Jean-Paul Marat
Prophet of Terror
Format:Hardback
Publisher:The University of Chicago Press
Publishing:14th Nov '25
£40.00
This title is due to be published on 14th November, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
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.
“A monument of sparkling erudition that brilliantly achieves the daunting task of understanding the most contentious and unsympathetic of French Revolutionaries as a man rather than as a monster. Beautifully written, profoundly researched, and impressively and lucidly argued, Jean-Paul Marat is a biography for the ages.” * Colin Jones, emeritus, Queen Mary University of London *
“This is a monumental and definitive biography. Through his expert knowledge and gripping, clear writing, Baker has developed a brilliant political portrait of one of the most important revolutionaries in modern history.” * David Bell, Princeton University *
“Jean-Paul Marat is a dramatic story of political delusion, that concludes—in the diptych of Condorcet and Marat—in a moving and eloquent alternate vista of reason, sympathy, and the possibility of liberal society.” * Emma Rothschild, Harvard University *
“An astounding work of scholarship that will be valued by French Revolution scholars for decades. Following the complicated life of Jean-Paul Marat from beginning to end, it is at once a rich analysis of his thought and an extraordinarily detailed history of the actions, beliefs, and struggles that constituted the fraught daily politics of the French Revolution.” * William H. Sewell Jr, University of Chicago *
ISBN: 9780226820927
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 454g
952 pages