Oliver Cussen: Doctor of the Incurable

Oliver Cussen

Jean-Paul Marat did not have many friends in politics. Most of the members of the revolutionary assemblies were lawyers, and Marat had a habit of writing the kind of thing that makes a lawyer nervous. Throughout the summer of 1790 the readers of his daily pamphlet, L’Ami du peuple, were urged ‘to lop off six hundred heads’ to save ‘five or six million citizens’. A year later the number of necessary victims had grown to ‘two or three hundred thousand’. He defended the September Massacres of 1792, when gangs of sans-culottes stormed the prisons of Paris and slaughtered 1400 inmates, as acts of popular justice. A week after the massacres began he was elected to be a representative of Paris in the National Convention of the new republic. Colleagues who hoped that political office might temper his rhetoric were quickly disillusioned. When Girondin deputies tried to oust him he put a pistol to his head and threatened to ‘blow my brains out at the foot of this tribune’. He tried to pass a law that would punish misdemeanours with mutilation (one ear for embezzlement, both thumbs for military infractions). Other deputies called him an ‘evil genie’ and an ‘atrabiliar madman’, and did their best to stop him from speaking at the podium. Radicals like Danton and Desmoulins kept their distance. Even Robespierre thought Marat’s enthusiasm for blood and lynching was a bit much.

The contempt and distrust of his peers stemmed at least in part from his popularity beyond the relatively circumscribed world of revolutionary politics. The public galleries that lined the riding school which housed the convention erupted in cheers whenever ‘the people’s friend’ did get the chance to speak. Marat boasted that a crowd of more than two hundred thousand greeted his release from the Palais de Justice in April 1793, after being acquitted of inciting murder. Another observer guessed that it was more like seven or eight hundred ‘looters and brigands’. Either way, he was carried back to the convention amid cries of ‘Long live the republic!’ and ‘Long live Marat!’ Three months later he was dead, stabbed in his bathtub. But assassination only strengthened the cult of Marat. In his funeral procession, hastily arranged by Jacques-Louis David, Marat’s bathtub was carried through Paris by members of the Society of Revolutionary Women, and his corpse (bathed in aromatics to disguise the stench) was shouldered by a dozen men. Weeks later his heart was placed in an urn looted from the Tuileries Palace and displayed in the Cordeliers Club, a Jacobin stronghold. Mourners would soon be able to buy commemorative miniatures, plates, obelisks and rings. Towns and villages renamed themselves after him. Women had their hair cut ‘à la Marat’. David’s painting of his death, unveiled on the same day Marie-Antoinette went to the guillotine, immortalised the people’s friend as a martyr for the republic and the revolution.

Marat was born in Boudry, a small town in the principality of Neuchâtel, in 1743. His father was a defrocked priest from Sardinia who had fled to Geneva, converted to Calvinism and married into a family of Huguenot wig-makers. According to his own recollection, as a child Marat studied diligently, avoided ‘all the misdemeanours of youth’ and was quick to protest against injustice. A caning by a teacher when he was eleven prompted him to go on a hunger strike for two days and then throw himself out of his bedroom window. Otherwise, his guiding passion was a ‘love of glory’ that only became more intense as he matured, as if through some inverse sentimental education. ‘At five I wanted to be a schoolmaster,’ he recalled, ‘at fifteen a professor; at eighteen an author; at twenty a creative genius.’ To realise this ambition he left Switzerland at seventeen and moved first to Montpellier and then to Bordeaux, two provincial centres of the Enlightenment, before ending up in London at the end of the 1760s.

