Jean-Paul Marat: Prophet of Terror

Keith Baker (Stanford University, Professor Emeritus) will give a presentation from his upcoming book, Jean-Paul Marat: Prophet of Terror.

This biography of Jean-Paul Marat explores, more fully than has been done before, the frightful language and radical political action of one of the most bloodthirsty protagonists of the French Revolution. It aims to makes sense of Marat by showing the way in which he inhabits and intensifies the fundamental gap in the ideology of the Revolution, still present in the endangered democratic politics of our own day, between a conception of sovereignty as inherent in the body of the people on the one hand and as expressed in representative institutions on the other.  It traces the character of his populist convictions and enduring distrust of representation as they emerge in London on the eve of the American Revolution. It explores the underlying assumptions and bitter failure of his struggles for scientific glory in the French capital in the decade before the collapse of the Old Regime. It follows him embittered into the revolutionary torrent as he reinvents himself as a radical journalist forced underground in response to his constant calls for a popular insurrection to purge the nation’s elected representatives and other enemies he accuses of frustrating the popular will.