Looking at Jean-Paul Marat

Clifford D. Conner

Keith Michael Baker,
Jean-Paul Marat:
Prophet of Terror
(U. of Chicago, 2025). 930 pages. $50.00.

A shorter and slightly older version of this review was published in March-April 2026 ATC.

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 ninety-nine 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 on the covers 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 symbolic driving force of 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 not be entirely judged by its cover. It is an invaluable contribution to the anglophone literature on the history of the French Revolution and an essentially honest account of by far its most controversial character. I was not surprised. Since my graduate school days forty years ago, I have admired Keith Michael Baker as a judicious scholar and historian.

“. . . an invaluable contribution to the anglophone literature on the history of the French Revolution and an essentially honest account of by far its most controversial character.”

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.

There Is, Nonetheless, a Major Problem . . .

There is, however, one major problem, but it is by no means unique to Professor Baker’s biography. It is a bias that afficts the entire Anglo-American historical Establishment and thereby distorts almost all anglophone accounts of the French Revolution — and especially Marat’s role in it. The source of that bias is Cold War anti-Marxism, which has persisted in attenuated form since the brutal McCarthyist purge of academia in the 1950s.

“. . . a bias . . . afflicts the entire Anglo-American historical Establishment and thereby distorts almost all anglophone accounts of the French Revolution — and especially Marat’s role in it. The source of that bias is Cold War anti-Marxism.”

Marxist scholarship tends to portray social revolutions as generally progressive historical events, whereas anti-Marxist scholarship depicts them as fearsome spates of unnecessary violence. That tendency, as I have already noted, is featured prominently on the cover of Professor Baker’s 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 denigration of the French Revolution as simply mayhem and arbitrary violence elicited this powerful remonstrance from one of the moral giants of American letters:

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.(6)

Twain wrote that a hundred and thirty-five years ago, and yet, sadly, the all-pervasive distortion of history it addresses is no less in evidence today.(7) It also happens to echo Marat’s journalistic prose:

I can only see the evils, the calamities, the disaster of a great nation in the clutches of tyrants — chained, pilloried, tortured, oppressed, and massacred for whole centuries.(8)

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 symbol 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.”(9) 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 to consciously or subconsciously 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 prose 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 eliminate 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.”(10)

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.(11) 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!”(12) 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 off a few hundred heads had the effect 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(13) 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.

A Brief Historiography of the French Revolution

The French Revolution divided France and eventually all of Europe with a line of blood. Jean Paul Marat, more than any other individual, has for more than two centuries remained the focus of the passionate emotions unleashed by that great social upheaval. Controversy over how to interpret the Revolution has endured to the present day.

The main axis of contention is the interpretation of an author who was not primarily a historian and never wrote a book specifically devoted to the French Revolution: Karl Marx. But the debate, ironically, centers on a proposition that did not originate with Marx: that the French Revolution was essentially a bourgeois revolution aimed at overturning a feudal society.

A number of authors who were eye-witnesses to the Revolution themselves described their experience in those terms. Marx’s contribution was to incorporate this view of the French Revolution into a comprehensive theory of history.

As Marx acknowledged, “It is not I who should receive the credit for having discovered either the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me, bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle.”(14) In particular, Augustin Thierry was identified by Marx as the “father of the class struggle” in French historiography.(15)

The first historian to arrive at a social interpretation of the French Revolution was Antoine Barnave, himself an active participant. In his Introduction to the French Revolution, written in 1792, he explained that during the 18th century, artisan production and commerce had “succeeded in penetrating the people and created a new means to wealth” to such a degree that “all was ready for a revolution in political laws; a new distribution of wealth produced a new distribution of power.”

Historians writing in the first half of the 19th century took Barnave’s basic insight, the bourgeois character of the Revolution, for granted. Why did this concept, so solidly grounded in pre-Marx scholarship, later become controversial?

The answer lies in the fact that historians are not immune to the influence of their own political environment and have often incorporated their own political sentiments into their interpretations of the Revolution. In the second half of the 20th century, debate over the French Revolution was fueled by Cold War anti-Marxism.

Revisionism vs. Orthodoxy

In the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War, a group of historians in England and the United States devoted themselves to challenging the Marxist viewpoint. They came to be known as the “Revisionist” school and their most prominent representative was the British historian Alfred Cobban. The Revisionists’ primary target was the Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution, which they attacked as an “outmoded orthodoxy.”

