Jean-Paul Marat

A week and a half ago, I took part in a celebration of Keith Michael Baker’s new book, Jean-Paul Marat: Prophet of Terror, graciously hosted at Harvard by Emma Rothschild and Malick Ghachem. For anyone interested in the French Revolution, it is an essential work, and monumental in just about every possible sense (930 pages long!—kudos to Darrin McMahon’s series at the University of Chicago Press for publishing it). It forms a deliberate counterpart to Baker’s first book, his classic biography of the mathematician and revolutionary Condorcet, published more than fifty years ago. Baker sees Condorcet as an emblematic modern: an optimistic believer in nearly infinite human progress who embraced political representation, commercial society, and global exchange. Marat, the radical journalist and politician, by contrast emerges in the new book as emblematically anti-modern: a deep pessimist who saw corruption and decay all around him, and deplored representation and commerce. True, both Condorcet and Marat actively participated in eighteenth-century science. But as Baker points out, Marat did so in a distinctly “ancient” style, always searching for physical essences (for instance, in fire) rather than trying to discover underlying principles. In my comments, I suggested that in one sense Baker’s diptych extends Benjamin Constant’s famous argument that the French Revolution went off the rails because the Jacobins rejected the “liberty of the moderns” in favor of a “liberty of the ancients” wholly unsuited to a changed world. No French Revolutionary was more of an “ancient” than Marat.

Between Condorcet and Marat, it’s no secret where Baker’s sympathies lie. The subtitle of hisbook—“Prophet of Terror”—is not subtle. In her fine comments, Emma Rothschild asked Baker how he could spend so many years with a man he detested. And Marat was, in fact, quite detestable. The revolutionary newspaper he published and wrote singlehandedly, L’ami du people, in one sense amounted to a single long, hateful, aggressive rant, full of lies, exaggerations, conspiracy theories, and incitements to violence. Baker opens the book with a quote from Parisian militants from November 1793, four months after a young woman named Charlotte Corday stabbed Marat to death: “Never forget the sublime words of the prophet Marat: Sacrifice two hundred thousand heads, he said, and you will save a million.”

But as the discussion about the book developed, it became clear why Marat exerted such a fascination over Baker. Despite his radicalism, and despite his status as one of the great left-wing martyrs, Marat was not really much of a revolutionary at all, at least not in the way we understand the idea. As Baker himself showed in previous work, the very word “revolutionary,” as both noun and adjective, was a neologism born in France soon after 1789. It could only come into being once the concept of “revolution” itself had changed. To quote from Marat: “‘Revolution’ had once meant a sudden and unexpected turn of events that had occurred in human affairs. Revolution experienced in this old sense as fact would now give birth to revolution in a new sense as a collective act. This profound shift, in turn, would spawn ‘revolutionaries’ struggling over a script for conscious political transformation.” In a brilliant new book, inspired in part by Baker’s essays on the subject, Dan Edelstein has further investigated this story. In it, he argues that the crucial shift from fact to act could only come about because of the development of a new vision of historical time in the Enlightenment, linked to a belief in potentially infinite human progress. Edelstein describes Voltaire as the key figure associated with the new vision and he quips that therefore the French Revolution really was Voltaire’s fault, la faute à Voltaire, just as the counterrevolutionaries used to claim. (See my review of Edelstein’s book here). But how does Marat fit into the story?

In a basic sense, he doesn’t. Marat was a classic “classical republican” who saw time as the great enemy, not as a source of hope. Like the Roman historians who wrote in mourning for their lost Republic, he saw little around him but corruption and decay, backsliding and treason. He had nothing but suspicion for elected representatives and constantly called for the people to exercise vigilance over them. But he didn’t have much respect for the people either, constantly accusing them of falling into somnolence and failing to guard their own rights and interests. He urged cutting off thousands of heads to save millions, but it was unclear what they would be saved for. To Marat, the future always looked bleak. Robespierre and Saint-Just believed (as did Condorcet) that the French Revolution would bring about a glorious future, indeed a glorious transformation of the human race. Marat had no such hope. Whatever occasional enthusiasm he had for what the Revolution had accomplished was always quickly swamped by floods of bile and despair.

But unlike Livy or Tacitus, he had no glorious past to look back on, either (except for their own, Roman one). He hated the monarchy, hated the King, hated the “old regime.” So there was nothing to restore, nothing to recover. There was corruption behind him, corruption around him, corruption ahead of him. At one point in 1791 it seemed to Marat, as Baker writes, that “all the conspiracies against freedom in the world were rolling into one. There would be civil war everywhere…. Marat appeared almost to welcome this universal cataclysm.” Perhaps out of this gigantic effusion of blood a cleansed, purified society might finally arise. Or perhaps the human race would simply drown in it, and good riddance. Marat sounds uncannily like the Futurists, in their bloody manifesto of 1909: “war is the only hygiene of the world . . . we want to glorify war, the only cure for the world.” He was less a revolutionary than an almost clinically pure nihilist.

But what does it say about the French Revolution that so many of its most eager participants—people who, like Robespierre and Saint-Just, believed in a bright, shining future—took Marat seriously, even worshipped him? After his death, the comparisons to Christ came fast and furious, most famously in David’s amazing painting of his death scene, a secular pietà. Crowds of sans-culottes marched through Paris carrying his heart, chanting “cor de Marat, cor de Jésus.” What does Marat’s story say about the future revolutions that also made a hero of him? The Soviets named ships after him, and, for a time, “Marat” became a popular Bolshevik first name.

As Malick Ghachem noted at the celebration, the subtitle of Baker’s book is not “Prophet of the Terror,” but “Prophet of Terror.” What the book so powerfully reveals are the dark, uncontrollable passions so often released in the heat of modern revolutionary events, in which unavoidable violence for the sake of building a better future collapses into violence for its own sake. The story of Jean-Paul Marat hardly invalidates the idea or promise of revolution, then or now. But it amounts to a giant note of caution. What would Marat have thought about Leon Trotsky massacring the rebellious sailors at Kronstadt? What would he have thought of Joseph Stalin presiding over the execution of some 650,000 people during his own Great Terror, and the deaths of untold millions more as a direct result of his policies? Most likely, Marat would have stood up and applauded.