During this period of intellectual development Marat wrote two essays, on the soul and on man, that showed a misanthropic worldview (society is rooted in self-preservation and violence, ‘pity is a forged sentiment’) and a readiness to mock the ignorance of scientific authorities while passing off familiar arguments as his own. The essays earned him notoriety, if not glory; Diderot and Voltaire wrote damning, exasperated reviews. But his time in London was politically formative. Marat arrived during the controversy around the censorship, arrest and expulsion from Parliament of John Wilkes. The twin spectacles of political corruption and popular dissent during the Wilkes affair inspired Marat to embark on a frenzied study of the English commonwealth tradition, resulting in the publication in 1774 of The Chains of Slavery: A Work wherein the Clandestine and Villainous Attempts of Princes to Ruin Liberty Are Pointed Out, and the Dreadful Scenes of Despotism Disclosed. Once again, the argument was derivative, amounting to a rehearsal of conventional themes of early modern republican thought: liberty was undermined by standing armies and growing public debts, and money corroded civic virtue. And once again, it was a critical flop – a failure Marat attributed to ‘trickery’ on the part of ‘the cabinet of Saint James’. Nevertheless, in The Chains of Slavery he first articulated what was to become the defining conviction of his revolutionary life: that parliaments, not kings, posed the greatest threat to democracy. The people were never more oppressed, he argued, than when they alienated their sovereignty to easily corrupted representatives.

It was also in London that Marat learned how to make money – not through writing, but through medicine. Having gained a degree in absentia from the University of St Andrews and set up practice in what is now Romilly Street in Soho, he ventured into the unregulated bazaar of the bourgeois wellness industry. To attract business he placed essays in respected periodicals advertising the ingenuity of his treatments: medicated tapers in the urethra for venereal sores; electrotherapy to the eyes for far-sightedness. In 1776 he moved to Paris, where he secured powerful clients at court (including the comte d’Artois, the king’s youngest brother and the future Charles X) and in the wealthy Faubourg Saint-Germain. He called himself ‘doctor of the incurable’.

But Marat soon tired of commercial medicine. In the 1780s he renewed his pursuit of glory, this time through an assault on Newtonian science, which, he claimed, obscured reality behind mathematical abstraction. In contrast, his own experiments with Leyden jars and solar microscopes rendered visible the hidden forces of fire, light and electricity, disclosing the inner workings of nature to anyone curious enough to look, regardless of their credentials. He submitted his findings to the Academy of Sciences in Paris, whose members were staunch Newtonians. Almost a year passed before they rejected it in a review of two short paragraphs. Marat suspected the influence (or hidden force) of an academic cabal determined to protect Newton’s legacy. Undeterred, he appealed instead to the judgment of ‘an enlightened and impartial public’. He convinced friends to write favourable reviews of his work and to get provincial academies to finance (and rig) essay contests on the themes of his research. The campaign generated enough attention to earn him an interview for the directorship of a new Academy of Sciences in Madrid. Marat was convinced the job was his to lose. He began learning Spanish and designing a coat of arms to reflect his new status. But the functionaries of the Spanish embassy regarded him as a ‘notorious charlatan’. By the end of the 1780s he was still in Paris, ‘poor and living miserably’, according to his then friend Jacques-Pierre Brissot, and suffering gravely from a skin condition that would afflict him until his death.

Marat’s frustrated ambition might help to explain his later radicalism. Other revolutionaries drew on similar memories of being marginalised and humiliated by the institutions of the High Enlightenment. Brissot too had wanted to be a great philosophe, but during the 1780s he was in and out of prison for debt and libel before taking a gig as a police spy. Jean-Marie Collot d’Herbois and Jacques-Nicolas Billaud-Varenne, who would both become members of the Committee of Public Safety, were frustrated playwrights, as was the journalist Jacques-René Hébert. Camille Desmoulins was a lapsed lawyer who had to beg his father to send him money for food and lodging. Saint-Just managed to publish a two-volume mock epic at the age of 22, but wrote most of it in prison. It was from the ‘visceral hatred’ of the ‘lean and hungry men of Grub Street’, Robert Darnton argued in 1971, ‘not from the refined abstractions of a contented cultural elite, that the extreme Jacobin revolution found its authentic voice’. Their hatred was directed not at the king and the nobility, but at the cultural elite of the old regime: the lawyers and intellectuals who had once blocked their access to salons and academies, and who had gone on to lead the first phases of the revolution.

