Jean-Paul Marat

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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 (though never a member of the Jacobin Club as such) during the French Revolution, he helped launch the Reign of Terror and compiled "death lists." He was stabbed to death in his bathtub by self-proclaimed Girondist Charlotte Corday.

Contents 1 Scientist and physician 2 The Friend of the People 3 Events 4 The National Convention 5 Marat's death 6 Marat's memory in the Revolution 7 Marat's skin disease 8 Marat's bath 9 Marat's works 10 Artistic and theatrical representations 11 Quotations 12 Notes 13 References 14 External links

[edit] Scientist and physician

The eldest son of Jean Mara, (Giovanni Mara), a native of Cagliari in Sardinia, and Louise Cabrol born in Geneva (but her family came from Castres in France), Marat was born at Boudry, in the principality of Neuchâtel, on May 24, 1743. His father and mother were Protestants. Marat set out on his travels and spent two years at Bordeaux. 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 and skin. 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'Homme 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.^[1]

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. 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)

[edit] The Friend of the People

On the eve of the French Revolution, Marat placed his career as a scientist and philosopher 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.^[2] His 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, 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 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 Watch"), changed four days later to Publiciste parisien, 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).

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. This resulted in prosecutions as early as October 1789. He took refuge in London where he wrote a Denonciation contre Necker ("Denunciation of Jacques Necker"). In May he returned to Paris to continue the publication of L'Ami du peuple, and wrote many articles against war and underhand dealings to disorganise the national guard, first line of defence of liberty. Fear of reprisal often forced Marat to hide.

Marat often repeated that he had made up his mind about politics well before he settled into his role of censor of the crimes and misdemeanours of the great and powerful, first with Le Publiciste parisien and then, famously, as L’Ami du peuple. Everything he advocated in 1792 and 1793 was already there in 1789.

Marat was surprisingly indifferent to the institution of monarchy and unmoved by the existence of noble "titles" (he regards their abolition in June 1790 as a needless provocation). He condemned the National Assembly’s decision to sell the property of the Church to fund the state’s debts, arguing that the land in question would be better used to meet the needs of the propertyless poor. He opposed the abolition of guilds, warning that unlimited competition would force down the quality of products. Marat’s republicanism was a system consisting of a mix of popular sovereignty, patriot king, moderate prosperity and a common concern for the public good.

[edit] Events

Marat placed his hopes in the Constituent Assembly, but lost faith in the actions of the Legislative Assembly. In 1792, he was summoned by the Cordeliers Club, which provided a political base for him to work. In 1792, he married 27 year old Simonne Évrard, the sister-in-law of Jean Antoine Corne, the typographer of L'Ami du peuple.

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 was partly caused by the Duke of Brunswick Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand's proclamation which called for the crushing of the Revolution, and served to inflame sentiments in Paris.

[edit] The National Convention

Although 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 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.

[edit] Marat's death

See also Charlotte Corday.

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 cold 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, 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, and her action provoked reprisals in which thousands of the Jacobins' adversaries – both royalists and Girondins – were executed on supposed charges of treason. She 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."

[edit] Marat's memory in the Revolution

Marat's assassination led to his apotheosis during the following years. The French painter Jacques-Louis David led the task of organising a grandiose ceremony. The entire National Convention attended Marat's funeral and he was buried in the Couvent des Cordeliers. His remains were transferred to the Panthéon on November 25, 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.

On the 19 of November, the town of Le Hâvre de Grâce changed its name to Hâvre de Marat and then became Hâvre-Marat. 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.

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

[edit] Marat's skin disease

The nature of Marat's debilitating skin disease has been an object of ongoing medical interest. Dr. Josef E 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 herpetiformis^[3]

[edit] Marat's bath

After Marat's death, his bathtub disappeared. Simonne Evrard, Marat's wife, may have sold it to her journalist neighbour. It was included in an inventory of the journalist's possessions after his own death. The royalist M. de Sainte-Hilaire bought the tub, taking it to Sarzeau in Normandy. 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 without heirs.

A Le Figaro journalist tracked down the tub for an article published on July 15, 1885. The curé then understood that the tub could earn him money for the parish, yet the Musée Carnavalet director turned it down due its lack of identification as well as the high price the curé proposed. The curé then approached Madame Tussaud's waxworks. The Tussauds agreed to purchase Marat's bathtub for 100,000 francs; however, the curé's response in accepting this offer 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 Grevin, where it rests today.^[4]

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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.
• Marat's infamous death in his tub was parodied in the movie Land of the Blind, where Chairman Thorne, soaking in the bathtub due to having the same disease as Marat, was stabbed to death by a female trustee.
• R.E.M. references Marat in their song We Walk from the 1983 debut LP Murmur. "Take oasis, Marat's bathing"
• In Victor Hugo's book, Quatrevingt-treize, he is featured in one chapter, where he's quarreling with Robespierre and Danton.

[edit] Quotations

• "Nothing superfluous can belong to us legitimately so long as others lack necessities."^[5]
• "To ensure public tranquility, two hundred and seventy thousand heads more should fall."^[6]

[edit] Notes

1. ^ Marat, Jean-Paul, Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, 1911. Accessed online 2 July 2006.
2. ^ "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.
3. ^ Jelinek, J.E., "Jean-Paul Marat: The differential diagnosis of his skin disease", American Journal of Dermatopathology (1979) 1:251-2. PMID 396805.
4. ^ Ransom, Teresa, Madame Tussaud: A Life and a Time, (2003) p. 252-253.
5. ^ Durant, Will and Ariel. The Age of Napoleon. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975. pg. 21
6. ^ Taine, Hippolyte. The French Revolution, Volume 3. Kessinger Publishing, 2004. pg. 118

[edit] References

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition article "Marat, Jean-Paul", a publication now in the public domain. 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":

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)

[edit] External links

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