ONE of the most famous and celebrated works of art in European history is a painting about a political assassination. That painting is The Death of Marat (La Mort de Marat in French) by Jacques-Louis David. It was painted in 1793. David was already one of the most respected French artists of the 18th century, a leader of French Neoclassical art. He was also himself a political figure, a prominent member of the Montagnard faction (itself a subset of the Jacobins) and a member of the revolutionary Committee of General Security.
It’s an overtly political painting in every way, created by a man who was as much a French Revolutionary politician as he was an established and esteemed artist. It’s about a shocking political event, and it was crafted as an exercise in propaganda. For those who have never seen it or require a reminder, here it is.
The painting shows us Marat in his bath, immediately after being assassinated by Charlotte Corday on the July 13, 1793. It is a beautifully composed image of political martyrdom. Marat’s posture, for anyone with the slightest awareness of Western art traditions, immediately shows where the sympathies of the artist lie (and also, where the sympathies of the artist lie).
Marat’s pose is, of course, a deliberate mirroring of the pose of Christ in hundreds if not thousands of Western art traditional depictions of the Crucifixion. The pale, slim but muscular figure, marked by the assassin’s blade but in a manner that might be compared to the puncture wound inflicted by the Spear of Longinus or to the stigmata nail wounds of crucifixion on Christ himself, has that peculiar serenity in death that other artists place in depictions of Jesus. The blood is present as proof of supreme sacrifice, but artistically minimised, prevented from distracting from the clean, shining, almost marble-like flesh of the deceased, who is already a kind of heroic statue in repose, fixed for the admiration of the ages. The dead man has a gentle, compassionate smile on his lips, as if interrupted in the process of forgiving his murderer. The angle, the gentleness, the delicacy of it all suggests Christ-like self sacrifice, as if Marat has chosen his death knowingly, given his life willingly.
Here is the martyr of the Revolution. A new Christ, as good as the old one… if not better.
But this is not just a figure we should view with reverence for his martyrdom. This is also a hero of the Enlightenment. The still-clutched quill pen shows that this was a man of letters, an educated man, a thinking, reasonable creature. Marat was not caught simply enjoying a bath. He was such a servant of France, such a learned and dedicated servant of the Revolution, that he was even in this most intimate of settings still at work on behalf of others, busily answering correspondence or drafting fresh legislation or Revolutionary philosophy and rhetoric. There is a double meaning here. His work was interrupted, showing us how selfless he was, but in a deeper sense his work is not interrupted at all. It is transfigured, ascended. He begins his new post in death, as a rallying martyr of the cause. What in life was mere words and letters, in death becomes resounding, echoing, unstoppable example.
David’s Marat is a New Christ, a culmination of Western civilisation recalling a founder of the religious aspect of Western civilisation. He is depicted as such because David is an intensely committed supporter of the same political faction as Marat. Marat, like David, was a Montagnard. But the quill, the papers, the writing, all show us too that this was a man of Reason, a true son of the Enlightenment. We are to worship this figure, for political reasons, not just as the inheritor of the imagery and mantle of Christian martyrdom, but as the apotheosis of Reason and intellectual political radicalism as the replacement of mere superstition. David’s great skill as a propagandist and artist is to synthesise these, in some ways directly contrary, aims into a tellingly memorable image.
It’s at this point that we should mention the central dishonesties here. Christian self sacrifice and martyrdom is a very different thing to one politically radical extremist being murdered by another. Marat was, in reality, about as far away from this movingly gentle depiction of him as one could imagine. As one of the most radical and zealous figures of the Revolution, Marat was a lesson for the ages in the exact opposite way to the one that David depicts. He wasn’t a gentle figure of self sacrifice. He wasn’t a Lamb bringing Peace in the manner of Christ. He wasn’t an innocent. He was a brutal, grasping, rapacious sadist. He was one of the leaders of the storming of the Bastille, and that too has symbolic and practical importance – the terrible monarchical regime had hardly anyone in its most hated prison, whereas the Revolutionary ‘liberators’ soon stuffed it full of their political enemies.