In his new biography, Keith Baker provides a different account of the origins of Marat’s ideas. Grub Street writers were fuelled by ressentiment and the desire for recognition, sentiments that, as Axel Honneth has argued, became more prevalent in the gradual and fraught transition from a feudal order to a modern class society. For Baker, though, Marat did not need to be radicalised by failure. He was less a product of modernity than someone entirely out of place in it: ‘His call for terror was as reactionary as it was revolutionary.’ Borrowing from the Platonic theory of the soul, Baker describes him as a ‘thymotic personality’ whose need for recognition was a function of his innate character. In his ideas, too, Marat was ‘an Ancient longing for immediacy in an increasingly abstract, complex and extended modern world’. His scientific and political writings before the revolution were characterised by a hatred of representation, whether in Newtonian formulas or parliamentary assemblies. He wanted power to be visible, embodied, experienced directly.

In the 1980s, Baker was one of the chief proponents of the revisionist turn in scholarship on the French Revolution, which emphasised intellectual discourse and political culture at the expense of social and economic interpretations. He has long argued that the central contradiction of the revolution, which drove it to violence, consisted in its dual commitment to sovereignty, as embodied – in the people, in the Paris crowd, in charismatic figureheads – and as represented in successive national assemblies. The revolutionaries were at once committed to realising a Rousseauian general will that could not be alienated and had to be continually reasserted, and to fashioning a representative government that could administer a modern commercial society while leaving its subjects to get on with their private affairs. Ultimately, they chose the former. As Baker wrote in Inventing the French Revolution (1990), it was a choice of unity over difference, will over reason, virtue over commerce, and absolute sovereignty over limited government. Now, through Marat, Baker is attempting to make sense of the way those decisions played out on the ground – how in rejecting modernity the revolution opted for terror.

A rejuvenated Marat pounced on the problem of representative government in the summer of 1789, when the Estates General that had been convened by the king and his ministers to solve a fiscal crisis was transformed from within by representatives of the Third Estate (along with a handful of renegade nobles and clerics) into a National Assembly representing the unitary, sovereign people. A week or so later Louis XVI ordered the remaining members of the privileged orders to join them. In Marat’s view, this contaminated the new assembly, whose activities he treated with intense suspicion. On 4 August the deputies voted to abolish the ‘feudal regime’, which Marat saw (not unreasonably) as an attempt to protect their own châteaux and privileges from growing peasant unrest. He was quick to point out their prevarication and backsliding the following week, when various rents, tithes and seigneurial courts were allowed to endure until the creation of new institutions. Across a series of short-lived periodicals he vowed to serve as ‘the people’s eye’, scrupulously monitoring the proceedings of what he insisted on calling the ‘Estates General’, since it was merely a tool of the corrupt elite of a persistent old regime. He soon settled on the title L’Ami du peuple, and embarked on a frenzied period of writing that yielded 22 single-authored eight-page issues in September alone. Day after day he encouraged his readers to ‘purge’ the placemen and ‘minor academics’ of the Assembly, by violence if necessary. By early October the authorities had read enough. An order for his arrest was issued, and the journal was shut down. But Marat couldn’t be silenced: around seven hundred issues of his journal appeared, many in clandestine fashion, before he entered the National Convention in September 1792.

Most of the early issues of L’Ami du peuple consisted of commentaries on the proceedings of the National Assembly. Over time these daily reports added up to a disenchanted interpretation of the revolution as a series of accidents and illusions. Each apparent triumph of popular mobilisation, such as the storming of the Bastille, had in fact been the product of circumstance and good fortune. Each legislative gain had been co-opted by the nobility and the clergy, by magistrates and financiers, by the king himself. The people were just too stupid to realise they were being taken for a ride. And so Marat swapped dense political analysis for a style that practically shouted at his readers; he vowed to keep them ‘constantly alert’, to prevent them from ‘falling back into the abyss’. He would later attribute his influence over the revolution to this stylistic choice, ‘from the audacity with which I crushed every destructive prejudice, from the outpouring of my soul, the fervour of my heart … my painful tones, my cries of indignation, fury and despair’.

