Jean Paul Marat
IT has always been the pride of the medical profession that its aim is to benefit mankind; but opinions may differ as to how far this aim was fulfilled by one of our most eminent confrères, Jean Paul Marat. He was born in Neufchatel of a marriage between a Sardinian man and a Swiss woman, and studied medicine at Bordeaux; thence, after a time at Paris, he went to London, and for some years practised there. In London he publishedA Philosophical Essay on Man, wherein he showed enormous knowledge of the English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish philosophers; and advanced the thesis that a knowledge of science was necessary for eminence as a philosopher. By this essay he fell foul of Voltaire, who answered him tartly that nobody objected to his opinions, but that at least he might learn to express them more politely, especially when dealing with men of greater brains than his own.
The French Revolution was threatening; the coming storm was already thundering, when, in 1788, Marat’s ill-balanced mind led him to abandon medicine and take to politics. Hereturned to Paris, beginning the newspaperL’Ami du Peuple, which he continued to edit till late in 1792. His policy was simple, and touched the great heart of the people. “Whatsoever things were pure, whatsoever things were of good repute, whatsoever things were honest”—so be it that they were not Jean Paul Marat’s, those things he vilified. He suspected everybody, and constantly cried, “Nous sommes trahis”—that battle-cry of Marat which remained the battle-cry of Paris from that day to 1914. By his violent attacks on every one he made Paris too hot to hold him, and once again retired to London. Later he returned to Paris, apparently at the request of men who desired to use his literary skill and violent doctrines; he had to hide in cellars and sewers, where it was said he contracted that loathsome skin disease which was henceforth to make his life intolerable, and to force him to spend much of his time in a hot-water bath, and would have shortly killed him only for the intervention of Charlotte Corday. In these haunts he was attended only by Simonne Everard, whose loyalty goes to show either that there was some good even in Marat, or that there is no man so frightful but that some woman may be found to love him. Finally, he was elected to the Convention, and took his seat. There he continuedhis violent attacks upon everybody, urging that the “gangrene” of the aristocracy and bourgeoisie should be amputated from the State. His ideas of political economy appear to have foreshadowed those of Karl Marx—that the proletariat should possess everything, and that nobody else should possess anything. Daily increasing numbers of heads should fall in the sacred names of Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality. At first a mere 600 would have satisfied him, but the number rapidly increased, first to 10,000, then to 260,000. To this number he appeared faithful, for he seldom exceeded it; his most glorious vision was only of killing 300,000 daily.
He devoted his energies to attacking those who appeared abler and better than himself, and the most prominent object of his hatred was the party of the Girondins. These were so called because most of them came from the Gironde, and they are best described as people who wished that France should be governed by a sane and moderate democracy, such as they wrongly imagined the Roman Republic to have been. They were gentle and clever visionaries, who dreamed dreams; they advised, but did not dare to perform; the most famous names which have survived are those of Brissot, Roland, and Barbaroux. Madame Roland, who has become oflegendary fame, was considered their “soul”; concerning her, shouts Carlyle: “Radiant with enthusiasm are those dark eyes, is that strong Minerva-face, looking dignity and earnest joy; joyfullest she where all are joyful. Reader, mark that queen-like burgher-woman; beautiful, Amazonian-graceful to the eye; more so to the mind. Unconscious of her worth (as all worth is), of her greatness, of her crystal-clearness, genuine, the creature of Sincerity and Nature, in an age of Artificiality, Pollution and Cant”—and so forth. But Carlyle was writing prose-poetry, sacrificing truth to effect, and it is unwise to take his poetical descriptions as accurate. Recent researches have shown that possibly Manon Roland was not so pure, honest, and well-intentioned as Carlyle thought—nor so “crystal-clear.” Summed up, the Girondins represented the middle classes, and the battle was now set between them and the “unwashed,” led by Robespierre, Danton, and Marat.
