Jean-Paul Marat

Jean-Paul Marat
Born (1743-05-24)24 May 1743
Boudry, Principality of Neuchâtel, Prussia (now part of Switzerland)
Died 13 July 1793(1793-07-13) (aged 50)
Paris, France
Cause of death Assassination
Alma mater University of St. Andrews, MD
Occupation Journalist, politician, physician, scientist
Political party Jacobin Club (1789–1790)
Cordeliers Club (1790–1793)
Spouse(s) Simonne Evrard
Parent(s) Jean Mara,
Louise Cabrol

Jean-Paul Marat (French: [ʒɑ̃pɔl maʁa]; 24 May 1743 – 13 July 1793) was a French political theorist, physician, and scientist[1] who became best known for his role as a radical journalist and politician during the French Revolution. His journalism became renowned for its fierce tone, uncompromising stance towards the new leaders and institutions of the revolution, and advocacy of basic human rights for the poorest members of society. He was one of the most radical voices of the French Revolution. He became a vigorous defender of the sans-culottes, publishing his views in pamphlets, placards and newspapers, notably his periodical L'Ami du peuple (Friend of the People), which helped make him their unofficial link with the radical, republican Jacobin group that came to power after June 1793.

Marat was assassinated by Charlotte Corday, a Girondist sympathizer, while taking a medicinal bath for his debilitating skin condition. In his death, Marat became an icon to the Jacobins as a revolutionary martyr, as portrayed in Jacques-Louis David's famous painting, The Death of Marat. For this assassination, Corday was executed four days later, on 17 July 1793.

Early Life, Education and Writings

Jean-Paul Marat was born in Boudry in the Prussian Principality of Neuchâtel, now part of Switzerland, on 24 May 1743.[2] 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 sixteen, Marat left home in search of new opportunities, aware of the limited opportunities for outsiders. His highly educated father had been turned down for several college (secondary) teaching posts. His first stop was with 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 in 1765, for fear of being "drawn into dissipation", he set himself up informally as a doctor, befriended the Royal Academician artist Angelica Kauffman, and began to mix with Italian artists and architects in the coffee houses around Soho. Highly ambitious, but without patronage or qualifications, he set about inserting himself into the intellectual scene with works on philosophy ("A philosophical Essay on Man", published 1773) and political theory ("Chains of Slavery", published 1774).[3] Voltaire's sharp critique of "De l'Homme" (an augmented translation, published 1775–76), partly in defence of his protégé Helvétius reinforced Marat's growing sense of a widening gulf between the philosophes, grouped around Voltaire on one hand, and their 'opponents', loosely grouped around Rousseau on the other.[3]

Around 1770, Marat moved to Newcastle upon Tyne. His first political work, Chains of Slavery, inspired by the extra-parliamentary activities of the disenfranchised MP, and later Mayor, John Wilkes, was most probably compiled in the central library here. By Marat's own colourful account, he lived on black coffee for three months, during its composition, sleeping only two hours a night – and then slept soundly for thirteen days in a row.[4] 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-upon-Tweed, Carlisle and Newcastle. The Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society Library[5] 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 (gonorrhoea) probably helped to secure his medical referees for an MD from the University of St Andrews in June 1775.[6] On his return to London, he published 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 June 1777, as physician to the bodyguard of the comte d'Artois, Louis XVI's youngest brother who was to become king Charles X in 1824.[7] The position paid 2,000 livres a year plus allowances.

Scientific Writing

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 de l'Aubespine's house. Soon he was publishing works on fire and heat, electricity and light. He published, first, a summary of his scientific views and discoveries in Découvertes de M. Marat sur le feu, l'électricité et la lumière (Mr Marat's Discoveries on Fire, Electricity and Light) in 1779. He then went on to publish three much more detailed and extensive works, expanding on each of his areas of research. His method was to describe in detail the meticulous series of experiments he had undertaken on a problem, seeking to explore and then exclude all possible conclusions but the one he reached.

