Most political assassinations take place in public. Julius Caesar was stabbed to death in the Roman Senate in 44 BCE, King Henry IV of France was knifed in his carriage in Paris in 1610, and Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, Sophie, were shot while being driven through the streets of Sarajevo in 1914—the murder that ignited World War I. Assassinations in private are rare, but one stands out: the bathtub stabbing of Jean-Paul Marat in July 1793 by a twenty-four-year-old noblewoman from Normandy, Charlotte Corday. Although born into a minor aristocratic family, she was acting not out of devotion to royalism but because she hoped to change the course of the French Revolution by killing the journalist who had called incessantly for ever more heads to roll. Corday supported the more moderate republic advocated by the deputies known as Girondins, so called because some came from the Gironde region near Bordeaux. They had fled for their lives after being expelled from the National Convention six weeks earlier and hoped to raise a rebellion against the radicals in charge in Paris, among them Maximilien Robespierre.

Corday did not succeed in inspiring others, and she may even have salvaged Marat’s reputation by killing him as he lay ailing in his medicinal bath. He was instantly memorialized; she was vilified and executed after a hasty trial. Would Marat have become such an iconic figure if he had died a natural death? We will never know, but Jean-Paul Marat: Prophet of Terror by the historian Keith Michael Baker and Murder in the Rue Marat: A Case of Art in Revolution by the art historian Thomas Crow offer fascinating insights into the man and the process by which he became the reviled mouthpiece of revolutionary bloodthirstiness for some and the revered martyr of the people’s cause for others. Their books, though very different, reflect the intense interest sparked by the enigmatic and deliberately provocative Marat.

In September 1790, when hopes were still high for a peaceable outcome to the revolution, Marat declared that five or six hundred heads might have sufficed on July 14, 1789, but now “ten thousand heads lopped off would scarcely be sufficient to save the homeland.” By May 1791—at a time when the guillotine had yet to be used—he thought “it would take fifty thousand.” The numbers kept rising inexorably; after Marat’s death his followers endorsed their prophet’s call for the “horrifying but indispensable execution of two or three hundred thousand.” Long before the terrifying months of denunciations, arrests of countless suspects, and summary executions that he did not live to see, Marat foretold an even more dreadful future. Did he precipitate the violence, as Corday insisted, or did he just sense it coming?

Almost everything about Marat is shrouded in mystery. As Baker points out in his meticulously researched and evocative account, his name was not even Marat. His father was Juan Salvador Mara, Sardinian-born and a native speaker of Catalan. Juan became a Catholic priest, converted to Calvinism when he fled to Geneva, married, had nine children, and tried a panoply of occupations, among them textile designer, hawker of medical prescriptions, teacher of geography and history, and translator. His second child and eldest son, Jean-Paul, added the t to the family name to avoid being considered Irish when he was living in London. He had the same restless energy as his father and even greater ambitions. Unlike his father, he was not tied down by a brood of children requiring support, and though he had a younger female companion in the last eighteen months of his life, he never formally married.

Marat left home at sixteen and ended up in Paris a couple of years later, just as the conflicts between writers and the French monarchy reached a boiling point. In 1762 the Parisian high court condemned Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s novel Émile as subversive of the true religion and ordered his arrest and the confiscation and public burning of all copies. In this heady atmosphere, Marat started writing a philosophical tract but did not yet publish it. In 1765 he moved to England. He earned a medical degree, though it is not clear that he ever studied medicine, and began treating patients and publishing medical tracts before returning to his original interest in philosophy and developing a new one in British politics (though he never showed any interest in events in the American colonies). He spent eleven years in Britain and then left abruptly in 1776.

Paris proved irresistible, and once there he got a job as a doctor to the guards assigned to King Louis XVI’s youngest brother, the comte d’Artois. The career choice is surprising, since Marat denounced all aristocrats as “bloodsuckers of the state” just months after the beginning of the revolution. His time in London had taught him the importance of publicity, and he used well-placed stories in the French press to establish a thriving practice as a healer to the rich and gullible, to whom he dispensed his own patent medicines. Accusations of fraud soon surfaced in reputable journals, enraging Marat and provoking feelings of victimization that would multiply in the years to come. Two linked traits henceforth shaped his life: a burning desire for fame and a paranoia about the reactions of the establishment to his attempts at innovation. The nature of the group in power would change dramatically but not his sense of being at odds with it.

