The war was now the question, and Marat saw clearly that it was to serve the purposes of the Royalists and the Girondins, who thought of themselves alone. Again denounced, Marat had to remain in hiding until Aug. 1o. The proclamation of the duke of Brunswick excited all hearts; who could go to save France on the frontiers and leave Paris in the hands of his enemies? Marat, like Danton, foresaw the massacres of September. After the events of Aug. io he took his seat at the commune, and demanded a tribunal to try the Royalists in prison. No tribunal was formed, and the massacres in the prisons were the inevitable result. In the elections to the Convention, Marat was elected seventh out of the twenty-four deputies for Paris, and for the first time took his seat in an assembly of the nation. At the declaration of the republic, he closed his Anti du peuple, and commenced, on the 25th, a new paper, the Journal de la republique francaise, which was to contain his sentiments as its predecessor had done, and to be always on the watch. In the Assembly Marat had no party; he would always suspect and oppose the powerful, refuse power for himself. After the battle of Valmy, Dumouriez was the great est man in France; he could almost have restored the monarchy ; yet Marat did not fear to denounce him in placards as a traitor.
His unpopularity in the Assembly was extreme, yet he insisted on speaking on the question of the king's trial, declared it unfair to accuse Louis for anything anterior to his acceptance of the constitution, and though implacable towards the king, as the one man who must die for the people's good, he would not allow Malesherbes, the king's counsel, to be attacked in his paper, and speaks of him as a "sage et respectable vieillard." The king dead, the months from January to May 1793 were spent in an un relenting struggle between Marat and the Girondins. Marat de spised the ruling party because they had suffered nothing for the republic, because they talked too much of their feelings and theft antique virtue, because they had for their own virtues plunged the country into war; while the Girondins hated Marat as repre sentative of that rough red republicanism which would not yield itself to a Roman republic, with themselves for tribunes, orators and generals.
The Girondins conquered at first in the Convention, and ordered that Marat should be tried before the Revolutionary Tri bunal. But their victory ruined them, for on April 24 Marat was acquitted, and returned to the Convention with the people at his back. The fall of the Girondins on May 31 was a triumph for
Marat. But it was his last. The skin disease he had contracted in the subterranean haunts was rapidly closing his life; he could only ease his pain by sitting in a warm bath, where he wrote his journal, and accused the Girondins, who were trying to raise France against Paris. Sitting thus on July 13, he heard in the evening a young woman begging to be admitted to see him, saying that she brought news from Caen, where the escaped Girondins were trying to rouse Normandy. He ordered her to be admitted, asked her the names of the deputies then at Caen, and, after writing their names, said, "They shall soon be guillotined," when the young girl, whose name was Charlotte Corday (q.v.), stabbed him to the heart.
The Convention attended his funeral, and placed his bust in the hall where it held its sessions. Louis David painted "Marat Assassinated," and a veritable cult was rendered to the Friend of the People, whose ashes were transferred to the Pantheon with great pomp on Sept. 21, 1794—to be cast out again in virtue of the decree of Feb. 8, 1795. (R. AN.) Besides the works mentioned above, Marat wrote: Recherches physiques sur l'electricite, etc. (5782) ; Recherches sur l'electricite medi cale (1783) ; Notions elementaires d'optique (1764) ; Lettres de l'ob servateur Bon Sens a M. de M. . . . sur la fatale catastrophe des infortunes Pilatre de Rozier et Rotnain, les et l'aerostation (1785) ; Observations de M. l'amateur Avec a M. l'abbe Sans . . . etc. (1785) ; Eloge de Montesquieu (1785), published 1883 by M. de Bresetz ; Les Charlatans modernes, ou letters sur le charlatanisme aca demique (1791) ; I es Aventures du comte Potowski (published in 1847 by Paul Lacroix, the "bibliophile Jacob") ; Lettres polonaises (unpub lished). Marat's works were published by A. Vermorel, Oeuvres de J. P. Marat, l'ami du peuple, recueillies et annotees (1869). Two of his tracts, (I) On Gleets, (2) A Disease of the Eyes, were reprinted, ed. J. B. Bailey, in 1891.
See A. Vermorel, Jean Paul Marat (188o) ; Francois Chevremont, Marat: esprit politique, accomp. de sa vie (2 vols., 188o) ; Auguste Cabanes, Marat inconnu (1891) ; A. Bougeart, Marat, l'ami du peuple (2 vols., 1865) ; M. Tourneux, Bibliographie de l'histoire de Paris pendant la revolution francaise (vol. ii., 1894 vol. iv., 1906), and E. B. Bax, J. P. Marat (1900) . The Correspondance de Marat has been edited with notes by C. Villay (1908) ; L. R. Gottschalk, Jean Paul Marat (1927).