A landmark biography of one of the most notorious and controversial protagonists of the French Revolution—Jean-Paul Marat.
Who better to pen an authoritative biography of Jean-Paul Marat (1743–93) than preeminent historian of France, Keith Michael Baker? Decades in the making, this monumental work takes readers on a journey through the intriguing, sometimes shocking life of this writer and thinker.
Starting with his Swiss family and upbringing, Baker then sheds light on Marat's early years in England, his career as an aspiring scientist in Paris, his gradual transformation from impassioned pamphleteer to revolutionary newspaperman, and, finally, his murder and martyrdom. Throughout, Baker offers readers the unique opportunity to reconsider the outbreak and development of the French Revolution through Marat's eyes and in his own words. To help make sense of Marat's trajectory, he shows how his violent and incendiary public calls to render unseen forces visible, to inject immediacy into an increasingly abstract modern world, would transform classical republicanism into the language of the Terror.
Far beyond a standard rendering of Marat's life and its milestones, this biography offers readers an opportunity to see the French Revolution as never before, through the perspective of one of its major figures. Baker's book reveals how someone like Marat could go from translating Newton and engaging Franklin to calling for an ever-growing number of heads to roll—a transformation as chillingly relevant as ever.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
1. The Swiss Family Mara
“A Little Man . . . A Quick Eye”
2. On the Move
3. Making It in London
4. Locating the Soul
5. Wilkes and Liberty
6. The Chains of Slavery
7. Doctor to the Incurable
Agonistic Science
8. Big Game
9. A New Newton?
10. Following Franklin
11. The Fight for Glory
12. Destination Madrid?
Thymotic Politics
13. Revolutionary Rebirth
14. The People’s Eye
15. Enemies of the People
16. How Many Heads?
17. Remember Nancy
18. Mobilizing the People
19. Salus populi
20. Repression, Revision, Despair
The First Modern Populist
21. A Machine That Would Not Work
22. The People’s Revolution
23. The Monster and the Mountain
24. To Kill a King?
25. A Party of One
26. The Marat Moment
27. Purge
Conclusion: A Revolutionary Diptych
Acknowledgments
Note on Sources
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Index
About the Author :
Keith Michael Baker is the J. E. Wallace Sterling Professor in the Humanities, professor of history, and professor (by courtesy) of French and Italian, emeritus, at Stanford University. He is the author or editor of several books on the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.
Review :
“[A] meticulously researched and evocative account.”
"Baker’s nine-hundred-page biography of Jean-Paul Marat, the journalist turned revolutionary who went on to orchestrate the Terror, is both a fascinating character study and a sweeping history of the period. Baker’s achievement is to show how a combination of resentment, petty grievance, and the radical mood of the cosmopolitan world of the late eighteenth century came together in Marat to form a deeply paranoid, conspiratorial man. Baker’s is a perfect bedside book for anyone wanting to understand the origins of Jacobinism and to make sense of one of its most fascinating figures.”
“A monument of sparkling erudition that brilliantly achieves the daunting task of understanding the most contentious and unsympathetic of French Revolutionaries as a man rather than as a monster. Beautifully written, profoundly researched, and impressively and lucidly argued, Jean-Paul Marat is a biography for the ages.”
“This is a monumental and definitive biography. Through his expert knowledge and gripping, clear writing, Baker has developed a brilliant political portrait of one of the most important revolutionaries in modern history.”
“Jean-Paul Marat is a dramatic story of political delusion, that concludes—in the diptych of Condorcet and Marat—in a moving and eloquent alternate vista of reason, sympathy, and the possibility of liberal society.”
“An astounding work of scholarship that will be valued by French Revolution scholars for decades. Following the complicated life of Jean-Paul Marat from beginning to end, it is at once a rich analysis of his thought and an extraordinarily detailed history of the actions, beliefs, and struggles that constituted the fraught daily politics of the French Revolution.”
“A magisterial biography, obviously the fruit of decades of reading and research. . . . I doubt that any biography in English of Marat will be called for after this book.”
