By Joost van Steenis
Marat—L’ami du peuple: He really meant it. And that’s why the royalists engineered his death.
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Jean-Paul Marat (1743-1793), one of the leaders in the French Revolution, was murdered while taking a bath. He was already in poor health because for two years he had been kept on the run by anti-revolutionary forces and had to live in very bad surroundings.
“Revolution is a natural right of The People”, he said and in March 1789 he proclaimed the violent Revolution. “Violence by The People is legitimate, it remains always far inferior to the sum of all injustices by the despots over the centuries”.
He propagated that the “Revolution will be a kind of guerrilla in which we can attack the enemy in all places where the army cannot be used. This means that we can deprive the enemy of all his advantages”. He edited the “L’ Ami du Peuple” , the “People’s Friend” a famous journal in the name of the sans-culottes, the people without trousers, the core of the street-fighting French Revolutionaries. He trusted the masses because his basic idea was “to let the masses participate, the only people who really cheer freedom”.
He participated and stood behind the poor in the struggle against rich people. Later he was revered in leftist circles for his revolutionary attitude but his ideas were hardly used. He pointed to the importance of the struggle against powerful persons and introduced the idea of forming patriotic clubs to control representatives. One of the clubs was the “Societé des Vengeurs de la Loi”, “the Club of Avengers of the Law”.
The clubs are a kind of Permanent Revolution because they continuously control representatives (and the 1%) by a constant surveillance. It is direct democracy on leading persons when the clubs have means to their disposal to exercise pressure. “Their goal is to pursue the punishment of all crimes that attack the security and the liberty be it public or individual”.
His revolutionary “People’s Friend” was time and again disturbed by magazines with the same name, that propagated other policies. But Marat wrote that “it was easy to distinguish the sham magazines from the true “People’s Friend” because their authors (humbugs) always preached peace, tolerance, patience, submission to laws, obedience etc”.
“The ‘Friend of the People’ has never been directed against common citizens. It has only attacked people in the civil service, unreliable bookkeepers, magistrates who neglected their duties, representatives of the people who forgot their obligations and betrayed their principals. And its respect for justice was so high that the paper even found laudable exceptions in the most corrupt circles”.
Marat did not want to use only words against the people at the top. He proposed the formation of Patriotic Clubs that should analyse and examine the deeds of leading people:
“Patriotic Clubs will only pay attention to people in the civil services and unite the forces of the people in order to make up for the grievances of citizens. They will punish the agents of the authorities who are guilty, stop the continuation of their bad deeds and safeguard the well-being of the people …… but we will never be a club that is involved in the process of making decisions. That should be a serious mistake: a free union of citizens is not allowed to meddle in public affairs, to govern or to administrate. That must be clear: a club has only the simple and pure right to make propositions, to give advice and to ask questions. But when the freedom and the safety of the people is attacked it is not only advisor but also agitator, censor, punisher and even killer ……”
“The only goal is the punishment of the perpetrators of crimes against public and individual freedom and safety. Therefore the clubs are not open for people who are attached to the Royal Court, for Queens’ Commissioners, for members of leading academic clubs, for gentlemen of independent means, for captains of finance, for speculators on the bourse, for attorney-generals, for members of the Parisian military police and for members of the town council. And one should be very careful to admit noblemen, members of the judicature or high army officers…..”
Marat did not want the misdeeds of members of the leading class to be judged and tried by other members of that class as is normal in our present society. He did not limit the height of the punishments: “When now some heads are spared then in the future much more blood will have to ran in the streets….”. Because of this remark, Marat has been portrayed as one of the most bloodthirsty characters of the French Revolution. His goal was simple, “to stop corruption and other crimes of the leading class that caused too much misery and also too many dead common citizens from the lower regions of society”. He was very close to an idea common in many revolutionary movements: “punish one in order to educate a hundred”.
Marat proposed an attack on two fronts. “Between the clan of the privileged and The People, between the small number and the masses, reconciliation is not possible. But also is needed a fight against the apathetic people who are also called reasonable”. Marat claimed the right of the oppressed on violent actions.
In those turbulent times Marat wanted to protect the achievements of the French Revolution with his Patriotic Clubs. He wanted to prevent that the old leading class should regain the power they lost to The People. The current situation in the rich Western countries is not very turbulent. But the organisation of society in the time of Marat does not differ principally from the present situation. Our democracy has his roots in the French Revolution and the ideas of Montesquieu about the Trias Politica. There exists a deep separation between the 1% and the 99%. The Trias Politica regulates in the first place conflicts inside the 1%. The influence of the 99% was small and is two hundred years after the French Revolution still negligible.
Only masspeople, people without power, can belong to the Autonomous Clubs of Marat. A multitude of such clubs will form a new controlling fourth power next to the existing Trias Politica. The 1% may not have any influence on this new power. The three separated powers of Montesquieu increased the freedom of the leading class, the new autonomous fourth power will increase the freedom of the common citizen.
Participate for discussion in the group Occupy the 1% http://www.facebook.com/groups/238569759557393/
In the first chapter of my book “The Power of the Autonomous Human, theory and practice of attacks on persons” I have highlighted the ideas of Marat in the present struggle against the 1%. The book can be downloaded for free from the site
“Down with any Elite” http://members.chello.nl/jsteenis
JOOST VAN STEENIS is a veteran Dutch activist.
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