Jean-Paul Marat | Biography, Death, Painting, & Facts

On September 21, 1794, Jean-Paul Marat's remains were transferred to the Panthéon in Paris, with the eulogy given by the Marquis de Sade. From the article:

"Jean-Paul Marat | Biography, Death, Painting, & Facts

Early scientific work
Marat, after obscure years in France and other European countries, became a well-known doctor in London in the 1770s and published a number of books on scientific and philosophical subjects. His Essay on the Human Soul (1771) had little success, but A Philosophical Essay on Man (1773) was translated into French and published in Amsterdam (1775–76). His early political works included The Chains of Slavery (1774), an attack on despotism addressed to British voters, in which he first expounded the notion of an “aristocratic,” or “court,” plot; it would become the principal theme of a number of his articles.

Top Questions
What is Jean-Paul Marat famous for?
Jean-Paul Marat was a prominent figure in the French Revolution. His polemics against the French monarchy and aristocracy were influential in the rise of the Jacobin Club, but his advocacy for the execution of counterrevolutionaries earned him many enemies.

What did Jean-Paul Marat do before the French Revolution?
Jean-Paul Marat was a renowned doctor in London until he returned to France in 1777. He served as a physician to various aristocrats while performing scientific experiments in his spare time. Although his paper on electricity received accolades from the Royal Academy of Rouen in 1783, he was never elected to the Academy of Sciences.

How was Jean-Paul Marat involved with the National Convention?
Jean-Paul Marat became a delegate to the National Convention in 1792 after scathingly denouncing the National Assembly for refusing to remove King Louis XVI. He became popular among Parisians for supporting tax reforms and new state-sponsored programs. The conservative Girondin faction despised Marat and arraigned him on political charges in 1793, but he was acquitted.

How did Jean-Paul Marat die?
On July 13, 1793, Jean-Paul Marat received a visit from the young Girondin activist Charlotte Corday. Corday claimed to have intelligence on Girondins in Caen and was admitted to his quarters, where Marat was taking a medicinal bath. There Corday drew a knife from beneath her clothes and stabbed him through the heart.

What is Jean-Paul Marat’s legacy?
Jean-Paul Marat’s assassination in 1793 quickly became a symbol of the French Revolution for Jacobin supporters, who had seized power from the Girondins just weeks before. The murder was immortalized through Jacques-Louis David’s painting The Death of Marat. Marat’s radical thought shaped the direction of the Jacobins during their brief but devastating Reign of Terror.

Returning to the Continent in 1777, Marat was appointed physician to the personal guards of the comte d’Artois (later Charles X), youngest brother of Louis XVI of France. At this time he seemed mainly interested in making a reputation for himself as a successful scientist. He wrote articles and experimented with fire, electricity, and light. His paper on electricity was honoured by the Royal Academy of Rouen in 1783. At the same time, he built up a practice among upper-middle-class and aristocratic patients. In 1783 he resigned from his medical post, probably intending to concentrate on his scientific career.

In 1780 he published his Plan de législation criminelle (“Plan for Criminal Legislation”), which showed that he had already assimilated the ideas of such critics of the ancien régime as Montesquieu and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and was corresponding with the American Revolutionary leader Benjamin Franklin. More serious, perhaps, was Marat’s failure to be elected to the Academy of Sciences. Some historians, notably the American Louis Gottschalk, have concluded that he came to suffer from a “martyr complex,” imagining himself persecuted by powerful enemies. Thinking that his work refuted the ideas of Sir Isaac Newton, he joined the opponents of the established social and scientific order.

In the first weeks of 1789—the year that saw the beginning of the French Revolution—Marat published his pamphlet Offrande à la patrie (“Offering to Our Country”), in which he indicated that he still believed that the monarchy was capable of solving France’s problems. In a supplement published a few months later, though, he remarked that the king was chiefly concerned with his own financial problems and that he neglected the needs of the people; at the same time, Marat attacked those who proposed the British system of government as a model for France.

Attacks on the aristocracy
Beginning in September 1789, as editor of the newspaper L’Ami du Peuple (“The Friend of the People”), Marat became an influential voice in favour of the most radical and democratic measures, particularly in October, when the royal family was forcibly brought from Versailles to Paris by a mob. He particularly advocated preventive measures against aristocrats, whom he claimed were plotting to destroy the Revolution. Early in 1790 he was forced to flee to England after publishing attacks on Jacques Necker, the king’s finance minister; three months later he was back, his fame now sufficient to give him some protection against reprisal. He did not relent but directed his criticism against such moderate Revolutionary leaders as the marquis de Lafayette, the comte de Mirabeau, and Jean-Sylvain Bailly, mayor of Paris (a member of the Academy of Sciences); he continued to warn against the émigrés, royalist exiles who were organizing counterrevolutionary activities and urging the other European monarchs to intervene in France and restore the full power of Louis XVI.


In July 1790 he declared to his readers:

Five or six hundred heads cut off would have assured your repose, freedom, and happiness. A false humanity has held your arms and suspended your blows; because of this millions of your brothers will lose their lives.

The National Assembly sentenced him to a month in prison, but he went into hiding and continued his campaign. When bloody riots broke out at Nancy in eastern France, he saw them as the first sign of the counterrevolution.

Activities in the National Convention
In 1790 and 1791 Marat gradually came to the view that the monarchy should be abolished; after Louis XVI’s attempt to flee in June 1791, he declared the king "unworthy to remount the throne" and violently denounced the National Assembly for refusing to depose the king. As a delegate to the National Convention (beginning in September 1792), he advocated such reforms as a graduated income tax, state-sponsored vocational training for workers, and shorter terms of military service. Though he had often advocated the execution of counterrevolutionaries, Marat seems to have had no direct connection with the wholesale massacres of suspects that occurred in the same month. He had opposed France’s declaration of war against antirevolutionary Austria in April, but, once the war had begun and the country was in danger of invasion, he advocated a temporary dictatorship to deal with the emergency.

Actively supported by the Parisian people both in the chamber and in street demonstrations, Marat quickly became one of the most prominent members of the Convention. Attacks by the conservative Girondin faction early in 1793 made him a symbol of the Montagnards, or radical faction, although the Montagnard leaders kept him out of any position of real influence. In April the Girondins had him arraigned before a Revolutionary tribunal. His acquittal of the political charges brought against him (April 24) was the climax of his career and the beginning of the fall of the Girondins from power.

Assassination
On July 13, Charlotte Corday, a young Girondin supporter from Normandy, was admitted to Marat’s room on the pretext that she wished to claim his protection, and she stabbed him to death in his bath (he took frequent medicinal baths to relieve a skin infection). Marat’s dramatic murder at the very moment of the Montagnards’ triumph over their opponents caused him to be considered a martyr to the people’s cause. His name was given to 21 French towns and later, as a gesture symbolizing the continuity between the French and Russian revolutions, to one of the first battleships in the Soviet navy.

The Death of Marat, by French artist and member of the Jacobin Club Jacques-Louis David, was painted just days after the murder. Called the “Pietà of the Revolution” (in reference to Michelangelo’s sculpture) and widely considered David’s masterpiece, the painting is frequently reproduced for its historical and artistic value."