Recherches Physiques sur le Feu

The first of Marat's large-scale publications detailing his experiments and drawing conclusions from them was Recherches Physiques sur le Feu (Research into the Physics of Fire) which was published in 1780 with the approval of the official censors.[8] This describes 166 experiments conducted to demonstrate that fire was not, as was widely held, a material element but an 'igneous fluid'. He asked the Academy of Sciences to appraise his work, and it appointed a commission to do so, which reported in April 1779. The report avoided endorsing Marat's conclusions but did speak of his 'new, precise and well-executed experiments, appropriately and ingeniously designed'. Marat then published his work, with the claim that the Academy approved of its contents. Since the Academy had endorsed his methods but said nothing to agree with his conclusions, this claim drew the ire of Antoine Lavoisier, who demanded that the Academy repudiate it. When the Academy did so, this marked the beginning of worsening relations between Marat and many of its leading members. A number of them, including Lavoisier himself, as well as Condorcet and Laplace took a strong dislike to Marat. Others however, including Lamarck and Lacépède wrote positively about Marat's experiments and conclusions.[9]

Découvertes sur la Lumière

In Marat's time Newton's views on light and colour were regarded almost universally as definitive, yet Marat's explicit purpose in his second major work Découvertes sur la Lumière (Discoveries on Light) was to demonstrate that in certain key areas, Newton was wrong. The focus of Marat's work was the study of how light bends around objects, and his main argument was that while Newton held that white light was broken down into colours by refraction, they were actually caused by diffraction. When a beam of sunlight shone through an aperture, passed through a prism and projected colour onto a wall, the splitting of the light into colours took place not in the prism, as Newton maintained, but at the edges of the aperture itself.[10] Marat also sought to demonstrate that there are only three primary colours, rather than seven as Newton had argued.[11]

Once again, Marat requested the Academy of Sciences to review his work, and they set up a commission to do so. Over a period of seven months, from June 1779 to January 1780, Marat performed his experiments in the presence of the commissioners so that they could appraise his methods and conclusions. The drafting of their final report was charged to Jean-Baptiste Le Roy. The report was finally produced after many delays in May 1780, and consisted of just three short paragraphs. Significantly, the report concluded that 'these experiments are so very numerous..[but]...they do not appear to us to prove what the author believes they establish.' The Academy declined to endorse Marat's work.[12] When it was published, Découvertes sur la lumière did not carry the royal approbation. According to the title page it was printed in London meaning either that Marat could not get the official censor to approve it, or he did not want to spend the time and effort to do so.

Recherches Physiques sur L'Électricité

Marat's third major work, Recherches Physiques sur l'Électricité (Research on the Physics of Electricity) outlined 214 experiments. One of his major areas of interest was in electrical attraction and repulsion. Repulsion, he held, was not basic force of nature. He addressed a number of other areas of enquiry in his work, concluding with a section on lightning rods which argued that those with pointed ends were more effective than those with blunt ends, and denouncing the idea of 'earthquake rods' advocated by Pierre Bertholon de Saint-Lazare. This book was published with the censor's stamp of approval, but Marat did not seek the endorsement of the Academy of Sciences.[13]

In April 1783,[7] he resigned his court appointment and devoted his energies full-time to scientific research. Apart from his major works, during this period Marat published shorter essays on the medical use of electricity (Mémoire sur l'électricité médicale (1783)) and on optics (Notions élémentaires d'optique (1784)). He published a well-received translation of Newton's Opticks (1787), which was still in print until recently, and later a collection of essays on his experimental findings, 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). Benjamin Franklin visited him on several occasions and Goethe described his rejection by the Academy as a glaring example of scientific despotism.

Other Pre-Revolutionary Writing

In 1782, Marat published his "favourite work", a Plan de législation criminelle. It was a polemic for penal reform, inspired by Rousseau and Cesare Beccaria, which had been entered into a competition announced by the Berne economic society in February 1777 and backed by Frederick the Great and Voltaire. Marat's entry contained many radical ideas, including the argument that society should provide fundamental (natural) needs such as food and shelter if it expected all its citizens to follow its (civil) laws, that the king was no more than the "first magistrate" of his people, that there should be a common death penalty regardless of class, and that each town should have a dedicated "avocat des pauvres" and set up independent criminal tribunals with twelve-man juries to ensure a fair trial.