It may seem peculiar that in any field of study Marxism could have been viewed at that time as orthodox in Western Europe and North America. Leaving aside the false imputation of rigidity or dogmatism, it is true that Marxist and Marxist-influenced historians had long dominated the study of the French Revolution.

At the turn of the twentieth century the great French socialist leader Jean Jaurès published his four-volume Socialist History of the French Revolution. Jaurès looked to Marx for inspiration and produced the first serious treatment of the Revolution that focused on the actions of the masses rather than on the maneuvers of political leaders.

Jaurès was somewhat inconsistent in his historical materialism. In the introduction to the Socialist History he described his approach as both “materialist with Marx and mystical with Michelet.” In spite of the work’s weaknesses, however, Jaurès blazed a new trail for others to follow, and one who acknowledged Jaurès as his master was the most important of the modern historians of the Revolution, Georges Lefebvre.

Lefebvre’s first major contribution was to bring the great mass of the French population, the peasantry, into the historical picture. Lefebvre’s research demonstrated that the rural rebellion was indispensable to the success of the Revolution. It follows that the French Revolution cannot be understood without adding the forces of the peasantry into the equation.

Lefebvre did not stop with the peasantry, however, but went on to develop a comprehensive picture that took into consideration all of the social classes and their complex interactions in the course of the Revolution. His masterful weaving together of the disparate strands of social history is known as the “Lefebvre synthesis.” It became the standard account—the “orthodox version,” if you will—of the Revolution.(16)

Lefebvre held the chair of the History of the French Revolution at the Sorbonne, the institutional reflection of his stature as the leading interpreter of the great event. He was not a Marxist in all aspects of his thinking and activity, but he certainly acknowledged the centrality of Marxism to his work on the French Revolution.

Lefebvre died in 1960; in 1967 his chair at the Sorbonne was occupied by another of France’s most prominent Marxist historians, Albert Soboul, a long-time member of the French Communist Party.(17)

“Revisionists” Gain Influence

The virtually unchallenged dominance of the Lefebvre synthesis seemed to mock the Marxist axiom that bourgeois society is dominated by bourgeois ideology. For a Marxist interpretation to hold sway over an important academic discipline was an anomalous situation, especially in the extreme anticommunist political context of the 1950s. It is not surprising that many historians in the English-speaking world flocked to Cobban’s Revisionist banner when he raised it.(18)

Since then the Revisionists’ influence has been strong in British and American universities and they have even picked up a few adherents in France. The most prominent French Revisionist, the late François Furet, was explicit in his political antipathies; he complained of “Leninist-Populist Holy Writ” and identified Soboul’s “Short History of the French Revolution” as “undoubtedly the best example.”

Most subsequent books on the French Revolution published in the United States have reflected the Revisionists’ anti-Marxist bias. Their attack on the Marxist view has consisted of a set of unconnected partial criticisms. For that reason, they have been unable to offer an alternative synthesis of their own to supplant the Lefebvre synthesis.

Anyone who seeks to understand the meaning of the French Revolution, then, will not find what they are looking for in the works of the Revisionists. It is my contention that the only comprehensive picture of the Revolution in all its complexity remains the classic interpretation provided by Georges Lefebvre and his successors.

Revisionist history downplays the Revolution’s significance as a cause of social change and denies that its most radical phase from September 1793 through July 1794 contributed anything of value to future generations. Insofar as that is true, Marat’s role in the Revolution was likewise of little consequence. The traditional view, held by Marxists and most non-Marxists alike, holds that the French Revolution was a watershed event in world history. It is my contention that Marat’s contribution to it was indispensable.

’89ers versus ’93ers

The aforementioned French historian François Furet correctly pointed out that participants in and interpreters of the French Revolution can be divided into two groups: ’89ers and ’93ers. The ’89ers are the revolutionaries of 1789 and those who identify with them. Like Furet himself, they believe the Revolution would have been just fine if it had been more moderate; if its participants had been satisfied with what had been achieved in 1789 and stopped with that.

The ’93ers, on the other hand, are the radical Jacobins and their latter-day counterparts who believe that consolidating the Revolution’s achievements could not have been accomplished without turning the world upside down in 1793.

Among the most prominent of the ’89ers were Mirabeau, Necker, Lafayette, Bailly, and Lavoisier. Then there were also a number who began as radicals, but whose radicalism cooled as the Revolution heated up; the most prominent were Condorcet and Brissot. And finally, the ’93ers were those who began as radical revolutionaries and continued to be so to the end: Robespierre, Danton, Desmoulins, Hébert, and of course, Marat. The trajectories of the ’89ers and ’93ers began to diverge early on, less than three weeks after Bastille Day, on August 4, 1789.

