Out of the dust and din of the French Revolution, now seen by us on the horizon of time, there emerge four names: Robespierre, Mirabeau, Danton and Marat.
Undaunted men all, hated and loved, feared and idolized, despised and deified—even yet we find it hard to gauge their worth, and give due credit for the good that was in each.
Oratory played a most important part in bringing about the explosion. Oratory arouses passion—fear, vengeance, hate—and draws a beautiful picture of peace and plenty just beyond.
Without oratory there would have been no political revolution in France, nor elsewhere.
Politics, more than any other function of human affairs, turns on oratory. Orators make and unmake kings, but kings are seldom orators, and orators never secure thrones. Orators are made to die—the cross, the torch, the noose, the guillotine, the dagger, awaits them. They die through the passion that they fan to flame—the fear they generate turns upon themselves, and they are no more.
But they have their reward. Their names are not writ in water; rather are they traced in blood on history's page. We know them, while the ensconced smug and successful have sunk into oblivion; and if now and then a name like that of Pilate or Caiaphas or Judas comes to us, it is only because Fate has linked the man to his victim, like unto that Roman soldier who thrust his spear into the side of the Unselfish Man.
In the qualities that mark the four chief orators of the French Revolution, there is much alloy—much that seems like clay. Each had undergone an apprenticeship to Fate—each had been preparing for his work; and in this preparation who shall say what lessons could have been omitted and what not! Explosions require time to prepare: revolutions, political and domestic, are a long time getting ready. Orators, like artists, must go as did Dante, down into the nether regions and get a glimpse of hell.
Jean Paul Marat was exactly five feet high, and his weight when at his best was one hundred twenty pounds—just the weight of Shakespeare. Jean Paul had a nose like the beak of a hawk, an eye like an eagle, a mouth that matched his nose, and a chin that argued trouble. Not only did he have red hair, but Carlyle refers to him as "red-headed."
His parents were poor and obscure people, and his relationship with them seems a pure matter of accident. He was born at the village of Boudry, Switzerland, in Seventeen Hundred Forty-three. His childhood and boyhood were that of any other peasant boy born into a family where poverty held grim sway, and toil and hardship never relaxed their chilling grasp.