Jean-Paul Marat (UK: , US: ; French: [ʒɑ̃pɔl maʁa]; born Mara; 24 May 1743 – 13 July 1793) was a French political theorist, physician, and scientist. A journalist and politician during the French Revolution, he was a vigorous defender of the sans-culottes, a radical voice, and published his views in pamphlets, placards and newspapers. His periodical L'Ami du peuple (The Friend of the People) made him an unofficial link with the radical Jacobin group that came to power after June 1793.
His journalism was known for its fierce tone and uncompromising stance toward the new leaders and institutions of the revolution. Responsibility for the September Massacres has been attributed to him, given his position of renown at the time, and a paper trail of decisions leading up to the massacres. Others posit that the collective mentality which made them possible resulted from circumstances and not from the will of any particular individual. Marat was assassinated by Charlotte Corday, a Girondin sympathizer, while taking a medicinal bath for his debilitating skin condition. Corday was executed four days later for his assassination, on 17 July 1793.
In death, Marat became an icon to the Montagnards faction of the Jacobins as well as the greater sans-culotte population, and a revolutionary martyr; according to contemporary accounts, some even mourned him with a kind of prayer: "O heart of Jesus! O sacred heart of Marat." The most famous painter in Paris, Jacques-Louis David, immortalized Marat in his iconic painting The Death of Marat. David and Marat were part of the Paris Commune leadership anchored in the Cordeliers section, from where the Revolution is said to have started in 1789 because those who stormed the Bastille lived there. Both David and Marat were on the Commune's Committee of General Security during the beginnings of what would become known as the Reign of Terror.
Jean-Paul Marat was born in Boudry, in the Prussian Principality of Neuchâtel (now a canton of Switzerland), on 24 May 1743. He was the first of five children born to Jean Mara (born Juan Salvador Mara; 1704–1783), a Sardinian from Cagliari, and Louise Cabrol (1724–1782), from Geneva. His father studied in Spain and Sardinia before becoming a Mercedarian friar in 1720, at age 16, but at some point left the order and converted to Calvinism, and in 1740 emigrated to the Protestant Republic of Geneva. His mother, who had Huguenot background from both sides of her family, was the daughter of French perruquier Louis Cabrol, originally from Castres, Languedoc, and Genevan citizen after 1723, and his wife Pauline-Catherine Molinier. Jean Mara and Louise Cabrol married on 19 March 1741 at the parish church of Le Petit-Saconnex, a district of Geneva. One of Marat's brothers, David Mara (born in 1756), was a professor at the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum in the Russian Empire, where he had Alexander Pushkin as his student.
Marat's family lived in moderate circumstances, as his father was well educated but unable to secure a stable profession. Marat credits his father for instilling in him a love of learning. He explains he felt "exceptionally fortunate to have had the advantage of receiving a very careful education in my paternal home." From his mother, he claims to have been taught a strong sense of morality and social conscience. Marat left home at the age of 16, desiring to seek an education in France. He was aware of the limited opportunities for those seen as outsiders as his highly educated father had been turned down for several college (secondary) teaching posts. In 1754 his family settled in Neuchâtel, capital of the Principality, where Marat's father began working as a tutor.
Marat received his early education in the city of Neuchâtel and there was a student of Jean-Élie Bertrand, who later founded the Société typographique de Neuchâtel. At 17 years of age he applied for the expedition of Jean-Baptiste Chappe d'Auteroche to Tobolsk to measure the transit of Venus, but was turned down. His first patronage was fulfilled with the wealthy Nairac family in Bordeaux, where he stayed for two years. He then moved to Paris and studied medicine without gaining any formal qualifications. After moving to France, Jean-Paul Mara francized his surname as "Marat".
He worked, informally, as a doctor after moving to London in 1765 due to a fear of being "drawn into dissipation". While there he befriended the Royal Academician artist Angelica Kauffman. His social circle included Italian artists and architects who met in coffee houses around Soho. Highly ambitious, but without patronage or qualifications, he set about inserting himself into the intellectual scene.
Political, philosophical, and medical writing
Around 1770, Marat moved to Newcastle upon Tyne. His first political work, Chains of Slavery (1774), inspired by the extra-parliamentary activities of the disenfranchised MP and later Mayor of London John Wilkes, was most probably compiled in the central library there. By Marat's own account, while composing it he lived on black coffee for three months and slept two hours a night, and after finishing it he slept soundly for 13 days in a row. 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." In the work, Marat criticized aspects of England's constitution that he believed to be corrupt or despotic. He condemned the King's power to influence Parliament through bribery and attacked limitations on voting rights. Chains of Slavery's political ideology takes clear inspiration from Jean-Jacques Rousseau by attributing the nation's sovereignty to the common people rather than a monarch. He also suggests that the people express sovereignty through representatives who cannot enact legislation without the approval of the people they represent. This work earned him honorary membership of the patriotic societies of Berwick-upon-Tweed, Carlisle and Newcastle. The Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society Library possesses a copy, and Tyne and Wear Archives Service holds three presented to the various Newcastle guilds.
Marat published "A Philosophical Essay on Man," in 1773 and "Chains of Slavery," in 1774. 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.
After a published essay on curing a friend of gleets (gonorrhoea) he secured medical referees for an MD from the University of St Andrews in June 1775.
He published Enquiry into the Nature, Cause, and Cure of a Singular Disease of the Eyes on his return to London. In 1776, Marat moved to Paris after stopping in Geneva to visit his family.
In Paris, 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 as physician to the bodyguard of the Comte d'Artois, Louis XVI's youngest brother. He began this position in June 1777. The position paid 2,000 livres a year plus allowances.
Marat set up a laboratory in the Marquise de l'Aubespine's house with funds obtained by serving as court doctor among the aristocracy. 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.
He published works on fire and heat, electricity, and light. He published a summary of his scientific views and discoveries in Découvertes de M. Marat sur le feu, l'électricité et la lumière (English: Mr Marat's Discoveries on Fire, Electricity and Light) in 1779. He published three more detailed and extensive works that expanded on each of his areas of research.
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 (English: Research into the Physics of Fire), which was published in 1780 with the approval of the official censors.