The Night of August 4

It was on that date that a most peculiar session of the newborn National Assembly look place. Aristocrats stood up, one after the other, to voluntarily renounce their privileges.

This was not a case of belated generosity or guilty consciences as might be supposed if the remarkable session were viewed in isolation from its social context. For one thing, the nobles were renouncing rights and privileges that had already come under sharp attack by the peasants’ revolt. They were in a sense putting the best face possible on a fait accompli.

More importantly, the aristocrats were hoping by their action to win compensation for the privileges they were “giving up” and, indeed, the National Assembly backed their requests.

The peasants would be expected to pay for their emancipation. Feudal dues were to be legally done away with, but only in exchange for large cash payments. Since hardly any peasants were able to pay such amounts, they were faced with being perpetually in debt to their former landlords. Instead of feudal dues, they would now forever be making payments on their “loans.”

In other words, the moderate revolutionaries of 1789 ended feudalism as a legal system, but on the condition that the peasants compensate the nobles by paying a heavy price for their emancipation. Such an arrangement would have replaced the bonds of feudal law with debt bondage; the peasants would have remained tied to the land for a long, long time, as in Russia following the 1861 emancipation of the serfs.

The peasants, understandably, were not at all satisfied with this deal. Their struggle continued (often in open rebellion to the point of civil war) from 1789 until their complete victory in 1793, when the Jacobin Convention declared the peasants’ redemptive debts null and void.

The 1793 decree canceling all of the peasants’ obligations without compensation was the decisive act of the bourgeois revolution. It put an end to the feudal mode of production once and for all, and by freeing the peasantry from its attachment to the land transformed it into a potential proletariat.

“Good for Business”

These, in summary, were the primary accomplishments of the bourgeois revolution in France: the peasants were liberated from feudal exactions, the guilds and internal tariffs were swept away, a nationwide market was created, and “careers were opened to talent.”(19) Furthermore, the extensive landholdings of the Church were expropriated, and the very definition of “property” was profoundly transformed.

All of these measures pointed toward a relatively free-market economic environment conducive to the development of capitalism: one that was good for business.

The principal long-term beneficiaries of the Revolution were the business class: entrepreneurs, manufacturers, merchants, and bankers. The new society was geared to serving their class interests rather than those of the landed aristocracy.

This is not to say, of course, that a full-blown capitalist economy immediately sprang into existence in France. The elimination of internal tariff barriers, for example, created the possibility of a unified national market, but the actual development of the national market would have to wait almost a century until railroads were able to connect all parts of France.

Likewise, the loosening of the traditional ties holding the peasants on the land provided a potential source of urban industrial workers, but the actual conversion of peasants into proletarians was a lengthy process. But regardless of the pace of capitalist growth after the Revolution, the Revolution was the indispensable action that cleared the way for capitalist development.

A Contradictory Democratic Legacy

Although the socioeconomic transformation was the essential achievement of the Revolution, it was certainly not its only important legacy. Most commentators, in fact, have concentrated more on the Revolution’s democratic features as symbolized by the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.”

The old regime had been founded on the principle of natural inequality; that some people were by birth superior to others and thereby entitled to special privileges. The Revolution produced a social order based on the opposite premise of human equality. From this premise were derived the rights to equality before the law, representative government, and guarantees of civil liberties.

The importance of the democratic legacy of the French Revolution to the cause of human progress is undeniable. But those who focus solely on the democratic achievements are seeing only the surface of events and missing the underlying dynamic. The Napoleonic experience bears this out.

The export of the French Revolution to the rest of Western Europe began before Bonaparte came on the scene. Sister republics were created in Holland, Switzerland, Northern Italy, Naples, and the Papal States by means of revolutionary action led by local “Jacobins” with the crucial support of French arms. Thus was the social transformation of Western Europe initiated, later to be extended and consolidated by the Napoleonic wars.

Bonaparte, however, was anything but a democrat. He did away with the republics and converted them into kingdoms ruled by his brothers, other relatives, and assorted sidekicks. At home he scrapped the French Republic, crowned himself Emperor, and even created a new titled nobility. By naming his brother Jerome as King of Westphalia, his brother Louis as King of Holland, and his brother Joseph as King of Naples (and later Spain), he intended to create a new royal dynasty to rule Europe long into the future. Although his plans were not realized in the way he’d hoped, the social order had indeed been permanently revolutionized.

