Observations de M. l'amateur Avec a M. labb Sans . . . &c., (1785)
Eloge de Montesquieu (1785), published 1883 by M. de Bresetz
Les Charlatans modernes, on lettres sur le charlatanisme academique (1791)
Les Aventures du comte Potowski (published in 1847 by Paul Lacroix, the bibliophile Jacob)
Lettres polonaises (unpublished)

Artistic and theatrical representations

Although he detested the Reign of Terror, 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, 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.

Notes

References

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

- A. Vermorel, Jean Paul Marat (1880)
- François Chevremont, Marat: esprit politique, accomp. de sa vie (2 vols., 1880)
- Auguste Cabans, 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)
- E. B. Bax, J. P. Marat (1900)
The Correspondance de Marat has been edited with notes by C. Villay (2006)

External links

Jean-Paul Marat Internet Archive on Marxists.org.
Jean-Paul Marat, The People’s Friend, biography by Belfort Bax.
Marat premier de Corday by Gilles Marchal.
"The Bastard in the Bathtub", biography by Cali Ruchala

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