Nothing was off limits for Marat. In the 1770s and early 1780s he churned out pamphlets and books on an astonishing number of subjects, including general philosophy, the British constitution, the general history of liberty, the physiology of the eye, criminal legislation, optics, electricity, and combustion. He took on the leading scientific academies and academicians and did not hesitate to offer corrections of Newton’s work. But he never got the approval or endorsement that he craved; instead he had to fight repeated accusations of charlatanism. He knew who his enemies were: “Envious cowards, the numerous horde of whom never cease striving for my ruin; the modern philosophers who hide under anonymity or false names to defame me.” In 1783 or 1784 he lost his appointment with the comte d’Artois’s guards; his enemies seemed to have prevailed.

The coming of the French Revolution in 1789 offered him a new start, this time as a revolutionary journalist. Stricken by a mysterious skin disease—the diagnosis remains in doubt, according to Baker—he still produced torrents of words, and they were still bursting with paranoia, outrage, and fury, but now they tracked events like a hunter stalks its prey. Marat brought himself back to public notice by writing as a French citizen about his “homeland” France and warned his “fellow countrymen” that if they did not have the courage to demand liberty, “a hideous awakening will find you in misery and enchained.” He had long been concerned with slavery, but for him it was synonymous with despotism, and he made no reference to plantation slavery or to the debates about it that had begun percolating in France in the late 1780s. When the enslaved in Saint-Domingue, France’s richest Caribbean colony, organized an enormous revolt in 1791, Marat supported their right to rebel, but he also defended the right of the white colonists to demand independence from France.

The title of Marat’s first journal, The Patriotic Monitor, which he set up anonymously in August 1789, reflected his obsessive desire to comment on virtually every action taken by the new National Assembly. At this point in his account, Baker necessarily shifts gears. Although he devotes much more attention than most of Marat’s biographers to his prerevolutionary writings, whose description and analysis take up about a fourth of the book, he follows Marat’s political gyrations even more closely after 1789. The happy result is one of the most absorbing accounts of this turbulent and unpredictable period when the French lurched from a constitutional monarchy to the abolition of nobility, declarations of war on a series of European powers, the establishment of a republic, and the execution of the king.

Marat found almost every development wanting. While others saw as fundamentally transformative the National Assembly’s decisions of August 4, 1789, to eliminate the buying and selling of offices, all claims to special exemptions in taxes, and the remnants of feudal law from property relations, Marat saw a project “to delude the people” because these measures would require compensation for those who lost income. By the middle of September 1789, when he gave his second attempt at a journal the title most closely associated with him, The Friend of the People, his views had already been denounced as scandalous, and within weeks it was forced underground. In the following years Marat often had to flee Paris and publish his commentary in pamphlets instead. Hardly anyone escaped his ire; he repeatedly accused the court, the ministers, the deputies, the mayor of Paris, and later the generals of corruption and conspiracy. By January 1790 denunciation no longer sufficed. Killing was necessary: the history of nations, he wrote, showed that “none of them has succeeded in breaking its chains without choking its oppressors in their own blood.” And so began his deliberately sensational counting of the number of heads the revolution required. Marat’s frenetic insistence on blood was there almost from the start, not a reaction to war or internal strife.

Baker calls this “thymotic” politics, after Plato, and he defines it as a politics of paranoia, disclosure, persecution, victimization, and sacrifice but also “ancient virtue” because of Marat’s emphasis on purifying politics of corruption. In his painstaking recounting of Marat’s evolving positions, he makes every effort to explain the consistent logic behind them: those in power, including the members of the revolutionary assemblies, offered reforms, but these were almost always ploys to deceive the people and preserve their own interests. Marat was invariably one step ahead, or rather one leap to the left, defending the interests of the poor and oppressed yet always finding them too stupid to follow his advice.

