PSYCHOLOGY OF THE JACOBIN LEADERS.
I.
Marat. - Disparity between his faculties and pretensions. - The Maniac. - The Ambitious delirium. - Rage for persecution. - The permanent nightmare. - Homicidal frenzy.
Three men among the Jacobins, Marat, Danton and Robespierre, had deserved preeminence and held authority: - that is because they, due to a deformity or warping of their minds and their hearts, met the required conditions. -Of the three, Marat is the most monstrous; he is nearly a madman, of which he displays the chief characteristics - furious exaltation, constant over-excitement, feverish restlessness, an inexhaustible propensity for scribbling, that mental automatism and single-mindedness of purpose constrained and ruled by a fixed idea. In addition to this, he displays the usual physical symptoms, such as insomnia, a pallid complexion, hot-headed, foulness of dress and person,[1] with, during the last five months of his life, rashes and itching all over his body.[2] Issuing from ill-matched stock, born of a mixed blood and tainted with serious moral agitation,[3] he carries within him a peculiar germ: physically, he is a freak, morally a pretender, and one who covet all places of distinction. His father, who was a physician, intended, from his early childhood, that he should be a scholar; his mother, an idealist, had prepared him to become a philanthropist, while he himself always steered his course towards both summits.
"At five years of age," he says, "it would have pleased me to be a school-master, at fifteen a professor, at eighteen an author, and a creative genius at twenty,"[4]and, afterwards, up to the last, an apostle and martyr to humanity. "From my earliest infancy I had an intense love of fame which changed its object at various stages of my life, but which never left me for a moment." He rambled over Europe or vegetated in Paris for thirty years, living a nomadic life in subordinate positions, hissed as an author, distrusted as a man of science and ignored as a philosopher, a third rate political writer, aspiring to every sort of celebrity and to every honor, constantly presenting himself as a candidate and as constantly rejected, - too great a disproportion between his faculties and ambition! Without talents,[5] possessing no critical acumen and of mediocre intelligence, he was fitted only to teach some branch of the sciences, or to practice some one of the arts, either as professor or doctor more or less bold and lucky, or to follow, with occasional slips on one side or the other, some path clearly marked out for him. "But,"he says, "I constantly refused any subject which did not hold out a promise. . . . of showing off my originality and providing great results, for I cannot make up my mind to treat a subject already well done by others." - Consequently, when he tries to originate he merely imitates, or commits mistakes. His treatise on " Man" is a jumble of physiological and moral common-places, made up of ill-digested reading and words strung together haphazard,[6] of gratuitous and incoherent suppositions in which the doctrines of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, coupled together, end in empty phraseology. "Soul and Body are distinct substances with no essential relationship, being connected together solely through the nervous fluid;" this fluid is not gelatinous for the spirits by which it is renewed contains no gelatin; the soul, excited by this, excites that; hence the place assigned to it "in the brain." - His " Optics"[7] is the reverse of the great truth already discovered by Newton more than a century before, and since confirmed by more than another century of experiment and calculation. On" Heat " and "Electricity" he merely puts forth feeble hypotheses and literary generalizations; one day, driven to the wall, he inserts a needle in a resin to make this a conductor, in which piece of scientific trickery he is caught by the physicist Charles.[8] He is not even qualified to comprehend the great discoverers of his age, Laplace, Monge, Lavoisier, or Fourcroy; on the contrary, he libels them in the style of a low rebellious subordinate, who, without the shadow of a claim, aims to take the place of legitimate authorities. In Politics, he adopts every absurd idea in vogue growing out of the "Contrat-Social" based on natural right, and which he renders still more absurd by repeating as his own the arguments advanced by those bungling socialists, who, physiologists astray in the moral world, derive all rights from physical necessities.
"All human rights issue from physical wants[9]... If a man has nothing, he has a right to any surplus with which another gorges himself. What do I say? He has a right to seize the indispensable, and, rather than die of hunger, he may cut another's throat and eat his throbbing flesh. . . . Man has a right to self-preservation, to the property, the liberty and even the lives of his fellow creatures. To escape oppression he has a right to repress, to bind and to massacre. He is free to do what he pleases to ensure his own happiness."It is plain enough what this leads to. - But, let the consequences be what they may, whatever he writes or does, it is always in self-admiration and always in a counter sense, being as vain-glorious of his encyclopedic impotence as he is of his social mischievousness.
Taking his word for it, his discoveries in Physics will render him immortal[10]:
"They will at least effect a complete transformation in Optics. . .