The Terror: An Assassination in Paris (Part 1)

The Rest Is History

This episode explores the volatile atmosphere of 1793 France, centered on the assassination of radical journalist Jean-Paul Marat by Charlotte

Key takeaways

• Charlotte Corday, a 24-year-old from the provinces, assassinated Jean-Paul Marat in his bathtub.
• The political landscape was split between the Girondins, who were more moderate and mercantile, and the Montagnards, who were radical populists.

Main topics

• Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat
• Girondins vs. Montagnards

Notable quotes

Let my last breath be useful to my fellow citizens.

Conclusion

The episode provides a gripping look at how political instability and

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:11) How long, Frenchman, will you put up with disorder and divisions? Oh, Frenchman, a little longer, and all that will remain of you is the memory of your existence. Already the provinces are marching on Paris. Already half of our empire burns with the fire of discord and civil war. There is still a way to extinguish it, but that way must be swift. Already the vilest of villains, Marat, whose name alone is the image of all crimes, is falling under the avenging blade, shaking the mountain and making Danton and Robespierre pale. Those other brigands seated on this bloody throne. Your peace depends on the execution of the law. I am not undermining it by killing Mara. Condemned by the universe, he is outside the law. What court will judge me? Let my last breath be useful to my fellow citizens. Let my head, held aloft in Paris, be a rallying point for all the friends of the law. Let the universe declare that I deserved well. of humanity. Frenchmen, I have shown you the way. You know your enemies. Rise up. Strike. So a very punchy manifesto there and had a very catchy title, Address to the French Friends of Law and Peace. And it was found on a young woman who was arrested in Paris on the 13th of July, 1793. And the name of this young woman, Charlotte Corday, 24 years old, strikingly good looking, everyone. commented on this all the time. And of course, her looks and her youth made her arrest all the more of a sensation because she was charged with the assassination of perhaps the single most controversial man in France. A radical journalist, a revolutionary firebrand, the supreme champion of terror, Jean-Paul Marat. And it is one of the most famous episodes in French history, the murder of Marat, the pretty young woman who comes from the provinces, talks her way into Marat's apartment, finds him soaking his pustule-ridden body in a bath, pulls out a knife, plunges it deep into his chest. A scene famously painted by Jacques-Louis David, one of the most... famous illustrations of the French Revolution ever painted. But Dominic, it's not just an incredibly exciting story in and of itself, is it? It is also the trigger for perhaps the most celebrated, the most notorious passage of the entire revolution, the passage that is known as the Terror. Yeah, Speaker 3 (3:17) exactly right. I'd say it's one of the most thrilling moments in all world history. I remember doing it at school, just absolutely loving it. The moment in 1793, 1794, when he should say France descends into the reign of terror. So. Loads of people will be familiar with the images of this. The triumph of Madame Guillotine. You've seen it in films, you've seen it in video games and books, whatever. The carts rattling through the streets loaded with prisoners. The old women, the tricoteurs knitting at the foot of the guillotine. They're going to mob howling for blood as their blade begins to fall. It's something that English writers in particular have always adored. They're turning the melodrama right up to the maximum. Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities or Hilary Mantel in A Place of Greater Safety. But in this series, we will be looking behind those images to explore exactly what happened and why. And we have an amazing cast of characters. So we'll Speaker 6 (4:13) be Speaker 3 (4:13) talking about the revolutionaries, people like Danton and Robespierre. We've got an amazing episode to come on the execution of Marie Antoinette. And then we have today's protagonist, the man who kicks off the whole story. And he really is an extraordinarily grotesque and fascinating character with his lovely blisters and his squint and his vehement rhetoric. And that is Jean-Paul Marat. So Marat is actually born in what's now Switzerland in 1743 in a small town. His father was a Sardinian friar who converted to Calvinism. So as a little boy, Marat is... It's something he has in common with a lot of revolutionary figures. He's very ambitious. He said later, at five, I wanted to be a schoolmaster, at 15, a professor, at 18, an author, and at 20, a creative genius. Actually, he's none of those things. He moves to France initially, and then he goes off to London, lives in London. And he arrives in London when London is gripped by the great controversy about the radical journalist and MP, John Wilkes. Wilkes is a great sort of newspaperman who's always slacking off the British government and the establishment and corruption. And this is a great influence on Marat. He's really taken Wilkes' radical style and his sort of invocation of the ordinary people against the corrupt metropolitan elite. And Marat will obviously take that and then turn that up to 11. But in the short term, his real enthusiasm is medicine. So he writes a thesis on gonorrhea. He manages to wangle a degree in absentia from St. Andrews. I