"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. In 1788, when the Assembly of Notables advised Louis XVI to assemble of the Estates-General for the first time in 175 years, Marat devoted himself entirely to politics. In January 1789, he published his Offrande à la Patrie ("Offering to the Nation") which touched on some of the same points as the Abbé Sieyès' famous "Qu'est-ce que le Tiers État?" ("What is the Third Estate?"). This was followed by a "Supplément de l'Offrande" in March, followed in July by "La Constitution, ou Projet de déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen", intended to influence the drafting of France's new constitution, then being debated in the National Assembly.

On 12 September 1789, Marat began his own newspaper, entitled Publiciste parisien, before changing its name four days later to L'Ami du peuple ("The People's friend"). From this position, he often attacked the most influential and powerful groups in Paris, including the Commune, the Constituent Assembly, the ministers, and the Châtelet, (the ancien regime legislative body). In January 1790, he moved to the radical Cordeliers section, then under the leadership of the lawyer Danton, was nearly arrested for his aggressive attacks against Jacques Necker, Louis XVI's popular Finance Minister, and was forced to flee to London. In May, he returned to Paris to continue publication of L'Ami du peuple and briefly ran a second newspaper in June 1790 called "Le Junius français" named after the notorious English polemicist Junius. Marat faced the problem of counterfeiters distributing falsified versions of L'Ami du peuple, which led him to call for police intervention, which resulted in the suppression of the fraudulent issues, leaving Marat the continuing sole author of L'Ami de peuple.

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 warned against counter-revolutionaries, advising, "five or six hundred heads cut off would have assured your repose, freedom and happiness."[14]

Between 1790 and 1792, Marat was often forced into hiding, sometimes in the Paris sewers, where he almost certainly aggravated his debilitating chronic skin disease (possibly dermatitis herpetiformis).[15] In January 1792, he married the 26-year-old Simonne Evrard[16] in a common-law ceremony on his return from exile in London, having previously expressed his love for her. She was the sister-in-law of his typographer, Jean-Antoine Corne, and had lent him money and sheltered him on several occasions.

Marat only emerged publicly on the 10 August Insurrection, when the Tuileries Palace was invaded and the royal family forced to shelter within the Legislative Assembly. The spark for this uprising was the Brunswick Manifesto, which called for the crushing of the Revolution and helped to inflame popular outrage in Paris.

The National Convention

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

Marat was elected to the National Convention in September 1792 as one of 26 Paris deputies although he belonged to no party. When France was declared a Republic on 22 September, Marat renamed his L'Ami du peuple as Le Journal de la République française ("Journal of the French Republic"). His stance during the trial of the deposed king Louis XVI was unique. He declared it unfair to accuse Louis of anything before his acceptance of the French Constitution of 1791, and, although implacably he said believing that the monarch's death would be good for the people, defended Guillaume-Chrétien de Lamoignon de Malesherbes, the King's counsel, as a "sage et respectable vieillard" ("wise and respected old man").

On 21 January 1793, Louis XVI 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. Marat’s hatred of the Girondins became increasingly heated which led him to call for the use of violent tactics against them. The Girondins fought back and demanded that Marat be tried before the Revolutionary Tribunal. After attempting to avoid arrest for several days Marat was finally imprisoned. On 24 April, he was brought before the Tribunal on the charges that he had printed in his paper statements calling for widespread murder as well as the suspension of the Convention. Marat decisively defended his actions, stating that he had no evil intentions directed against the Convention. Marat was acquitted of all charges to the riotous celebrations of his supporters.

Death

The fall of the Girondins on 2 June, helped by the actions of François Hanriot, the new leader of the National Guard, 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 soaked in a medicinal bath. Now that the Montagnards no longer needed his 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.