Even at a point where many murders were already being committed, Marat was noted as an unusually brutal proponent of Revolutionary excess. His assassin was from a rival, supplanted Jacobin faction, the Girondists. The Girondists too had supported the earliest uses of violence, riot and uprising within France, and were a ‘war party’ who wanted to export the Revolution abroad and topple monarchical dynasties across Europe. These two factions did not really differ on whether you should murder your political enemies or not, but the Girondists were at times embarrassed by Montagnard violence when it was at its most indiscriminate. The Girondists tended to be the most intellectualised of the Revolutionaries. They were the writers of pamphlets and doctrines of great length and increasingly mind-numbing tediousness. Marat, although also a street-level gutter pamphleteer, was much more of a bloody handed man of action, more akin to a modern terrorist. But the two were aligned in the creation of the bloodshed, even if the Girondins wanted it to be more focused and controlled and ultimately directed outside France:
‘Temperament largely accounts for the dividing line between the parties. The Girondins were doctrinaires and theorists rather than men of action. They initially encouraged armed petitions, but then were dismayed when this led to the émeute (riot) of 20 June 1792. Jean-Marie Roland was typical of their spirit, turning the Ministry of the Exterior into a publishing office for tracts on civic virtues while riotous mobs were burning the châteaux unchecked in the provinces.’
The split between the two factions came to a head as a fall out from the September Massacres of 1792. Marat, a leader of the peasant sans-culottes mobs, was personally engaged in the orgy of bloodshed. Girondist leaders were alarmed, already sensing that previously aligned Revolutionaries or widespread mob violence could turn on them. Typically, the Girondists took defensive measures that were mainly concentrated on written statements, declarations or on bureaucratic ministries, whereas the Montagnards gradually took control of revolutionary militias and the people who were prepared to actually decide, at the point of a sword or via the barrel of a musket, who got killed and when. Neither side could be described as moderates, but one side were more ruthlessly pragmatic, which is why it was the Girondists who ended up being put on the execution lists of the Terror.
At the time that Corday assassinated Marat, Girondists had already been ousted from positions of power and arrested. Marat, along with Danton and Robespierre, was one of their three most prominent denouncers and enemies. Corday stated that she had ‘killed one man so that 100,000 could be saved’. It’s clear that she had hoped her action would save her arrested Girondin allies and personal friends, but it had the opposite effect and sealed their subsequent trial and executions.
There’s also no doubt based on his crudeness, his fanaticism, and his involvement in the September massacres as well as his increasing demands for destruction of the Girondists that Marat would have been just as murderous as his fellow Montagnards, Robespierre, had he survived Corday’s attack. In death, Marat’s martyrdom did not inspire others to a new period of gentleness and reason, but instead provided even more impetus towards the Terror he would have delighted in. Similarly Corday’s own martyrdom (she faced her execution bravely on July 17, 1793, at the age of just 24, still convinced she had done good in striking down a man she described as ‘a monster’) only fed the spiral of violence into which the Revolution descended, devouring its Revolutionaries of defeated factions just as hungrily as it devoured aristocrats and monarchists.
What is it, though, that makes me want to talk about all this and recall the largely forgotten factionalism between the Montagnards and the Girondists of the French Revolution?
Well, there are several reasons to remind ourselves of this history. The truth is that, while we are capable of remembering the huge impact of the 1960s sexual and cultural revolution, and of understanding the huge impacts of the two world wars of the 20th century on all of our modern political experience and social conditions, it is astonishing how much we collectively forget regarding the impact and continuing importance of the French Revolution.
The French Revolution built the modern world. In destruction and death within its own nation, France had the global impact it could not obtain by military arms against its British rival either before the fall of the French monarchy, or after it via the efforts of Napoleon.
Britain was the father of the modern world through the Industrial Revolution, through military and trading success as well as technological development and innovation. France was the mother of modern political consciousness, the ruler of how we would think about politics and how we would define politics. The first can be said to be responsible for the tools of modernity, the things we create, but the second shaped our understanding of those tools and their impact, the ideas we create. Britain shaped the exterior physical realities of modernity, and France shaped its internal voice, that self-reflective and self-blind consciousness that marks interior dialogue (whether on politics or philosophy, or in terms of political examination of society and literary examination of the self).
Think of how many modern, and especially postmodern, absurdities are the creation of French philosophy. Sartre, Derrida, Lacan, Foucault. Think of how indebted to French thought modern political relativism is, how indebted modern political bureaucracy is, most obviously in the form of the EU. Think of how much the language and conflict of Religion versus Science is shaped by Enlightenment French theorists and writers like Voltaire, as is the understanding of differences between aristocracy and democracy. Think of Rousseau’s enormous impact, and the relation between the concept of the Noble Savage and modern prioritisation of non-western cultures by Western political movements and leaders. Think of a line from Noble Savage to Black Lives Matter or to postcolonial guilt or to Green and Cultural Marxist assumptions of white Western moral inferiority. Think of the high culture obsession on the Self, the idea that a novel or a work of art is at its most profound solely as a claustrophobic internal monologue of self analysis, and all that manifested and inspired by Proust, and then compare that with the kind of monomaniacal focus on the feelings and internal reactions of the Self (above objective reality) that dominates transgender ideology or more general forms of objective-reality-divergent self-obsession, virtue signalling display and political delusion in the modern world.