When Marat was elected in September 1792 as a deputy from Paris to the National Convention—the new constituent assembly of the French First Republic—he had to face his multitude of critics in person. He defended his calls for a temporary dictatorship and denied responsibility for the horrendous massacres that had occurred in Paris earlier in the month. Facing the prospect of a decree of accusation, he brandished a pistol and pointed it at his head; the moment passed, though he was often prevented from speaking thereafter. His critics did not give up, and on April 20, 1793, the Convention voted to send him to the new revolutionary court for inciting violence, advocating dictatorship, and promoting the dissolution of the Convention by attacking many of its deputies.

Marat turned the trial into yet another forum for denouncing the Girondins and was immediately acquitted. Hoisted onto the shoulders of his supporters, he was paraded in triumph back to the Convention. A few weeks later he had his revenge; on June 2, 1793, an armed throng surrounded the Convention and demanded the immediate arrest of the Girondin deputies. Under intense pressure, the Convention acquiesced and ordered thirty of them placed under house arrest. Stunned by the events of that day, most deputies then snubbed Marat, who continued to denounce their criminal inaction.

The deputies might not have known what to do with Marat when he was alive, but after his death he became instantly useful as a martyr who symbolized, Baker argues, “unity in the popular resolve to mobilize in defense of the Republic against its enemies.” This rather bland assessment does not do justice to Baker’s account, but it does reveal one of the underlying tensions within it. He devotes so much attention to the development of Marat’s ideas that he shortchanges the other half of the populist equation, which is the response of those who claimed the mantle of “the people.” Marat’s followers admired his unwillingness to compromise, shared his belief that conspiracy and corruption were everywhere precisely because they were invisible, and found his emphasis on purifying violence persuasive even when or perhaps because it was deliberately sensationalist. In death Marat was not an emblem of unity, or even of popular resolve; he stood for the force, the obdurate power of a vaguely defined “people,” those who had counted for so little for so long and who were ecstatic to find someone who wanted to speak for them. He remained useful to those in power only as long as they needed that force.

While Baker examines every scrap of Marat’s writing in his attempt to make sense of his motivations and beliefs, Crow looks at him from the perspective of Jacques-Louis David, whose painting The Death of Marat endeavored to capture him for all eternity shortly after his assassination. The artist is a fascinating figure in his own right; almost single-handedly responsible for the rise of neoclassicism in French painting, he embraced radical revolution, was elected a deputy to the National Convention in 1792, orchestrated festivals for the new republic, and unlike most of his colleagues befriended Marat rather than simply holding his nose. David organized the funeral of the deputy Louis-Michel Lepeletier and painted a portrait—now lost—of him on his deathbed after he was assassinated in a café in January 1793 for having voted for the execution of the king. Crow, however, focuses on what The Death of Marat reveals about David’s aims, about the politics of the time, and ultimately about the painting’s capacity to make us rethink literary and social theories about the meanings of art and life more generally.

Crow’s approach therefore rarely intersects with Baker’s, though they both devote attention to the aftermath of Marat’s murder. Baker writes in the familiar historian’s voice of omniscient narrator; he carefully recounts his subject’s life and death and carries readers along in novelistic fashion, making them keen to learn what comes next. Crow’s account is deeply personal; he hopes to justify his youthful fascination with the portrait itself, not with the man portrayed or even the artist who portrayed him. He wants the painting to be just as powerful now as it might have been then, even if in different ways, so he uses a variety of art historical and theoretical approaches, ranging from the more usual analyses of the painterly techniques and the choices made in the composition to the possible resonances with literary and social theorists who never showed any particular interest in Marat or David.

Crow certainly succeeds in making viewers look more intently. He provides image manipulations by Dominika Ivanická to show, for instance, how David took some of the painting’s basic structure from a Pietà painted by one of his students, Anne-Louis Girodet. Crow refers to the picture as Marat at His Last Breath rather than the more customary Death of Marat in order to reinforce this parallel with the Christ figure. The expiring Marat is depicted at the very moment the man dies and the icon is born. His expression therefore is beatific, not terrified or angry, and though the violence of his death is signaled by the knife on the floor as well as the blood on the sheet and seeping from the fatal gash, there is little of it in comparison with the blood gushing everywhere that witnesses saw at the time.