Marat addressed his audience with the authenticity and immediacy he wanted to see in politics. He published (often fabricated) correspondence from both fawning and critical readers and then replied to it, scolding the writers’ naivety and cowardice. By making his journal ‘more interactive, more dynamic, more personal’, he fashioned an intimacy that allowed him to speak for the people. Despite casting Marat as an ‘Ancient’, Baker also calls him ‘the first modern populist’ (perhaps the point is that all modern populists are nostalgic reactionaries), whose appeal lay in his forthright language, his comfort with violence, his paranoid worldview, and his insistence that conspiracy lurked behind the obfuscating complexities of both monarchical and parliamentary politics.

From very early on in this nearly thousand-page biography Baker seems exasperated by his subject, and you can understand why. Marat was constantly promoting himself, or feeling victimised, or glibly advocating mass murder. He fell out with most of his friends – spectacularly so with Brissot, who had become leader of the Girondins, and whom Marat denounced as ‘a hideous hypocrite, a base conspirator, and the vilest of villains’. But he also alienated ideological allies like the sans-culotte Jacques Roux, whose patience ran out after hosting him for a week (‘I slept on the floor for six days, I did all the cooking, I even emptied your chamber pot’) only to receive a parting gift of fifteen livres in worthless assignats. He is tough company for the reader too, and you wonder why Baker chose to spend so much time with someone he seems to find both personally and politically distasteful. At various points he explores a comparison between Marat and the marquis de Condorcet, the ‘more amiable’ subject of his first and very different book, published in 1975. The contrast between the two revolutionaries could not be starker: Baker has come to view them ‘as representing opposite poles within 18th-century responses to the shaping of the modern world’. Marat saw humanity in terms of self-interest, history in terms of corruption, and politics in terms of violence, deception and will. Condorcet, a fixture of the salons and academies of the high Enlightenment, believed in sympathy, progress and elections. ‘Condorcet was the apostle of modern liberal society,’ Baker writes in his conclusion, whereas Marat was ‘the classical republican martyr, the prophet of terror’.

It is tempting to trace in the fifty years between the publication of Baker’s book on Condorcet and this study of Marat the rise and fall of a fundamentally liberal interpretation of the French Revolution. Beginning in the 1960s, historians on both sides of the Atlantic rejected an older ‘Jacobino-Marxist vulgate’ which saw 1789 as the origin of a revolutionary project that endured until 1917 and beyond. (In England this effort was spearheaded by Alfred Cobban, Baker’s PhD adviser; in France by François Furet, his future colleague at Chicago.) For theoretical inspiration they turned to the likes of Condorcet and the Abbé Sieyès, who tried to carve out democratic constitutions that put checks on both centralised power and the tyranny of popular will, or to Benjamin Constant, who blamed the Terror on a mistaken attempt to recover ancient virtue in a modern society, where liberty no longer meant ‘active participation in the collective exercise of power’ but instead the ‘peaceful enjoyment of individual independence’. Around the bicentenary of the revolution, at the height of the new revisionist consensus, Baker could confidently assert that ‘the modern distinction between state and society – and the liberal insistence on their separation – appears historically as the essential response’ to the violent excesses of the revolution. That he has now turned his attention to a ‘dangerous revolutionary maniac’ like Marat, who wanted the people constantly to exercise its sovereignty (through the press or through protest and purge) and the state to murder its enemies, suggests an anxiety that the lessons of the 18th century are once again being forgotten.

The liberal insistence on the separation of state and society wasn’t just about keeping some areas of private life free from political control. It was also about hoarding power, as Marat was quick to understand. That’s why he was so ready to denounce the equivocal abolition of feudal privileges in 1789, and why he was such a vocal opponent of the distinction, conceived by Sieyès and written into the constitution of 1791, between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ citizens, which restricted voting rights to men who paid a certain amount of tax. Repeated attempts to limit the freedom of the press, as well as the Le Chapelier law of 1791, which banned strikes and workers’ guilds, also drew his ire. His campaigns consistently sought to expose the way the new regime was trying to demobilise the people who had destroyed the old one – the peasants who rebelled in the countryside, the Parisian workers who stormed the Bastille, the women who marched on Versailles. The fact that he was motivated not by subaltern solidarity but by contempt for the elite didn’t necessarily make his arguments disingenuous, or any less compelling for his readers. And his paranoia made him especially sensitive to the way counter-revolution so often emerged from within the revolution itself, rather than the Ancien Régime or the forces of reaction. His enmity towards Mirabeau, a leading figure in the National Assembly who was interred at the Panthéon after his death in 1791, was vindicated the following year with the discovery of correspondence that proved Mirabeau had secretly been in Louis’s XVI’s pocket. And Marat’s fear that a war (vigorously promoted by the Girondins) would only strengthen the army’s aristocratic generals, whom he regarded as potential traitors, was later justified by the defections of Lafayette and Dumouriez. Beyond the violence and immediacy of his language, perhaps Marat was popular for a more straightforward reason: he gave his readers a plausible and often far-sighted account of what they were up against.

