Looking at Jean-Paul Marat

Clifford D. Conner

Jean-Paul Marat:
Prophet of Terror
By Keith Michael Baker
University of Chicago Press, 2025, 930 pages, $50 hardback.

NOTE: You can find a longer version of this review here.

THE ADAGE “YOU can’t judge a book by its cover” makes a valid point, of course, but covers do often provide useful clues to a book’s contents. Until this book by Keith Michael Baker appeared in late 2025, there had been only two biographies of Jean-Paul Marat in the English language published in the previous 99 years.(1)

So now there are three, and it so happens that I have a couple of horses in this race: I am the author of the other two.(2) At the risk of proffering an odious comparison, I think comparing the three covers yields something of value here.

The first thing that hits the eye are the three images of Marat. One portrait displays a creepy, homuncular figure, while the others present, respectively, a swashbuckling, heroic image and a more realistic human countenance.(3)

I do not believe that those graphic choices were random or accidental — they represent assessments of Marat that go far deeper than his face. I didn’t choose the cover art for my books, and perhaps Professor Baker didn’t choose his, either, but presumably the publishers’ art departments were aware of the general contents of the respective biographies.

The words in the titles also offer clues as to how the books will portray their subject, and they were surely chosen by the biographers. In one, Marat’s essence is epitomized as a “Prophet of Terror,” while the others sum him up as “Scientist and Revolutionary” and a “Tribune of the French Revolution.”

The implications of those choices are starkly at odds. “Terror” has become arguably the most potently prejudicial word in the English language, especially since the U.S. “War on Terror” replaced the Cold War as the nominal rationalization for the militarization of American policy. (I almost wrote “foreign policy,” but the Trump administration is now explicitly aiming at garrisoning American cities in the name of “combatting terrorism.”)

In the current context, a “prophet of terror” does not sound like a person one would think well of. A “scientist and revolutionary,” on the other hand, could describe someone who made a worthwhile contribution to the annals of humankind, as could a “tribune of the French Revolution.” Depending, of course, on how one feels about the French Revolution.

Beneath the Covers

For less superficial aspects of Marat, we must look beneath the covers and examine how the respective bios portray him in political, ideological and moral terms.

Although my assessment of Professor Baker’s cover might anticipate a harsh critique of his treatment of Marat, I found to the contrary that his book is one that should definitely not be judged by its cover. It is in my estimation an invaluable contribution to the anglophone literature on the history of the French Revolution and a scrupulously honest account of by far its most controversial character.

I was not surprised. Since my graduate school days 40 years ago, I have admired Keith Michael Baker as a judicious scholar and historian. Baker’s specialty as a historian of ideas adds a great deal of value by situating Marat’s ideological writings in the context of the Late Enlightenment. And his earlier intellectual biography of Condorcet(4) provides a perfect basis of comparison with Marat, ideologically, politically, and axiologically.

Nonetheless, A Major Problem

My positive appreciation of Professor Baker’s biography, however, requires one essential qualification. It is a product of the Anglo-American academic historical establishment that perpetuates a Cold War bias that distorts almost all anglophone accounts of the French Revolution, and especially Marat’s role in it.

That bias, as I have already noted, is featured prominently on the cover of the book in the word “Terror.” If you were to give English-speaking readers a word-association test with the prompt “French Revolution,” I suspect that the most frequent response you would get is “terror.”(5)

That is an unthinking Pavlovian reflex, instilled by more than two centuries of academic contempt for the climactic radical phase of the French Revolution.

The vilification of the French Revolution as simply mayhem and arbitrary violence elicited this powerful remonstrance from a moral giant of American letters, Mark Twain:

“There were two ‘Reigns of Terror’ …. The one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the ‘horrors’ of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak …. A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror — that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”

Twain wrote that 135 years ago, and yet sadly, the all-pervasive distortion of history he addresses is no less in evidence today.(6)

Professor Baker’s long quotations illustrating Marat’s violent rhetoric are accurate and in no way unrepresentative of Marat’s oeuvre. But making that the central focus of an assessment of his historic importance not only produces a serious misconception of Marat, but also renders impossible an accurate understanding of the dynamics and consequences of the French Revolution as a whole.

Victor Hugo recognized Marat as a timeless icon of social revolution. “As long as there are misérables,” wrote the author of Les Misérables, “there will be a cloud on the horizon that can become a phantom and a phantom that can become Marat.”(7)

Fear of that powerful phantom, and of its reappearance, has made a dispassionate evaluation of the historic Marat all but impossible. It has led innumerable authors, consciously or subconsciously, to distort their portrayals of Marat.

In general, conservative and liberal historians alike have detested Marat; the conservatives because he was a threat to the status quo, and the liberals because of the extremism and calls to violence that permeated his agitational writings.

Marat’s Violent Polemics

Marat’s journalism was indeed characterized by an apparent bloodlust that discomfits me as much as it does Professor Baker. Furthermore, it also disturbed Marat’s contemporary allies.

Both Camille Desmoulins and Robespierre urged the People’s Friend to tone down his intemperate screeds, but he refused to do so. He insisted that the only way “the people” could defend themselves from wholesale slaughter by their enemies was for the people to eradicate those enemies first.

Marat despaired at what he perceived as the complacency of the people, who were behaving as if the Revolution had achieved its final victory, while he was convinced that it was in grave danger of being extinguished.

