Jean-Paul Marat
Jean-Paul Marat was stabbed in his bath and became the Revolution's martyr. Born in Neuchâtel in 1743 to a Sardinian father and a Swiss mother, he trained and practised as a physician in Britain for a decade, published on optics, electricity and fire, and was awarded an honorary degree by St Andrews. He was embittered by the French scientific establishment's refusal to take his work seriously. He founded L'Ami du Peuple in September 1789 and made it the most violent paper of the Revolution, denouncing named individuals — ministers, generals, the king, and eventually the moderates — and calling repeatedly for executions in numbers that rose from five hundred to two hundred thousand. He was prosecuted and driven into hiding several times, spending long periods in cellars and sewers, which is generally held to have worsened the severe skin disease that forced him to work in a medicinal bath. He was elected to the Convention in 1792 and sat with the Montagnards. He was tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal in April 1793 at the Girondins' insistence and acquitted to acclamation, and his agitation contributed directly to their expulsion and destruction two months later. On 13 July 1793 Charlotte Corday, a young woman from Caen sympathetic to the Girondins, gained admission by promising a list of traitors and stabbed him once in the chest. She was guillotined four days later. David painted him within days, arm hanging, letter still in hand, in a composition borrowed from images of the dead Christ, and it is among the most effective political pictures ever made.
- Lived: 1743 CE – 1793 CE
- Nationality: French
- Roles: journalist, revolutionary, physician