The assassination of Marat by Charlotte Corday on 13 July 1793

Marat was in his bathtub on 13 July, when a young woman from Caen, Charlotte Corday, appeared at his flat, claiming to have vital information on the activities of the escaped Girondins who had fled to Normandy. Despite his wife Simonne's protests, Marat asked for her to enter and gave her an audience by his bath, over which a board had been laid to serve as a writing desk. Their interview lasted around fifteen minutes. He asked her what was happening in Caen and she explained, reciting a list of the offending deputies. After he had finished writing out the list, Corday claimed that he told her, "Their heads will fall within a fortnight", a statement she later changed at her trial to, "Soon I shall have them all guillotined in Paris". This was unlikely since Marat did not have the power to have anyone guillotined. At that moment, Corday rose from her chair, drawing out from her corset a five-inch kitchen knife, which she had bought earlier that day, and brought it down hard into Marat’s chest, where it pierced just under his right clavicle, opening the carotid artery, close to the heart. The massive bleeding was fatal within seconds. Slumping backwards, Marat cried out his last words to Simonne, "Aidez-moi, ma chère amie!" ("Help me, my dear friend!") and died.

Corday was a Girondin sympathiser who came from an impoverished royalist family – her brothers were émigrés who had left to join the exiled royal princes. From her own account, and those of witnesses, it is clear that she had been inspired by Girondin speeches to a hatred of the Montagnards and their excesses, symbolised most powerfully in the character of Marat.[17] The Book of Days claims the motive was to "avenge the death of her friend Barboroux". Marat's assassination contributed to the mounting suspicion which fed the Terror during which thousands of the Jacobins' adversaries – both royalists and Girondins – were executed on supposed charges of treason. Charlotte Corday 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".

Memory in the Revolution

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

Marat's assassination led to his apotheosis. The painter Jacques-Louis David, a member of one of the two "Great Committees" (the Committee of General Security), was asked to organise a grand funeral.[18] David took up the task of immortalising Marat in the painting The Death of Marat, beautifying the skin that was discoloured and scabbed from his chronic skin disease in an attempt to create antique virtue. David, as a result of this work, has since been criticised as glorifying the Jacobin's death. The entire National Convention attended Marat's funeral and he was buried under a weeping willow, in the garden of the former Club des Cordeliers (former Couvent des Cordeliers).[19] After Marat’s death, he was viewed by many as a martyr for the revolution, and was immortalized in various ways in order to preserve the values he stood for. His heart was embalmed separately and placed in an urn in an altar erected to his memory at the Cordeliers in order to inspire speeches that were similar in style to Marat’s eloquent journalistic skills.[20] On his tomb, the inscription on a plaque read: "Unité, Indivisibilité de la République, Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité ou la mort". 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. The eulogy was given by the Marquis de Sade, delegate of the Section Piques and an ally of Marat's faction in the National Convention.[21]

On 19 November, the port city of Le Havre-de-Grâce changed its name to Le Havre-de-Marat and then Le Havre-Marat.[22] 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.[23]

After the Thermidorian Reaction, Marat's memory became tarnished. 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 were destroyed. His final resting place is the cemetery of the church of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont.[24]

A bronze sculpture of Marat was removed from Parc des Buttes Chaumont and was melted down, during the Nazi occupation of Paris.[25]

His memory lived on in the Soviet Union. Marat became a common name and the Russian battleship Petropavlovsk (Russian: Петропавловск) was renamed Marat in 1921.[26] A street in the centre of Sevastopol was named after Marat (Russian: Улица Марата) on 3 January 1921, shortly after the Bolsheviks took over the city.[27]

Skin disease

Described during his time as a man "short in stature, deformed in person, and hideous in face,"[28] 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. There were various minerals and medicines that were present in his bath while he soaked to help ease the pain caused by the disease. The bandana that is seen wrapped around his head was soaked in vinegar to reduce the severity of his discomfort.[29] Jelinek's diagnosis is dermatitis herpetiformis.[15]

Tub

After Marat's death, his wife may have sold his bathtub to her journalist neighbour, as it was included in an inventory of his possessions. The royalist de Saint-Hilaire bought the tub, taking it to Sarzeau, Morbihan in Brittany. His daughter, Capriole de Saint-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, but 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.[30] The tub was in the shape of an old-fashioned high-buttoned shoe and had a copper lining.[31]

