Description: 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 Marat's Swiss family and upbringing, Baker then sheds light on his 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 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 with Franklin to calling for an ever-growing number of heads to roll--a transformation as chilling as ever.Brief description: 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 Quotes:
"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."
-- "Jacobin"