Bonaparte imposed a unified body of law, the Napoleonic Code, on the conquered territories, based on the principle of equality before the law (i.e., the negation of legal aristocratic privilege). The essence of the Napoleonic Code was the principle of bourgeois property rights, which supplanted the old-regime system based on birthright and the feudal system of production.

In 1807 Napoleon sent a constitution for Jerome to impose on the newly created Kingdom of Westphalia. The main point, he wrote to Jerome, was “that every trace of serfdom, or of a feudal hierarchy between the sovereign and the lowest class of his subjects, shall be done away.”(20)

Bonaparte’s armies, in short, reproduced throughout Western Europe that new social order that was good for business. Again, they did not create fully developed capitalist economies, but they did liberate peasants and cleared away obstacles to the future development of capitalism.

The Prophet Marat

So what was Jean-Paul Marat’s role in this world-historical transformation? It is my contention that he was not simply an icon of radicalism or a notorious demagogue, but an indispensable leader, second in importance only to Robespierre, of the radicals whose actions in 1793 and 1794 consolidated the gains of the French Revolution.

Without the decisive measures accomplished by Robespierre, Marat, and their Jacobin comrades, the subsequent history of the world could have unfolded in dramatically different ways.

A significant aspect of Marat’s leadership was manifested in his widespread reputation as a prophet. At every juncture from the insurrection of July 14, 1789, until his assassination four years later, he analyzed the current political situation and predicted what lay ahead. He thereby exemplified an essential attribute of political leadership: knowing what to do next.

In August 1790, Camille Desmoulins reported on a shocking injustice known as the Nancy Massacre and identified it as the “horrible awakening” Marat had foreseen. “Oh People’s Friend! Oh Cassandra Marat!” Desmoulins exclaimed. “How right you were when you warned that it was all over for us!”(21) He later added: “When I consider how many of the things [Marat] predicted have come to pass, I am inclined to buy his almanacs.”(22)

Other noteworthy predictions that burnished Marat’s renown for political prophecy were:

• The King’s attempted escape from Paris—“La Nuit de Varennes,” June 20–21, 1791.

• Mirabeau’s corruption—Marat had frequently accused the ’89er revolutionary leader of being on the King’s payroll. Indisputable evidence of the truth of that charge was discovered after Mirabeau’s death.

• That the French revolutionary armies would improve with time, but that the whole process would be “long and disastrous”—The wars would continue, off and on, for more than twenty years, until Bonaparte’s final defeat at Waterloo.

• Lafayette’s betrayal—Marat had long predicted that General Lafayette would defect to the enemy. On August 19–20, 1792, after failing to rally the troops under his command to march on Paris, Lafayette deserted his post and fled to Austria.

• Dumouriez’s betrayal—In late November 1792, Marat audaciously predicted that the renowned General Dumouriez, who had recently defeated the Prussians in a major battle, “will defect before the end of next March.”(23) He was only off by two days; on April 2, 1793, Dumouriez did indeed go over to the Austrians.

• And finally, one of Marat’s most frequent predictions was of his own martyrdom, which came to pass when he was assassinated by a Girondin agent on July 13, 1793.

How Did He Do It?

Marat had no crystal ball, no supernatural powers. His “secret” was, above all, a deep understanding of the class dynamics of French society. That gave him the ability to accurately assess the political situation and the political actors of the moment and forecast their subsequent trajectories. Rival journalists allowed themselves to be misled by naive hopes and wishful thinking that Mirabeau, or Lafayette, or even Louis XVI might “do the right thing,” but Marat was immune to such illusions.

Marat’s apparent clairvoyance was also greatly facilitated by his journal’s loyal sources: an underground network of informants, which undoubtedly included sympathetic eyes and ears within the palace walls, police headquarters, and army barracks.

Marat as a Revolutionary Strategist

As a political strategist and tactician, Marat proved himself to be the equal of any of history’s most effective revolutionary leaders. He consistently and accurately identified the central issues of the moment, as well as the main line of the Revolution’s development, and tirelessly hammered them into his readers’ consciousness. His early recognition of the reactionary essence of the Girondins’ appeal for an international military crusade is a prime example.

Marat’s most significant strategic move was the “new course” he embarked upon following the insurrection of August 10, 1792, which aimed at constructing a political alliance of Jacobins (in the Convention faction known as the Mountain) and sans-culottes. That coalition was essential to the process of consolidating the Revolution’s gains, and no one was more important in bringing it into being than Marat.

