Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/555

Rh as ever, and in June 1789 he published a supplement to his Offrande, followed in July by La Constitution, in which he embodies his idea of a constitution for France, and in September by hrs Tableau des Vices de la Constitution d Angleterre, which he presented to the assembly. The latter alone deserves remark. The assembly was at this time full of Anglomaniacs, who desired to establish in France a constitution exactly similar to that of England. Marat, who had lived in England, had seen that England was at this time being ruled by an oligarchy using the forms of liberty, which, while pretending to represent the country, was really being gradually mastered by the royal power. His heart was now all in politics ; and, feeling that his energies needed a larger scope than occasional tracts afforded, he decided to start a paper. At first appeared a single number of the Moniteur patriote, followed on September 12 by the first number of the Publiciste parisien, which on September 16 took the title of L Ami du Peuple, and was to absorb his future life. The life of Marat now becomes part of the history of the French Revolution. From the beginning to the end he stood alone. He was never attached to any party ; the tone of his mind was to suspect whoever was in power ; and therefore no historian has tried to defend him, and all state the facts about him with a strong colouring. About his paper, the incarnation of himself, the first thing to be said is that the man always meant what he said; no poverty, no misery or persecution, could keep him quiet ; he was perpetually crying &quot; nous sommes trahis.&quot; Further, the suspicious tone of his mind extended to his paper, and he made it play the part of the lion s mouth at Venice : whoever suspected any one had only to denounce him to the Ami du Peuple, and the denounced was never let alone till he was proved innocent or guilty. He began by attacking the most powerful bodies in Paris, the corps municipal, with Bailly at their head, and the court of the Chatelet, and after a struggle found them too strong for him, and fled to London (January 1790). There he wrote his Denonciation contre Necker, and in May dared to return to Paris and continue the Ami du Peuple. He was embittered by persecution, and continued his vehement attacks against all in power against Bailly, against La Fayette, and at last, after the day of the Champs du Mars, against the king himself. All this time he was hiding in cellars and se*,vers, where he was attacked by a horrible skin disease, tended only by the woman Simonne Evrard, who remained true to him. The end of the constituent assembly he heard of with joy, and with bright hopes (soon dashed by the behaviour of the legislative) for the future, when almost despairing in December 1791 he fled once more to London, where he wrote his cole du Citoyen. In April 1792, summoned again by the Cordeliers, he returned to Paris, and published No. 627 of the Ami. The war was now the question, and Marat saw clearly enough that it was not sought for the sake of France, that it was to serve the purposes of the royalists and the Girondins, who thought of themselves alone. The early days of the war being unsuccessful, the proclamation of the duke of Brunswick excited all hearts ; who could go to save France on the frontiers and leave Paris in the hands of his enemies ? Marat, like Danton, foresaw the massacres of September. After the events of August 10th he took his seat at the commune, and demanded a tribunal to try the royalists in prison. No tribunal was formed, and the massacres in the prisons were the inevitable result. In the elections to the convention, Marat was elected seventh out of the twenty-four deputies for Paris, and for the first time took his seat in an assembly of the nation. At the declaration of the republic, he closed his Amidu Peuple, and commenced a new paper, the Journal de la Republique Franqaise, which was to contain his sentiments as its predecessor had done, and to be always on the watch. In the assembly Marat had no party ; he would always suspect and oppose the power ful, refuse power for himself. After the battle of Valmy, Dumouriez was the greatest man in France ; he could almost have restored the monarchy, yet Marat did not fear to go uninvited to the tragedian Talma s, and there accuse Dumouriez in the presence of his friends of want of patriotism. His unpopularity in the assembly was extreme, yet he insisted on speaking on the question of the king s trial, declared it unfair to accuse Louis for anything anterior to his acceptance of the constitution, and, though implacable towards the king, as theons man who must die for the people s good, he would not allow Malesherbes, the king s counsel, to be attacked in his paper, and speaks of him as a &quot;sage et respectable vieillard.&quot; The king dead, the months from January to May were spent in an unre lenting struggle between Marat and the Girondins. Marat despised the ruling party because they had suffered nothing for the republic, because they talked too much of their feelings and their antique virtue, because they had&quot; for their own purposes plunged the country into war; while the Girondins hated Marat as representative of that rough red republicanism which would not yield itself to a Roman republic, with themselves for tribunes, orators, and generals. The Girondins conquered at first in the convention, and ordered that Marat should be tried before the Tribunal Revolutionnaire. But their victory ruined them, for Marat was acquitted on April 24, and returned to the con vention with the people at his back. Their fall was a veritable victory for Marat. But it was his last. The skin disease he had contracted in the subterranean haunts was rapidly closing his life ; he could only ease his pain by sitting in a warm bath, where he wrote his journal, and accused the Girondins, who were trying to raise France against Paris. Sitting thus on the 13th July he heard in the evening a young woman begging to be admitted to see him, saying that she brought news from Caen, where the escaped Girondins were trying to rouse Normandy. He ordered her to be admitted, asked her the names of the deputies then at Caen, and, after writing their names, said, &quot;They shall be soon guillotined,&quot; when the young girl, whose name was Charlotte Corday, stabbed him to the heart. Grand was the funeral given to the man who had suffered so much for the republic. Whatever his political ideas, two things shine clearly out of the mass of pre judice which has shrouded the name of Marat that he was a man of great attainments and acknowledged posi tion, who sacrificed fortune, health, life itself, to his con victions, and that he was no bete feroce, no factious dema gogue, but a man, and a humane man too, who could not keep his head cool in stirring times, who was rendered sus picious by constant persecution, and who has been regarded as a personification of murder, because he published every thought in his mind, while others only vented their anger and displayed their suspicions in spoken words. The only works of Marat not mentioned in the text are Les aventures du Comic, Potoivski, a poor novel, which must have been written in his early days, and which was discovered in MS. and published by Bibliophile Jacob ; two brochures on a balloon acci dent, 1785 ; Lcs Charlatans Modcrncs, ou Lcttrcs sur le Charla- tanismcacadtmiquc, 1791 ; Le Junius Frangais, journal politique, June 2 to June 24, 1790 ; translation of Chains of Slavery, with fifty pages on French history prefixed, year 1. On Marat s life should be read L ami du peuple, Skizzen aus Marat s journalistichc.n Lebcn, Hamburg, 1846 ; A. Bougeart, Marat, Pamidu pcuplft, 2 vols., 1864 ; G. Piazzoli, Marat, I amico del Popolo ela Jlivoluzione, Milan, 1874; A. Vermorel, GEmrcs de J. P. Marat, I ami du peuple, recueillies et a.nnoties, 1869; F. Chevremont, Marat, Index du Bibliophile, &c., 1876; Id., Placards de Marat, 1877; and particularly his Jean Paul Marat, esprit polUiquc, accompagnt de sa vie scientifque, politique, ctpnvee, 2 vols., 1881.