Jean-Paul Marat lives in cultural memory as a beautiful corpse, immortalised by Jacques-Louis David, who has him clutching a note pleading for the aid of ‘The People’s Friend’ (the note was in fact a treacherous assassin’s lure). It is a curiously passive depiction of martyrdom for a man who built his political career on frenetic and splenetic activity in writing and in person. David’s sanitised view, useful as it was to a beleaguered national Jacobin establishment on the brink of ‘the Terror’, neglects almost every aspect of what made Marat so interesting.

Marat’s background was extraordinary. His father was a defrocked Sardinian Catholic priest, exiled to Protestant Geneva and later to Neuchâtel, a part of Switzerland then under the sovereignty of the King of Prussia. Marat was born there in 1743, his mother a descendant of French Huguenot refugees, his father scraping a semi-respectable living on the fringes of the education system. Jean-Paul was raised a scholar and spent an extended teenage period with the Nairacs, a family of wealthy merchants in Bordeaux, although no evidence for this stay beyond his own account of it has ever been found. Choosing subsequently to study medicine in Paris, he remained there for a few years before moving to London, aged twenty-two, to establish himself in any field that would have him, from physiological investigation and speculative philosophy to empirical science.

During the years that followed, Marat was extraordinarily active. He wrote and published texts that gained the notice of figures such as Diderot and Voltaire; purchased a Scottish medical degree; lived for several years in Newcastle upon Tyne; wrote (in English) The Chains of Slavery (1774), a compilation of assaults