don't think he ever went to St. Andrews. And then he went into the wellness industry. Speaker 4 (5:55) He's based in Newcastle for five years, isn't he? So presumably he speaks English with a Geordie accent. Speaker 3 (6:01) Yeah, Speaker 4 (6:02) he goes Speaker 3 (6:02) around peddling these mad cures for venereal disease. If you have bad eyesight, you, of course, like me, don't wear glasses. He would prescribe you electrotherapy for your eyes. It would definitely change your eyesight. I don't think whether it would make it better. The sizzling of your eyeballs. This doesn't really work out. He comes back to Paris. He establishes himself as an experimental scientist. He basically puts his money from the wellness industry, what money he's made, into making his own laboratory. He claims to have proved that fire is an igneous fluid. And what would that have meant? It meant that previous views about fire were wrong. and that actually people needed to appreciate the fluidity of fire. I mean, how would he monetize that? He wouldn't. That's the problem. He also said that Newton was a fool. Newton's theories of light and color were totally wrong. And he claimed to have written papers proving that Newton was an idiot. I mean, isn't that what Einstein does, Speaker 4 (6:55) basically? Is Einstein and Marat parallel lives? Genius ahead of his time. Yeah, maybe. Speaker 3 (6:59) Anyway, Marat submitted these findings to the French Royal Academy of Sciences, and they said, this is idiocy from you. You know, they rejected him and he felt humiliated. Now, actually, Robert Danton, the great historian of 18th century France, points out that this feeling of humiliation on the part of a provincial young man is very, very common among the leaders of the revolution. You know, you can go through a lot of these characters and they are from the provinces. They're from small towns. They've come to the big city. They feel rejected and ostracized by this sort of establishment figures. And this... fuels a lot of their rage once the revolution Speaker 4 (7:37) starts. I mean, isn't that the stereotype of revolutionaries, that it's people who've got just enough academic background to feel that they deserve better society and then don't get it? Exactly. Speaker 3 (7:49) It's people who've spent a lot of time doing kind of YouTube rabbit holes. And they're not idiots, but they feel rejected by the sort of, you know, big science or big history or whatever it might be. So this is Mara. By the late 1780s, he's a very lonely, bitter, disappointed man. Everyone thinks he's a crank and a charlatan. He's struggling to make ends meet. And then, bang, summer of 1789, France convulsed by political and economic crisis. Louis XVI runs out of money, gets into a mess politically, recalling the Estates General. Mob storms the Bastille, and this disorder escalates into what we would call the French Revolution. And Marat... seizes his chance. He basically thinks back to John Wilkes in London when he was there all those years ago, 1770s or something. And he says, bang, this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to reinvent myself as a radical polemicist, set up my own newspaper, the people's friend, Lamy Dupup. So basically, the Speaker 4 (8:51) cause of the French Revolution is the British press. Speaker 3 (8:55) Yeah. I Speaker 4 (8:55) mean, Speaker 3 (8:56) you heard it here first. Speaker 4 (8:57) The model of British journalism. is what triggers it all. But we know where to stop, Speaker 3 (9:02) Tom, and that's the difference. So, well, Marat goes well beyond the tone of the British press, the 18th century British press. He has this incredibly violent and messianic tone in his writings from the very beginning. There's a brilliant new biography came out, I think this year or maybe late last year, by the historian Keith Michael Baker, the kind of new definitive life of Marat. And Baker sees Marat as the first modern. populist and to pick out a couple of his elements of his appeal. I mean, these are obviously old things. They go back a long way, but Marat reinvents them for a new age. One of them is the invocation of the people with a capital P. So the people are constantly in danger of being betrayed by appeasers and traitors. That's a huge part of modern populism and it's part of Marat's journalism. Marat is obsessed with conspiracies. He says quite explicitly, my aim is to keep my readers constantly alert. If I don't keep them alert, they will fall back into the abyss and they'll be dragged there by royalists and priests and other ne'er-do-wells who are all plotting against the people. Speaker 4 (10:06) I mean, it's the idea of, you know, wake up sheeple. If the truth that is motivating all these awful things that are happening is revealed, then you as someone who has been illuminated stand actually above the mass of the people. So Mara's calling himself a friend of the people, but he's also offering a kind of... privileged status to those who read him completely and actually Speaker 3 (10:30) you are quite right the language of waking and sleeping mara uses that a lot we're so familiar with that now both on the right and of course on the left hence are you woke um mara would have been very very familiar with that and he his argument was always to wake people up you need to be provocative confrontational indeed violent that could be rhetorical violence or it could be physical violence But only extreme language and extreme behaviour can rouse the masses from their slumber so their eyes are opened to the horrors of the conspiracy that threatens