What manner of man, then, was this Marat, physically? Extraordinary! Semi-human from most accounts. Says Carlyle: “O Marat, thou remarkablest horse-leech, once in d’Artois’ stable, as thy bleared soul looks forth through thy bleared, dull-acrid, woe-stricken face, what seest thou in all this?” Again: “One most squalidestbleared mortal, redolent of soot and horse-drugs.” There appears to have been a certain amount of foundation for the lie that Marat had been nothing more than a horse-doctor, for once when he was brevet-surgeon to the bodyguard of the Compte d’Artois he had found that he could not make a living, and had been driven to dispense medicines for men and horses; his enemies afterwards said that he had never been anything more than a horse-leech. Let us not deprive our own profession of one of its ornaments. His admirer Panis said that while Marat was hiding in the cellars, “he remained for six weeks on one buttock in a dungeon”; immediately, therefore, he was likened to St. Simeon Stylites, who, outside Antioch, built himself a high column, repaired him to the top, and stood there bowing and glorifying God for thirty years, until he became covered with sores. Dr. Moore gives the best description of him. “Marat is a little man of a cadaverous complexion, and countenance exceedingly expressive of his disposition; to a painter of massacres Marat’s head would be invaluable. Such heads are rare in this country (England), yet they are sometimes to be met with in the Old Bailey.” Marat’s head was enormous; he was less than five feet high, with shrivelled limbs and yellowface; one eye was higher placed than the other, “so that he looked lop-sided.” As for his skin disease, modern writers seem to consider that we should nowadays call it “dermatitis herpetiformis,” though his political friends artlessly thought it was due to the humours generated by excessive patriotism in so small a body attacking his skin, and thus should be counted for a virtue. Carlyle hints that it was syphilis, thus following in the easy track of those who attribute to syphilis those things which they cannot understand. But syphilis, even if painful, would not have been relieved by sitting for hours daily in a hot bath.
Mentally he appears to have been a paranoiac, to quote a recent historical diagnosis by Dr. Charles W. Burr, of Philadelphia. Marat suffered for many years from delusions of persecution, which some people appear to take at their face value; theNew Age Encyclopediaspecially remarks on the amount of persecution that he endured—probably all delusional, unless we are to consider the natural efforts of people in self-defence to be persecution. He suffered from tremendous and persistent “ego-mania,” and appears to have believed that he had a greater intellect than Voltaire. Marat, whom the mass of mankind regarded with horror, fancied himself a popular physician, whom crowds wouldhave consulted but for the unreasonable and successful hatred of his enemies. Possibly failure at his profession, combined with the unspeakable irritation of his disease, may have embittered his mind, and for the last few months of his life there can be little doubt that Marat was insane.
It seems to be certain that he organized, if he did not originate, the frightful September massacres. There were many hundreds of Royalists in the prisons, who were becoming a nuisance. The Revolution was hanging fire, and well-meaning enthusiasts began to fear that the dull clod of a populace would not rise in its might to end the aristocracy; so it was decided to abolish these unfortunate prisoners. A tribunal was formed to sit in judgment; outside waited a great crowd of murderers hired for the occasion. The prisoners were led before the tribunal, and released into the street, where they were received by the murderers and were duly “released”—from this sorrowful world. The most famous victim was the good and gentle Princess de Lamballe, Superintendent of the Queen’s Household. The judge at her trial was the notorious Hébert, anarchist, atheist, and savage, afterwards executed by his friend Robespierre when he had served his turn. Madamecollapsed with terror, and fainted repeatedly during the mockery of a trial, but when Hébert said the usual ironical, “Let Madame be released,” she walked to the door. When she saw the murderers with their bloody swords she shrank back and shrieked, “Fi—horreur.” They cut her in pieces; but decency forbids that I should say what they did with all the pieces. Carlyle, who here speaks truth, has a dark saying about “obscene horrors with moustachiogrands-levres,” which is near enough for anatomists to understand. The murderers then stuck her head on a pike, and held her fair curls before the Queen’s window as an oriflamme in the name of Liberty. Madame was but one of 1,100 whose insane butchery must be laid to the door of Marat; though some friends of the Bolsheviks endeavour to acquit him we can only say that if it was not his work it looks uncommonly like it.
The battle between the Girondins, who were bad fellows, but less bad than their enemies of the “Mountain”—Robespierre, Danton, and Marat—continued; it was a case ofarcades ambo, which Bryon translates “blackguards both,” though Virgil, who wrote the line—in the Georgics—probably meant something much coarser. The “Mountain” began to get the upper hand, and the Girondins fled for theirlives, or went to the guillotine. The Revolution was already “devouring its children.”