Recall all that and understand what David Starkey really meant when he said that ‘all bad ideas are French’.
It is the French Revolution that gives us the terms Left and Right for the most fundamental political divisions, and thereby of course also the idea of Centrism, that there is this reasonable, moderate middle of things not prone to the extremism of either political wing. As I hope my very brief summation above shows, that’s really the least of it. It’s still the most important political terminology we deploy, even when it’s increasingly evident how flawed and redundant it has become.
Its a terminology created by French Revolutionary extremists, by politically radical murderers, which set how we understand what extremism is. It is like the political equivalent of not just consulting with Hannibal Lecter about other serial killers, but letting Hannibal Lecter define what serial killing is, before conveniently removing his own type of murders from the definition.
The basic language of our moral and political understanding of what constitutes extremism and centrism was set by radical mass murderers. That’s why so many people, especially when they don’t access or understand true morality of older origins than the French Revolution, can become so relativistic, so morally confused that they decide the mass murdering terrorist is a fully justified freedom fighter.
The French Revolution purported to be the culmination of Western civilisation, and it delivered the reversal of civilisation and the imposition of the pure strength-based rules of barbarism. It thought of itself as liberty, and delivered newer and bloodier tyranny. It began as theory and textual philosophy, the thing reached by Reason, and it ended as brute power and orgies of violence, the thing more irrational than the monarchy it replaced. Robespierre, after Marat but from the same Jacobin sub-faction, would attempt to replace Christianity with a Cult of Reason. Think of that contradiction too in relation to the embrace by so many atheists and secularists of every fanatical movement of modern times, from Communism, to Fascism and Nazism, and even to our new religions of Climate Change and Alphabet Sexuality and Transgender Dysphoria. Think of Robespierre, after the slaughter of priests, calmly writing ‘rationalist’ sermons for his new Cult, in between with equal calm filling in lists of people to execute… and then compare that display of ‘Reason’ at its most horrific with the Scientism of the Covid era, where in the name of Science and Reason some people started telling us how happy they would be to watch the unvaccinated die.
Only by making these comparisons can we begin to understand that modernity and particularly modern political understandings, including the ones which are so proud of their alleged basis in rational thought, were actually drafted for us all by politically violent lunatics who never understood the difference between Freedom and Terror.
Go back to that picture of the murdered Marat. David is a partisan, a violent radical, not an objective observer. This high expression of culture is also a crude, brutal weapon of propaganda. We are to mourn the murdered murderer. A modern David might paint a picture of a slain Hamas terrorist with similar sympathetic framing… indeed they do, but they call these things articles and documentaries. And the Girondists? Well, modern descriptions describe them as the ‘moderate faction’. But they were no such thing. They were a faction almost as responsible for the worst excesses as those who committed them. They called for the violence, and then they were scared by what they had unleashed, soon devoured by what they had unleashed. Corday gave herself the right of assassination, just as Marat did. Danton (another Montagnard rather than a Girondist) was devoured too, and is today often presented as a heroic figure, a liberal icon, though he was another radical mass murderer.
There was no moderate Revolutionary. There never is. That’s what Burke recognised when he discussed the French Revolution and formed the key original texts of British Conservatism. A conflict like that between two Jacobin factions is not a conflict between moderate and extreme, any more than a battle between Communist and Nazi is. It’s a battle between radical mass murderers for control of who gets murdered next. Or at the very kindest interpretation, it’s a battle between fools, who enabled mass murder and finally realise the danger of that, and the people they created.
The vaunted Centrist is not in some ideal philosophical and political space outside all this. The Centre can succumb to all the arrogance and fanaticism of the worst parts of Left or Right. The Centre can give birth to either of these things. Indeed, the Centrist can sometimes be more self blind than any other fanatic, in the right circumstances, because it is the assumption of the Middle that they are the sole possessors of Reason and moderation. Centrists and classical liberals today, lecturing us on the ‘Woke Right’, forget that there is a reason that people in the US started to use the word liberal to mean ‘insane’. The classical liberals forget that they were the last people to recognise the madness of wokeness and to fight against it. They spent years enabling and excusing it before they spent a single moment challenging and repudiating it.
They are the Girondists of this modern story of political extremism, not the blameless innocents.
This article appeared in Jupplandia on May 9, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