Missing from David’s Pietà is the equivalent of the Virgin Mary. Crow follows the philosopher Rebecca Comay in arguing that the artist incorporates the Virgin into Marat, which makes the martyr, in Comay’s terms, “at once son and mother to himself.” Crow wants to go even further than this, however, by suggesting that David also inserted the positive qualities of the absent female assassin—“vitality, composure and self-possession”—to enhance the “depleted male subject.” In short, the sanctification of Marat seemed to require androgyny.

Crow admits that this androgyny is “subtle,” meaning not entirely obvious to the viewer, and he attributes its elusiveness to the “conflicted brief” that shaped the work. The painter needed to offer both a portrait and a historical narrative, with the latter requiring more than one figure. David also wanted to present an individual “softened for the purposes of mourning and elegy,” in other words, a portrayal that did not recall the ugliness of the skin disease, the violence of the assassination, or the ferocity of the bloodshed advocated by Marat.

Crow also wants The Death of Marat to talk back to contemporary literary and social theories, and here his line of argument is less convincing, because it says more about his long-standing interest in French social and literary theorists than it does about the painting. Although the list of those invoked is long, the central one is Roland Barthes, whose book S/Z (1970) occupies much of Crow’s attention. S/Z is a series of reflections on a novella by Honoré de Balzac, Sarrasine (1830), whose connection to the Marat painting is tenuous but not nonexistent. When Balzac wrote his tale of sexual ambiguity and misidentification, he had in mind a painting by Girodet, TheSleep of Endymion (1791), which captivated him and has fascinated viewers and art historians ever since because it features an epicene male figure in an unusually provocative pose.

Barthes largely overlooked the androgynous qualities of Girodet’s Endymion and therefore, to some extent, of Balzac’s novella because, as Crow recounts, he was too intent on emphasizing the necessary difference between the genders. For Barthes the picture had to be understood using Freud’s fear of castration; androgyny did not and could not play a part. Thus the Girodet and David paintings reveal the fissures and lacunae in Barthes’s account. Most useful in Barthes, then, for Crow is his “systematic parsing of virtually every detail of a suitably concise object of analysis.” Like Claude Lévi-Strauss in anthropology, Barthes turns the details of Balzac’s narrative into a series of “interlocking signs” that can be unbundled and reconfigured “in some atemporal, tabular array” in order to lend themselves to decoding.

The attempt to combine a historical analysis with this structural approach constitutes Crow’s own unacknowledged “conflicted brief.” He wants to anchor his analysis of the painting in the extraordinary events of 1793 and show its resonances right up to the present. At the same time, he wants to decode the elements of the painting in a more atemporal manner. When examined more closely, as “interlocking signs,” the ordinary objects around the bath, for example, can be interpreted as relics. Similarly, the sanctification of Marat’s body can only be grasped when the elements of the painting are literally reconfigured through image manipulation, a form of unbundling.

The tension between these approaches becomes most apparent in Crow’s reliance on the concept of androgyny. Barthes’s analysis of the Girodet painting might be lacking, but is there an atemporally correct one? Balzac saw in the painting sexual ambiguity and sexual ambivalence, qualities that appeared in his other works as suggestions of homosexuality.¹ Yet those who viewed the painting nearer to the moment of its creation saw only the beau idéal, the timeless nude that combined the beauties of both sexes in a perfect union, not ambiguity, hermaphroditism, or intersexuality.² Androgyny is not always the same. Its meaning varies over time. Crow is right, nonetheless, to draw attention to the tension beween the atemporal and the historical. The historical is that which varies over time, but the variation can only be judged against a yardstick of the timeless. Similarly, the atemporal is defined as that which does not change, but it can only be determined by comparing it to those things that do. Our perspective on Marat the man and Marat the depiction will always change with time, but some elements of both will remain the same.