If the people were asleep, then he would just have to shout louder. He decided that in order to shock the comatose masses out of their stupor he would have to make a major adjustment in his agitational techniques. As early as the beginning of June 1790 he lamented to his readers:

“Soon you won’t open your eyes to anything but cries of alarm, of murder, of treason. How can I keep your attention? How can I keep you awake? There’s only one thing left for me to do; I’ll have to take your tastes into consideration and change my tone. Oh, Parisians! No matter how bizarre this will make me appear in the eyes of scholars, I won’t hesitate to do it — your old friend cares only for your safety. I have to keep you from falling into the abyss.”(8)

It is amusing that the prophet Marat foresaw the judgment of future historians who would cite his inflammatory rhetoric to depict him as a “madman.” He announced in advance that he was going to become more shrill, more frenetic, more hysterical, more “bizarre,” if that was what was necessary to rekindle the Parisians’ revolutionary spirit. And that is what he did.

To understand the social context of the French Revolution it is necessary to accept that Marat’s hyperaggressive rhetoric was precisely what made him by far the most popular and influential of its journalists.

The Parisian public in 1789–93 was not bloodthirsty; it was angry and fearful. Nor can its fears be dismissed as irrationally paranoiac — its enemies, external and internal, explicitly announced their intention to destroy Paris root and branch and massacre its inhabitants.(9)

Marat’s writings appear less extremist when the extreme circumstances in which he was operating are taken into account.

“It’s All Over for Us!”

Marat launched his new shock-tactics campaign on July 26, 1790, with a pamphlet headline screaming “It’s All Over for Us!”(10) It was destined to become the single most notorious example of Marat’s extremism and violence-baiting.

In it he claimed that a reliable source had just given him a document containing positive evidence of a counterrevolutionary plot to help Louis XVI flee Paris, join up with an émigré army at Metz, and launch a military assault on Paris. The pamphlet ended with a passage designed to startle his readers into sitting up and taking notice:

“Five or six hundred heads chopped off would assure you peace, liberty and happiness. A false humanitarianism has restrained your arms and has prevented you from striking such blows. That will cost the lives of millions of your brothers. Let your enemies triumph for an instant and torrents of blood will flow. They’ll cut your throats without mercy, they’ll slit the bellies of your wives, and in order to forever extinguish your love of liberty, their bloody hands will reach into your children’s entrails and rip their hearts out.”

As he had hoped, the explicit call to chop o? a few hundred heads had the e?ect of tossing a dynamite charge into the political discourse. And for more than two hundred years authors hostile to Marat have quoted these lines as evidence of his bloodthirstiness.

But Marat’s violent polemics, or the actual violence of the September Massacres(11) and the Reign of Terror, are only sidebars to the essential story of the historical significance of the French Revolution, and by extension, Marat’s.

What Would Marat Think?

If Marat were to return today, what would he think of the state of our planet in the third decade of the 21st century? He could read in the history books that the Great French Revolution — his Revolution — is recognized as crucial to the making of the modern world. “But what did it accomplish?” he might ask.

We answer: It rid France of a parasitic social class whose right to rule was based upon aristocratic birthright and traditional privilege.

“Is that all?”

It established legal and political equality, which then spread throughout much of Europe and the world.

“Legal and political equality? What about economic and social equality?”

No, the situation in that regard is even worse than you remember it. Today, despite two centuries of mind-boggling technological progress, a handful of multibillionaires control most of the Earth’s resources while billions of people remain mired in hunger, disease, oppression, and grinding poverty.

Marat would surely be shocked and dismayed to learn that after more than two hundred years his struggle for social revolution had lost none of its relevance and urgency. Where is the People’s Friend now, when we need him?

Notes

1. The last before the three recent ones was Louis R. Gottschalk’s Jean Paul Marat, a Study in Radicalism, published in 1927.
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2. The first (“Scientist and Revolutionary”), is a full biography covering Marat’s entire 50-year life, and the second (“Tribune of the French Revolution”) focuses only on the four years of his revolutionary career (July 14, 1789-July 13, 1793). The latter was published in French translation as Marat: Savant et tribun (Paris, La Fabrique, 2021).
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3. If you would like to know what Marat “really” looked like, your best bet is the third one, painted by Joseph Boze in 1793. Marat’s sister Albertine said that of all the many portraits of her brother, this one looked most like him. She would know.
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4. Keith Michael Baker, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (1974).
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5. I asked an AI chatbot (Anthropic’s “Claude”) what the most common responses to a word-association prompt “French Revolution” might be, and this was Claude’s response: “ ‘Terror’ or ‘reign of terror’ would likely be among the most common responses.”
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6. Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, first published in 1889. That these passages are from a work of fiction should not detract from the passion of Twain’s denunciation of a hypocritical falsification of history.
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7. Victor Hugo, Oeuvres complètes (Paris, 1910), vol. XV, 524.
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8. Le Junius Français no. 1, June 2, 1790.
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9. See Baker’s accounts of the Brunswick Manifesto (556) and Isnard’s threat that “Paris will be annihilated” (790).
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10. Les Pamphlets de Marat, C. Vellay, ed. (Paris, 1911), 201–9.
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11. On September 2, 1792, several hundred armed sans-culottes converged upon jails where counterrevolutionaries were being held and over the next four days killed more than a thousand inmates of nine prisons. After the Revolution, in the period known as the Thermidorian Reaction, blame for organizing and directing the September Massacres began to be retrospectively attributed to Marat. Few historians today give credence to that charge, but the myth of Marat’s responsibility lives on in popular accounts of the Revolution. Professor Baker writes (575): “Early historians of the massacres . . . charged him with direct responsibility for inciting the bloodshed. Later ones have noted that he was not alone in demanding the exercise of popular justice against the people’s enemies in the weeks following 10 August, and that no single voice can credibly be blamed for an upsurge of almost instinctual popular anger in a profound moment of crisis.”
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March-April 2026, ATC 241