them. Speaker 4 (11:07) And I suppose at this point, to slightly extenuating circumstance for him, is that he doesn't know quite what the matches are that he's playing with. Speaker 3 (11:17) No, I suppose he doesn't. But Mara's instinct is always to... To keep lighting those matches. Speaker 4 (11:22) Yeah, and chucking them onto sticks of geolignite. He doesn't have an off button. I don't think he'd ever have had an off button, frankly. Speaker 3 (11:28) Anyway, the revolution spirals out of control in the early 1790s and Mara becomes one of its most controversial outspoken figures. This is very deliberate from him. So rather as in the last few years, you'd see people on social media saying, you know, civility is a political choice. We don't have a, you know, we don't want to be civil. We want to be confrontational because the crisis facing our civilization is so great. Mara sees charm, politeness, courtesy as fake and a sign of treason, actually. Because it's fake, you are treasonous if you are polite and polished. Speaker 4 (12:04) And I suppose also that, I mean, as with social media today, so then, attracting hate can become a measure of status. Speaker 3 (12:12) Yeah, completely, Speaker 4 (12:14) completely. Speaker 3 (12:15) Mara has a, I mean, he actually has this. sort of martyr complex. He's constantly talking about how his life is in danger, how plotters and traitors are out to get him. Now, actually, the argument that civility and charm are treacherous is very convenient for Mara because he's an extremely uncivil and charmless man. Everybody agrees he's hideously ugly, he's thin, he's shabby, he's kind of twitchy, he has this shock of unkempt black hair, he's a bit cross-eyed, and above all, he has this absolutely dreadful skin condition. And people have spent a lot of ink discussing whether it's syphilis, which it probably wasn't. The diagnosis now is chronic dermatitis herpetiformis. I don't really know what that means, but it's bad. And it's Speaker 4 (12:57) getting worse, isn't it? It is, yeah. Speaker 3 (12:59) And it will flare up when he's under stress. And the cure for that is a bath, right? Well, that's the only thing that will soothe it. He comes out in these terrible blisters and sores. So he takes a bath. So he has to have a soak. He has a soak. And he's very small, isn't he? He's only about five foot, I think. He's a sort of wizened man. He's like Yoda. And although he doesn't sound like a great catch, he does actually, in 1792, he goes through a sort of atheistical marriage ceremony with a woman called Simone Evra, who was 21 years his junior and was a sort of maragrupee. Right. So he's not exactly a catch. He's a terrible husband, I would imagine. But anyway, he's got this wife, so that's nice. Most of the other revolutionaries can't stand Marat. They find him very, very objectionable company. So Corday, in the speech you read, his assassin, she bracketed him with Danton and Robespierre, but neither Danton nor Robespierre actually liked Marat or really enjoyed hanging around with him. They thought he's extreme, he's histrionic, he's much too bloodthirsty, he's always shouting and ranting, and he's just extremely unpleasant company. Other sort of apostles of the terror would say. He doesn't pay for his drinks. He catches off you. He borrows money. He doesn't pay it back. He's just basically an incredibly Speaker 4 (14:12) unpleasant man. I suppose also what he does, though, is to push to extremes arguments that people like Danton and Robespierre are making that we need to react firmly to counter-revolution or whatever. Marat is saying we basically need to bathe France in blood. Speaker 3 (14:30) Completely. So from the beginning, he's talking about killing people. 600 heads in 1791. He's talking about 200,000 or Speaker 4 (14:38) 300 Speaker 3 (14:38) ,000 people. And this is not just empty rhetoric. So in 1792, France is at war. The Prussians are advancing on Paris. And it's Marat who urges the street kind of militants, the sans-culottes, the trouserless sort of masses, to break into the prisons and to slaughter. one and a half thousand inmates of the prisons. And Marat said, this is justice. This will deter these legions of traitors. So this has real world consequences. You know, he is encouraging the massacre of hundreds and hundreds of people. And moderates, even people who supported the revolution, but were moderate, came to hate Marat. So in his book on the French Revolution, Peter McPhee cites a club in Grandville in Normandy. And this club... It issued a resolution. It called Marat the provoker of murder, who's leading a disgusting faction of blood. But in Paris, which is his kind of heartland, Speaker 4 (15:34) Marat is very Speaker 3 (15:34) popular. He's seen as the tribune of the common man. And a week after these prison massacres, he's elected to represent Paris in the new national convention. So the national convention is going to be playing a huge part in our story in this series. And this is the new sort of legislature of France. And it meets at first in the old riding school, the manège in the Tuileries gardens, in the gardens of the royal palace. And the mood of this new convention is very well suited to Marat's style. Because this winter, 1792 to 1793, under the pressure of the economic and military crises that the revolution is facing, it's beginning to tear itself apart. So to paint a picture of the scene. In this convention building, you have about 750 largely young men, inexperienced, a lot of them from the provinces originally, very passionate, very idealistic. They're