The Friend of the People: Marat


"If I am extreme I am not extreme in the way you are
Against Nature's silence I use action
In the vast indifference I invent a meaning
I don't watch unmoved I intervene"
--Marat, Peter Weiss' Marat/Sade

Marat was the greatest martyr of the Revolutionary left. For a year, he was worshipped as a saint. Today, he is usually remembered with a feeling of revulsion and horror. But this superficial reading does little for the complex character of the man once worshipped as "The Friend of the People." A strange and driven man, who began life obsessed with human healing and ended his life obsessed with gathering 500,000 heads, a man who had once worked as an expensive doctor for the priveleged and then devoted his life to a people he called "too gentle." This Marat of strange paradoxes is the one far too often dismissed as merely a blood-ravening madman in history books.

Jean-Paul Marat (1743-1793)

Jean-Paul Marat was not the most pleasant person one could hope to meet. Even his extreme stench resulting from scrofula that he had contracted in the sewers aside, his paranoia did not render him a very popular man which is possibly the reason why, despite his influence, he had no personal following as did Robespierre , Danton and even Hebert. Marat was a obsessive workaholic. He said that he had no time to sleep and that twenty-four hours a day he was on guard for the people's welfare. He was violent, when not verbally so than he appeared it and he usually carried pistols. He called the Parisian mob "gentle" and was continually asking them why they did not take measures against the aristocracy. Marat, somewhat like Robespierre, believed that when he failed to achieve something it was inevitably due to a conspiracy of men determined to undermine the virtuous. He, like Robespierre, suffered from a martyr complex (although, unlike Robespierre, he actually got to be one. It was said that Robespierre was jealous of the manner in which Marat died) He was, let's face it, one taco short of the full enchilada. Nevertheless, he was not a man that his colleagues could easily ignore for not even Danton or Robespierre aroused the love and respect of the people as did the rather mentally disturbed editor of the Ami du Peuple. He also compelled admiration from various subsequent thinkers, among them Peter Weiss, who in Marat/Sade makes Jacques Roux give the following elegy for Marat:


Woe to the man who is different
who tries to break down all the barriers
Woe to the man
who tries to stretch the imagination of man
He shall be mocked he shall be scourged by the blinkered guardians of morality
You wanted enlightenment and warmth and so you studied light and heat
[unrest in background]
You wondered how forces can be controlled so you studied electricity
You wanted to know what man is for so you asked yourself
What is this soul this dump for hollow ideals and mangled morals
You decided that the soul is in the brain
[The PATIENTS form into a group and advance.]
and that it can learn to think
For to you the soul is a practical thing a tool for ruling and mastering life
And you came one day to the Revolution because you saw the most important vision
That our circumstances must be changed fundamentally
and without these changes everything we try to do must fail

His Story

Jean-Paul Marat was born in Boudry Switzerland on May 24th 1743, the child of an obscure Sardinian family. He got a degree in medicine at St. Andrew's College which has a reputation of being something of a degree mill and traveled around Europe for many years, working as a doctor and a scientist in several European cities. He finally established a permanent practice in London in the 1770s where he worked for the aristocracy and upper middle-class (supposedly charging rather exorbitant fees) and interesting himself in scientific experiments involving light, electricity and fire. He also wrote several philosophical essays including Essay on the Human Soul, A Philosophical Essay on Man and The Chains of Slavery. In 1777, he became the official medical doctor to the Comte d'Artois, brother of Louis XVI. It was said that he had an affair with Theroigne de Mericourt at this time, and that is why he saved her from attack by a hostile mob in 1793, but such an incidence is highly unlikely. Marat's pent-up rage against authority, whom he didn't believe gave him the respect that his intellect demanded because they were in a conspiracy against him, was fueled by the suppression of his "Plan for Criminal Legislation" and his failure to be elected to the Academy of Sciences. By the eve of the Revolution, 1788, he was penniless and believed his entire life to be a failure due to the evil conspiracies of others. He wrote an last will and testament the year the Revolution broke out.