Marat’s tactical acumen — his sense of what to do next at every moment during the upheavals of a revolutionary situation — was repeatedly demonstrated by his uncanny ability to provoke the authorities while evading arrest. That he was able to stay a step ahead of the police of successive regimes for several years means that his success cannot be attributed to good luck. And when the time came that he no longer had to evade the authorities, his tactical prowess remained evident in his ability to continuously force the Convention onto the grounds of his agenda.

Marat’s tactical masterpiece was the conversion of his own trial in April 1793 into a decisive triumph over his Girondin prosecutors. His decision to evade arrest until a formal indictment had been brought against him was a critical one. Had he allowed himself to be imprisoned on the initial vague decree of accusation, the Girondins could have stalled and left him to rot in jail. If they had succeeded in that, they could well have regained the political momentum they needed to block the consolidation of the Jacobin Republic.

The most spectacular example of Marat’s tactical genius, however, was his intervention in the events that resulted in the insurrection of May 31–June 2. At the beginning of April he had warned the overzealous sans-culottes against prematurely rising in revolt. At the end of May, when he felt the time had come, he embarked upon a whirlwind of agitational activity — at the Hôtel de Ville, at the Convention, and in the streets — injecting an element of clarity into an otherwise confused mass movement.

The balance sheet of Marat’s political leadership, however, has one significant entry on the deficit side. He did not organize his followers into a political party. Both Robespierre and Brissot, by contrast, had created solid, loyal, organized followings they could count on to follow their lead in crucial situations.

Marat showed that he recognized the need for cadre political formations, but he did not create any himself. Although hailed as “father of the fraternal societies,” it was strictly an honorific title; none actually looked to him directly for leadership. The difference between Marat and Robespierre in this regard is best exemplified by the fact that Marat might well not have been elected to the Convention at all had Robespierre not instructed the Jacobins under his influence to vote for the People’s Friend.

Marat’s failure to create a party owed to his conviction that being at the head of a party would compromise his political independence. When the Girondins accused the Mountain of being controlled by a “Maratiste party,” Marat angrily avowed that no such party had ever existed. His only “party,” he declared, was “the people.” By the time he decided to subordinate himself to the Mountain, however, he may well have come to regret the lack of a Maratiste party, but it was too late — the parties of the Revolution had already been formed.

That Marat’s role in the Revolution was not as central as Robespierre’s is evidenced by the fact that the Revolution continued to deepen in the wake of Marat’s assassination, while Robespierre’s defeat and execution resulted in its definitive reversal.

In Conclusion: What Would Marat Think About Our World Today?

If Marat were to return today, what would he think of the state of our planet in the third decade of the twenty-first 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 fifty-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 (1889).
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7. 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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8. Ami du Peuple no. 35, Nov. 11, 1789.
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9. Victor Hugo, Oeuvres complètes (Paris, 1910), vol. XV, 524.
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10. Le Junius Français no. 1, June 2, 1790.
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11. See Baker’s accounts of the Brunswick Manifesto (p. 556) and Isnard’s threat that “Paris will be annihilated” (p. 790).
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12. Les Pamphlets de Marat, C. Vellay, ed. (Paris, 1911), pp. 201–9.
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13. 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 (p. 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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14. Marx correspondence: Letter to Joseph Weydemeyer in New York, March 5, 1852.
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15. Marx correspondence: Letter to Friedrich Engels in Manchester, July 27, 1854.
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16. Some of Lefebvre’s works that are readily available in English are The Coming of the French Revolution, The French Revolution (in two volumes), The Great Fear of 1789, and Napoleon (Vol. I: 1799–1807; Vol. II: 1807–1815).
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17. Despite Soboul’s scholarly work on the French Revolution having been in the best Marxist tradition, Soboul was a staunch Stalinist in his day-to-day politics. As such, he bitterly opposed the revolutionary upsurge in France in May–June 1968 and supported his party’s betrayal of the general strike.
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18. Cobban first articulated the Revisionist theme in 1955. His major work is The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution, published in 1964.
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19. “Opening careers to talent” meant that the top positions in political administration, academia, journalism, medicine, the clergy, and the military were no longer monopolized by the sons of the nobility.
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20. Letter from Napoleon to his brother Jerome, King of Westphalia, November 15, 1807.
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21. C. Desmoulins, Révolutions de France et de Brabant, no. 41.
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22. C. Desmoulins, Révolutions de France et de Brabant, no. 47.
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23. Journal de la République Française, no. 60, November 29, 1792.
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