In the spring of 1793 he was at the height of his power. The convention, bowing to pressure from the Girondins, had voted to indict him for advocating murder and dictatorship. Defending himself before the revolutionary tribunal, Marat invoked a remarkable constitutional provision which stipulated that deputies could not be held accountable ‘for what they have said, written or done in the exercise of their functions as representatives’ – a brazen defence given his hatred of representatives and constitutions. The argument worked: a jury of ten unanimously found him not guilty of all charges, to great applause from a crowd of sans-culottes that had packed the Palais de Justice. Celebration turned to vengeance, when a coalition of Montagnards (the radicals who sat on ‘the mountain’, on the highest benches of the convention), members of the Parisian Jacobin clubs and assorted sans-culottes set about purging the deputies who had failed to purge Marat. On 2 June thirty leading Girondins were placed under house arrest and a crowd of citizens invaded the convention. The people were now in charge. ‘An experiment in representative democracy had come disastrously to an end.’

The next day Marat suspended his functions as a representative and retired to his sickbed, where he was assassinated five weeks later. He made few public appearances in that time, reverting instead to his favoured occupation of writing screeds. Despite his success in ridding the convention of his enemies, he remained convinced that the revolution had been a failure. The task facing the French people in 1789 had been ‘to reverse all their political institutions and establish a new order of things’. But four years later the ‘thugs’, ‘flunkeys’, ‘priests’ and ‘courtiers’ of the old order remained secretly in charge, in an awkward alliance with the chief functionaries of the new regime: ‘the capitalists, the financiers, the speculators, the large landowners’. As a definition of true revolution – the total reversal of all political life – this was hopelessly utopian. As an insight into the society that would emerge in the 19th century – a marriage of convenience between an adaptable Ancien Régime and a conciliatory, no longer revolutionary bourgeoisie – it was admirably prescient. But Marat didn’t live to see his worst fears confirmed. On 13 July 1793 he was stabbed in his medicinal bath by Charlotte Corday, a Girondin sympathiser from Caen who had travelled to Paris in order to kill him and, anticipating her execution, to become the last sacrificial victim of a ‘tottering Mountain’. If she succeeded in the first ambition but not the second it was because, according to Baker, Marat’s work was already complete. He had destroyed the mediating, constraining institutions of representative democracy and cleared a path for the Terror.

It takes Baker 812 pages to get to Marat’s death; just fourteen more are dedicated to his afterlife in revolutionary politics and imagery. In a sense, by the time Corday enters the narrative Baker’s iconoclastic work is complete. His aim is to expose the people’s friend for what he was, a ‘prophet of terror’, not the martyr of liberty he became in death. Where Baker wants to dismantle the myth of Marat, Thomas Crow wants to indulge in it, through a close reading of David’s Marat at His Last Breath. Speaking in the convention on 14 July, the day after the assassination, David, a Jacobin deputy and ‘pageant master of the revolution’, promised to commemorate his friend. He worked on his task during the summer and autumn, at the height of the nationwide cult that compared Marat to Jesus and treated his body parts and belongings like holy relics. Throughout this period the fledgling Jacobin government was waging a civil war with Catholic peasants in the Vendée. Its coalition with the sans-culottes remained uneasy. The memory of Marat, the secular saint of a still disenchanted republic, could lend the Jacobins popular legitimacy; it was something the masses could rally around. David’s reimagining of his death was part of his government’s effort to contain the insurrectionary populace that had delivered it to power. And by the time the painting was unveiled in October, that effort had largely succeeded. Roux and other prominent sans-culottes had been arrested, their assemblies curtailed, their newspapers shut down. One doubts that Marat would have approved. But in the meantime David had transformed him, somewhat ironically, into the aesthetic representation of an illusory general will.