At Caen in Normandy there lived a young woman, daughter of a decayed noble family which in happier days had been named d’Armont, now Corday. Her name was Marie Charlotte d’Armont, and she is known to history as Charlotte Corday. She had been well educated, had read Rousseau, Voltaire, and the encyclopædists, besides being fascinated by a dream of an imaginary State which she had been taught to call the Roman Republic, in which the “tyrannicide” Brutus loomed much larger and more glorious than in reality. Some Girondists fled to Caen to escape the vengeance of Marat; Charlotte, horrified, resolved that the monster should die; she herself was then nearly twenty-five years of age. I have a picture of her which seems to fit in very well with one’s preconceived ideas of her character. She was five feet one inch in height, with a well-proportioned figure, and she had a wonderful mass of chestnut hair; her eyes were large, grey, and set widely apart; the general expression of her face was thoughtful and earnest. Perhaps it would hardly be respectful to call her an “intense” young lady; but there was a young lady who sometimes used to consult me who might very well have sat for the portrait; shepossessed a type of somewhat—dare I say?—priggish neurosis which I imagine was not unlike the type of character that dwelt within Charlotte Corday—extreme conscientiousness and self-righteousness. Such a face might have been the face of a Christian martyr going to the lions—if any Christian martyrs were ever thrown to the lions, which some doubt. She went silently to Paris, attended only by an aged man-servant, and bought a long knife in the Palais Royal; thence she went to Marat’s house, and tried to procure admission. Simonne—the loyal Simonne—denied her, and she returned to her inn. Again she called at the house; Marat heard her pretty voice, and ordered Simonne to admit her. It was the evening of July 13, four years all but one day since the storming of the Bastille, and Marat sat in his slipper-bath, pens, ink, and paper before him, frightful head peering out of the opening, hot compresses concealing his hair. Charlotte told him that there were several Girondists hiding at Caen and plotting against the Revolution. “Their heads shall fall within a fortnight,” croaked Marat. Then, he being thus convicted out of his own mouth, she drew forth from her bosom her long knife, and plunged it into his chest between the first and second ribs, so that it pierced the aorta. Marat gave onecry, and died; Charlotte turned to face the two women who rushed in, but not yet was she to surrender, for she barricaded herself behind some furniture and other movables till the soldiers arrived. To them she gave herself up without trouble.
At her trial she made no denial, but proudly confessed, saying, “Yes, I killed him.” Fouquier-Tinville sneered at her: “You must be well practised at this sort of crime!” She only answered: “The monster!—he seems to think I am an assassin!” She thought herself rather the agent of God, sent by Him to rid the world of a loathsome disorder, as Brutus had rid Rome of Julius Cæsar.
In due course she was guillotined, and an extraordinary thing happened. A young German named Adam Lux had been present at the trial, standing behind the artist who was painting the very picture of which I have a reproduction—it is said that Charlotte showed no objection to being portrayed—and the young man had been fascinated by the martyresque air of her. He attended the execution, romance and grief weighing him down; then he ran home, and wrote a furious onslaught on the leaders of the Mountain who had executed her, saying that her death had “sanctified the guillotine,” and that it hadbecome “a sacred altar from which every taint had been removed by her innocent blood.” He published this broadcast, and was naturally at once arrested. The revolutionary tribunal sentenced him to death, and he scornfully refused to accept a pardon, saying that he wished to die on the same spot as Charlotte, so they let him have his wish. The incident reminds one of a picture-show, and it is not remarkable that an American, named Lyndsay Orr, has written a sentimental article about it.
The people of Paris went mad after Marat’s death; his body, which was said to be decaying with unusual rapidity, was surrounded by a great crowd which worshipped it blasphemously, saying, “O Sacred Heart of Marat!” This worship of Marat, which showed how deeply his teaching had bitten into the hearts of the people, culminated in the Reign of Terror, which began on September 5, 1795, whereby France lost, according to different estimates, between half a million and a million innocent people. Some superior persons seem to think that Marat had little or no influence on the Revolution, but to my mind there can be no doubt that the Terror was largely the result of his preaching of frantic violence, and it is a lesson that we ourselves should take to heart, seeing thatthere are persons in the world to-day who would emulate Marat if they possessed his enormous courage.
I need not narrate the history of the Reign of Terror, which was even worse than the terror which the Bolsheviks established in Russia. Not even Lenin and Trotsky devised anything so atrocious as thenoyades—wholesale drownings—in the Loire, or themariages républicainson the banks of that river, and it is difficult to believe that the teaching of Marat had nothing to do with that frightful outbreak of bestiality, lust, and murder.
The evil that men do lives after them. There was little good to be buried in Marat’s grave, doctor though he was.