Marat’s end is well known: a bathtub, a blade, Charlotte Corday, in July 1793. Less familiar is the trial that preceded it by three months, recorded by the Gazette des nouveaux tribunaux with the scrupulous precision of a court clerk.
The Convention, upon the report of its Committee of Legislation, had decreed the impeachment of one of its own members, committing him for trial before the Revolutionary Criminal Tribunal, established at the Palais by the law of March 10, 1793, to judge conspirators without appeal. The chronicle opens upon a striking scene: “Marat enters the courtroom. The hall echoes with applause.” And Marat speaks before he is even questioned: “Citizens, it is no guilty man who appears before you; it is the apostle and martyr of Liberty; it is but a cabal of factious intriguers that has brought this decree of accusation against me.”
Then procedure reasserts its rights. Name, age, station: Jean-Paul Marat, doctor of medicine, deputy for Paris to the Convention, forty-nine years of age, residing in the Rue des Cordeliers, Section du Théâtre-Français. The Public Accuser, Fouquier-Tinville, reads the bill of indictment.
It is a curious document, composed entirely of the accused man’s own words. His issues are cited one by one, with their dates. He is charged with having written that “in any country where the rights of the people are not empty titles, the pillaging of a few shops, at whose doors the hoarders should be hanged, would put an end to their villainy”; and it is noted that on the very day the journal appeared, the grocers of Paris were ransacked, on February 25 and 26. He is charged with having clamoured for a military tribune, a dictator, a triumvirate; with having written that he expected nothing good from legislators almost all devoid of enlightenment and virtue; with having denounced a criminal faction within the Convention itself.
It was not a deed being tried, but prose. The entire accusation rested within a sheaf of printed sheets, read aloud before their author amidst the cheers of his public.
The issue of the Gazette breaks off mid-enumeration of the charges, and does not record the verdict here. History tells us well enough how the affair ended, turning the prisoner into a conqueror rather than a condemned man; yet that is not the purpose of these pages. What they preserve is Marat’s opening sentence: in a court of law, he cast himself as a martyr, three months before becoming one elsewhere.
Gazette des nouveaux tribunaux, 1793, Revolutionary Criminal Tribunal: the case of Jean-Paul Marat.