Works

Notes

  1. ↑ Isaac Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology - Second Revised Edition, 1982, p.334.
  2. ↑ Belfort Bax 2008, p.5.
  3. 1 2 de Cock, J. & Goetz, C., Œuvres de Jean-Paul Marat, 10 volumes, Éditions Pôle Nord, Brussels, 1995.
  4. ↑ Les Chaines de l’Esclavage, 1793 (ed. Goetz et de Cock) p4167 (6). Numbers in brackets refer to the original version.
  5. ↑ "Lit & Phil Home – Independent Library Newcastle". Litandphil.org.uk. Retrieved 9 January 2010.
  6. ↑ Conner, Clifford D. Jean Paul Marat: scientist and revolutionary, Humanities Press, New Jersey 1997 p.33
  7. 1 2 Conner, Clifford D. Jean Paul Marat: scientist and revolutionary, Humanities Press, New Jersey 1997 p.35
  8. ↑ Conner, Clifford D. Jean Paul Marat: scientist and revolutionary, Humanities Press, New Jersey 1997 p.71
  9. ↑ Conner, Clifford D. Jean Paul Marat: scientist and revolutionary, Humanities Press, New Jersey 1997 pp 77-79
  10. ↑ Conner, Clifford D. Jean Paul Marat: scientist and revolutionary, Humanities Press, New Jersey 1997 pp 89-95
  11. ↑ Conner, Clifford D. Jean Paul Marat: scientist and revolutionary, Humanities Press, New Jersey 1997 pp 105-106
  12. ↑ Conner, Clifford D. Jean Paul Marat: scientist and revolutionary, Humanities Press, New Jersey 1997 pp 94-95
  13. ↑ Conner, Clifford D. Jean Paul Marat: scientist and revolutionary, Humanities Press, New Jersey 1997 pp 132
  14. ↑ Gregory Fremont-Barnes (2007). Encyclopedia of the age of political revolutions and new ideologies, 1760–1815: vol 1. Greenwood. pp. 1:450.
  15. 1 2 Jelinek, J.E. (1979). "Jean-Paul Marat: The differential diagnosis of his skin disease". American Journal of Dermatopathology. 1 (3): 251–2. doi:10.1097/00000372-197900130-00010. PMID 396805.
  16. ↑ Belfort Bax 2008, p. 191.
  17. ↑ Andress, 2005, p. 189.
  18. ↑ Citizens, Simon Schama, Penguin 1989 p.742
  19. ↑ Citizens, Simon Schama, Penguin 1989 p. 744
  20. ↑ Andress, 2005, p. 191.
  21. ↑ At Home With The Marquis De Sade, Francine Du Plessix Gray, Random House,2013
  22. ↑ The French Revolution, David E. A. Coles, FriesenPress, 2014 p.134
  23. ↑ Three Deaths and Enlightenment Thought: Hume, Johnson, Marat; Stephen Miller, Bucknell University Press, 2001 p.125
  24. ↑ Encyclopedia of the Age of Political Revolutions and New Ideologies, 1760–1815, Gregory Fremont-Barnes Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007 p.451
  25. ↑ "Where the Statues of Paris were sent to Die". messynessychic.com. Retrieved 20 November 2016.
  26. ↑ McLaughlin, Stephen (2003). Russian & Soviet Battleships. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press p.321
  27. ↑ (Russian) Streets of Sevastopol – Marat Street
  28. ↑ Adolphus, John. Biographical Anecdotes of the Founders of the French Republic. London: R. Phillips, 1799. p 232.
  29. ↑ Stanley Loomis, Paris in the Terror; J.B. Lippincott Company, 1964), 42.
  30. ↑ Ransom, Teresa, Madame Tussaud: A Life and a Time, (2003) pp. 252–253.
  31. ↑ Stanley Loomis, Paris in the Terror (J.B. Lippincott Company, 1964), 42.

References

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