The Revolution changed things for Marat just as for his other colleagues. In September of 1789 he began publication of the immensely popular L'Ami du Peuple which was very radical for the time in that it catered to normal citizens but would be soon be surpassed in vulgarity and violence by Hebert's Pere Duchesne. In 1790, Marat was forced to flee to England after publishing articles against Necker. And in 1791, after Paris was declared under martial law after the Champs de Mars Massacre, he went into the sewers, hiding from Lafayette and the National Guard. There he contrasting a devastating skin disease which has been called scrofula and skin cancer among other things, none of which seem to work. It was a terrible disorder though which caused itching, rashes, a terrible stench and immense pain. This made Marat's normal sunny character no more pleasant. He took to wearing white turbans around his head and doing much of his work in a mineral bath. He was tended by his common-law wife Simone Evrard whom he had married in a Rousseau-esque ceremony before the Supreme Being in 1790. He is most famous for inspiring the brutal September Massacres in 1792. After being arrested and then acquitted by the Girondin Party in 1793, he helped lead the attack on the Gironde and their overthrow in June 1 of that year. On July 13th, Charlotte Corday, an obsessed young Girondin from the provinces, came to his bath under the pretense of giving him a list of traitors from her native Caen. There, she stabbed him. He instantly became a martyr of the Revolution, being referred to as "the Blessed Martyr Marat" and, ironically enough, Corday's assassination of the man she feared would bring about a dictatorship in fact led to that very thing....for Corday's murder of Marat provoked the Montagnards to jail and execute the remaining Girondins at the beginning of the Reign of Terror.

Fictional Representations

Films


Napoleon(1927)
The re-staging of David's famous Pieta-like bathtub picture The Death of Marat is absolutely brilliant. When Marat spits coffee into the bath tub, the audience is not thinking of coffee at all and rather sympathizes with Charlotte. In the "Three Gods" scene, which imitates the a scene in Hugo's 1793 Marat is arguing rather viciously with Danton and when everyone bursts into La Marseilles declares to Robespierre "They're braying like donkeys out there."
Marie Antoinette(1927)
Marat appears briefly so he can act smug and bloodthirsty like a good Jacobin should when pronouncing a death sentence on the King.
Marat/Sade
Not surprisingly, this is the most in depth study of Marat on film....it is the only one that pays heed to the full extent of Marat's radical ideas (although Weiss's play does go a little too far in making Marat a communist....Roux, who also appears in Marat/Sade, was much more of a communist than Marat). It is also the only film that pays tribute to Marat's idealism that fueled his bloodthirstiness. In other words, it gives a much more well-rounded and stunningly intellectual portrayal of Marat, the man who sanctions State Terrorism, than any of the other fictional representations.
La Revolution Francaise(1989)
Marat does not assume nearly as much importance as Danton and Robespierre, but yet there remain certain touches that let you know that his influence was extraordinarily vast and that he was by far the most extreme of the three.

Plays


Marat/Sade by Peter Weiss
See comments on the film.

Novels


A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel Mantel stated in the preface to this novel that she would consider writing a novel later on from the point of view of Marat. I hope she does...that would be fascinating, and Hilary Mantel, with her deft understanding of characterization, could pull something like that off to. With A Place of Greater Safety itself, Marat is seen as a fanatical and yet realistic man absolutely dedicated to what he sees as in the people's best interest. He also, because of Camille's perverse love of violence we suppose, befriends him.
The Gods Are Thirsty by Tanith Lee
Marat is, surprise, surprise, a singularly disagreeable character ("Draw a heart: Marat hates everyone, everyone hates Marat") with a stinging toungue and a bitter prophetic bloodthirsty realism.
City of Darkness, City of Light by Marge Piercy
We don't see much of Marat but what we do see is a man dedicated to serving the people in the way he feels is best...of course nobody likes him for it but still....
1793 by Victor Hugo
Marat seems to enjoy unnerving Danton and Robespierre by saying things such as "You, Robespierre, will kill Danton and that will lead to your own death." He keeps trying to talk them in to a nice little dual dictatorship with himself watching the two of them. He seems to be the wisest, telling them that he has "lived forever" (to which Danton replies, "like Cain") and informs them that the true enemy is not in the Vendee or Europe but at all around them....which helps Robespierre's paranoia immensely as one can imagine.