Crow does not seem too concerned about whether the tenuous relationship between the Jacobin government and the people Marat had come to represent might have informed David’s painting – whether what looks like commemoration might in fact have been a form of co-option, or propaganda. He’s more interested in the way David managed to transform a figure as divisive as Marat into a totem of republican unity. He did this in large part by drawing on existing, primarily Christian, myths. The prominence of the stab wound on Marat’s chest, the wooden writing stand that resembles the base of a cross, the relics surrounding the dying figure (bathtub, quill, assignats, blade), the correspondence between the dying Marat and the grieving Mary of the Pietà (1790) by David’s pupil Anne-Louis Girodet: all these details attest to the ‘beatific transformation’ of the people’s friend. The near absence of blood suppressed Marat’s associations with violence, the September Massacres, his reputation as a buveur de sang. And whereas in life his appearance had prompted revulsion (one colleague likened him to a ‘hideous insect’), David gave his face an androgynous beauty that evoked the otherwise absent Corday, who during her trial had become the object of sexualised affection and contempt. Almost every social conflict of 1793 was sublated into the unlikely figure of Marat.

For Crow, the dying Marat is not just a secular Christ, or one of Baker’s outmoded Ancients, but a thoroughly modern figure. He draws on Sartre to explain the relationship between the clutter and corporeality of the painting’s lower half, the inert and alienated region of ‘l’être-en-soi’, and the void of its upper half, the potentially transcendent realm of ‘l’être-pour-soi’ – ‘a future yet to be formed but there to be shaped’. Throughout the book he appeals to Lévi-Strauss and Barthes, reading the painting as a repository of mythic structures that have resurfaced throughout modernity to lend meaning to struggles for equality and emancipation. Daumier composed a mirror image of David’s Marat in Rue Transnonain, le 15 avril 1834 to honour the rebellious workers massacred by the soldiers of the July Monarchy. In 1933 the German poet Gertrud Kolmar wrote a paean to Marat to protest against Hitler’s rise to power. Decades later the success of Peter Weiss’s play Marat/Sade, adapted for film by Peter Brook, ensured that the myth ramified through the 1960s counterculture, with references in the music of Judy Collins and Love. As a student in suburban Los Angeles at the time, Crow first saw David’s image on a poster for a concert by the Bay Area band Moby Grape. He then left to study in Paris during the spring of 1968, where from his window in the Latin Quarter he watched the student protests that ‘seemed to make vivid and actual all the famous street rebellions stretching back to 1789’.

You could think of Crow and Baker as representing opposite poles in the response of historians of the French Revolution to the 1960s. Crow has retained the intellectual and political attachments he made in that decade; he believes that the myths of the revolution continue to animate political struggle, and that their promises might still be fulfilled. Baker has arrived at the opposite conclusion: the revolution revealed the inherently violent logic of a politics grounded in the general will, for which liberal representative democracy was the only solution. From the perspective of a different historiographical generation (one informed, admittedly, by its own version of Grub Street ressentiment) it’s hard not to feel some envy of these scholars and their shared conviction that the French Revolution has a coherent meaning in the present – that we can look to it as modernity’s origin story, whether romance or tragedy, and organise our politics accordingly. Those of us who came of age not in 1968 but in 2008 tend to be wary of both the radical promise of utopia and the liberal insistence that there are no alternatives. The historical imagination of the contemporary moment is much more indeterminate, which makes it harder to be convinced by depictions of Marat as either a hero or a villain, a revolutionary martyr or a prophet of terror. But considerations of his life and legacy still yield some lessons. Populists thrive when representation fails, and when the powerful are not held to account. Turning politicians into icons will result in disappointment. And the people should always keep one eye on the liberal counter-revolution.

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