MARAT (Jean-Paul). Autograph manuscript entitled... Lot 48

MARAT (Jean-Paul). Autograph manuscript entitled "Lettre de l'ami du peuple à l'auteur des Révolutions de France et de Brabant". [June 1790]. 7 in-4 ff. mounted on tabs on in-folio stiff paper leaves; incomplete at the end, some traces of burning at the corners. IMPORTANT POLITICAL PAMPHLET ADDRESSED TO CAMILLE DESMOULINS. Eager to launch a major "patriotic demonstration" against what he felt were the failings of the National Assembly, Jean-Paul Marat wrote two texts that he would have liked to circulate concurrently: one, entitled "Supplique de dix-huit millions d'infortunés, aux députés de l'Assemblée nationale", which he published on June 30, 1790 in n° 149 of his own press organ, L'Ami du peuple, and the other, the present "Lettre de l'ami du peuple", which he wished to see published in Camille Desmoulins' widely read weekly Les Révolutions de France et de Brabant. However, this initiative came at an inauspicious time for recriminations, in the general euphoria of the days preceding the Fête de la Fédération commemorating the storming of the Bastille, and Camille Desmoulins did not follow up his request - the present manuscript therefore remained unpublished until 1836, when it was presented in the Correspondance inédite de Camille Desmoulins (Paris, Ébrard, pp. 76-86, with an error on the date of the document). It was republished in La Correspondance de Marat (Paris, Eugène Fasquelle, 1908, pp. 151-158). "L'ASSEMBLEE NATIONALE... CET ENFANT POSTUME DU DESPOTISME". With his trademark scathing eloquence, and in his self-appointed role as journalist and opinion-former, Jean-Paul Marat here attacks the regime born of the Revolution: first addressing Camille Desmoulins, he expresses his rejection of political representation (a hostility drawn from Jean-Jacques Rousseau), and then launches into a "Supplique aux Pères conscrits, ou Très sérieuses réclamations de ceux n'ont rien, contre ceux qui ont tout". In this second part, a violent philippic addressed to the deputies he calls "Conscript Fathers" (borrowing the term used to designate senators in ancient Rome), he criticizes the deviation of a democracy that is not the instrument of social justice: "The importance of this text cannot be ignored [...]. With real boldness, Marat took up the cause of the poor to claim for them the equal rights of which they had been deprived by the National Assembly. He was the first (a fact worth noting) to take the debate onto new ground [...] No one among the revolutionaries had hitherto given such prominence to the demands of the proletariat, had made the appeal of class resonate with such insistence" (Gérard Walter, Marat, Paris, Albin Michel, 1933). In this respect, Jean Jaurès would defend the thesis that it was "thanks to Marat that the proletariat became conscious to a certain extent of forming a class". In this way, Jean-Paul Marat heralded the criticism of an entire historiographical trend against the Revolution as essentially bourgeois, and constituted the matrix of revolutionary currents rejecting legalism and formal democracy. "CAMILLE DESMOULINS WAS THE CRUEL CHILD OF THE REVOLUTION, MARAT WAS ITS RAGE" (Alphonse de Lamartine, Histoire des Girondins). Both formidable publicists and libellists, they were particularly listened-to voices of the Revolution, and considered themselves "brothers in arms", even though they expressed their radicalism in sometimes different fields, and even though Camille Desmoulins later inflected his thinking in the face of the excesses of the Terror. In the Revolution, the irredeemable Jean-Paul Marat was exemplary as "the emblematic figure of the journalist at the service of the people, the embodiment of that new and decisive power, public opinion; also the mouthpiece of the deepest fears of the popular imagination: famine, poisoned bread, conspiracy; expression, as Thiers saw it, of that dreadful thought, "a thought that revolutions say to themselves every day as the dangers increase, but which they never admit to themselves, the destruction of all their adversaries". To have tirelessly cried out this hidden truth, such was indeed Marat's exceptionality" (Mona Ozouf, in Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution française, Paris, Flammarion, 1988). MARAT'S POLITICAL MANUSCRIPTS ARE EXTREMELY RARE. When he died, most of his papers fell to his sister Charlotte-Albertine, and were dispersed after her death. The most important set, though modest in relation to Jean-Paul Marat's entire output, comprised around one hundred autograph leaves (including one leaf that completes the present manuscript): it was acquired by Count Noël-François-Henri Huchet de La Bédoyère and is currently held at the BnF, under the NAF 310 symbol. "