JEAN PAUL MARAT. By HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE.

[A leader of the revolutionary Reign of Terror in France, born in 1744, assassinated by Charlotte Corday in 1793. His energy and ferocity made him a power, which he never could have become by his talents. He was the right hand of Robespierre, and the principal agent in the destruction of the Girondist party in 1793. With Danton and Robespierre he formed the triumvirate which turned France into a vast human shambles.]

Three men among the Jacobins—Marat, Danton, and Robespierre—merited distinction and possessed authority. Owing to a malformation, or distortion, of head and heart, they fulfilled the requisite conditions. Of the three, Marat is the most monstrous; he borders on the lunatic, of which he displays the chief characteristics—furious exaltation, constant overexcitement, feverish restlessness, an inexhaustible propensity for scribbling, that mental automatism and tetanus of the will under the constraint and rule of a fixed idea, and, in addition to this, the usual physical symptoms, such as sleeplessness, a livid tint, bad blood, foulness of dress and person, with, during the last five months of his life, irritations and eruptions over his whole body. Issuing from incongruous races, born of a mixed blood, and tainted with serious moral commotions, he harbors within him a singular germ; physically he is an abortion, morally a pretender, and one who covets all places of distinction.

His father, who was a physician, intended from his early childhood that he should be a savant; his mother, an idealist, meant that he should be a philanthropist, while he himself always steered his course toward both summits. “At five years of age,” he says, “it would have pleased me to be a schoolmaster, at fifteen a professor, at eighteen an author, and a creative genius at twenty,” and afterward, up to the last, an apostle and martyr to humanity. “From my earliest infancy I had an intense love of fame, which changed its object at various stages of my life, but which never left me for a moment.” He rambled over Europe or vegetated in Paris for thirty years, living a nomadic life in subordinate positions; hissed as an author, distrusted as a man of science, and ignored as a philosopher; a third rate political writer, aspiring to every sort of celebrity and to every honor, constantly presenting himself as a candidate and as constantly rejected—too great a disproportion between his faculties and ambition.

Talentless, possessing no critical acumen, and of mediocre intelligence, he was fitted only to teach some branch of the sciences, or to practice some one of the arts, either as professor or doctor, more or less bold and lucky, or to follow, with occasional slips on one side or the other, some path clearly marked out for him. Never did man with such diversified culture possess such an incurably perverted intellect. Never did man, after so many abortive speculations and such repeated malpractices, conceive and maintain so high an opinion of himself. Each of these two sources in him augments the other; through his faculty of not seeing things as they are, he attributes to himself virtue and genius; satisfied that he possesses genius and virtue, he regards his misdeeds as merits and his crotchets as truths.

Thenceforth, and spontaneously, his malady runs its own course and becomes complex; next to the ambitious delirium comes the mania for persecution. In effect, the evident or demonstrated truths which he supplies should strike the public at once; if they burn slowly or miss fire, it is owing to their being stamped out by enemies or the envious; manifestly, they have conspired against him, and against him plots have never ceased. First came the philosophers’ plot; when his treatise on “Man” reached Paris from Amsterdam, “they felt the blow I struck at their principles and had the book stopped at the custom-house.” Next came the plot of the doctors, who “ruefully estimated my enormous gains. Were it necessary, I could prove that they often met together to consider the best way to destroy my reputation.” Finally, came the plot of the academicians; “the disgraceful persecution I had to undergo from the Academy of Sciences for two years, after being satisfied that my discoveries on light upset all that it had done for a century, and that I was quite indifferent about becoming a member of its body.... Would it be believed that these scientific charlatans succeeded in underrating my discoveries throughout Europe, in exciting every society of savants against me, and in closing against me all the newspapers!” Naturally, the would-be-persecuted man defends himself—that is to say, he attacks. Naturally, as he is the aggressor, he is repulsed and put down, and, after creating imaginary enemies, he creates real ones, especially in politics, where, on principle, he daily preaches insurrection and murder.

Naturally, in fine, he is prosecuted, convicted at the Chatelet Court, tracked by the police, obliged to fly and wander from one hiding-place to another; to live like a bat “in a cellar, underground, in a dark dungeon”; once, says his friend Panis, he passed “six weeks on one of his buttocks,” like a madman in his cell, face to face with his reveries. It is not surprising that, with such a system, the reverie should become more intense, more and more gloomy, and at last settle down into a confirmed nightmare; that, in his distorted brain, objects should appear distorted; that, even in full daylight, men and things should seem awry, as in a magnifying, dislocating mirror; that frequently, on the numbers (of his journal) appearing too blood-thirsty, and his chronic disease too acute, his physician should bleed him to arrest these attacks and prevent their return. When a madman sees everywhere around him—on the floors, on the walls, on the ceiling—toads, scorpions, spiders, swarms of crawling, loathsome vermin, he thinks only of crushing them, and the disease enters on its last stage; after the ambitious delirium, the mania for persecution, and the settled nightmare, comes the homicidal mania. At the outset a few lives would have sufficed: “Five hundred heads ought to have fallen when the Bastile was taken, and all would then have gone on well.” But, through lack of foresight and timidity, the evil was allowed to spread, and the more it spread the larger the amputation should have been. With the sure, keen eye of the surgeon, Marat gives its dimensions; he has made his calculation beforehand. In September, 1792, in the Council at the Commune, he estimates approximatively forty thousand as the number of heads that should be laid low. Six weeks later, the social abscess having enormously increased, the figures swell in proportion; he now demands two hundred and seventy thousand heads, always on the score of humanity, “to insure public tranquillity,” on condition that the operation be intrusted to him, as the summary, temporary justiciary. Save this last point the rest is granted to him; it is unfortunate that he could not see with his own eyes the complete fulfillment of his programme, the batches condemned by the revolutionary tribunal, the massacres of Lyons and Toulon, the drownings of Nantes. From first to last he was in the right line of the revolution; lucid on account of his blindness, thanks to his crazy logic, thanks to the concordance of his personal malady with the public malady, to the precocity of his complete madness alongside of the incomplete or tardy madness of the rest, he alone steadfast, remorseless, triumphant, perched aloft, at the first bound, on the sharp pinnacle, which his rivals dared not climb, or only stumbled up.