all dressed, I mean, and we'll talk about this in a future episode, I know. They wear this sort of revolutionary uniform, this long black overcoats and these big kind of leather boots. They will be debating for 12 hours at a time, arguing about the new society they're trying to build. And then all night they will be staying up to read letters and study paperwork. And all the time they're getting drunk. By and large, they're a very particular kind of people. I already said they're idealistic young men. So they're young. They're all Republicans. There are lots of lawyers and writers. They're from middle class backgrounds. And they're steeped in the values of the Enlightenment. So they've all read their Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Yeah, Rousseau is the dominating influence, isn't he? He is, exactly. But within... the convention, there are now two factions, we've talked about them in previous series, who are competing for people's allegiance. So on the one hand, you have a faction called the Girondins, and they really have had their upper hand for the last year or so. And they are led, I mean, let's just reduce them very simplistically to two people, a former anti-slavery journalist called Jacques-Pierre Prissot, and there's a woman called Madame Roulon, presiding at a literary salon. And by and large, Massive generalisation, but by and large, their power base are the kind of high-minded, bien pensant, upper-middle classes of the big provincial cities like Bordeaux, Marseille. Speaker 4 (17:54) And particularly Bordeaux, right, because the name Gironde, Girondin, comes from the Gironde, and Bordeaux is just downriver from the Gironde estuary. Exactly. So they're kind of mercantile, self-improving. Yeah, and the mercantile aspect is important, isn't it? Because they are... I mean, maybe slightly anachronistic, but they are kind of free market in their attitude towards economics, whereas we will see their opponents are much more dirigiste. So there's a slight Roy Jenkins against Tony Benn. Speaker 3 (18:25) Do you know, I was just about to say, they're people who would have been in the SDP in the 1980s, I think, the Girondins. Oh, good. Speaker 4 (18:31) I'm glad I Speaker 3 (18:31) got that right. That would mean nothing to anyone who's not British. In fact, it would mean nothing to anybody who's not British or who's under 50. For people who've read your Speaker 4 (18:38) books, it would mean a great deal. Speaker 3 (18:40) Precisely, to both of those people. Speaker 4 (18:41) It's Speaker 3 (18:41) a Speaker 4 (18:41) self Speaker 3 (18:42) -selecting elite, Dominic. An important thing about the Girondins, they're not a Parisian party. So they don't have a lot of strength in the streets of Paris. Now, on the other hand, the other people, the other big faction, are what's called the Montagnards, the Mountain. And they're called the Mountain because they sit high up in the left-hand side of the convention. There's about 200 of them. They're more radical, more militant. And the Montagnards are big in Paris. They are dominated by some of the best-known figures of the revolution, more radical figures. So you've got Robespierre, who we'll be talking about next time, Maximilian Robespierre, cold, chilly, self-consciously virtuous, you know, the incarnation of kind of republican purity. And then you've got Georges Danton, who is a big man, big appetite, earthy, corrupt, the sort of slightly more Churchillian, I suppose. It's you and me, basically. Let's be upfront. I didn't want to say it. So what's the difference between the Girondins and the Montagnards? It really boils down to two things. I think the Montagnards, like Marat, they idealize the people. They are ultra-populists. The Girondins, the sort of more high-minded types, are a little bit more suspicious of the people. They're more paternalistic. They want to be the people directing the revolution. They're anxious about giving too much power to the streets. The Girondins also... and this is allied to that, they think the revolution is in danger of tipping into kind of, you know, an orgy of bloodshed. They want to rein back on the violence a bit. Whereas the Montagnards, I mean, this is putting it very simplistically, they see the violence as necessary, even healthy, to build the better world they want. So, for example, when they scrapped the monarchy, which they did in the autumn of 1972, the Montagnards said... we've got to get rid of Louis XVI. The Girondins were much more squeamish about it. You know, this one man, do we really need to get rid of him, all of this? And so their enemies, the Girondins' critics said, hold on, are these guys committed to the revolution or not? Because, you know, you can't make an omelette and are they prepared to break the eggs? Well, people Speaker 4 (20:47) start to say that they are actively royalist, don't they? And the mountain. Exactly the same. Speaker 3 (20:52) So if we fast forward to the spring of 1793, this feud between these two factions is so bitter. it's probably only going to end one way. I mean, somebody is going to lose their heads. And on the 13th of March 1793, a great Girondin speaker, who was regarded as actually the best speaker in the convention, a guy called Pierre Vernieu, he issued this famous prophecy. He said, we are in danger of destroying ourselves in all these squabbles. We will be like Saturn devouring his children, and this will all end in a dictatorship. And of course, how prescient he was, he was quite right. The irony, though, is actually when you look at Viennese speech, he says